Don’t Outsource Your Writing to AI!

Nobody knows this. I don't think I really revealed this yet, but check this out. You see my screen?

Yes.

Now I can see it. Okay. So this post over here has 147,000 views on Twitter. Okay. I threw it up on LinkedIn as well. It has like 50,000 views, which is pretty decent for LinkedIn, right? Guess what? This is AI generated. This is 95% AI generated over here.

Yeah, but you still had the human in the loop. You knew how to modify it to make it better.

I barely modified it. You want to know where I modified it? I think I just modified it here. Truth is, so this was like talking about hired gun CEOs and that, that how it doesn't work, right? And so truth is, no hired CEO will ever match a founder's obsession. They're playing with house money while you built the house. I definitely didn't write that sentence. And then second part— Well, let's go back up.

Yeah, where are they getting the number revenue dropped 40% in 18 months?

That's made up.

Customer churn hit 35%, they stopped innovating.

That's the problem with AI content.

You may get the views, but it's going to make you look bad in the long run if everything's made up.

Exactly. But I wanted to test it. I was like, my theory, because I was using, um, one of my friend's product, um, it's called Stanley, right? He runs a company called stand.store, which is backed by, uh, Gary Vee and Stephen Bartlett, right? And so he came up with this new product. Um, I was at a dinner and then he was like, hey, check this thing out. He's like, it actually generates a lot more views. I'm like, okay, I'm just going to test it, right? Because like on LinkedIn X, like these posts have a very short half-life anyway. They don't last very long, right? Um, but I'm like, holy crap, this actually performed well on both. And only one person called it out saying this is, this is AI generated. I was like, no, no, I helped, I helped, I helped, right? But very little here. Um, like, I think I only added these 2 sentences over here.

Like, keep in mind, Eric here was doing this as a test. Eric does not post AI generated content from his profiles all day long.

By the way, when you, when you release something out like this, it feels like you lose a piece of your soul. Like, that's what I'll tell you. Like, and so Yes, I did edit maybe like what this looks like, what, like 15, 20% of this? That's about it, right? And then I made the em dashes like just one dash, so.

Yeah, but it shows you the power of it. But this is the problem. AI just has a lot of junk stuff that people are using that is not true and it's just making stuff up. Dude, one of the people I met up this morning, he's in marketing and we were talking about how we're finding Mid-level managers who are older, who are first starting to adopt AI, they're the ones— we're both seeing this pattern— that are starting to show us work that was pure AI-generated and they didn't check their work. And I'm like, I don't have that problem anymore. They're like, why? I'm like, my team knows if they send me AI-generated crap and it just sucks, you get a warning. If you do it again and you didn't even review it, I'll write you up. The first time I don't write you up, but the second time you do it, I'll write you up. If the third time you do it and you're not checking, you're just giving me AI stuff, you're pretty much not working at the company. And I try to be fair with this. I let people know because why am I paying someone to use AI, not check the work, send it to me, then I have to go and fix all their work? And not only does that cost me more time, but I paid the person to do this so I didn't have to deal with it. What's the point of it?

It's double work. It's triple work.

Exactly. And there's just so much AI slop in organizations. Like it's getting really bad. And you know, you see, uh, the Michael, I forgot what his last name is from, uh, he shorted Palantir and he shorted, I think Nvidia. Michael Burry. There you go. Um, I'm not, this is not financial advice. Palantir is worth roughly 100 times revenue, right? Roughly. And they're growing at only 60% a year, which 60% at that pace is massive, but I really rarely ever see a company worth 100 times revenue.

I think he put $912 million in shorts for Palantir and like $100-something for Nvidia, right? I was just, yeah. Like, by the way, he hasn't been that right recently.

Yeah, but dude, look at OpenAI. They're supposedly worth $500 million, $500 billion, and they supposedly will do $20 billion this year. That's 25 times revenue. Expensive, but they're growing at more than 100% a year, right? And we all know that's going to be game-changing. Are they worth half a billion or trillion? I don't know. Time will tell. But Palantir, definitely valuable company, but should it be worth 100 times revenue?

