AI 101 What Creators Need to Know with Brennan Woodruff

Hey, hey, you're listening to the Level Up Creators Podcast. Amanda Northcutt here, founder and CEO. We help digital creators build thriving, sustainable businesses they love, and we're so glad you're here. Welcome. My special guest, Brennan Woodruff, and I are tackling a super hot and controversial topic in the creator economy today, AI. And I'm so pumped to unpack this topic because Level Up Creators is a glass half full kind of company, and we see a pretty sunny future for creators who properly leverage AI. And Brennan and I will cover what AI is, what its highest and best uses are based on the information we have now, how to view AI, leaving all of the media fearmongering and disinformation to the side where it belongs. And we'll talk about this all through the lens of content creators. But first, a little bit more about Brennan. Brennan has a deep background in finance and technology working for companies like Deloitte, KPMG, and Uber. He is a first-time co-founder at GoCharlie.ai, which we'll discuss in detail today, and just moved from the Bay Area to the Windy City of Chicago. And notably, Brennan has been a groomsman a whopping 35 times and officiated 3 weddings. Wow. Welcome, Brennan.

Thank you. It's great to be here. If anyone wants to endorse a sequel to Katherine Heigl's 27 Dresses, I'm here for it. I will write the script. Bradley Cooper's already in to play me.

Nice. I'm so glad you're here. I'm excited about our conversation today and just, you know, kind of your ability to help educate our listeners about AI and demystify some of the information floating around about it. First, you've got to tell us a little bit more about yourself, which absolutely must include something about your serial groomsmanship and of course all about GoCharlie.ai.

Yeah, well, thank you. I'm so glad to be here, Amanda. I think this is going to be a fun chat because it's a space that's so misunderstood. I think the creator space is even very misunderstood as well. So I'm really excited about the intersection of the two. But myself, I grew up in a place called Evansville, Indiana. I went to Indiana University. So if there's any Hoosiers listening, Go Hoosiers. Our basketball team will hopefully get it together by the end of this season. But the 35-time groomsman thing was honestly just living in so many different places. Like the Indiana folks get married a little earlier and then the Chicago folks a little earlier after that. And then New York and San Francisco are like, we're never getting married. So then that's now coming back into play. But I really attribute it to 2 things or probably 3 things. One is that I looked good in a suit before I became a founder. 2, I'm a great public speaker, or at least I think so, which is half the battle of being good at public speaking. And 3 is I am an absolute menace on the dance floor. So I usually was the one getting grandma up during Uptown Funk to really get the party going. So I feel like all that just like combined into a very top quality groomsman pick. No.

Yeah, that's, that's quite a resume for sure. Yeah. Party, party starter deluxe with experience. So yeah.

Yeah, yeah. It remains to be seen if the dancing abilities helped me in any of the stuff that I did at Uber or SoftBank, but that's neither here nor there.

All right, how about Go Charlie?

So Go Charlie is a labor of love. Fun fact for the listeners, we used to be called Gaudium.ai, which is Latin for joy, because we wanted to bring joyful AI experiences. But as you might imagine, no one really knows how to read Latin or what Latin sounds like. And so we decided, well, What is the most engaging thing on the planet? Because we started from creating content to help engage your audience. And most engaging thing, funny enough, is babies or dogs. And I was like, it's going to be a little weird if we say we're making babies, so let's do dogs. And so Charlie is actually a real dog. It is not some fancy AI acronym. And there's so many puppy puns between like training an AI and training a dog. And when you're telling an AI to go do something, it's kind of like you're saying to go. And so originally, instead of running a task, we would call it a fetch. And so Charlie would go and run and fetch content for you based upon your parameters. So Charlie's really started as this content creation platform. We focus on text and images, but we really are specialized in being able to start anywhere. So a video, a text file, a PDF, links to a website, your YouTube channel. We allow you to use anything as inspiration and then more importantly, keep that same messaging constant across multiple outputs. So creators that are looking to go multiplatform can do so in a single prompt. Creators that want to specialize in a different platform from where they built their initial audience, we can help them replatform a lot of their content. And so that's where you start to see the magic of what we've built.

Nice. Awesome. And we're definitely going to unpack that a little bit more, but let's back up a couple of steps. So Brendan, if you can give us kind of a nicely wrapped up with the bow on top description of what AI is and how it works in layman's terms would be awesome. And maybe draw some distinctions between how ChatGPT and other generative tools work versus how, for instance, Siri and Google work.

