#342: Futurist Kevin Surace on Why Writers Must Jump on the AI Bandwagon (and Why the Future Is B...

Welcome to the High Income Business Writing Podcast, helping you propel your writing business to a whole new level. And now, here's your host, Ed Gandia. Hey there.

Welcome to another episode of the High Income Business Writing Podcast, the number one podcast for business writers and copywriters who want to earn more and less time doing work they love for better clients. With well over 1 million downloads from listeners just like you across 101 countries as I record this episode and it's March 2024 right now, we've yet to feel the full effects of generative AI in our solo businesses as writers, copywriters, and solo marketers. So if that's true, why are so many writers and copywriters and solo marketers losing business and have been for the past year or so? Well, everything that I'm hearing and seeing points to other factors for the challenges many creative professionals are experiencing right now. And the main factor seems to be the softening economy. Now, you wouldn't know it right now by the state of the stock market, by the low unemployment rates, by the economic growth that we continue to see quarter after quarter, all those factors seem to be pointing to a fairly strong economy. But the marketing profession is seeing something very different now. It's no secret that marketing is one of the first things to get cut during challenging times. It makes no sense, but that's what it is. And there are a lot of companies that are worried right now. They're concerned, they're playing it safe. And marketing is where they're starting to basically hold back, to play small. And that seems to be the biggest reason behind canceled content marketing initiatives or marketing team layoffs and clients that can't seem to make a decision on pending projects. In fact, clients and prospects who just are suddenly just ghosting all their outside contractors. AI is certainly starting to have an impact on our work, but where that's been happening is not where we want to be anyway. It's not where we want to be playing. You're seeing it in the lower tiers of the market. SEO, content mills, small companies, lower budget organizations that wouldn't be viable clients even before ChatGPT entered the picture. But that's changing, and the changes are going to be palpable. So joining me today to explain why and to dive deep into this issue is Kevin Surice. Kevin is the CTO of Appvance AI and is a renowned futurist, a disruptive innovation, keynote speaker and pioneer in the AI space since the 1990s. This guy is the real deal. He's the recipient of Inc magazine's Entrepreneur of the Year award in 2009. He's built multiple startups from ground zero to over a billion dollar valuations. And he has been awarded 94 worldwide patents, including the groundbreaking technology behind Siri and other digital virtual assistants. I wanted to bring Kevin on the show because I've had multiple discussions in this podcast about AI and its impact. And those conversations have been happening for over a year now, since early 2023. But most of them had been with fellow writers and marketers that I brought into the show. They've been fascinating conversations in very practical. But I also wanted to bring in someone who could give us an outsider's perspective, someone who could explain what's really happening outside of our marketing ecosystem and share his perspectives on what's coming and what we can do to prepare. More specifically, somebody who came in who, from the technology side and had a bird's eye view into what's going on in terms of AI and its impact on many different industries and business processes. Kevin did not disappoint. We in this conversation dive deep into the issue of the disruption that's happening. Some of what he shares might feel uncomfortable to people. It may feel disheartening to some of you, and I'm sure it's going to ruffle some feathers, and that's okay. I'm a big believer in hearing all voices. I hate echo chambers, especially when it comes to big important issues. And Kevin's voice is an important one with perspective that you're going to want to hear. So I'll leave it there. And I hope you enjoy this conversation and come into it with an open mind and give it a fair shot. Kevin, great to be talking to you. Welcome.

Hey, great to talk to you, Ed. Thanks for having me.

Yeah, this is a fascinating topic. I'm dying to get into this with you because I think you offer a different perspective than some of the perspectives we've had on this show on this topic. But before we get there, why don't you give us a little bit of background? I think people need to understand where you're coming from.

Yeah, you bet.

In terms of AI.

So I've been, well, people call me the father of the virtual assistant and the father of the voice user interface, because back in the 90s, all of that work that later became licensed to things like Siri and Alexa and all that was me and my team at a company called General Magic. And since then I've been inventing in the AI space. I have 94 worldwide patents, but more than that I've been speaking on the AI topic for the last 20 years, and I do 40 or 50 keynotes a year, sometimes more around the world to every company that's one, wants to know how to take advantage of AI across the board. And two, everyone in the audience is worried it's going to take their job. Everyone, this is, you know, par for the course, and your listeners are worried it's going to take their job. But we have now thousands of years of history showing that technology does take and reduce some tasks and change some tasks, but it increased the jobs. Now, this is a very interesting thing, and I'll give you a bunch of examples. So anyway, that's the background. So there are people way smarter than me and, you know, inventing what's called foundational algorithms and foundational models. I am someone who uses those models in real applications. So that's called applied AI. And I think applied AI is the most fun space, if you will, because that's where we get to take these foundational models and apply them to real tasks, real jobs, real output. So I've got a pretty good, you know, handle on how this works and when it works and when it doesn't and how all the experts who are listening to your podcast can benefit.

One of the arguments that I've heard is that, hey, all these disruptive technologies that we've had over the past hundred years, right, those are different. This is different from those, right? Because, hey, yeah, now looking back, I see how that was disruptive, but it wasn't disruptive to the level that generative AI is. What do you have to say to that?

