The Great AI Debate [HUBHEROES, EP32]
George B. Thomas, Liz, and Jorge Fuente debate AI's impact on marketing and creativity. They tackle job displacement fears, whether AI kills human creativity, and why people still matter in the process. Recorded April 2023.
Do you live in a world filled with corporate data? Are you plagued by siloed departments? Are your lackluster growth strategies demolishing your chances for success? Are you held captive by the evil menace Lord Lack, Lack of time, lack of strategy, and lack of the most important and powerful tool in your superhero tool belt knowledge. Never fear, Hub Heroes. Get ready to don your cape and mask, move into action, and become the Hub Hero your organization needs. Tune in each week to join the League of Extraordinary Inbound Heroes as we help you educate, empower, and execute Hub Heroes. It's time to unite and activate your powers. Before we begin, we need to disclose that Devin is currently employed by HubSpot at the time of this episode. Recording. This podcast is in no way affiliated with or produced by HubSpot, and the thoughts and opinions expressed by Devin during the show are that of his own and in no way represent those of his employer.
Welcome back to another episode of the Hub Heroes podcast. Oh, but we don't have the same lineup as usual today, George.
A little different.
Tell us who. A little different. We've been mixing. We've been making things spicy over the past few. A few weeks.
Yeah, it's like. It's like jalapeno, green pepper jelly jam stuff. I don't know. We're just. We're mixing up different stuff. We're creating the jams. Goodness.
Yeah, that's oddly specific. Yeah, yeah, like, that's an oddly specific.
There's. It's a Southern thing. Like if.
If.
By the way, if you're my Southern folk and you know what green pepper jam or jelly is, and you like to put it on some of your little toasty toast in the morning, hit me up and let me know. But yeah, we're doing something special. Liz. I'm super excited because at the end of the day, to have Jorge Fuente on the Georges. The dude. The two Georges or the two Jorge's, we can go either way. But I'm super excited. And. And if you're listening to this and you're like, who. What? Who's Jorge? A couple things. First of all. Yeah. Who is Jorge? Hey, that could be a long question. We might need a couch. Yeah. Why is Jorge. We need a couch in a therapy session. But Jorge has 15 HubSpot certifications, which is absolutely amazing. I know. Liz, I saved that for you. I wanted to drop that right here. By the way, everybody, Liz's jaw dropped about two feet when I said that.
He's been a lot of work to do during World Certification Week. I got a lot of work to do.
I had been hard at it. Hard at it. And by the way, we're going to put a link in the show notes to the actual introducing Jorge, because there are some things about him that will shock the crap out of you, especially maybe, maybe, just maybe, his strategy on hiding a giraffe. You're going to have to check that out.
Wait, I mean, what. You gotta have a strategy for that, right? Like, it is what it is.
I didn't. Wait, is there like an imminent giraffe threat that I'm not prepared for?
Well, you have to have a surprise.
Yeah, I've got armadillos covered and wombats. Giraffes. I hadn't quite gotten there yet. So, Jorge, we're gonna have to. Can you and I just talk later? I did not realize I was caught so unprepared.
Sure, sure. No problem at all. You gotta have a strategy for that.
Yeah, you gotta have a strategy for that. And Liz, you might even be double in trouble because not only is Jorge's strategy for giraffes, it's giraffes. Weari arrows.
You gotta put something on it.
Those are my kind of giraffes. Do they also like that weird jalapeno jelly or is that not for them?
I haven't gotten to that point yet, but they might, you know, they might enjoy that.
Jorge, what are you doing here then, man? Yeah, what are you doing here?
Right? So, like, thank you guys for that introduction. Definitely, George. I mean, you know, I've been. I've been working with you for the past month or so, and, you know, it's been a huge learning curve. We haven't talked about too much about giraffes, just in the beginning, you know, because I have that already cut out for me. But definitely, like this. This is. This is great. And thank you for having me on the podcast. Absolutely.
Yeah. Today we're going to talk a little bit about more. More important things in giraffes. But now we got past that.
Wow. Wow. Big giraffe is going to come for you. So if all the giraffes. All the giraffes listening. His email is georgeeorgebthomas.com. you can send all complaints there.
Yeah, yeah, that's right.
Wow.
Well, the good thing is I have an AI bot that will send them out immediately. A AI generated message, because that's how.
We should be using that. I don't know, man. I don't know. I've heard robots are taking over the world. I'VE heard they'll be doing all the giraffe hiding from now on and taking all our jobs and predicting all the stocks and ruining all of our lives.
Yeah, you should probably rein us in a little.
I don't know about that.
What are you talking about? Everything's totally fine. No, I'm just kidding. Gentlemen, are you ready?
Let's go.
Are you ready?
Let's do it.
Because we are talking about. Not giraffes, ladies and gentlemen. We are talking about AI. That's right. We are taking a step back from our usual hyper focused HubSpot and inbound lens to talk about a topic that has like, literally every day on LinkedIn, it's like, AI is the greatest. AI is the worst. AI's taking my job. AI is taking your. Like, it is. It is so overwhelming. And, and then also, let's not forget all the posts that say you have chat GBT, 99.9% of you are using it incorrectly. And then there are the thousand different ideas that everybody's just throwing at us all the time.
