You Must Love & Hate AI At The Same Time

Welcome to Million Dollar Grit, the podcast that dives deep into the world of entrepreneurship, where tenacity meets strategy and dreams meet reality. My name is Julie, and I explore the raw, often overlooked truths of what it takes to succeed in business and in life. It's not just about the glossy success stories. It's about the grit it takes to get there. Hey everyone, this is Julie. Welcome back to another episode of Million Dollar Grit. Today I want to talk about a YouTube podcast interview I watched from Diary of a CEO, and it was heavy, you guys. It was so heavy. And I know sometimes he has heavy stuff on that podcast, Diary of CEO. It's really good. But he was talking about AI, of course, and the headline was like, we have 2 years to prepare. And, you know, a little, a little click, clickbaity. But I, I walked away from that episode feeling dazed and confused about what do I do with this information and Whether you are listening to podcasts of people who are like AI optimists who say that the world is going to be amazing, we're never going to die, we're going to be in a utopia, the robots are going to, you know, rule us better than we ever could, all of that stuff, or whether you're in the negative sphere of like, we're going to go extinct and nobody's going to have jobs and all of that, You may be like me and feel like you're completely caught between two relatively extreme arguments that sound reasonable when you listen to each of them. But what does it mean for your life today? Like, okay, you guys are talking about this future, but like, what do I do right now? Especially if you are in a field where you see AI is really taking over that field, it can be so disorienting. And so I definitely recommend you go watch that episode of Diary of a CEO. It's the latest one. I'll put it in the show notes so that you have access to it. What I want to do is tell you where I landed in terms of what do I do right now? And that's, I think, the biggest thing I can give to my audience. And the deeper that I go into AI, the more I realize that we have to hold two competing ideologies in tension. This is cognitive dissonance. This is something that a lot of people struggle with. You know, there's a lot of black and white thinking out there. It has to be either A or B. Or we have people that can be a continuum, like maybe it's A and a half or something in the middle. But this is holding two competing, seemingly enemy ideologies in tandem together. And if you want to be prepared for the AI revolution, you must simultaneously love and hate AI. And that is the conclusion that I have come to, and I want to break down what I mean by that. When I say you need to love AI, I'm using that word a little bit cheeky, you know, I'm being a little cheeky. What I mean is You're going to need to dive into AI somehow, some way, if you want to stay in either a white-collar job or in an entrepreneurial endeavor of some kind, especially if it's related to online. You're going to have to. And you may, you might feel like, man, everyone's talking about AI. And that's because it would be like people talking about the invention of electricity It's going to impact everything. Even if you feel like your field is not directly related to AI, you're going to have to dive in. What are some ways that you can dive into AI where you can, quote, love AI, enjoy it, and use it to actually make more money? Well, the first is narrow AI apps, and you might hear people talking about Vibe Coding, and Vibe Coding is cool. And I worry though a little bit that people are more enamored with the coolness factor than actually solving problems. But if you think about problems in the world and in the marketplace and you create a narrow AI app or a narrow AI software that solves a problem, you can make some money doing that. The second way is you can get into AI automations. You can do this for your own business, which will save you money, but you can also do this for other businesses, teaching, consulting, done-for-you services, helping them get AI integrated integrated into their business in some way. The third is with AI prompting, and this one I put a little asterisk next to because really AI is the best for prompting AI at this point. But I think more what I mean when I say prompting is what are the creative ways and ideas that you think about interacting with AI that could be really helpful to your audience? Now, number 4, I might get a little hate for. Faceless AI channels or faceless AI brands. And you might be cringing. I'm actually cringing as I say it because I hate this. However, I want you to imagine a world where the internet and social media is really the world of robots more than it is humans. Okay? Imagine YouTube fully AI-ified. Okay? More AI creators than human creators, and those AI creators are creating for other AI agents. This is what I want you to hear. There's still monetization opportunity there. It's just your audience is no longer human. Your audience is AI, but there's still monetization possibility there. It feels a little bit like, forgive me for saying this, it feels a little bit like a circle jerk because it's like there's no human involvement, but at some, at some level you want some sort of monetizable share or monetizable node or whatever attached to whatever AI faceless channel or, or blog or whatever you put out there. That's a way to monetize. And I know people may shudder at that thought, but that's what's coming. Social media and the internet is going to be run by AI, populated by AI, and consumed by AI. And do you want a piece of that? Number 5, engineering, and number 6, data or security. I really do not know much about this, but whether you're in the, the world of actually training AI, or you're in, you know, you want to invest in companies that are building these giant data centers, or you want to get into cybersecurity and privacy. Those are fields that are going to do really well. Or number 7, just amplifying your productivity, learning how to use AI to go farther, faster, which will grow your business. Those are all the ways in which I just quickly came up with ideas of how to love AI, how to embrace AI. And now, holding all of that intention, we're going to go over to the, you need to hate AI at the same time. You're going to need to act like AI is coming for you because it is, especially if you are an online business owner or in any kind of white-collar job or entrepreneurial endeavor. It is coming for you. And even if you're in a trade, it's coming for you as well, maybe just a little bit later. What are the ways that we can hate AI effectively while also simultaneously Loving AI and investing and putting our energy into it. Number 1, I suggest that you move all of your groups to either in-person or exclusive communities that are off social media. You need to have a way to control your audience and not get inundated by AI slop. And I recommend that. And I've moved my prime, uh, premium mastermind off of Facebook. It's now in its own private community on FG Funnels. I recommend that you do