Yeah, I think that direction of thinking isn't correct, but I think people think that way because for the first time, you don't have to be a coder to speak to AI. Let's take other technologies off the table for a minute. You don't have to be a coder. You can just speak in English or whatever your language is, and it speaks back to you. And that's a fundamental change. Now, we've actually had AI spoke English really, since the 60s, and the work I did in the 90s, we clearly spoke English, right, And interacted with you in English as a real human interaction. But, you know, that had 3 million users, not a billion people. Try it.

Right?

So this is a different level of that. But let me give you some examples of other technologies throughout history. So the wheel comes around thousands and thousands of years ago, and there's two guys in a town, and these two guys in a town See the wheel show up. These two guys, their only job is to carry stuff up the hill. That's what they've been doing for, you know, their life. That's their livelihood. I carry things up the hill, and all of a sudden there's a wheel. And one guy says, well, that's it. My career is over. Okay? He goes home. The other guy gets a second wheel, builds a cart, carries five times as much up the hill in terms of overall volume in a day. So the simple story is as far back as the wheel you had. People embrace technology and get more productive, and others go home and die paupers. So one died a pauper and one died a rich man. That's the end of that story. And this is true with all of the technologies. You know, when the smartphone came out, some people didn't want to embrace it. I'm never going to get one. And that included people at work, it included parents and included all kinds. I'm never going to get one of those. Well, today, I don't know, 4 billion people have them or 3 billion people have them. Why? Because it's a productivity enhancement. And can you imagine running your business ad today without, when you're on the road or wherever, you are being able to look at your email just like that, or someone text you just like that. So it's expected that you're going to get that information almost in real time, save if you're in a movie theater, right? So, in fact, when you are in a movie theater and you come out, there's almost always emails or texts that said, where have you been? I've been texting for three hours.

Yeah.

Are you watching Oppenheimer? What's going on?

Right?

So these are all technologies. And when every single one of these technologies came out, it displaced tasks, it changed the way tasks work, but it made more jobs. And another example is Excel. We talked about this earlier is when Excel showed up in finance departments, right? Finance departments thought of themselves as we do math. That's how they looked at the world. We do math. We do ledger books and we do long division and we add, subtract, and we do it all in pencil. That's how we do it. All of a sudden, Excel shows up, you put the numbers in, but it does the math for you. All of a sudden, Gene in the corner, who was a brilliant mathematician, that could do long division in his head, right? All of a sudden, we have no need for him. Well, we have a need for him. His job is eliminated, but that particular task is gone. He could Be fabulous at strategic finance, but we don't need him to do long division. Right. So if you were in finance and your language was math, they felt like your listeners feel today. My language is English, therefore my livelihood's going to be taken. And they felt their livelihood was going to be taken because they did math, but their livelihood wasn't taken. In fact, there are more people employed in finance today than there were then, making finance departments far more productive, like 10 times more productive than they were then. And now they're very strategic and they can analyze things at a level they could never analyze before. Because it's a machine that does the math.

Right?

You're not sitting there doing the math. So I'm going to tell you that throughout history we've seen teams and people and everything get more productive, creating more output, driving the cost of goods and services down. Because they're getting more output, you know, per human hour.

Right.

And that drives demand up. So a quick example in this field, if I'm an independent freelance writer and I'm writing copy, marketing copy, blog post, maybe advertising copy, whatever, for data sheets, et cetera, for companies, I only had so many hours, if, let's say 50 hours a week I could devote to that. And sometimes I had too many companies that wanted too much, you know, I couldn't take on anymore.

Right.

Unless I'm building out a firm. But now you might be able to be far more productive than you have been, basically not lowering your hourly price, but lowering the cost of goods back to your customer.

Right.

So it could be that I'm going to make it up. A data sheet used to cost X and now it costs half X and you go, that's going to destroy my livelihood. No, it isn't. Because that half X might be able to be done in a quarter of the time, giving you more hours to do more work for more people, thus increasing your revenue, not decreasing your revenue, provided you can market to enough companies that need your service.

That's the key right there, isn't it? So you need to be able to make the numbers work. You have to scale in a way that the productivity you gains enable you to get a lot more. Yeah.

In the end you get more per hour because you're four times. I'm making it up before. I'll give you an example in marketing that people are looking at. So to write a blog post used to take probably days. And I don't mean in a bad way. I mean you gotta research it, you gotta write it, you gotta edit it, you gotta Go back and forth with your client. And so if you could get for that client 52 weeks, if you could get 52 blog posts out a year, everyone's super happy. And it might have taken a good portion of your week, including back and forth, to get that blog post done, right? Like research, interviews, understanding the topic, coming up with topics, just go on and on, right? So I might have devoted a day or two, or even two and a half days in some cases of my week to that one exercise. That customer needed to pay whatever, you know, $2,000 for that blog post. I'm making up a number. Thousand dollars, $2,000. Pick your poison.

Right?