Yeah. Here's what I'll say. By the way, Nvidia is not even that expensive. It's like 29 times or something like that, right? Which is not crazy. Like they're actually like, you know, growing accordingly with it. But going back to what you said too, I think it's really important that your company sets guidelines around AI-generated content. So for example, for us, if someone is going to come with an idea and they want resources for it, they're supposed to write a memo. And usually a memo in the past would take them days or weeks to finish a memo. It's like an Amazon-style memo where it's like, it might be a couple pages. Hey, what resource I'm looking for? Here's the overview. Here's the press release. Here's what success looks like. All that right now. I have a MemoGPT, a custom GPT that people use. What I realized is that initially I was using that and I wasn't even spot checking the work. And I'm like, hey, I realized what was happening there. I was like, guys, like you're going to have to spot check it. And then your job as a leader is to say, hey, when they send you a memo or they send you anything that's AI generated, that might be AI generated, you just ask, hey, is this your best work? And was this, did you check the work? Is this your best work? If not, I don't want to look at it right now. Right. It's your job to kind of stop, put, stop people in their tracks, just Just to kind of set this new rule.

Yeah, and then the other trend that I'm starting to see in marketing is corporations are hiring these consultants like from Deloitte, McKinsey, and all these places, and they're just like, you're paying too much for these agencies to manage your ad spend. You can just use AI tools and you don't even need them, like, or you can get them to spend like one charge, they should only charge you like 1, 2%. First of all, it can't be profitable if it's 1-2%, you would be losing a ton of money. Second of all, anyone who claims that isn't going to put the time and attention. Third, if the AI tools were so powerful and amazing where you didn't need a human, Google and Meta would've already created them. And anyone who tries to claim that you don't need humans and you can run Meta and Google Ads, I can show you more case studies of humans getting involved in improving the metrics than just letting Meta and Google go on their own. I'm not saying their technology is bad, and I'm not saying humans are better than their technology. I think the winning combination is use their AI technology combined with a human, and we're finding the results to be better. But it's funny because we're seeing people like, hey, you know, you don't need to be spending all this money. You should just put pressure on your marketing teams and tell them to just cut back. They can do it for like a fifth of the cost. Tell them to use more AI tools and technology. Like they think it's that simple and no joke, it's coming from some of the ones that you have on screen here, like McKinsey, you know, Boston Consulting Group, Bain, no joke, because we're working with companies that are paying them and they're sending us the memos being like, you're spending too much on managing your ads. Tell them to do it. You know, it should be a flat fee of $100 grand. You want me to manage $100 million on a flat fee of $100 grand? Good luck on that.

Let me tell you something. So, um, one of my friends hired McKinsey, okay, for, um, her organization. And they're getting, I think they're paying McKinsey like $2 to $3 million a year, okay? And it's like, and she has been thoroughly unimpressed by McKinsey. But you know what McKinsey, BCG, and Bain are good for? Like when I talk to founder friends, it's called CYA insurance. So we talked about this a week ago, cover your ass insurance, right? Because when you're an executive at a big company, you need CYA insurance so you can point the finger at these consulting groups if things don't go well, right? That is cover your ass insurance, right? Look at this, McKinsey on track for what, or they did $15 billion in revenue. What is this, $12, $13 from BCG? And then Bain, $6 billion. Look, they've just continued to move up and to the right. This is the power of a brand here. This is really interesting to me, Neil. And this graph we looked at a week before, CYA insurance. So McKinsey, Bain, and BCG will probably be fine because they are CYA insurance, but the rest of the consultancy industry could be in trouble. And this we kind of debunked a little bit as well, but it's interesting to look at You know, stock prices over time. Stock price doesn't affect— that doesn't reflect necessarily on the growth of the company all the time. Sometimes it could just be the market too.

So.

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I just, I don't understand what a lot of these consultants are actually doing in areas that they don't understand, but I get it. They got to make money somehow.

Yeah. Okay. So there's some questions. And by the way, the cool thing about us doing it live is that we get some, we get some questions in here. And by the way, you want to know how much the minimum it is to invest in Italy to restore? Guess, Neil.

25,000, 50,000?