Yeah. So we could spend an entire podcast episode on those things. How people define artificial intelligence is always interesting because the first piece is how do you define artificial? Because I think a lot of humans are artificially intelligent, but that's, that's a judgmental thing. But then the, how do you define intelligence, right? Like most people's intelligence is actually a memetic device. It's they hear something, it validates or rationalizes their position, they give it, give it to them. I think of this current wave, I just kind of house it as generative AI. And generative AI is using machine learning to create net new information. And some people even challenge the idea of net new. But really how these models work is not so different from how you and I learn. So the basis of ChatGPT, many of these other tools, our own Charlie 1 platform that we've created is what's called a large language model. Large means greater than 1 billion parameters. You don't need to know what parameters are. If you want to get really technical, definitely reach out to me. I'll be happy to educate you. But language means that it can take language in. And create language. And then model just means algorithm. And so large language models are what powers ChatGPT and these other technologies. But the way that they work is think about if you were trying to teach someone about physics or you were trying to teach someone about copywriting, you would give them a whole bunch of examples to look at and then you would tell them what was good and what was bad. And then you would have them do it a whole bunch. And continue to tell them what was good and what was bad. And over time they would get better and better. That's how AI models are trained. We effectively create these datasets and we feed them through these algorithms and we tell the algorithm when it's good or bad. And over time it gets better and better and better. And then we finish the model. And that is ultimately what a large language model is. It is a collection of information that's been fed through an algorithm with a reward system and ultimately is able to produce content About what it already knows. That's an important fact because there was a recent Google research paper that tells you that no AI model is good at generalizing beyond the data that it has seen in its training dataset. We'll get into this a little bit later, but that's why it's so important to give more context to the AI model, because if the model hasn't seen anything about what you're trying to do with it before, then it's going to fail miserably at what you would expect it to be able to do. So context is important, but that's— Mm-hmm. a very, very rapid run-through of how large language models are kind of trained and built and ultimately power some of these applications.

I like that. I really like the human learning analogy as well. And learning physics is a great topic because it's hard. Physics is a hard topic for most of us. Okay. And so can you compare large language models like ChatGPT to how we get results in Google and how Siri answers us?

Yeah.

Draw a distinction there.

Yeah. So Siri, I think Siri is actually about to get a massive upgrade. So let's pigeonhole it to Siri as it existed when it first came out and Alexa as it existed when it first came out. So basically the AI models of old were cognitive structures. So there's really 2 sides of AI. One is cognitive and one is deep learning. Cognitive is pretty much everything before 2017 when the transformer paper was invented. And the transformer paper is what gave birth to large language models. Uh, so deep learning is more the large language model side of AI. So I, I have analogies for everything, so apologies, but—

Good. Yeah, that's how we learn. So—

Yeah, I, I think about it in basketball terms, right? And I do this in all the presentations I give, like, uh, one side, the cognitive side, is like you're teaching the AI the theory of basketball and like specific rules that it needs to know. But you don't have it play any games. And on the other side is deep learning. And deep learning is like you're teaching an AI model to shoot free throws, but you're not teaching it why free throws are important, why there's teammates, why there's fouls, what out of bounds are, any of those things. You're just teaching it to shoot free throws. So it's going to be really good at shooting free throws. And so I think long-term, those 2 fields are going to come together. But cognitive was like the Siris and Alexas of the world where they had a bunch of rules that they programmed in. And so if you gave a response that made sense with that rule, then it would run that task. But anything outside of those rules it couldn't do. Whereas here you've trained an AI model on a bunch of different tasks. And so if it has seen that task before, it'll be able to do it without you having to build all these different rules. So slightly different ways to sometimes get to the same answer, but I think you're going to see a combination of those 2 coming back together. So one is just more rules-based. The other is more flexible, but they both have their trade-offs because large language models don't know what they're actually saying. They don't have the concept of truth versus lie in them, whereas cognitive systems may have that concept, but you have to spend so much time building all these rules and testing them and developing them.

Yeah. So with Alexa and Siri, you are receiving responses from pre-programmed sets, basically, right? Whereas with large language models, they are drawing upon all of the context from which they can draw based on, you know, whether it's ChatGPT GPT or Go Charlie or whatever, and they're getting or trying to create new information based on a large dataset rather than just like, here's a response that Google's pulling up based on their algorithm, which is based on keywords. So it's drawing on existing stuff versus trying to create somewhat net new. Is that fair?

Yeah. And I think where you're seeing Google go with its new generative search functionalities is not so different than a large language model piece, because what large language models really are is just a knowledge graph of information that they're calling upon when they hit the right stimulus. So if you come ask a question, it's going to pull an answer based on this massive index that it has access to. So Google is very much becoming similar to a ChatGPT of sorts. And then if you've ever used Perplexity, I think that's the best search experience now, but it's slightly more evolved. Google's search is polluted by a lot of paid advertising. Think about that as like biasing an AI model. Whereas Perplexity, ChatGPT, they're all just biased by the information that they've seen already. So slightly different experience, but kind of the same function.

Yeah. And that's also why this whole emerging field of prompt engineering is so important. It says what you, your inputs drastically affect your out— the outputs that a large language model will give you. So if you're not asking it the right questions, you're not giving it the right dataset to draw on, it can give you some like totally weird bogus stuff and take you down like a rabbit hole of weirdness. So that's— Oh yeah.

Yeah.

So how does— plenty of examples we will not get into today, but how does GoCharlie sort of like reduce the barrier to entry, if you will, for people who are not prompt engineers, right? Like what can you go into GoCharlie and do very quickly because of the way that it's set up?