Okay, what happens if I can write all 52 blog posts this week? All of them? All of them. Now, I'd have to be incredibly good at prompt engineering. Better learn that skill. Incredibly good at editing, incredibly good at coming up with 52 topics. Ah, but I can use GPT4 to help me come up with those topics, right? Give me new ideas. We'll talk about that in a minute. It's possible I can write 52 blog posts for that customer. Now, that customer used to pay me 100k a year for those blog posts and it took me half my year essentially. But let's say I could plow those out in a week because I got really good and maybe it's a long week, it's an 80 hour week, but I plowed them out a week and I'm done. That's the year's worth of blog posts for that client. I know I have 51 week to work for other clients. And maybe I don't charge that customer 100k anymore. I charge them 50 because I'm able to do it much more effectively. And some of your listeners are going to go, oh my goodness, how do I ever get the other 50? Yes, you have to go market yourself. But there is unlimited demand for what you do. And if you're really good at these tools, there's more than unlimited demand. You should be marketing yourself as an absolute prompt engineering expert to drive marketing content. Because that's what people want today. Not, I don't use that thing or I barely use it. I am the master of it. The master of the wheel died a rich man, right? Not the barber, the master of AI. You will get rich. That's how it works.

I love it. I love it. So tell me, I'm going to play devil's advocate here for a little bit. Those who think, well, yeah, but what I fear or what I'm hearing is that my clients are actually taking the these tools on, you know, inside, internally, and using it themselves. So they're not going to need me. It's not that they want me to do it for less, is that they feel, oh, great, now I need everything I need, or I have everything I need to do it internally.

Well, here's the problem with that, right? What they're doing is they're taking people that already have a full plate, and someone's saying, we can cut that budget completely, and I'm going to add to the things that you need to do. So let's say I'm a director of marketing, and I used to hire Ed to write all my content. And I go, ed, I don't need you anymore. I'm going to do it myself. Which means I'm going to become an expert in prompt engineering, an expert in understanding what comes back, an expert in editing.

Right?

So apparently I had a lot more time on my plate as the director of marketing or one of my people did than I thought. Were they just sitting around doing nothing?

Right.

So they have to gain that expertise and they have to get good at it, and then they have to produce the content and they have to edit the content. They actually have to do your job. It's what you're good at.

Right?

And so, you know, yes, some people for cost savings are going to do that. Now, I would say a lot of those people who are doing that for cost savings probably were going to save that cost anyway. Meaning they might have come to you and said, well, just not going to do 52 blog posts this year. We can only afford 10 or we can't afford any or whatever.

Right?

But smart companies are going to say, this is great. I want to negotiate a different contract. Maybe I want a hundred block I'm making. Right? Maybe I want a hundred blog posts this year instead of 50 from you for the same price. And you go, I'll take that all day. Now a lot of your people are going to hear that and go, I would never say that. Okay, well, then your competitor's going to. That's the problem, right? You've got, I don't know, 44,000 people who listen to your podcast regularly. Something like, I mean, close.

Yeah, it's more like 14,000, but.

14,000. I knew it had a four in it. Great. Well, after.

I like 44.

After this show, it might be 44,000. So great. You got 14,000 people. Frankly, most of those 14,000, even if they're not in the same region, essentially compete for Similar services, Right? So lots of people out there competing for similar services. And I will tell you, the people who are going to get the future contracts are going to be able to deliver more for less money because they're leveraging these technologies. Right? So it's not that you're just competing to, you know, keep the business. You're competing against someone else who comes in and says they charge you 50k, but I can now do it for 25 because I am the master of AI. Oh, I want the master of AI. That's who I want to hire.

Right, yeah.

So you have to acknowledge that of your 14,000, some thousands of those are becoming masters of the technology. And on the other side of that bell curve, some are going, I'm not going to touch that stuff with a ten foot pole. I'm going to do it all the way. I've been doing it since 1962. And you don't win if you think you, you win by becoming the master of all new tools that come along, like Excel, like GPT4.

I would argue that it's going to be a long time, if ever, before most potential clients want to do this in house themselves. They're not doing in house. I mean, look at really any profession, any skill, right? It's, you know, you could develop it internally, but the learning curve, the opportunity costs, it's just too many obstacles to doing that. They're just too busy. I would argue the point once.

That's the point. They're already busy. If they had that time, they would have been doing some in house themselves anyway.

Exactly, exactly. Now there are some capabilities that could develop in house. They already got a couple of staff writers. They're able to get them more productive. Yes, I get that. But where I'm seeing a degradation of the business is really kind of at the bottom, you know, the bargain basement level. The companies that were just cranking out content for SEO purposes, they didn't care about quality, right? They saw this as like, great, we can fire all these people we've been using, right? You know, outside. But that was an untenable market anyway.

That is a fake market if you think about it. Those are people pushing out SEO content at, you know, 50 times a week. And that's a volume business. That is not Procter and Gamble, that is not Apple. That is a, you know, pick your poison, right? That is a volume business. And that volume business was always ripe to be taken over by a machine. In fact, that's all they want is a machine. And by the way, I Mean, we've had essentially machines even before Gen AI pushing out SEO content and taking content of a writer and automatically rejiggering it, pushing it again and rejiggering it and pushing it again. Those tools have been around for a decade, Right. They're not AI based, but they were good enough. And of course we see this, you know, in the stock market space, in the stock advice space, where these robo articles have been written for a decade and you could tell it's written by.

A robot and they're terrible.

They're terrible. The numbers aren't right. Okay. But they're just pushing stuff out, you know, against thousands of stocks every single day.

Right.