Yo. So first of all, I think I got to go back in the recording because I really do think you just said chat GPT instead of chat GPT, which, by the way, that's my chat bot that we need to create.
But yeah, that is true.
Just go back and listen, people. Let me know if that's. I think that's what I heard.
But.
But by the domain already, George.
No, here's the thing, Liz, what's funny? I want to jump in here though, too. Not just to like, make fun of the fact that we have our own chat bot.
Make fun of me, but to shame me.
But here's the. Okay, I love that you're talking about. It's everywhere because one of the things my daughter Kaylee, she helps with the marketing profs. Marketing smarts podcast, like getting guests. And she said, man, do you know the one topic that everybody on the planet wants to talk to you about right now? And I turned to her and I said, let guess AI. And she just started laughing. She's like, yeah, everybody wants to talk about. It's everywhere. It's crazy.
Oh, yeah, it is. I mean, like, think about some of the. Think about some of the things that we're seeing in the headlines recently. Right? Like, I just took a quick skim over the past week of some of the articles that have been put out there. So predicting stocks and public opinion all potentially possible with Chat GPT. There you go. Like models Chat GPT. Will the lower the barrier to entry for CyberCrime. Can Chat GPT predict what will happen with banks? Will AI take all of our jobs? Goldman Sachs initially predicted 300 million jobs lost. So, you know, things are going great. But I did want to share as we go into this discussion today. I've read this really fascinating piece in the Atlantic that talks about how we're seeing this waterfall of truly wild predictions, and at least a meaningful number of them, if not all of them, will likely end up being wrong. And here's the quote from that that I want to read to you. Imagine somebody showing you a picture of a tadpole like embryo at 10 days, telling you the organism was growing exponentially and asking you to predict its species. Is it a frog? Is it a dog? A woolly mammoth? A human being? Is it none of those things? Is it a species we've never classified before? Is it an alien? You have no way of knowing. All you know is that this thing is larval and it might become anything. And to me, that's generative AI. This thing is larval and it might become anything. Which is exactly why I wanted to have this discussion today. Because while the future of AI and chat GPT like solutions may still be murky at best, to discern, this is still a conversation we need to be having in the HubSpot and inbound universe. Whether that's you as a business owner, a marketer, a sales pro, literally anybody who experiences the world digitally through your work. This is a conversation we have to be having today. So I want to open up this discussion if you guys are game.
Oh, yeah, I'm game, though. I'm game.
Even though we're anti giraffe, I want to make sure we're okay.
We're pro AI. We're good to move forward.
Yeah, no problem.
Wow. So pro robot, anti giraffe again, ladies, gentlemen, that email addresses georgeorgebthomas.com.
But. But we need to know right off.
No giraffes have been hurt.
Yeah, no giraffes have been hurt. But we also have to know right off the top, like, listen, we're talking robots, we're talking giraffes, but we always know the tippy, tippy, tippy top is the.
There it is.
That's right.
I really appreciate how you've gotten progressively more awkward at squeezing that in so I don't ever shame you about the humans.
That's right. Again, like, it's on my mind every beginning of the show. I gotta figure out a way to. Humans.
Nah. Oh, my gosh. You know what? Speaking of the humans, just kidding. I actually like to take everybody's temperature here for a moment. How do you feel about the AI conversation today? What excites you about it? What concerns you the most? What do we got?
Absolutely. So one thing Liz, is, you know, anything regarding the jobs that are going to be lost, I'm just always hearing that that is going to cause some form of massive unemployment across the board, whether it's in Europe, the us whichever country. And you know, you got to also have in in mind that, you know, there are other factors causing unemployment usually. Like it can be anything from bad management decisions, like poor management decisions across the board and big companies, the large, I would say yes, substantial debt financing across large companies, the startup world as well, as well as pretty much the tech industry. So I mean anything that is actually causing that. I wouldn't attribute 300 million jobs lost to AI. Like, I think that's an exaggerated number. It is more like, I would say, yes, some form of evolution in the workspace, like you gotta use it. I heard like a quote that is about AI called. It was saying something like, your job won't be replaced by AI, but somebody using AI will replace probably your job or will be more competitive. So I mean, I'm just throwing that out there. I don't know what you guys think, but definitely I think AI was made by humans, for humans, so to speak. It didn't come from, you know, that's what I'm thinking. I don't know what you're thinking, George.
No, I'm. I'm with you actually. What's funny, I don't think the aliens or the frogs created AI. I'm pretty sure it was.
Or the giraffes.
Right? Or the giraffes. They didn't create the AI either. But, but here's the thing. What's funny is I think you got to the crux of it is that I would. Well, actually let me back up because I think what happens is humans have these moments in time where they allow fear to take over and anything that are something new, sometimes we become fearful. And that is something that I wish people would stop. I would be more afraid of people who are actually educating themselves on AI, testing AI, using AI than I would be the actual AI. Like Jorge said. I think it'll be the people who learn how to use the tool for what it is, a tool than running away from the tool like they're coming to invade the planet. It's going to be a whole thing. I can't wait to dive deeper into some of these conversations as we move forward. But Liz, I really do have more feelings than I thought I would have around this conversation and the, and the questions that we're going to go through. But I will say I, I am an early adopter. I love some of the things that I'm seeing. I also hate some of the things I'm seeing.