Yeah. So we, maybe as a fun fact, before I joined GoCharlie and we really turned this into something, my initial business idea was to create a music NFT platform that basically digitized Bowie Bonds and made fan engagement a crypto-driven experience. But I quickly realized that the biggest issue that crypto had was the on-ramp problem of it was just too dang hard to figure out what you needed to do to make a wallet, to get crypto, to hold crypto, how it all worked. They made up this ridiculous language and it just, it doesn't work to the average person. And so I kind of think that prompt engineering is that same problem for AI. And so what Charlie has tried to do is we've programmed kind of both the cognitive and the large language models to work together. So we have a bunch of different tasks that the brain knows how to use, but then we also have the execution power and the speed of a language model itself. What that means is you don't have to do these insane prompts. I've seen prompts that are like 10,000 words long. And guys, if you're putting 10,000-word prompts into an AI, it's only going to pick up the very beginning and the very end. It's not going to maintain the same context over the stuff in the middle. It's been proven out in researchers' methods to do it. But what we aim to do is you can come to the platform and simply just say what you want. And we're giving you more and more tools to be able to upload more and more context and more long-term memory such that instead of saying, write a Facebook post about XYZ, include this file attachment, use these links, you can already have that stored in the platform. So when you go to say, I want to create a Facebook post, it'll just create the Facebook post and it'll already consider all that context that you have.

Mm-hmm.

So as you were mentioning, like giving it the right context is better, but like I'm kind of on a march or what's, let's call it on a mission to get rid of prompt engineering. I think prompt engineering makes sense now, but as these models get better, it's going to be as simple as just providing the right context. And over time, I think we're going to get to a place where you give it goals, you give these AI tools a goal. So maybe I want to 30x revenue or 30x my following. And everything that it does will be viewed through the lens of that goal and the context that you provided such that it will start to be able to suggest things before you're even there. So I think prompt engineering is definitely a huge hurdle now. I don't see it being a huge hurdle long-term.

That's, that's really cool. And I know a lot of people will be really glad to hear that. And, you know, OpenAI, I think we're recording this in January of 2024. I think their GPT store opened today. So I think that will, that's one huge prompt engineering barrier that is being knocked down because we're going to see all these little baby ChatGPTs that can do specific functions. And so that's going to be a very, very interesting thing. And like, I'm super interested in how that goes. But okay, so give me some more examples of what you can do right now natively within GoCharlie without having to be a prompt engineering expert. Like, what are the outputs specifically that like content creators would benefit the most from?

Yeah. So maybe providing a little bit of scientific context because I think it's always fun to drop in little facts here. But before ChatGPT, which most people think is when AI really started, it started decades ago. But for most people, the tangible AI was ChatGPT. But before that, there was a model called GPT-3. It was a step change in the internet in my mind, and ultimately it was only available via an API. And can you guess what the majority of the GPT-3 API calls were for?

I'm afraid to guess.

It's okay. It's a safe space. All right, I'll save you the guess. So it was for SEO, right? Oh, okay. So you have a 175 billion parameter model. Remember, large means greater than 1 billion. 175 billion parameter model. That's super expensive to run. Very, very, very cost prohibitive to run, especially in today's modern cloud. That's why Microsoft and OpenAI did a partnership because it's so cost prohibitive to run these models. So what we did with our first model and the first platform that we created is we isolated the 3 billion parameters that were necessary to create blogs for SEO, social media posts, email marketing, copywriting, all of that. And we built a model. That just did that. And so when you tie that back to what can you do in the platform now? Well, pretty much any ad copy, Facebook post, Instagram post, Twitter post, TikTok captioning, emails to customers, blog posts, any of that, any writing that's promotional and meant to engage an audience, we can do right off the bat. We can also do image generation, but not only image generation in 4K, we can do it in the aspect ratio of nearly every modern media platform that you're going to promote on. So we can do LinkedIn, TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, square, landscape, horizontal, anything that you can think of. We can actually do the aspect ratios natively in the generated content and then edit the images on top of it. That's a huge thing with most other AI platforms is they haven't introduced a way to edit on top of the images, but then taking it a step further, right? So all of those things that I just talked about, you can do in a single prompt. So if you wanted to create a Facebook post, LinkedIn post, Instagram post, Twitter post, blog post, and use a YouTube video that you did as the source material to create all of that, you can do it. And so Charlie will tailor the outputs to each individual platform. It will tailor the outputs to your target audience based on its memory of you. It'll tailor it based upon the YouTube video you've given as context. And then ultimately it's trained to optimize that for the most engaging way for you to post. So that's really where Charlie starts to be magical is combining these messages across platforms. 'Cause I'm sure you've done it. Every time I create something cool, I'm like, crap, I have to make this for every platform that we're trying to target our audience on. It's a long process. Posting is a long process. That's why people hire social media managers. They get sick of just reoptimizing for each platform. So that's where there's a huge value in using Charlie.

Cool. All right, that's awesome. I mean, we talk a lot on this podcast about creator, content creator burnout and just the demands placed on content creators and multi-platform, you know, multiple posts a day, it just gets to be far too much. So, um, I hope that this is highly encouraging to everyone listening that like, hey, not only is help coming, but help is here. You just have to take advantage of it. And you guys have, again, really reduced that barrier to entry, um, with GoCharlie.ai. So that is super cool, super relevant, on brand, and, uh, should be applicable to literally everyone listening here. So that's super cool.

Yeah.

Um,

maybe just on that point, 'cause I've actually helped a couple creators through this. I think we often think about these AI machines as like content creator tools, but it's also very much a beautiful idea generation tool. That's something that I hadn't really thought about and was, has become an increasing part of my workflow. Like we were redoing all of our messaging for our website and I was like, these are the words that I want people to know us for. But I don't know how to like put that into a succinct message. And so I just threw it into the blender of Charlie and came out with perfect ideas. Or I'm like, what should we create videos about to talk about these topics? Or here's my website. What are some platforms to target and what should I be posting about for those platforms? So not only does it help you get the content that you want created and help you tell those stories across platforms, but the biggest thing for burnout for me was just, I don't know what I'm supposed to be saying. And Charlie can help with all of those aspects that often don't get talked about in those conversations.