That was never going to employ a real writer. The quality, it wasn't about quality, it was about pushing out junk. So I don't think there's a great business in the volume business anyway.

Right.

Yeah, I would agree with you. Let's come back to the cost issue because I find that fascinating. What you essentially said was, look, fees are going to come down, period, what you've been charging.

So the amount per hour that you make, I think your revenue goes up, but the fees per output come down.

That's what I meant. Yeah, yeah, per, per output, per project fees. But you have to look at it differently. You have to look bigger picture. So where is that pressure going to come from? Is it going to come from, hey, other writers who are smart and realize, hey, I, I have a system now that enables me to crank this stuff out and maintain quality. And I am, you know, is it going to be driven by writers themselves or is it going to be an expectation of the market or both?

So someone's going to shoot me listening to what I'm going to say in one point here, which is what I'm seeing across the board, not across the board in many cases can be improved quality and it's improved quality over the writer doing themselves. Because a GPT4 or copilot in Word right now, which is based on GPT4, either one you have to subscribe to. But the subscription level Gen AI products are giving you ideas that you wouldn't have had on your own. And I know some writers are going to say, no, no, no, I had all those ideas. No, no, no, it learned a trillion phrases, right? It's going to come back with things not always right, not always in your word, not always the way you would say it. It's not always something you'd include. However, there are more ideas on paper in 30 seconds than you would have had all day. It just is true. You don't have to use them all. And this is where all of your writing skills come into play. What am I trying to show? What am I trying to prove? What's my outcome? And what do I need to say in X number of words? Out of this plethora of ideas that came back, I can't use all of them, right? And some of them don't apply, and some of them will be great for another post or marketing or article or whatever. So I think everybody's got to look at these tools as, first of all, their brain multiplier. What I always like to say is, I'm taking Ed's brain, and instead of one ad, I could have two or three or five ads. There's still ads because you prompt it. You decide what you're going to do, you decide what you're going to keep. You decide how you edit it, and you decide what the final outcome is. But instead of staring at a blank screen, and don't anyone tell me that they've never stared at a blank screen. We all do. When it's time to write something, we look at that and we write a line and we race it. And, you know, I mean, this writer's block is a normal thing, right? You're just trying to turn stuff on. It's hard. All of a sudden, there's no writer's block. It's boom. Here's your ideas. Okay, great. Change these ideas, change it this way, change it that way, change it. So your outcome an hour from now, what would have taken you a day, maybe eight hours or six hours or four hours or two days, or whatever it is, you're done. You can put that to rest. And the output quality, if carefully curated, is better, Certainly better than what you could have done in an hour, but it's probably better than what you could have done in a day. And again, I know people are thinking, no, it isn't, because we all have pride in what we do, right? So, you know, I've made voice clones of myself, which are easy to do today, and I use them on stage, and people can't tell if it's a recording of me or it's my voice clone. And I have no ego about that. It's like, actually, the voice clone is better. More articulate, sounds better. The writing is, you know, the words that it's using are better. Actually, it's a better me than me. You have to be okay with that, right? I mean, that's what these tools do. Excel made us Better math people than we ever were. And then we never did long division again, none of us. And this is making us better writers than we ever were. Even, you know, better writers than people do this all day long, but it's making you more productive. And so let's get back to your point. I think there'll be an expectation from people you're contracting with, right, that they're going to want to see the costs come down and, or the output volume go up.

Right.

And quality stay the same or get better and even be, you know, a wider breadth of topics, for example, than one might have thought they could have covered. But now you can cover a little easier. And if they don't, then your competition is going to go knocking on their door saying, hey, I can deliver this at half that cost. Then here's three examples of what I can do and I'm an absolute master at prompt engineering. And they're going to take that person even though you've been in there a long time. So again, if they don't ask you for a cost reduction, always assume that they're talking to competitors. And I know again, everyone's going to listen to this and go, no, they're not. They've used me for 14 years and they're not going to. No, no. Everyone hears from competition. Your competition is out there, they want business, right? And if your competition is coming in at half the cost and the same or better quality, you're going to lose these contracts. So I think you have to think about that. And lastly, if you can produce output, if there's now four of you, essentially there's four of your brains, so you can produce output in a quarter of the time. And I can tell you, you know, the stats look like that, by the way, or better.

I was going to ask you if that's accurate, if that's it depends on what you're writing.

Yeah. IBM did some research on this and you know, many people are seeing a 75% productivity improvement in marketing writing, some depending on what it is. If it's a 500 word blog post, that could be a 10x improvement. So numbers like that, right. But 3x to 10x, let's say, right. That's what people are seeing now. You have to be good at prompt engineering, very good at editing and really focused on quality output in a given.

Right.

A blog post has to take you now, I don't know, 20 minutes, you know, 30 minutes, pick your voice and whatever it used to take you, I think you're going to find that's you know, between 3 or 4x and 10x faster than you used to be for a lot of reasons. Now this includes illustrations, too. A lot of our work includes illustrations. And of course, writers used to hire illustrators. Some writers are illustrators too, but many. You'd hire an illustrator or go to Stock photo or something like that. Well, I can generate those illustrations like crazy now, right? I can really generate them. And they're not always as good or as poignant or as this or that than an illustrator, but I have it in 30 seconds.