So what do you love and what do you hate?
Oh, so I love some of the extreme creativity that before AI and before some of the AI, things like, like, here's the thing, let's just keep it close to home. Would there have ever been hub heroes, limericks or poems if it weren't for chat? GPT? Probably not, because we can do it so quickly. And, and we're going to talk about speed in a little bit. Right. Would there be apps that would allow me to make myself look like I am like a God in space, space of some other planet in like 45 seconds? No, but, but this, this tool enables us some of the stuff around video, a lot of stuff around text. Like, they're like, if you are a creative human and can use the tool to be more creative. I just, I love that side of this. The thing that I hate. And by the way, hate is a strong word. So the thing that I strongly dislike.
Right. Like, there we go.
Is the idea of a cheat code or being a lazy person because of AI. And I'll leave it there because we'll probably dig in deeper later.
Yeah. You know, I, I would say my feelings are somewhat in the middle of this. I feel like I have about three different seemingly mutually exclusive opinions all at once. I agree with you, George. I agree that I think whenever something comes up like this, the same people who complain and fear monger about everything that's ever happened found something brand new to be upset about. And that is always going to be true because I agree with you. There is so much opportunity. It's a, it's a great way to work smarter, faster, if you are going into the tool with good intent. However, we have to remember that with every advancement we've ever seen, technologically or otherwise, there is always going to be the band of butt heads who come in and pee in everybody's fun cereal because they're not using the tool ethically, appropriately, or they're looking to scale crappy things faster. That is always going to be true as well. And that's something we need to be mindful of. I also agree that the doomsday predictions about job loss, again, I'm of two minds about it. On the one hand, I think it's fear mongering. On the other hand, I think we're going to see a lot of changes. And I'm very curious what's going to happen in terms of. Let's just talk about entry level copywriting. Entry level copywriting and stuff. Like, for example, where I got my start, where a lot of people in content got their start, may potentially be a little bit higher. We don't need that intern. We don't need that thing. Just throw some stuff in there. So we're going to get more into that conversation, but I think it's a little bit more nuanced. And at the same time, also, though, what types of jobs will be created.
That's the thing, right? With every loss, there's a gain. With every closed door, there's an open one. Like, there are some fundamental, like, principles of life, you know, how many social media consultants do we have now compared to before? There was a Facebook, Instagram, Twitter? Like, not all humans are going to want to embrace the amount of AI consultants that I have a feeling are gonna pop up over the next two to five years.
Because you know what? This world needs more consultants. Am I right, guys?
Yeah, I'm just.
No, I think it's just it. We're at a weird point right now where I too have a lot of things I love about it. We all know your girl loves an AI generated poem. We love it. We love a good AI generated poem. I'm gonna have to figure out what we're gonna be doing this afternoon for hours, but I'm excited. I love that stuff.
Can we just make it be something with Jorge? Can we leave me alone for one week? Maybe? Maybe.
So you were going to be left alone. You were going to be left alone. And what do you do, George? You bring it up. You bring it up. So that feels. Yeah, yeah. Look what you did. Look what you did.
That's right.
Did you literally.
That's right.
I don't have the equalizer that.
No, but I love that little sly. Like the humans, man.
That's right.
Let's talk to our humans a bit about the concerns, though, because I love that we're talking about, like, let's try to be more realistic here. Let's not fear Monger. But George, as you know, I sent you a recording of me cradling my dog, like, going off for 10 minutes about one of my biggest concerns, which I will get to later on, but I'd love to hear from both of You. Let's start with you, George, what your biggest concerns are.
Yeah, so my biggest concerns are. And again, nothing changes. Everything's the same. We humans have always been really bad, especially the. The male side of humans have been really bad about reading the instruction manual.
No.
Yeah, we have.
Or.
Or getting. Stopping to get directions, man. We're. We're good at not doing that. And so my fear with technology and especially AI is there's not a large hurdle and there's not even. It's like there's not even really a manual yet. Right. Like, it's funny, as I'm talking about this, I think back to one time when my daughter was super young. This was Madison. And I don't even remember what she did, but I remember what I said after she did what she did. I sent her to her room and I asked her what I should do, because I explained to her that she didn't come with a manual. My fear is a lot of this AI technology that we're getting doesn't come with a manual. And if it did come with a manual, we're not stopping to read it. And so what frustrates me is that we're. We're allowing ourselves to do things that we might look back on and go, ooh, why? Why did we do that? And I'm not only talking about this bad actors. I'm talking about people that are just uneducated to the fact of what harm they might be doing, even though they think they're doing good.
It's like the Jurassic park rule. Just because you can make the dinosaurs doesn't mean you should make the dinosaurs.