Yeah, I like that. Like the idea generation machine for sure. We just started an account on Instagram, CEO_Creator, and I'm fortunate to have a team that helps me. I do write all of the content. I do write all the scripts for the reels and I record them, but my team helps create posts and carousels and does the video editing and scheduling and all that. And so that is super helpful. I'm just at the beginning stages of this right now. We're doing batch Recording. I'm like sixty days in advance right now, and I'm like, I could do this all day every day. I have 150 topics that I have not even like addressed, and I've already done you know ninety or hundred days of content. But for those content creators who have been at this for two three four five six seven eight nine ten years, man, that has got to be so difficult to continuously come up with new amazing useful valuable content. So yeah, that's another. Major benefit. I'm glad you brought that up.

Think about that for 10 years. The only thing that's been in my life for 10 years is my family. Or maybe it's a lot about creators. Maybe one day I'll fit back into those. But yeah, it's, uh, so 10 years of content creating is bananas.

Mm-hmm. Yeah, I've got mad respect for people who have been in the game for that long and really stuck with it. And that's why all this data that's coming out, I mean, really starting In 2021, but the data that came out last year in 2023 was really, really profound and showing like the affinity and closeness that we feel, especially as like millennials was a specific generation being surveyed here. How much we trust and like and feel like we truly know on a personal level the you know half a dozen or so content creators that we follow most closely. So that is a weird thing that you just said. The only thing that's been in my life for ten more than ten years is family, but then like. I'm sure you and I both follow creators that have been in the game for at least that long. So yeah, my hat's off to creators who have been doing that forever, which is why my company exists so we can help people monetize that, that they've built, right? And y'all

too. Exactly. And I find with a lot of those creators, they are experts in knowing when it's time to refresh or repurpose. Like that's the ones that I've seen stay the longest. Have found ways to bring old content back to life. That's actually a tagline that I use for us sometimes, like bring your content to life because most creators, most businesses have all this rich history, rich sets of information. Let's find a way to tell that story in a new way.

Yeah. Yeah. I like that angle. I can definitely generate a lot of new ideas. Okay. Let's shift gears just a little bit here. So I've read some LinkedIn posts, articles, seen survey results and listened to interviews of creators talking about AI, and I'm definitely picking up on like an undercurrent of fear of the unknown, fear of creators being replaced, fear and apprehension about AI generating content that poses risks of like copyright infringement and things like that. Obviously, there's like huge lawsuit going on right now between OpenAI and the New York Times. And so, this is like a whole another emerging field coming out of the advent of AI. Are you picking up on those same things? And if so, kind of like what's your POV on all of that? And if not, what trends are you seeing?

So it's— I greatly understand the concern, mostly because I did something that took me 3 months to do at my time at Uber in 5 seconds. There's actually a YouTube Short about this, and I am just deathly tired recording it. So apologies for the face that I make in that video. But like, there's serious concern there. There's certainly jobs that The value of them will be deflated in price. And there's certain jobs where the work is just gonna change. Funny enough though, my theory is that the creator economy will be so spurred by AI. And so let me give you a little background on why I think that, and then hopefully help dissuade some fears. But if I think about how do people normally find things on the internet, it's historically been a Google search. Now a lot of people are using ChatGPT. Well, why are they using ChatGPT? They're using ChatGPT because they can ask questions and they can get the actual answer rather than some engineered result based on paid advertising and auctioning of it. Perplexity is a great thing for this, but eventually these machines and these systems are going to have to refer out to pages. So let's say that SEO or AI-generated blogs just ruins the internet, just pollutes this ability to find real information. Well, where are people going to go? Where are people going to find connection? And to me, that's the social media platforms. That's the newsletter communities. That's the private Slacks. That's the private Discord. And I honestly, I gotta tell you, the best people at doing that stuff are creators. The best people at running those audiences of being visible there are creators. So I actually think that AI is going to spur a blastoff for the creator economy. Now, where do I have concern about that theory, right? Because this gets super interesting as well. And the real concern I have is more about AI influencers. And so I'm not talking about people that talk about AI because those people sometimes piss me off because they don't know what they're talking about half the time and they're shilling stuff and they're shilling courses to people. I'm like, guys, I appreciate the hustle, but like, be real. Talk to people that actually know what's going on. But I more mean from a perspective of AI influencers where we're just replacing humans entirely.

Yeah.

And that is where it gets super tricky to me. I can definitely see some fears there. I can also see the benefit of an AI influencer as a brand because you can take people on this journey of someone like— I got really concerned when someone said they were going to create this like yoga girl that had anxiety and then they were going to take her posts on the journey of her finding meditation. In like improving her life as a result of that. And then once they had people hooked on that story, they were going to insert some beauty line that changed her life. And I was like, that's a whole level of marketing I hadn't even really thought about. But you don't have the scandals that can come with typical influencers. You don't have the like kind of personalities that you have to deal with sometimes in the creator economy. But if I really think about it, people want to buy from authentic stories. And so I think that this is actually going to push us to more authentic interactions in a way that I was hoping the internet was going to go for a long time. So I think if you are being authentic, you are bringing products and stories to the table that help people, I don't think that you have anything to worry about. And to be honest, I think AI is going to be your best friend in making that large-scale impact and the impact that you're hoping to make. So that's my soapbox story, but hopefully— I think it will come to fruition, but obviously there's certain things that we just haven't seen come out yet.