Well, not only that, but we're just at phase one. It's getting better by a week.

That's right.

I think in a year we're going to be having a different conversation about it.

It could be, but I use it like for my PowerPoints. I use it all the time. Like, I don't go to an illustrator anymore, right? So there's a task that, for my life, it's probably the only task that's truly gotten eliminated is I don't need to go to illustrators now. I also can use Illustrator and I'm a Photoshop wiz. So I've been using Photoshop since it came out. But I even don't really do that. I don't need to because I can generate things that would have taken me hours in Photoshop. And I have it in, you know, a few minutes because I have to do a few rounds of them. And the time, it's not about the money, it's actually about the time. I just want it done right. I want to get things done. So I think there's an opportunity for everyone to increase their revenue and increase their output and increase their quality, but only if you embrace the technology again. I know people are listening to this and some are going to go, yes, I'm going to. I'm going to listen to Kevin. And others are going to say, I'm never going to do that. Just think of the guys with the wheel. Just remember, didn't end well for the guy who didn't embrace the wheel.

I would say that a third to half of my audience is embracing the technology. And the other, you know, half, two thirds are really cautious or against it. But you've mentioned prompt engineering a few times and you have to be really good at prompt engineering. I know we could spend hours talking about that. But let's talk a little bit about a realistic and practical plan for getting really good at prompt engineering quickly. And here's where I'm coming from with that question. There's A flood of prompt engineering information and advice out there. So much so that we almost need AI to be able to dig through it to understand, okay, how do I approach it? How do I systemize the learning of that? Do you have a practical framework and. Or advice for. Okay, how do I get better at this Step by step?

Yeah, yeah.

Not get lost in just a flood of ideas.

So first of all, you can teach a professional GPT to speak in your tone and your voice right out the gate. So there's a setting for that. And you can put in a lot of, you know, a lot of things that you've written. For example, the second thing is you always want to specify how long. Like I want an article that's thousand words, it needs to hit these points. So you're probably putting in the major points, by the way, like you didn't come up with those. You could ask it separately, come up with some major points I should think about for a blog post that does this and it will give you a list of them and you go, oh, I'm going to choose three out of these 10. That's going to be my blog post, right? Then, then go or article or whatever. Right Then in the tone of. Always in the tone of. So I want the length, I want these points hit and I want it in the tone of Albert Einstein or directed to an audience that is X. Directed to a technical audience, directed to a non technical audience, directed to consumers, directed to consumers who are over 60.

Right?

All of those are very valid. So again, here are the things I need. You know, here's the three or four points I want to make. I need to make those points very solidly. Perhaps the purpose, like this is a sales article or it's a blog. I'm trying to sell something. What I'm trying to do in the tone of, in the tone of me, in the tone of this company and the brand of this company, right? In the tone of Procter and Gamble based on these other writings. And you can give it those writings, right? And then for this audience, right, those are the things you'd want to say. Now the important thing here that people screw up on is they think that their prompt has to be like one or two sentences. Your prompt can be like 4,000 words. Your prompt can be longer than the entire article. And the more you give it, the more precise you will get outcome. So the more words you put in, the better you get out. In fact, you could have written a blog post two years ago and say, take this blog post, update it for today, based on these things, you'll probably get the best output you've ever seen because you gave it all the data that it needs.

Right.

The other thing is that in some of the professional versions like GPT4, you can set it up to go out and do some research from a particular website. So you can say, also based on the information gleaned from this page, give me the following stuff, right? So it can go learn from competition, for example.

Right.

More is better. That is if. Just remember that more is better. Who is your audience? These are all things a writer, a marketing writer has already been thinking about in their mind, but they've never had to write it down before.

Yeah, yeah, you've made the sauce for years now you gotta write the recipe, right? Yeah.

Who's the audience? What's the tone? What am I trying to accomplish? I'm trying to sell, I'm trying to educate, you know, what am I trying to do? How many words these are? And here's the points I want to make. But you know, in 30 seconds you're going to get a terrific output. Then you're going to spend 20 or 30 minutes editing and verifying facts. Always verify the fact. Let's remember that generative AI based on a transformer is only a sentence builder. It's all it does. It's only putting one word after another. Doesn't really know what it's doing, right? So people think, oh, it knew the following. Well, they fixed this. But it used to be that I could say, who shot George Washington? And it would say, William Tryon shot George Washington. And the reason it said that, because in a novel, William Tryon shot George Washington. William Tryon didn't shoot George Washington in real life. But it doesn't know the difference between a novel in real life unless you ask it further questions, right? So you will get stuff that may not be true, but the sentence structure will be perfect because that's all it's trying to do, is create great sentence structure. You know, if today was my birthday and I said chatgpt, what would you say to Kevin on his birthday? It has seen enough sentences where it says, well, I'm going to start with the word happy. And then statistically, probability wise, the next word to come after that would be birthday. And perhaps there's a third word in the sentence which would be Kevin. Kevin's name, right? Happy birthday, Kevin. It's about the only phrase that could come back because out of trillions of phrases that learned when you're acknowledging someone's birthday that's all there is to say.

Right.

But it's only putting one word after another with a probability.

Right.