100,000. So not as crazy as I thought it would be. And so let's see, Roland has a question here. Do you feel this behavior, this AI slot problem has been always existing in the space of copy editing, just that it's more easily exposed now with the introduction of AI leading content creation? Yes, the answer is yes. So we'll just move on from there. By the way, I have a lot of great topics here. So would you like to know the— you wanna talk about Clue.ly? Remember we were talking about Clue.ly a few months ago?

Okay, but before you talk about it, can I make a guess on what's happening with Clue.ly? 'Cause I haven't been checking up on them.

Okay, but first you have to explain what Clue.ly is.

It's an app that helps you cheat on everything using AI. Okay, and I don't know if it was some Stanford kid or something like that funded by Andreessen Horowitz. They talked about how they went from zero to like a million and then like 5 or 6 or 7 million, I forgot the exact amount, really fast. And they were using people to just create tons of social content, hit or miss. Some influencers did really well, some didn't. The numbers game added up, generated a lot of revenue for them. All right, can I take a guess on what happened?

Yeah.

Or no?

Yeah.

I don't think they're generating anywhere near the revenue they were. I think they have massive churn. Their growth has slowed down. Maybe I'm wrong and maybe their revenue numbers are climbing a little bit, but I bet you it's slow down and the company won't be worth a ton of money. They use a lot of hype to gain revenue really quickly, but they're not able to keep the revenue. And I bet you they're struggling. And here's why I think that. Okay. The founder, I think is some Korean kid.

Mm-hmm.

Did some sort of interview. Smart kid. I couldn't get into Stanford or wherever he went to school. It doesn't matter what school, he probably got into a better school than me anyways. He talked about how, oh, I wish we never shared numbers. It creates a lot of negative stuff. Bullshit. The reason he didn't want to keep sharing numbers is because his growth numbers aren't good. That's probably the real reality.

And guys, we've talked about this years and years ago on this podcast. The reason it's not good to share, and people try to fight us on this. I'm like, it's not good to share your numbers because the moment your growth stops is when everyone starts to poo-poo on you and then you get this unnecessary attention, right? And also, You invite attention from your competitors too. So more often than not, you're probably better off just talking about something a little more abstract like your employee count, but even that is not the best proxy anymore, right? So, you know, here, let me just share my screen and then we can kind of validate what you're saying here. So yes, so fascinating, Neil. You said, look, Li declined to share Cluely's financial metrics just 4 months after boasting about how quickly the startup is growing. It's what you just called out. Um, now the fascinating thing is TechCrunch had him as the keynote speaker and they're just pooing on him, like poo-pooing on him everywhere, which is like— I'm just like, uh, this gal over here, Lulu Chang, um, says, um, or Miservi says, um, a reminder that not all press is good press and you can turn down interview requests. So it hasn't been good because they've pivoted into this note-taking app. And the reality is I actually just think there's— if they're so good at virality, Maybe they should just become like the ultimate virality agency and just do that. That's what the Ikon people did. They had this like ad software and now they're just an agency.

No, but dude, here's the problem with these like people who say that they're really good at virality. They're very good at virality for marketing that doesn't work. And what I mean by this is let's say if Clue.ly is a good product, that virality got them well known, but it wasn't creating sticky revenue. It's easy if you create an ad and just says, oh, no matter what you can do, you can just cheat on it. Just use Clue.ly, right? Like that kind of stuff of course is going to go viral, but is it going to create the right type of customers? Dude, do you remember Jasper? You no longer have to write content. Just dude, you can just use Jasper. It creates all your social posts, your text-based content, yada, yada, yada.

Yep.

What happened to Jasper? No one talks about it. All they did was get a lot of quick signups that churn super fast. Doing the marketing that generates you the right type of customers that stick, keep spending, evangelizing the product, say good things, leave positive reviews is much harder to do. And try doing that for things you can't market in a sexy way like cheat on anything. Of course, if you say cheat on anything, it's going to go viral. But now try to say, hey, cheat on anything with our note-taking software. You're not going to get the right type of signups.

That being said, Neil and I are going to hit stop now and we're going to make sure this uploads. But hope you guys have a great weekend.