Exactly. And so, you know, one of the things that hopefully we'll talk about during this episode is, does your organization need to create its own AI manual? The dues, the don'ts, the how. We will as you move forward. Because if, if, if we just treat this like the wild, wild west and go all willy nilly, it doesn't end well.
Let's. Let's dig into it right now. What would you say are some of the do's and don'ts? I mean, let's face it, George, you're a business owner. You should probably have one as well. What are some of the do's and don'ts you're considering?
Well, I know for sure, for me personally, AI is definitely not a. I'm gonna put this in, it's gonna push it out, and I'm gonna publish it. There are only pieces that I want to leverage. I don't have a problem with it helping with the ideation process. What are the 17 things that I should talk about? Or what are some statistics around this thing or, you know, like just bits and pieces. I also don't mind that it would help with the ending of something. Meaning I know already that Grammarly is my superhero. I love me some Grammarly. Right? And so the idea of being able to. And I've done this, by the way, take a transcript from a meeting or take a transcript from a show and run it through something like chat GPT and say, hey, rewrite this with proper spelling and grammar. Oh my God. Like, I'm down with that again. So it's. I don't mind little tidbits. I don't mind it helping with the start. I don't mind helping it for cleanup or some light. Light, light, light, light. And no, the record is not skipping light editing. I'm making a point for all the humans out.
Pretty light.
Yeah, pretty light. But so that's. That's kind of where my brain goes. But I have straight up seen just like I'm going to do this prompt that's 27 lines long. It's going to spit out a finished product and I'm going to put it on the Internet. And I'm like, no.
Oh my gosh. You know, it's funny, I. There are things that I love about it. Give me an outline for something that will rank number one for the search term. Great. Now give me an outline for every single one of those sections. Great. Now give me a little bit of extra whatever. I, you know, I'm not ready to go there yet because once I start on this train, I'm just gonna keep. It is something where I have a very big, big feeling about this. But here is what I will say for right now before I turn to you, Jorge, because I have some ethics questions for you. What gives me a lot of anxiety about this, aside from the big scary thing I'm going to get into, is the fact that like these tools go out of their way to tell you a couple of things. Number one, they say in multiple places, especially with ChatGPT, it says, by the way, did you know this information is like 2 years old? By the way, did you know some of the stuff we're going to spit out is harmful potentially because we're robots, we don't know any better. Right. So there's that because of it. Then there's the other thing that I think everybody has forgotten about, but Liz hasn't forgotten about it. This forgets nothing. The Google Helpful Content Update. The Google Helpful Content Update. And one of the big things that was emphasized throughout because normally when they do core algorithm updates, they're like, guys, don't worry about it. I know your traffic's cratering, but this is normal. We do this all the time. But this was one where they went out of their way not to to say like, oh, this is just business as usual. They didn't say the sky was falling. But what. There were a few points in there where it, they gave like questions you should be asking yourself. Right, Questions you should be asking yourself to understand what your content needs to be at a level in order to rank. Well, a lot of it had to do with does this look like stuff that was scraped from the Internet a lot Agencies or AI, you know, and when I say agencies, by the way, I'm talking to Bellegal beleaguered content people where you keep trying to get your subject matter experts on the phone for an interview and they just won't show up. So you're doing your best if you didn't know that stuff gets penalized now, so just be careful. But there, there's that kind of stuff right where you, you have no idea where this content is coming from. You have no idea it's quality. And not only that, Google literally said in that helpful content update something to the effect of we're looking for people who are experts in this genuinely or have a demonstrated enthusiastic passion. Right? Like you don't necessarily have to be the expert at the top of the mountain. You may just be a thoroughly impassioned and enmeshed investigator, teacher, explorer who's creating content about a topic. And my brothers and sisters, that is not what AI is going to do for you.
Yeah, I gotta jump in here before you go to Jorge, because my brain started screaming out as I was listening to you. Liz, if you're using AI to be an expert, you screwed like it is going to be a bad day. But if you're an expert that can understand that AI just gave you some jacked up stuff and you can fix it, you might be okay.
Yeah. And speaking of which, we. I didn't want to touch on this during my answer, but there are some definite ethical implications, Jorge, that I want you to see speak to. Because like, let's just give an example. I remember when AI art started taking over Tik Tok and reels like crazy. Look at me looking like a priest. Look at me looking like an astronaut. What does this AI prompt do with this? And then artists started seeing their work. They started even seeing their signature show up in some of the AI pieces. Like, let's get into the ethical piece of this Jorge. And Jorge, before you share your answer, can you give a little background on like why I want to talk to you explicitly about ethics?