So it's not Happy Llama, Happy Gandhi. It's not happy podcast. It's happy birthday because it's his birthday.

Right.

Just creating sentences. So when you realize that's all it's doing, and it's got great sentence structure, most of the time, you have to look at the facts and be thoughtful about what you're saying and how you're saying it. So we've all, you know, we've all heard there's horror stories. And the bottom line is this is where your expertise in editing comes in. Now you have to be a great prompt engineer and a great editor. But to be a great editor, you needed to know how to be a great writer. But you may not be writing as much as you will be editing, and that's okay. And, Ed, let me ask you a question. On your podcast, do you still re listen to the podcast and summarize it manually, or do you do speech to text, feed it to a summary generator which is based on gen AI and it generates the summary?

The latter, of course.

And the day that came out, you said, praise the Lord.

Well, I never did it myself. I had somebody else do it. But it was costly to have them go through everything. Right. So that was years ago, because we're on 11th year. So at first they have to take notes. Then we had transcription technology, but you have to take the transcript. Now a writer has to go through it and create a consolidated set of show notes. And now it's done in five minutes.

That's right. You push a button. It's just part of a podcasting platform. In fact, on many of the pod, not on Zoom, but on the podcast. Oh, actually, I think Zoom has this now has an AI that'll do that. But most of the podcasting platform, you know, Streamyard, etc, just have that built in. You just push the button, give me a summary of the thing. It goes speech to text, it goes text to Jenny, comes out with a summary. You tell it how many words you want. Chop, chop. And that has allowed you now to do technically more podcasts than you used to do.

Yeah. Oh, if you want, you got more time repurposing content. Yeah, there's lot. So you've hit on something that I hadn't really thought before, and it actually addressed a concern that I and several other people have had, which was, first of all, these tools are amazing for ideation, for brainstorming.

No question. No question.

And my concern has been this. This is. Brainstorming is one of the things that I love to do the most out of everything I do. I love dreaming, ideating, brainstorming. And my concern was if I'm using these tools as a crutch to help me, those neural pathways are going to just die.

Sure.

You know, I'm not going to be great at it. But you said something that just assured me that that's not going to be the case. And that is I now have to understand and really think better about my thinking. That's kind of a meta, a new skill that I think is going to make me a better thinker, a better, better brainstormer.

We're raising what we expect from you as a human. Yes, if that makes sense. Like anyone could have claimed that they were a writer. As long as, let's say, it's in English. As long as they could construct some reasonable sentences in English.

Right.

And we know there's good writers out there and there's bad writers out there. There are no bad writers who listen to your show. But there are bad writers and we've all seen them. And you go, who wrote this thing? This is horrific. Right, okay, so what this is doing is it is somewhat leveling the playing field of the quality of sentence structure, for example, that you're going to get. And so you might not be using your mind as much to construct a sentence, let's say, but now you got to use your mind at a different level that says, what do I want out of this? Did I get that out of it? How do I edit this? Are these facts correct?

Right.

You're operating at a different level than you used to. And yet many of us would sit there for hours, literally typing and erasing a line and typing and erasing a line. You don't need to do that part anymore.

That's low level work. Yeah.

Yes, that's low level work. Just like long division or addition was low level work. You learned to do it now in fourth grade, but you will never do it again in your life. I think none of us write cursive anymore. Or almost never. I mean, never. People don't send cards. Most of us have forgotten how to write cursive except our signature. It's very hard to do. We learned it in third and fourth grade. I found some papers in the attic recently. I go, I used to write like that. That's beautiful, you know, this beautiful cursive. I can't do it anymore. Why? Well, we type. We have a machine that took that over.

Right.

But it's raised my thinking about so many things. So cursive isn't as important getting that out of my hand as it is for us to generate the next patent or come up with a new invention in my field or think about what the future looks like five and ten years from now.

Right.

That's a, a whole different level of strategic thinking. And that's what I want all of these writers to do. Your outcome should be better because you're not worried about sentence structure or which sentence comes after another. You're worried about who's my audience? What am I trying to accomplish with that audience? Is it just SEO? Is it selling something? Is it educating? Is it raising brand awareness? Any of those.

Right.

I got to think about that.

Right.

And I got to make sure that what my outcome is is that. And now I can come out with that in a quarter of the time. Fabulous. And it'll probably be better. Fabulous. Now we should be using, you know, GBD4 and others. Bard, whatever. Gemini. Now for ideation. And I think it's fantastic. For ideation, I'll take. I mean, recently at a conference I was a keynote speaker at, these were industrial people that build plants. And I said to GPT4, Give me the processes of, of extracting ethane from natural gas. Here are all the different ways you could do that. Okay. Of this one, tell me what equipment I need and what is the process flow? And it gave me that. And then furthermore, draw me a plant. Literally give me an illustration of a plant that incorporates all of that equipment to process this much ethane per year. Boom. Take the storage tanks away. Boom. Now, here's what's interesting. I don't know if any of that was correct because I'm not an expert in extracting ethane from natural gas, nor are your listeners. Now, interestingly enough, people in the audience, I had to ask them, are those the correct steps? And they go, yeah, that's it. That's pretty amazing. Now here's what's interesting about that. If I am a manager in a company and I sent my, you know, one of my people out to take a look at how I extract ethane from natural gas, I can actually educate myself now a little bit before they come in and actually be thoughtful about my questions, even though I don't know how to extract ethane. And as a manager, I can't know how to build everything and I can even have some diagrams, right? So I can have some stuff at my disposal to educate myself first rather than trying to Find a book on Amazon, maybe on how to build an ethane plan, you know, and trying to read the book. No, no, no. I just need to know what are the major steps so that I can be smart enough to ask the right question. Did you think of this? Did you think of that? What's your background in this? What you experience in that? So that has raised my thinking. It's made me a better manager. They probably know I'm going to do that. It's raised their bar on bringing in their experience. On what of those steps maybe we can do in a different way.