Yeah, I like that you brought up the human element here because humans know humans. Humans can identify, you know, oh, this was written by a freaking robot. Like, are you kidding me? I can tell this is not human language. You must not have done a good job with your prompts or used GoCharlie, right? But we can sniff it out from a mile away, right? And so I think you're absolutely right that those who are truly authentic and are using AI as leverage, like, right, as business owners, which, you know, I'm trying to help creators think like CEOs and think like business owners. When you're thinking about your strategy, you're constantly looking for which lever can I pull that's going to give me the best return, right? Where can I find kind of the, the white space or the open space in the market and double down there to stand out, to be more authentic? And so if creators kind of look through AI and their businesses with that lens, I think the lever to be pulled here is to create efficiencies and, you know, maximizing existing workflows. Like you're talking about, like, okay, I have this source piece of content. We're, we're making an hour-long podcast right now. Okay. I need 20 YouTube Shorts from this. I need, you know, a post every day for 14 days or whatever for Instagram, Twitter. And TikTok. I need 3 articles and 2 blog posts and an email newsletter. You know, like, that's, that's really powerful to go in and have like a system like GoCharlie where it's speaking in your brand voice very consistently. And I haven't seen any generative model yet get a blog post or an email or anything to 100%. But I've seen them get to 90%. And that's a massive time saver. And at this point, like, if you're not on the AI train for like maximizing the creation and distribution of your content, it's like, that's no longer even a strategic, strategic advantage to be had. It's like you're behind if you're not doing that, right?

Yeah.

So view it as a tool, right? It's something to be helpful, not to replace you, but really elevate your authenticity and voice and POV in the world.

Yeah, I think This is a sound clip that I find myself saying more and more and more these days, but the current iteration of AI is intelligent amplification. It's not so different from the idea of leverage by any means, I think, but it is making you better, faster, more efficient at what you already do well. And so if you're really good at something, it's going to make you faster, better, and able to do more of it. If you suck at something, it's going to raise your floor. But what I really think the— from a creator standpoint, to me it's like, what are the things I hate doing? Give those to AI. Well, what are the things I'm doing most regularly that take me the most time? Give those to AI and then free up more space for me to either spend it with doing the things that I love or doing the creative aspects. Because what kills creativity more than anything is not having the time to spend being creative. That's the biggest farce that I see in many fields is that people think creativity is just this thing where you get struck by a lightning bolt and it just happens. But the best creators, the best artists, the musicians, the singers, anyone that I've ever seen that is an exceptional creator has taken painstaking amounts of steps to make sure they have the time to be in a creative space and withdraw that type of stuff out of them.

Yes, you've got to shovel the other shit off of your desk. And as you become more successful, as you add more followers, as you begin to try and monetize your influence, the administrative work, the strategic work, the business to be done really, really, really piles up. I mean, that is literally why we created Level Up Creators, right? That is why we exist, because we're marrying the exact right business skills, no more, no less, with creators who are effectively the product. So it's like we're marrying the product with revenue and revenue operations to maximize the income that creators can make from the years and years and years they've spent growing a very loyal following, right? And doing that in a way that also feels authentic and again, like creates the space for a creator to be creative and spend time with their community being their authentic self, not an AI-driven robot. And so yeah, you really hit the nail on the head there. I mean, that is such an important thing is to like find efficiencies in business, outsource when you need to. Um, and learning these skills and keeping up with technology and having a growth mindset saying like, okay, this is new, this is different. This is pretty much the biggest thing since the internet itself. And I can do it and I can step into the space, um, where I am viewing this as a tool and as leverage to maximize things that I'm already doing and find efficiencies like we've been saying. So, exactly. Yes, yes, yes.

Maybe, maybe a finishing point on that exact concept is the inverse of it, right? There's some people that think AI is just supposed to do everything for them. And those are the people I find the most frustrated with using it. And the ones that just like simply don't adopt and then get left behind is like, I think there's a lot of people that are burnt out right now. Like post-pandemic burnout is a real thing. Creators is even more so because like marketing dollars are drying up. People are trying different channels to work with creators. And so people are having to do more to get the same kind of results. And I think that this was a frustrating problem even for us early days. People were like, well, can it do this, this, this, and this? And I was like, you're basically asking the AI to do the whole job. And like, I'm okay with that, but are you okay with that? Because then if it can do the whole job, then is your client going to want you to use this? Like, what would be the reason for paying you? So it's an interesting part, but I would say if you're expecting AI to do everything right now for you, you're probably gonna be in a bad place.