Yeah, sure, sure. I mean, so I do think that ethics in AI. So first of all, if we, are we expecting AI to be ethical, like if they copied like a TikTok from a specific artist, you have their signature on those AI generated videos. Like is that a bad thing that AI just did? Like, is it unethical because it did that? I think we're expecting too much out of it that it may not be able to give us yet. It is not an actual person, it is AI. It is learning from what we already have produced in the past. So one thing, to me it is that ethics in AI is definitely a difficult discussion. Like it's this kind of eyes, what's it called, beauty in the eyes of the beholder type of argument, if you could say that. So definitely some things that are ethical to use within AI may not be ethical for some other people. Like I, for example, I'm not a copywriter, I've never been a copywriter. I don't particularly produce great blog articles. So to me, you know, saying I could leverage AI to kind of tweak it a little bit and publish some form of blog post or even a social post, it is like some form of skill, if you will, like that I could gain from AI. Right. So I do think it ties back to, you know, humans natural inclination towards getting, you know, some form of reward with minimal effort. Right. Like, like it'd be great if we could all not really have to work and earn a large passive income, et cetera. Like I do think there's some of that in some people, right. I don't have that maybe, but I would say I don't think I'm ever gonna stop working. But that's probably one thing there. It reminds me kind of like to the crypto craze, you know, which it might still be ongoing, but I know definitely said that it was gonna replace not only, you know, anything from currencies, but actual banks, etc, so. And I'm thinking that that hasn't happened yet in however many years it's been ongoing. So. So yeah, I mean it does reminds me that whenever a new trend comes out, whether it be crypto, whether it be AI, everybody's going to try to jump into the bandwagon and try to like benefit as much as they can from it. The ones that come first probably get the bulk of the, you know, the bag the money back there and they, it's just easy to get involved into it. Even as a user or a creator, the barriers to entry are pretty low. And, and I mean there are just overall people that are going to always be having some ethical debates on that or how you use it or on the use cases. And so I think some news just blew my mind, blow my mind, like depending on how you view it. Like one thing is that pledge sort of like not really like a request that the leader, leaders in tech made about like pausing AI for about six months. Then yeah, then one of those leaders just created their own competitor to ChatGPT. So. And then you also have some news about somebody, some people buying domains for $10 million and that are going to be like AI focused types of domains. So yeah, there's just, there's just a debate all around ethics with AI and yeah, I don't know what you think, George, but that's pretty much my, my take on that. Sure.
So it's, it's interesting to me because, and Jorge, I love what you said there and it really got my brain going in a really weird direction that I don't think I necessarily think of a lot because, because I always overindex that we're all coming from a good place. We're all trying to be good humans, but we're not all, we're not all trying to be good humans. And so I, you know, this, this conversation around ethics, I'm like, well, what I might consider completely unethical, the, the guy or gal next to me might be like, oh, that's completely ethical. Like, I don't see anything wrong with that.
Well, some people consider unethical only something that they get caught doing. As long as they're not caught in doing something, it's ethical.
And I'm even going back to that. Like, if you're worried about getting caught, trust me, it's not ethical. But then the other piece I go to is there are so many different layers of who we are as humans. Right. There's the, there's what I'll call us the typical people who, you know, make a yearly wage and we come home and we watch Netflix and, and then there's these like, other people, you know, that are like the upper echelon, you know, billions of dollars, like can actually afford, afford to be programming or have people programming the AI and what do they really want in life? Like, what's the True goal. Like why has this even been a thing that we've been trying to get to, to to begin with? Like, it, does it come down if you're willing to spend $10 million for a domain, does it come down that this is a big money play for the people who are trying to line their pockets and, and us, us little folks are just over here fighting about if it's ethical to use it or not, right?
Oh, 100%. I mean, think about, I think where it gets really dicey. I did, I did have a moment of pause when I started seeing things like being able to predict public opinion, stock markets, things like that. Because these, again, these language learning models, Jorge, to your point, these are robots. They're not sitting here like biting their nails wondering whether or not they should give a. Of piece, piece of information. It literally just, it follows directions and the smarter the input, the smarter the output. And that's where I think we have some ethical challenges where this is true of anything.
Right?
Like think about some of the cases we're still seeing come up because we're still learning how to regulate social media or the Internet or not regulate it. Like, there's a lot of confusion. And now we are having, we have these models that are able to crunch numbers and ideas at a, at a, at a rate that are completely unimaginable to the human brain. And there are going to be implications to that.
Well, and Liz, it's funny, I love this idea of implications because Victoria from your team, by the way, Buena Volpe, if you haven't checked it out, check it out. But Victoria from your team sent over a tick tock and it was about this kind of. And I'm going to generalize it. I'm just going to generalize it. It.
I'm sorry, is the dad of the, is the dad of the podcast going to paraphrase the TikTok?
I'm gonna paraphrase it. Yeah, without a doubt. Basically, it's like AI right now has been scraping the Internet to be able to provide us the things that it's spitting back out. Now all of us amazing marketers and business owners are gonna go ahead and use AI to put new stuff on the Internet, to which then AI will scrape the Internet to give us things to which then we'll put on the Internet, to which then it'll scrape. And then we'll put. Think about like the sixth, seventh, eighth cycle of what it's gonna scrape when it's actually scraping its own information that it provided. Wait, what? Like think about the down road spiral of legitimate information that it will be able to gather due to the medium to bad players who are not actually, like, there's just gonna be a thing that we really have to pay attention to here. And so this might be amazing at first. First, but we quickly could get into year three, year five, and be like, yeah, AI is a turd because its input is garbage. Which, by the way, reminds me of my grandpa. Garbage in, Garbage out.
