Brands add AI restrictions to contracts, Can Google detect AI content?, and Deepfake crypto scams

So Ad Age just wrote an article and they released it a few days ago and it was about something that was really interesting. Brands are starting to add AI restrictions to agency contracts and it's starting to become a growing trend in which when companies are hiring agencies to do their marketing, they're saying that you're not allowed to use AI to do things like create content or create creatives like those images or videos or anything like that. Which is funny enough, kind of like an anti-AI trend. We've been seeing tons of content around the internet on, hey, AI is changing everything, companies are embracing it, it's going to help improve margins and profitability. But we're now starting to see a trend according to Ad Age where companies are forcing agencies and, you know, marketers to not use AI within their own marketing.

It makes a lot of sense to me because if you're a big brand, you have to, from a legality standpoint, Because these AI models pull from the entire internet and sometimes they might pull inspiration from Disney, for example, or Marvel, and then you get into copyright issues and then they're on the hook at the end of the day, right? And so at the end of the day, you have to CYA, you have to cover your ass. And that's what these corporations are doing. It makes a lot of sense. And until the models, until AI evolves more, it makes sense to be more conservative than to be aggressive.

And on top of that, you know, if you're paying an agency to write content manually and create some sort of masterpiece that has new cool information that no one's talked about or create some sort of unique image or video concept that's never been done before, paying someone to do it using AI, but when you're paying a full fee, that's—

Yeah, why pay the full fee, right?

Yeah, it's like if you're going to use AI, they need to tell you and, You should get a discount.

There should be a discount. Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah, I think there's 2 things there, right? Definitely, it's if once companies become more comfortable with their agencies using AI, there should definitely be a discount. Because like if you're saving on costs, you better pass on those savings to us because this is business at the end of the day. By the way, Neil and I have an agency owners group called the Agency Owners Association. All you have to do, just go to marketingschool.io/agency. Once again, it's marketingschool.io/agency to learn more. And now back to the show. Did you hear about Here, I think because we're on the topic of AI right now, there is you know Matt Diggity. So Matt Diggity's a I'd say he's known for SEO. He has a he has a great YouTube channel. But here I'm going to share my screen because we're doing it online today. Don't worry guys, the lives are coming back soon as well. Neil just came back from traveling. So did I. So Matt Diggity SEO on Twitter says this. I'm just going to call it Twitter moving forward because I just think it just has staying power. So That's another topic. But Google killed AI content. Nah, not even close. The website in my portfolio with the biggest gains in the March update was none other than my pure AI site. The thing is Google can't detect AI. And even if they could, remember that they changed their definition of helpful content from helpful content written by people for people to helpful content created for people. I'm not going to read the whole thing here, but we talked about a couple weeks ago and actually did this, this, this, uh, The Shorts or this Reel did pretty well where we talked about how the SEO black hat influencers had all their sites torched because they were bragging about it. But in this case, Matt Diggity, he's not going out bragging about his websites here. He has pure AI websites and they're going up in traffic. So I think that's interesting.

I know a lot of people have pure AI sites. I know marketers, majority of them have actually got hit. It's not about if you're using AI or not using AI, it's more so the quality that AI is producing. People have this misconception that if you write AI content, you're going to get hit. If you write human content, you're not going to get hit. I've seen people with websites that have human content.

They got hit.

Yeah, they're trying to fix stuff.

Completely gone.

Yeah, and vice versa. It's more so about the quality. The reason we're seeing more AI sites get hit than not hit is because the quality sucks. If you have humans going in there and modifying it, or you're using better prompts to have the AI create better content, because a lot of people just use basic prompts, and basic prompts is producing crap content, you have a chance of doing well. If you're also using AI that's scouring the web versus just creating more regurgitated content, You're also probably going to do better. And if you have humans modifying it and adjusting it and adding in the double E-A-T, you're probably going to do better. So I do, do I think Matt is right or do I think other people are right? I actually don't think it, none of this really matters. Google's not optimizing to kill AI content or human content. Like when I, when I put on X, posts sharing data of AI websites and their traffic growth versus humans, it doesn't mean that humans are better or AI is better. It's more so that the reason most of these AI sites aren't working is because there's no human intervention. If you spend a ton of human time modifying the content, your results will be drastically different.