Yeah, that is definitely, definitely, definitely true. Okay, cool. And I definitely wanna talk a little bit, obviously Brendan, you and I have spoken apart from this recording and I've dropped like a couple little nuggets here and there that we're launching the Level Up Creator School on March 1st, like our beta version. And so this will be like membership-based business school for creators. And AI will be a very significant part of that curriculum. Collaborations with GoCharlie, having you on, Brennan, for like workshops and hands-on. You come to the workshop if you need this done. Like, I don't know how to take my video podcast and make it into 20 Shorts, 3 blog posts, 20 social media posts, and for multiple, multiple different platforms. And so like Brennan comes on and shows you exactly how to do that. And then boom, you know, you've got a new skill and a standard operating procedure to do that moving forward. So I'm very excited about the school because Level Up Creators in the last year has been a hands-on consulting firm and we have gotten phenomenal results for our creator clients and have tried to figure out like, how do we multiply ourselves and how do we kind of take this one-to-many model? And so that's exactly what the school is going to be. It will be all of the business things. So we're not focused on audience building, but it's like you've got an audience, here's how you, you know, kind of like take off on a rocket ship into the stratosphere. Because we can marry all these business school skills with that. So I'm super excited about content collaborations with GoCharlie and helping creators that come through the school use your tool and getting you in front of them for more like specific instructions on how to do this and like make this, you know, kind of conceptual thing into reality and get people using it and comfortable as well.

Yeah. And I think that type of systematized thinking is where AI really can be an unlock. Once you have that system of thinking, that way of thinking, like you get a lot more clear and a lot more mental space to be able to be like, all right, this is the step of that workflow, or these are the workflows I need coming out of this. And then you can start to plug AI into it. Disorganization is actually one of the greatest hurdles to AI effectiveness in my mind. And so having this system that you made, I think is going to naturally flow into so many other gains in different parts of what they're trying to do.

Yeah. And I mean, we're here to help creators embrace AI again as a tool to enhance efficiency, amplify content creation efforts, and access new possibilities. And while we recognize the benefits of AI, we also prioritize, of course, responsible ethical use. And we are committed as an organization to truly be a voice of reason in the creator economy, where in real time we are collating, testing, translating the highest and best uses of AI in the creator businesses for our listeners and clients. So with that and kind of like our entire conversation in mind here, Brennan, how can we help unlock a potential mindset shift for our more, you know, maybe skeptical listeners or those who are on the fence to a more balanced and curious, a growth mindset, if you will, about AI?

Oh man. That's a fascinating question. I haven't had it posed that way to me. So I'll go with just what's coming to mind, which is getting clear on your why usually gets that answered for me. And what I mean by that is there are some people that are just being creators to do product partnerships so that they can make money instead of having a job that kind of ties them to a desk. There are other people that genuinely care about spreading a certain mindset or certain way of doing things or a certain way of thinking, and that's why they are creators, uh, and their why is to impart that message to the world. And then there's some people I know that are wellness and fitness influencers, and they just want the world to be a better, healthier, fitter place, and that's their why. And if you sit there and think about it, AI is not explicitly stated in all of those, but you know what makes you better able to do those things is AI. Like, it saves you time so you have more time to spend telling that message. It saves you time so you have more ability to serve more clients, make yourself more money, have more flexible workspace. It allows you to tell your story in new and interesting ways. It allows you to share that mindset that you want to impart to the world in new and interesting ways. In my mind, AI is the amplification for that why. It is the enabler of that why on a broader scale. So if you are sitting there and you're thinking, I don't want to be a part of AI, I would be totally receptive to that. I get it. But when you really get down to like people's whys, it's almost like you can't do it without AI. If you want to be a big player, if you want to be competitive in this space that you are playing in as a creator, which I find that most people do, you really need to be using the best tools, the best processes, And really creating the space for you to be creative and think about how you push the envelope of that why forward. And I just see AI as an enabler of it. I don't think it's the spark. I think you guys are the spark. I think you're the creative aspect of any activity that you do. And AI is just here to help you do more of it.

Yeah. So maybe getting curious about it as opposed to being super skeptical and maybe turn off the cable news network. If you still have that on, please turn it off forever and ever. But yeah, I mean, like, find voices of reason who are cutting through the crap, who are cutting through the fearmongering. I mean, Level Up Creators, we have committed tremendous resources for 2024 to be that voice of reason in the creator economy and make sure that our followers and our students in the school have the latest and greatest information and are embracing the ethical use of AI in order to maximize their business. I mean, over 50% of content creators who are monetizing their influence in some way have no help, don't even have an administrative assistant. And I mean, so many people that we speak with and work with have struck out time and time again trying to go the VA route or the OBM, online business manager route, and Yeah, no, I'm super frustrated by that too, because I feel like so many of our clients have been burned repeatedly by, um, lacking help or attempt— attempts at help. And so like, if you're gonna go at it alone, you really can't do it without AI. And like, I promise that we will be here to, to show you how to use it, uh, and get you the help that you need. But yeah, approach, approach things in life in general, I feel like, with curiosity and a growth mindset. And technology's gonna change and it's only gonna change faster and faster and faster, right? And so like making sure that you are firmly on that train and that you believe that you are able to learn it, use it, implement it for the greater good, I think is a very important POV to hold.