Garbage out. Oh, yeah, Absolutely. So are we ready? Are we ready for Liz to have her moment?
Oh, man. Yes.
Here we go.
Okay. It's so bad that I have to stand up.
Buckle up, ladies and gentlemen. It's about to get real in here.
Okay. I have to stand up because this is where we're at.
I feel like I.
This is where we're at.
I feel like I need to give you one of those, like, let's get ready to rumble, like, one of those so that you can get going with it. So. And by the way, by the way, ladies and gentlemen, you can't see this, but Liz is literally standing up as she pulled her pulpit over, and she's about to preach her thoughts on AI to the Hub heroes community.
Go. Listen.
Okay. All right, all right. I know. Meanwhile, my dog Ham is looking at me like, mom, are you okay?
No, I'm not.
I'm not okay. Okay. I will begin this by saying I am a champion of napping. I am a champion of laziness. I am a champion of what can we do to make this easier and faster? However, content. And I've gone off on this before. Content is the hilarious little irony that exists within our ecosystem. It is simultaneously the thing that we need the most of. Of high quality. And it is the thing. Thing we avoid like the plague. We have built an entire industry around a thing people actively despise, avoid, diminish, denigrate, or just like, oh, God, is that a content manager coming to get me for an interview? I better tell her I'm too busy and I got to go do something else. Like, it makes us feel insecure. We do not like it. We sit down at a computer to write something, and even if you are the. The most seasoned expert in your field, you'll be like, I don't. I don't know what I'm supposed to do. The problem with some of these tools that I am starting to see. And it's, again, actually, you know what? To Jorge's point, it's not the tool's fault. It's not the tool's Fault. But we have a bunch of human who have for so long not understood that. By the way, cupcakes, Sitting in discomfort is part of the creative process. Sitting and figuring out what your own idea. Ideas are, takes time. It doesn't always feel good. But when you come out the other side, when you're like, is that the word? That's not the word. Is that the idea? No, that's not the idea. What is it? And you walk around, you walk outside, you learn how to walk away from your keyboard, you learn how to do all these things. And that, ladies and gentlemen, is where real thought leadership is born.
Yes. You know, yes.
And so here's where I start getting really anxious. I'm seeing so many people create prompts that completely nuke that process. They are creating things where it's like, well, tell me what the outline is now. Tell me what the outline of each section is. Tell me what the thing is supposed to be. And you may end up with something that is adjacent to something brilliant that is adjacent to genuine thought leadership. I've been seeing some of these tiktoks recently where it's like, I asked TikTok to write the first sentence of my book based on the plot, and they were fine. Like, you know, it was a stormy Tuesday evening and the blah, blah, blah. And then they would actually read what the real introduction was. And it was mind blowing. What it does is it creates something that's serviceable in many cases. Very good. But my fear is that we are a society that is increasingly trying to make things easier. And I'm all about things like, look, I got clear, I got TSA PreCheck. I want to buy my time back, right? But if you are here to make a difference for the humans that you serve through your thoughts, through your education, through your service, you have to be extremely careful how much you are turning to these tools to remove a pain that you think is bad that is indicative of your failure, indicative of, oh, my gosh, do I actually know what I'm doing? Doing? Do I actually know what I want to say? Do I? Yes, you do. But you have to sit with your feeling. You have to learn to brainstorm, to walk away from your keyboard, to throw stuff out there, to be like the guy at the club who knows that asking to get a girl's number is all about the at bats. Not everything is going to be Hemingway, you know, Corey, I love that you, bro. You perked up today. You're like, what? Yeah, that. Okay, I'm going to sit down now. But like, this is my big fear. I see, I see. I saw every day in my job before AI showed up, right? People who would sit down and say, I just genuinely don't think I have anything interesting to say. People who have been in their field of expertise for years, decades, and it's just because they haven't been taught what the creative process is like. And it hurts. It hurts sometimes, but the act of creating something from nothing is an inherently vulnerable act. Act. And if you're here to make a difference, if you're here to be a thought leader and not just put it in your social media bio, you have to build that into your process and understand it is not a. It is not a bug. It is a feature.
So this. It's interesting because there was a part in there which, by the way, I love everything that you just said, and I feel like that needs to be like a clip and just go out on the Internet for people to hear, because there's so much truth in it. There was a part in there that you used to. A word. And I could. I could literally feel myself go like. You were like, it. It's, it's, it's. It was good. And I immediately went to this thing. Why are people okay with good? Why are we not challenging ourselves to be great? Why are we not challenging our content to be great? Like, it's not about just shipping it. It's about shipping something that's special. And, and the, the whole funny thing, as you were kind of going, I was like, oh, man, I wanted to close out with something kind of like what Liz is going at. That is a Les Brown quote where he talks about, do what is easy in your life will be hard. Do what is hard in your life will become easy. It's through the process, it's through the challenges that we actually mold ourselves, mold our content, mold our creativity into the things that. That becomes this amazing thing. And, you know, I go into this, this again knowing that not all humans are good actors. Lazy people will be late, will do lazy things. Smart people usually do smart things. And my biggest worry and my. My challenge to people who are listening to this is, please don't be a smart person that allows AI to turn you lazy.