So this is why I think the AI versus non-AI content debate is not that helpful in the long term because when you think about Google, what are their incentives at the end of the day? They just want to serve helpful content to people, right? And if they don't think your content is helpful enough, then of course you're not going to— you don't deserve— nobody deserves reach. Just because you wrote all this content doesn't mean you deserve reach. Just like you don't deserve reach on YouTube, you don't deserve reach on Twitter, right? And so if you can think about, hey, how can I produce the best thing possible out there? Just like how MrBeast thinks about creating the best video out there. If you come with that frame instead of, oh, it's AI versus non-AI or AI-assisted, you're You're just going to do a lot better.

Yes. But most people don't think of it that way. And the funny thing is, is the biggest worry I have with AI content, you know, forget if it grows traffic or not, because we work with a lot of large brands at our agency, NP Digital, and most of these large brands are global. So let's hypothetically say you're not going to have copyright issues in the US, I'm making this up, You could have copyright issues in the EU, or you may have copyright issues in Southeast Asia. And these big corporations are worried because the chances that the AI copyright laws are going to be the same globally is very unlikely. Every country decides their own laws. And big corporations, if you do something for the United States, it's published on the web and people can access it anywhere. And the last thing big corporations want is a lawsuit waiting to happen because that lawsuit's going to cost them way more than having someone just manually write or create something.

This message is brought to you by Leveling Up Founders. And Leveling Up Founders is an invite-only event for founders. It happens once a year, usually during August. And past attendees include people such as Ali Abdaal, Cody Sanchez, Neil Patel, Vanessa Lau, and the list goes on and on. And ultimately it comes down to quality of the group of the people. We try to keep the group high caliber. That's why it's invite only. So if you are a founder at the top of your game, you can go to levelingup.com/founders to learn more about it, and then you can apply, and we'll see you on the other side. Dude, speaking of lawsuits, we'll hang on to this AI topic for one more, and then we'll move over to— so this tweet is from Mario Naful. So he says, breaking news, breaking now, fake AI livestream on YouTube scamming listeners. This fake stream shows Michael Saylor on the Patrick Bet-David podcast asking listeners to scan the code on screen blurred below to double the Bitcoin they send. The stream is still ongoing, has been on for over an hour. Unfortunately, YouTube doesn't have community notes to allow users to label the video as a scam. So there's a couple things here. We're gonna see a lot more deepfakes 'cause there's actually, I don't know if he's— I didn't show you this, Neil, but there was a video of Tim Ferriss speaking Hindi and the lips actually synced up with Hindi, right? And we're going to see a lot more of those now. Imagine you speaking Chinese or me speaking Hindi. And so this is, by the way, guys, this is where my friends have been making fun of me over the years. I was like, this is where AI and the blockchain tie in together, because then you can verify proof of identity for these videos, right? This all stuff is all going to come together. We're going to come back to this video in a couple years and I'm going to be like, I told you so.

Yeah, the biggest people that have to worry about this are like really well-known public figures, like publicly traded people or people on the Forbes list or celebrities, they're the ones that are going to have to watch out for this. And there needs to be some sort of mandate or something that the government or some of these platforms decide to take on themselves in which if something is created with AI, it's marked or coded in a way that people or platforms can easily know this.

There's gonna be a check mark. It's gonna be like a collab where you can see.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And, and then that makes it easy for people to be like, oh, this is fake news or whatever. You know, just getting cheap.

By the way, I'm drinking, guys watching the video, I'm drinking from this Tesla cup. Everyone hates it when we talk about this guy. So there you go. But I kind of want to watch this real quick here. Let's just see what he says.

Not only participate, but also to familiarize themselves with the world of Bitcoin. Uh, to be eligible for, uh, doubling their Bitcoin, viewers should follow these simple steps during our live broadcast. First, keep an eye out for the QR code that will appear on the screen.

Oh, it looks real.

So it looks real. Sounds like him too. Yeah.

And then you see the number of subs is real too. You can't really see it. It's 1.49 million subs. It's MicroStrategy. So they probably bought like a dormant YouTube account and they just renamed it and changed the logo. Um, all right. What do you got?

On a side note, you're drinking a Tesla cup.

I am. I am. Yeah. Oh yeah. This is you. Hey, but you bought one.

I talk so much crap on them too.

Yeah. So we had a video that did decently on Instagram, like 30K views or so. And then people are calling Neil an idiot. People are calling me an idiot, more so me an idiot than you, because I didn't describe why I think the tech is better. Let me describe it real quick for you, everyone. Let's see, full self-driving. Okay. They have the best charging network. Okay. Um, the spatial awareness where I can tell cars are around me and how close I am to other cars. I don't have that with my current electric car right now. So I'll just give you a couple of things right there. But anyway, let's go to your side.