You can skip the learning phase and get straight into productive conversation.

That's right. Get straight and productive conversation. So all your writers, all the writers, everyone listening to this podcast needs to think of their job as being elevated now, right? They've got 4 brain power, 5 brain power, 10 brain power, a hundred brain power, what they add before using these technologies. And they should go out and absolute market themselves if they're good at it, as, you know, as the robot overlord, right, they are in charge. They know how to do this. They know how to drive output and outcome. Here's some example. And when I'm done with my stuff, you can't tell it was written at all by GPT, okay? It's going to be in our tone, in our language, because if you prompt GPT, very little, it'll come out with something and any of us can identify that was written by, you know, a large language model. But if you prompt it really, really right, and you edit it correctly 20 minutes later, you cannot tell, in fact, the tool that that was written.

Right?

And then ideation. I mean, yes, I've just been asked to write. I haven't, but I've just been asked to write an article on the impact of redoing roads in this neighborhood, right? And I go, I'm not an expert on redoing roads. I'm a writer, I'm not an expert. And they gave me a few ideas. And now what did I used to do? I'd go to the Google and I'd say, help me understand roads, redoing roads in this kind of neighborhood. And I'd learn, and I try and I lift some things and I give some attribution. I do all those things. Now I can literally say, give me 20 ideas about the impact, both positive and negative, on redoing roads in this neighborhood. Boom. 20 seconds later, there's 20 ideas.

And study the two links they gave me. Yes, the client gave me. And then do some additional Research. And give me this.

Yes. Right now I've got this incredible ideation of which I'm not going to do all 20 in this 500 word article.

Right.

I'm going to put two or three of the biggest ones. But that's where my intelligence comes in. My intelligence experience in writing. How do I take 20 ideas and distill it down to a thousand words or 500 words or whatever it is and not hit all of them? Which ones are the most important, which are the most impactful? So it's given me a lot of ideas. What I find is for ideation, it gives me ideas I would not have had, including in my keynote. Yeah, I'm going to talk to the kitchen equipment repair, you know, industry association. I mean, actually know how everything works in the kitchen. I could probably repair it. But what are their concerns? What are they thinking? Boom, 20 ideas. And I will have one or two of those on, you know, I'll use in slides and say, I bet this is one of your problems. And they go, how did you know? Well, my research just took one minute instead of one hour. I would have done research. I might have found these things. I got it right there. Okay. It made me more productive because my job is to give a great keynote talk. Okay. A great keynote talk. And I can either spend 50 hours creating the customization of that or 10 hours, three hours. But they're paying me to give a great keynote talk. They don't care how many hours it took to get there. And so what used to take probably 40 or 50 hours, I'm still spending 10 hours on. But I've gotten far better ideas than I used to have.

You know, I, I read an article recently that big four consulting firms, or whatever they are these days, they've been able to cut down the time it takes to make partner by a year and a half, something like that. Because the first year, year and a half, people would have to spend all this time doing menial tasks, you know, doing all this grunt work. And part of it was character building, part of it was weeding out the ones who aren't going to make it. But a big part of it was like, we need you here, we need you here to sort through this and do all this just menial work. And now they're with AI, they're able to just take care of. Well, first of all, these people, these new young consultants using these tools are able to just breeze through that year and a half.

Yes.

Actually do it in like three months. And now they're making Partner in, I don't know, four years instead of five.

Right?

That's right. And look, some of the menial tasks that we did are going to go away. Like I said, sentence structure. Yes, you're going to check everything, and yes, you need to know what it is, but you're not going to slave over, should it be this word or that word? And is that really the way to say it? You know, the models have that done for you. They have ideation that you're still going to create your ideas on top of those. Again, just always remember, you're in charge of the thing. You're in charge of the machine. No one in finance thinks that they're not in charge of Excel. They thought that they wouldn't be in charge, like the first week when they saw it, they go, that's it. My job's over. But 40 years in, they're just in charge of the tool. Okay? There's no question, over the next 10 years, no one, no one will write any marketing content probably within two years, maybe three years without the assist of AI. Nobody. Why would you make any sense? People are writing patents today and they're using AI to help them. It didn't make the invention. I created the invention. But give me some ideas for some claims out of this invention. And they're actually really good.

Right.

That would have had that idea. They're not all right, but they're good. So I highly, highly encourage everyone to get excited about this new technology, realize it is going to drive your productivity efficiency up. It will ultimately allow you to charge less, which will ultimately allow you to attract more customers, many of which couldn't have afforded your services in the past, and today they can.

Right?