Oh, I completely agree with that. I like, like I said, you know, there is. There is a big difference between buying your time back so you can spend it on more valuable things. I. E. Like, clear TSA pre check. Your girl does not like taking off her shoes standing in lines. But it also makes the traveling experience so much Easier for me. Right. But then I also think about, for example, a few years ago I wrote an article while I was still at Impact about the fact that Forbes was actually using a custom built AI platform that would give their writers really ugly first drafts, right? Like it would just give them the mound of clay. And what it would do is it would help solve for the blank document syndrome, but it basically allowed those writers to immediately go in and start doing more of their high impact work. Right. So what I think people really need to realize is that you should absolutely, absolutely be using AI to shore up parts of your processes, right? Make things that take a long time, a much shorter amount of time. Create those outlines, do those different things, but don't let it take the whole process. You should be targeting the use of it toward tasks that are low impact so you can spend more time in your zone of genius, your high impact areas. Or more time to just stare at a keyboard and go, those are not the right words. I know the right words are in there, but that's not it yet. And then you go outside and touch grass for a little bit and then it's fine.
Yeah, I think so. Two things basically. So on the first side, I don't think either AI, machine learning, crypto web 3. I don't think anything's going to replace the put in the effort factor to success. So that's really whether we get AI to do absolutely everything. To automate my tasks, to automate like creating an ad, whatever it is. I do think there's always going to be naturally, you know, this, this factor of you gotta put in the work, you gotta put in the effort, and that's how you're gonna get actually rewarded. That's how you're gonna advance through life, through work, through business, whichever. So overall, I know there's this great debate and I don't think we've even touched the surface of it, but definitely I would, I would go as far as saying, yes, don't be a smart person. That allows AI to turn yourself into a lazy person, as George just said. But I do think that whoever does that, in the end, you know, there will be someone who's maybe lazy but now, you know, opens their eyes. And it's like, I'm not gonna let AI, you know, push me towards staying where I am, and I'm just gonna leverage it to advance even further. And I think that's, that's actually gonna, you know, always be a factor. I don't think any tool or any technology or any, you know, new Innovation is actually going to replace that. So, yeah, I mean, that's pretty much my, my thought there.
George, I want us to take a moment here because I think we spent a long time talking about the laziness factor. Right. And I'm in agreement with all of you, but I'd love for us to take a moment to pivot this conversation because I know you've been up close and personal with some of the new tools that are available. Do hubs, spotters and inbounders talk to us about what's going on there? So let's, let's, let's just make the assumption right now that the humans who are listening to us fall into that. Okay, maybe I like to nap a little bit too much sometimes. Crowd. Right. But like, for the most part, these are good humans here to do good work. What's at their disposal at the moment?
Yeah, there's two main things that. And by the way, this will tie into. So what, you know, what do I think the audience should start doing? Because I can't believe we're already at like 45 minutes and we've been having a whole lot of fun here. Like, what should the audience do right now? One of the things I wanted to talk about was play with it, test it. And so when you bring this up, HubSpot. When you bring this up, Liz. Oh, my gosh, did you just call me HubSpot? Words are hard, people, I'm telling you. But when you bring this up, Liz, immediately two things come to mind. One is HubSpot Content Assistant, and we'll put a link in the show notes, but basically this assistant lives inside a HubSpot. And so if you want to get blog ideas, if you want to create blog outlines, if you want to generate paragraphs, create marketing emails, amplify your ideas, that's the one I love, by the way. Amplify your ideas or write prospecting emails. Right. Or get the start of them again, you can go ahead and go to the link that was have in the show notes. You could Google it as well if you want. It's still there to you, but it is a set of new AI tools. The second one, by the way, is Chat Spot. And that is Dharmesh's, I think, new brainchild that he is having so much fun with. But it's Chat spot equals chat GPT plus the power of HubSpot CRM. And there's a little subline here. No more waiting. Head directly to go and, and start chatting. And literally you can go to Chat Spot AI and there's a little video there. You can watch it. It kind of explains what you can do. But if you've ever wished there was like, you know, create a form in HubSpot for me or do this thing or. What about this thing? It's. Yeah, it is, it is. Here's what's funny, right? It these two tools take what a couple months ago or weeks ago actually you had to go to a different website, do a thing, come back into the tool that you're using for sales and marketing enablement or marketing automation or content creation. And now these tools are just starting to be like right there inside the system that we live in every day. So definitely, if you haven't yet, check out HubSpot Content Assistant and definitely check out Chat Spot.
So before we head out today, I was love to hear from you all what is one thing someone listening in our audience right now should either start, stop or keep doing?