Yeah. And, you know, I, I was guilty of early on thinking about this technology like a memetic device because I know how it works under the hood and the early iterations were kind of meh. But it's getting better and better now. And the more I start talking with people about using AI, the more it's become a conversation of, wouldn't you like to have someone on your team? Wouldn't you like to have 2 versions of yourself that could be working back and forth with one another to get to a better result? How many times have you sat there and been like, man, if I could have talked this idea out with someone, I would have got to a better result? Or I'm like so emotional about this subject. Like, I can't even think straight. And then you, you like just use AI there. And so for us, we're aiming to position AI as your teammate long-term, has an understanding of you, sometimes can do things on your behalf, ultimately is there to enable you to be the most successful, best version of yourself. And when you start to think about AI in that lens, I think it really helps because to be honest, I think loneliness is the biggest detriment to the success of any initiative. Everywhere. People are people people. Even if you are an introvert, you still want people in your life. Everyone wants to be relevant, and especially in the creator economy, if you feel like you're on your own and maybe your stuff isn't performing the way that you want, you're going to feel irrelevant. And man, you can have AI be a teammate to, for lack of a better word, be that bridge, be that helpful hand up to make sure that you're not in it alone.

Yeah, that's super interesting. I'm going to take this a really strange direction, but I'm sitting here thinking about like, Unusual, or maybe not unusual, but uses for AI that I never would've been able to think of in my whole life. Like, I'll come back to the loneliness thing, but I think 2 weeks ago a story dropped that like MIT researchers were able to discover a new classification of antibiotics that kills like treatment-resistant bacteria that our current drugs cannot kill. Mm-hmm. And they did that because AI was able to run through all these different models that like would've taken years and years and years and years to go through in a lab. And so, I think that's a very interesting use case. I know another woman who is very interested in AI being like a conversation partner for people with Alzheimer's, for instance. And so, like, AI doesn't judge, and AI can talk back to you and have conversation with you. And it will have the same conversation with you 18,000 times without ever getting frustrated or anything like that. So coming back to loneliness and just so many wide and far-reaching potential applications of AI. So what else? I'm totally putting you on the spot. This is not in our notes, but what other interesting applications of AI are you seeing or do you foresee? If you have any quick thoughts on that.

You know, one of the weird ones that I heard a lot of people do in the early days was writing their wedding speech for their daughter's wedding. To take it back to the groomsmen thing, like full loop. I was like, you get to do this one time if your wife, if your daughter did it right and you're going to let AI write this thing. Like, but I sat there and thought like, maybe you're embarrassed. Maybe you need someone to help you over that hurdle. Maybe that's there. So that's definitely one of them. This is a bit more controversial. But I actually think that the AI girlfriend thing and the AI friend thing is going to do more to improve the quality of the world than we ever thought. How many sick sadistic people are just that way because they are crying for attention? They are lonely. They've spent too much time in their own head and thinking a certain way. And even just the introduction of an AI bot that they can interact with, I think Will do more wonders for the world and how people operate in the world. There are also AI bots constructed to teach people how to talk to the opposite gender or romantic interests. I actually think that's a super valuable use case because honestly, what we see in movies is like so far off from how I would ever treat anyone normally, unless it's a Hallmark movie, because I'm a hopeless romantic. But even Hallmark movies, I'm now scared of like the man that never left his hometown. My girlfriend goes home for Christmas. But it's one of those things where like, I think those are weird use cases at first. But when I take a step back and think about like AI companionship, just the benefits far outweigh the weirdness. So that's definitely another one. And then, man, just image generation is such a weird one. Like, I've seen some wild stuff. Like, I don't know why the Pope wearing a Balenciaga puffer coat became like this internet sensation, but man, it is hilarious. So like, that's definitely a weirder one because like, if you think about image generation, I always think about what's the business use case for a lot of these products. In image generation, I think about ad creative, but no AI model is really good at creating typical ad creative with like text overlaid and like ribbons and all that stuff. So there are literally just people going on there and generating images to see how their imagination works. And that is still a weird use case to me that's just become so commonplace that we're okay with it. But image generation is another one of those weird ones. The last one that I thought was weird at first is just a thought partner. Like just like, just think, go on this little journey with me for a second. Mm-hmm. But like you're talking into a machine It is hearing what you say and then it is responding back to you and then you are responding back to that and then it's back and forth and you're talking and it's really just you talking to yourself. But maybe you have all the knowledge of human history in your brain. So it's this conundrum that at first sounds weird, but I think is probably going to take us to new heights that we've never foreseen. The example that you gave about like the genetic bits, Yeah, one person perfectly described it to me, which was net nuance. But they said net nuance from a perspective of it can still get you to novel findings, novel conclusions, but it's because it has access to so many bits of information and so many repetitions that can run simultaneously that it just gets where you were going to go if you would have sat there and thought about it for 500 years. And so I think that's, that's where this is going to be interesting. But man, the wedding speech one was Kind of one of those things where I was like, guys, like, what are we doing here?

Yeah, I'm glad my dad didn't do that. That would not, I would not have appreciated that. But maybe you would, you know, come up with something a lot better depending on what your skills and abilities are. So it's interesting. Yeah, so many, so many applications. I mean, some of the stuff that I have yet to try it for, but I'm interested in like meal planning, build a grocery list. Give me recipes, stuff like that. Like I have this in my refrigerator. What, what can I make tonight kind of a thing? We, uh, my parents have a grass-fed cattle ranch in southern Oklahoma and they were wanting to put like a sign along the highway, like on their land. And they were trying to figure out quickly like, okay, well what are the county sign rules and regulations or whatever? And we're like, all right, let's pull out ChatGPT and like introduce my boomer parents to, uh, large language models. Yeah. And so we were able to like very quickly find answers and, uh, and then I was writing a, um, speech that I'm giving next week over the holidays. And so we use Notion, it's kind of like our second brain for work. Yeah. Like our entire knowledge base is in there. We're a very young company and probably have 300,000 words that we've written into Notion with standard operating procedures and everything like that. And a lot of my like knowledge base I've externalized into Notion and they have this cool little AI widget where the large language model that it's drawing upon is the information in your Notion instance. And so Uh, I was like needing, um, a bio for myself for the host to introduce me at this thing I'm doing next week. And so, um, I typed into Notion like, who is Amanda Northcutt? What is Level Up Creators? You know, like just really interesting kind of stuff.