Yeah. So it was funny. So yesterday going to the Tesla dealership, right? I was more so at the mall doing a lunch meeting. There's a Tesla thing.

Did they give you a cup?

No, they didn't give me a cup. I didn't buy it in person. I just bought it online. And then the guy called me and he's like, I just noticed you bought it. He's like, you were just in here an hour ago. You already bought a car? I was like, Yeah. I'm like, they didn't let me Apple Pay. I'm like, it'll let me Apple Pay $500 or something. I bought the cheapest one, by the way.

The 3?

Yes, but I bought the cheapest one of the cheapest, like motor-wise and all that. You know, my sister said I made a bad decision. She said I should have got like a little bit faster because acceleration is better. Not that you care. Not that I care. I'm only using it for city driving, right? And The only reason I ended up getting it is because, you know, love the Honda Odyssey. I'm not the best driver. Eric knows this. I don't have—

Oh no, he's one of the worst. Actually, you're probably the worst driver I know.

Yeah, I have a really bad driving track record. So the thing with the Model 3, whatever it's called, it's, it's smaller and compact. I used to drive like Honda Civics and stuff like that. So it's easier to parallel park because where we live in LA, there's a lot of parallel parking and stuff like that. And the only reason about—

It parallel parks for you.

Yeah, that's so, I bought that for that one reason. Because on Rodeo, the parking spots are just so tiny, right? And I was like, this is a pain in the butt. And then the second thing was the safety is amazing. So for my kids, the third was the pricing's not bad. It's affordable. The fourth thing, and this is actually one of the biggest reasons I bought the Tesla, in the building I live in, If you own a Tesla, it's free charging and your parking space already has the power adapters and you don't have to pay for it. If you have a different electric car, it starts costing money. And I'm like, I don't want to spend the money.

All right guys, new caption. Why Tesla is an amazing car.

Okay. I still don't think they're amazing cars. I think they're terrible. I took it for a test drive at the dealership. I didn't like the seats compared to a Mercedes or anything like that. They're not as comfortable. But where the kicker was, it was the safety in helping me drive. So for example, when I pulled into the Century City parking structure, you know, they have like that little yellow arm gate that goes in, you have to take a ticket.

Yep.

Dude, even with the Model 3, I'm like, am I hitting the curb? Am I not hitting the curb? And then my buddy's like, dude, it shows you right there. It's color coordinated.

Yep.

Yep. And I was like, oh, this is actually pretty easy for a— if you're a terrible driver like me and you're super cautious, I don't really stress out. Eric knows me for a long time. I don't stress out from business. I don't really have anxiety issues. Driving creates that problem for me though. So it's like when I drive, I actually count the seconds on how far the car in front of me is. And the Tesla guy's like, oh, you can just use this thing and it just puts more seconds. I'm like, oh, this is amazing. So for me, it reduces a lot of anxiety and stress, which funny enough, only driving really gives me that.

Mm-hmm.

I've dealt with lawsuits, business losses, I've lost like 10-figure contracts because of things that aren't under my control, like the stock market getting bad. And I'm okay with that. But funny enough, driving, I have problems with it. And the Model 3, the guy's like, you sure you want this? You know, he's like, you're going to put car seats. It's the smallest, easiest for me to drive. And I believe the technology will reduce some of my anxiety driving. But on the flip side, it's not that comfortable of a car.

So this is a business, and there's a business lesson in here for everyone, at least from my side, is that the definition of how good a car is is very subjective. So to Neil, it's comfortability of it, how spacious, the TVs and all that, right? For me, it's like the technology, the self-parking, the spatial awareness, all these things, right? I like to let it do things for me, right? And then The biggest problem with my car is I can't use the Tesla charging network. So if I ever do need to charge it, which is very rare, I have to go sit at one of those, those ones where like a bunch of people are waiting for it. Um, but with the Tesla network, you never have to wait. You're just good to go there. So anyway, that's it for— do you want to say something?

No, I was like, should I spend the extra $9,000 or whatever it is, $8,000 to get the one that lasts 170 miles?

You need range. You should have gotten the range one. You should return the one that you have right now. because having to charge it is a pain in the butt. So anyway, that's it for today, guys. Neil might go upgrade his car, but please don't forget to rate, review, and subscribe. And also go to marketingschool.io/agency if you want to learn more about our Agency Owners Association to help you grow your agency faster, get more clients, get, you know, if you're all relying on referrals, that's the place to go to. The community is growing and I'll see you tomorrow.