I would say pretty much, you know, maybe we need to stop watching so much AI news, so to speak, or read, you know, so many news about AI and everything that's going around it. I do feel that the overall, you know, feeling around AI might be a little of, you know, fear around it, maybe some negativity regarding how it is going to be used. Ethics, definitely. It's a debate. And if we stop focusing maybe on the negatives and just on the positives, I do think that we can actually advance further that technology and the use cases of it for our benefit. So that's one thing that we could stop and, or try start doing and one thing to keep doing. You know, I guess we can, I could say we should just keep doing what we're doing. Like we should just keep going. I don't think there's any, you know, doom around AI. Definitely. I don't think it's going to end humanity. Yes. You know, maybe what Goldman Sachs said about 300 million jobs being lost, you know, that doesn't mean 300 million people are going to be unable to absolutely do anything. Like they're just going to be work kind of handicapped, so to speak. Like they won't be employable anywhere. And that's actually not true. I do think that they will find their way somehow. Some will start maybe some businesses, some will get into other areas, other fields. I just don't think AI is ever going to, you know, take the trash out, the garbage in, garbage out. So I'm just, yeah, I'm just a believer in humanity overall. I don't think that it's going to be something that we're going to use to, you know, I would say, like, sabotage ourselves. So, yeah, I think we may, we may be even doing that every day, but I do think things are going to keep going. So I don't know what you're thinking, George, but that's pretty much my tips there and what I had to say for that. Sure.
Yeah, I love, I love that. And I'm gonna go back to Liz, the very, very beginning of this episode where you talked about a tadpole. And what is it gonna be? Is it gonna be human? Is it gonna be alien? Is it gonna be a frog? And my. I have two things I want to say. So my tip around the tadpole philosophy is you need to educate yourself on it, because for you, it might be a human. For somebody else, it might be a frog. For another person, it might be an alien. AI is gonna be what you make it. You have the power to use it in the way that you want to use it. But to do that, you have to educate yourself on it. So definitely make sure you check out marketing AI institute.com. that's our friend Paul Roadster and some other folks have put that together. Also, I did a, a great interview on the Marketing Sports podcast with Christopher Penn, who is one of the most ingenious humans I think I've ever met in my life. And he talks about how to use, use AI for marketing in the future. Really great conversation. So educate yourself around it and figure out what is your tadpole, what is your AI right now going to turn into in your organization. And then the last thing I'll say to this, that I want people to start doing or always do is I want you to think about always. The last thought in your mind is the icing on the cake. So you can use AI to like, get you an egg, to get you the flour, to get you the, the chocolate you need. But you should be mixing it up. You should be mixing it up and baking the cake. And then thing you do and the icing on the cake is, I want you to ask yourself now, now that I got this cake, how do I make it me? How do I make it sound like me, look like me? Like, how do I put my thought leadership on this? That's you. You, the human, are the icing on the cake of whatever you use AI to build as you move forward. That's my thoughts on this.
Are you ready for mine?
Oh, yes.
It's.
It's some sort of limerick or.
Absolutely.
Palmer.
I think everyone should start using Chat GBT to make more poems because it's super fun. Would you like an example? I'm so glad you asked.
Yes, we would.
George, I bet you're the most excited.
I'm so excited right now.
And as a reminder, for everything we've already discussed, I have no control over the robots. They are neither ethical nor unethical. Right? Yeah. Okay.
That is what we just said.
It is what we just see, Jorge. I listen, listened. I learned. I took note. In the African savannah lived a giraffe so tall. His name was George, but he was mean to all. He'd poke and prod and tease and taunt. The other giraffes would often feel daunt. One day, Jorge appeared with a cape and a sword. He was determined to save the giraffes that were ignored. George laughed at Jorge saying, what can you do? I'm bigger and stronger. You're just a kangaroo. But who. Jorge didn't give up. He hopped and he hopped. He knocked George down and all the giraffes popped. From that day on, George wasn't so mean. And the giraffes were grateful to Jorge, their new king. So if you ever see a bully, just remember this tale. There's always someone out there who can help you prevail.
Wow. Yeah. We'll just end it. Beautiful. My goodness. Where do we go from there? Nowhere. That's it.
I don't know. George, Are you all right, bud? I didn't realize he was gonna literally turn you into a giraffe and a bully. But, you know, like. But you know what? Let's ride with it. But with that. Ladies and gentlemen, thank you so much for listening this week. As always, we'd love to get a review from you or ideas of any other topics you'd like for us to cover. And robots out there listening. Don't worry. We. We all worship and love our Skynet overlords. Thank you and beep boop to you all. Until next week.
Okay, Hub Heroes, we've reached the end of another episode. Will Lord Lack continue to loom over the community, or will we be able to defeat him in the next episode of the Hub Heroes podcast? Make sure you tune in and find out in the next episode. Make sure you head over to thehubheroes.com to get the latest episodes and become part of the League of Heroes. FYI, if you're part of the League of Heroes, you'll get the show notes right in your inbox, and they come with some hidden power up potential as well. Make sure you share this podcast with a friend. Leave a review if you like what you're listening to, and use the hashtag hubbyroes Podcast on any of the socials and let us know what strategy conversation you'd like to listen into next. Until next time, when we meet and combine our forces, remember to be a happy, helpful, humble human. And of course, always be looking for a way to be someone's hero.