Yeah.

Um, and then, you know, I've got tidbits on, uh, pricing strategy, for instance, in this podcast and that podcast and that podcast. We have all of our podcast transcripts in Notion. And so I was able to ask Okay, explain to me what value-based pricing is and all of the factors that go into deciding on price points for digital products. And it aggregated information from you know fifteen different pages within our Notion instance. And I was like, ah, these are all my thoughts. But I I mean, it would take me hours to like go and Command F and like find all of those things even within our own Notion instance. So I mean, we are finding many many efficiencies well. beyond that in our business with it. And again, we'll like very diligently pass those on, but it's a whole new world. Super interesting. I feel like an old person saying that, but I am an elder millennial and I own that proudly. So it's cool.

No, no, it's, it's a whole new world, a dazzling place never seen. Did I just, did I just quote Disney in a podcast?

I'm definitely thinking about what princess said that for sure. Um, that seems on brand for you, Brendan. I don't know you that well, but I think that That works.

That works. I don't know how to take that, but I think it's a compliment. So we're going to take the compliment. And it was definitely Jasmine for those following along at home.

Thank you. Aladdin. Yes. Okay. Awesome. Well, let's bring this back to the creator economy and we'll kind of land the plane. Brendan, I would love for you to call your shot on the future of AI in the creator economy, right? So 2 years from now, how will it be used? What advantages will creators who are embracing AI now and into the future have? who have over those who are like on the tail end of the adoption curve. Is there anything else you would like to share before we sign off?

Yeah, so a couple things. One, I think AI influencers will be a cool fad, but as things, as the internet gets flooded with them, it will be useless. So I don't see AI influencers taking off in the way that we think that they will. I do like AI influencers from a perspective of digital clones. So making yourself 24/7 available, That sounds like a lot more useful use case, kind of what Meta did, but a lot more personalized to your audience and your messaging. So finding ways to make that technology available for people to be able to contact you and ultimately refer into you just expedites your messaging. Another one that I think is just like creators will all become multi-platform because it will be so easy for AI to optimize across different platforms. That seems like a given to me. And then I think the third one that is often overlooked, but we talk about how these systems can get an AI brain of you or your brand or your company and create as if they were that thing. But I think what is not talked about often enough is giving the information about your target audience into a system and being able to test concepts, ideas, things that would resonate with them. And so I think creators will start to adopt it from that lens and that perspective of how do I learn more about these people that I would want to resonate with? How do I, before I get to prime time and put it out there, how do I test that this is going to work? Or how do I get other ideas in using AI as more of that mirror of your audience? So simulation. So I think that's kind of where I see in the near term. In the long term, I see creators basically becoming and having the impact of large-scale companies using AI agents to do a lot of pretty much everything besides what they're creating. So that could be, you could just be a solopreneur and you could have 25 AI agents running every other part of your company at your discretion. I call this the solopreneur, but like the super version.

Super solopreneur.

And I think that will only be successful if they have the mindset that you guys are implanting into it with your programs to think about those types of things.

Interesting. Wow. It's going to be so fun to watch this unfold. And yeah, but I mean, creators like doing their own thing. I mean, creators often see like their accounts and their audiences as their babies and like don't really want to release control to other people. So this is kind of a way to facilitate running a bigger, more profitable business without having to sort of like give up or cede control of your baby. We do advocate doing some of that to trustworthy people like us, but I totally understand the sentiment. All right. Well, thank you again for joining me today, Brennan. This was super fun. Where can listeners find you online?

Yeah. So I'm fairly active on LinkedIn. Some posts are cringier than others, but Try to make it authentic myself to really practice what I preach. I'm also on Twitter. It's super simple. Brennan Woodruff on both of them. One has a dog emoji at the end of it. I'm also on Instagram. That's more personal, but it's Brennan Woodruff there as well. And then GoCharlie AI. I run our Facebook community. I write a lot of our newsletters. I'm our public-facing component. So anything where you see GoCharlie, you're likely not too far away from me.

Awesome. Yeah, and we love again gocharlie.ai spelled exactly how you would think, and we'll of course have that in the show notes. Really, really cool, interesting tool, and they've released some new features just in the last month that have truly leveled up the platform. So amazing, amazing tool for creators. I highly recommend it. All right, well, time is precious. Thank you again for sharing yours with us. Level Up Creators exists to amplify the voice, reach, and impact of creators making a positive difference in the world. World with your expertise as our focus. Our team of strategists, marketers, sales pros, product developers, administrators, and tech gurus handle the heavy lifting of building and optimizing a profitable business that will transform your life for good. Subscribe to the show and check out welevelupcreators.com to sign up for our newsletter where we share weekly actionable business tips for creators just like you. We'll see you next time on the Level Up Creators Podcast.