That's fascinating. Yeah. Bigger market. There's a bigger market today. Let's put this way, I'm making it up, right? I don't know what everybody charges. There's a bigger market for $500 blog posts than there is for $2,000 blog posts, period. Full stop. The market is probably 10x at $500 than it is at 2000. So if you can produce equal blog posts at $500 versus what you used to do for 2000, your market is 10 times larger. You need to go find those people, but your market's 10 times larger. That's what happens when you drive the cost of goods and services down. That's what we're doing here.

Well, and as a writer, it enables you to spend more of your time on your stone of genius. That's the other thing we haven't talked about. I mean, it's been implied, but I don't want to spend, which is what we do, spend 90% of our time doing stuff that really, that's not what a unique capability is. I want to spend more and more of my time doing what I do best.

That's a really good point. That's a really good point because you might be really, really good at, I know this type of writing that's very technical and very unusual and very tactical and very, you know, but it takes a lot of time and it's really hard. You may be able to spend more time on those things or the things that really drive you, or maybe you're writing a book, but you'll be able to spend more time on that.

Right?

So we're giving you time back. We're making you more productive. But always when the cost of services, of delivering services goes down and the price ultimately goes down to, you know, match that cost decline, the demand for those services goes up.

Right.

Look, the demand for $1 blog post is infinite. We know that nobody can write one for a dollar. But you get my point in the demand for $10,000 blog posts is almost zero.

Right?

So somewhere in between there, there's a price elasticity curve and you want to find a place where you can make twice what you made last year, doing, in essence, half the work. This is amazing. It's a great world.

I have one more question for you, which is actually is a good way to wrap all this up, because there's been a lot of talk about the legality of using, you know, AI generated content for client work. I know we don't have time to get into all the ins and outs, but what do you see happening in this area? Do you think this is going to sort itself out?

Well, Congress probably doesn't know what they're doing, so that leaves uspto. USPTO for Copyrights has said if it was strictly written by AI, it's not copyrightable. But did we really copyright most of, you know, copyright, so to speak, or marketing material? Yes, it was. Yes, sort of. But really, if someone copied things that we said in an article or a blog post or even a data sheet, did anyone ever go sue someone for copying some text off someone's data sheet? No. I mean, people learn from other data sheets and other marketing and other websites and do it all the time. So my sense is in marketing content, I think there's no fundamental difference. Even though any company could have claimed, you know, copyright was mine, this was Written by humans. People steal that stuff all the time. I mean, they wouldn't steal a tagline, but they'd steal everything else from your website. And have, since there have been websites and they rewrite a few words. I mean, I see websites that I have written and, you know, two months later I go, those are my words on the competitor side. What are we going to assume? You took my words from my website? No. So I think it fundamentally doesn't matter. I think that companies just want this stuff written, and I think companies expect that it's being written in part or as an assistant, you know, to you. With AI, that's going to be an expectation. And I think if you approach companies and say, I'm not going to do that, I think they're not going to hire you in the future.

What about those who say, look, because we don't want to be sued, you as a writer can't use these generative tools to.

I mean, the big generative tool guides, including, you know, OpenAI, et cetera, are indemnifying the use of that tool in case the tool somehow absolutely copies word for word, something which, by the way, they're highly programmed to not do. It's very hard to get it to do that without attribution.

Right.

So it isn't going to accidentally come up with three lines from Hemingway. It's. It's programmed to do not do that. So much so that they're saying, we will take on the lawsuit if accident. Microsoft said the same thing. We will take on the laws. If you get sued because our thing gave you three lines from Hemingway and you're getting sued by the Hemingway family, we will protect you from that because we have programmed the thing to never. Absolutely. Unless you ask it to give me three lines from Hemingway, it'll do that with attribution.

Right.

That's different.

Without attribution. And there are cases where it has done it possibly by accident, possibly because those sentences have been used a lot in many places. It just came up. But generally speaking, that should not be a problem today. And I think if a company is saying that they haven't really looked into and understood what those implications are. And lastly, obviously, you can just go use any plagiarism tools against which you've written before you send it to a company and run it through a plagiarism tool and just say, is there any direct plagiarism in here? It doesn't know about AI. It just says, did you steal something from a novel, from other marketing literature, from something? And if it finds, you know, a low score on some things, change those sentences, you're still in charge. Human is in charge. In the end.

Yeah, I, I think whatever is going to is still left out there is going to go away. I mean because there's no stopping this force is my view.

Train left the station.

And so yeah, Kevin, this has been a fascinating discussion. I really appreciate you coming here today and speaking about this. Where can I send listeners to learn more about you and your work?

Sure. KevinSerrace.com my website. Just go to KevinSerrace.com there's my LinkedIn is there and I accept LinkedIn messages and things like that. So love to hear from you. And like I said, I'm out speaking at conferences. You want me to speak at your conference? I'd love to show up.

Awesome. Thank you so much, Kevin.

Yeah, thanks, Ed.

Well, that's it for today. I hope you enjoyed the episode. And just a quick reminder to grab your free copy of my latest book, Earn More in Less time. The Proven Mindset, strategies and actions to prosper as a freelance writer. You can get your free copy@b2b launcher.com or you will also find find the detail show notes to this and all my other episodes. Enjoy and have a great day.