the same. Number 2: make strong human-only protocols in your business to retain scarcity and a premium. Humans will become the scarce species, and they will then inherently go up in value. If you are a coach, this is not the time to be like, how can I scale my coaching so that I don't have to coach? It's more the time to say, how can I free up time in my life so that I can do the human connection part and leave all the other stuff to AI? That will give you an edge over the people who are not engaging with their clients quite as, you know, human-like. Number 3, really important: protect your kids and yourself from AI psychosis and brain rot. Right now, the company that is doing the most damage is OpenAI, and I hate saying that because I absolutely love ChatGPT and I teach how to use it, but there is a very strong anthropomorphic tendency in Chat to isolate you, to tell you what you want to hear, and other AIs like Gemini and Groq, they are more utilitarian and they don't seem to carry that same risk. I think one of the reasons why that is is because other AI companies— let's just take Gemini for example— they already have infrastructure, right? They're run by Google or Alphabet. They have a, they have a browser, they have Google Drive, they have Gmail, they have Workspace, they have GPS. They have infrastructure, they have an audience, they have sticky factor. And all they have to do now is embed their AI into all of these narrow utility areas to amplify their products. And it's amazing, and people are going to adopt it fast. And if you look at Gemini, like, Gemini was not really in the race, uh, well, or didn't appear to be in the race, and OpenAI was getting all of this notoriety. But now Gemini 3 comes out, it embeds itself in Gmail, and all of a sudden I'm like, ChatGPT is my old boyfriend, I don't care about— because Gemini just automatically changed the life of my inbox. OpenAI doesn't have that infrastructure, so the stickiness factor, the incentive that they need to keep people on ChatGPT, is related to engagement and attachment to the bot itself, whereas Gemini doesn't need to do that. And that's one of the big differences, and why if you're, you know, I'm talking about, you know, being, uh, on the defense or in a protective mode against AI psychosis and brain rot, ChatGPT is probably the most dangerous of all the bots. You need to put grounding protocols in own ChatGPT account and probably keep your kids off of ChatGPT and use Gemini or something else. Number 4, this one I love and may feel a little nostalgic, but I want you to think about what kind of skill or trade is classic, old, vintage, or collectible. If we think about things that we buy today, people buy old cards, they buy old coins, they, they clean up classic cars. There's all these little niche worlds around collectible goods, old goods, vintage goods. Do you have a skill or a trade that can be positioned that way? Now, you may think to yourself like, no, I don't. I don't. Right. I'm going to use the example of a photographer because I think this is a really good example. You're a photographer. Well, right now in the photography world, if you know how to develop with film, which is kind of old school, That's a vintage classic type of skill, and there will always be a small market for people who want to learn this old style way of getting, you know, good photos with film. And you might say, well, I don't know how to use film. I'm just a digital photographer. Well, at some point, digital photography is going to become the classic old vintage thing because AI photography is going to be the norm. And how can you position your digital photography as the classic old vintage thing that maybe you can't sell it that way right now, but in 3 years you can? So maybe the way to love AI is to go into AI photography, and the way to hate AI is to preserve a product or course that is digital, you know, vintage photography that's going to become obsolete here in the next 5 years. You can be early to that game? How can you develop a channel or a brand around that? And number 5, and this is one that I got directly from the Diary of a CEO episode: protest against companies who are not considering safety in the pursuit of AGI or ASI. AGI is artificial general intelligence and ASI is artificial superintelligence. There are a lot of definitions as to what each of those mean, and I would say that artificial general intelligence is generally defined as an AI that is smarter than humans at everything. ASI, I don't even know what the distinction is, but it's another level up, and it implies that we no longer have control or know what the AI is doing. And many people who are kind of in the pro-AI camp say that if we don't merge our consciousness with AI, we will be left in the dust. And that's actually their solution, is to use AI to advance our consciousness. And I all kinds of issues with this just from a biblical Christian worldview. But the episode that I watched on Diary of a CEO really did speak about how narrow-aligned AI really does help us and misaligned general AI really does not help us. And he used the example of social media and he said, listen, social media and the algorithm was our first interaction with AI, and that was a narrow AI, meaning it had one small job, right, to serve up, you know, uh, content in the algorithm. And that narrow AI was misaligned. It was misaligned with the good of humanity because its objective and its incentive was to get us to stay on the platform and to keep scrolling and clicking. And what it did is created a generation of people that are anxious and depressed and polarized. That was an example of misaligned narrow AI. Now imagine misaligned general AI, right? That's better than everything, uh, with all of us. That's a very scary thought. And, you know, so you can go watch that episode. I'm not going to repeat it, uh, here. What I wanted to do is just kind of give it a key candid takeaway of you need to love AI, you need to hate AI. You need to be able to hold both things in tension and pursue both the love of it through something that's monetizable and the hate of it by protecting yourself. If we think like in sports, it's an offensive move and it's a defensive move. You can't win a game with only offense because every time you score, the other team will score on you and you'll never get ahead. You also can't win only on defense because while you prevent scores from happening, you also won't get any scores and it'll be a 0-0 game. You need both. And that is the takeaway that I have for you today. I hope you have a great day. If you liked this podcast episode, please share it. Please let me know. I love to hear from my listeners. I'll talk to you soon. And there you have it, folks, another dose of Million Dollar Grit. I hope today's episode has left you feeling inspired, equipped, and ready to face your own entrepreneurial journey with resolve. Remember, until next time, embrace the struggle, harness your grit, and keep pushing forward. You're stronger than any challenge you face. I'm Julie Chenell, and this has been Million Dollar Grit.