#65 - The One About Ai - Coaching and Ripping Clients Off.

Ai is everywhere, and the fitness/coaching space is moving at a million miles per hour with it too...Unfortunately you may be getting coached by AI as opposed to your coach who you are paying....

In this episode we dive in and expand on whats happening in the industry right now , the good bad and the ugly with AI

Got questions? simply email or dm us with those questions

Larry IG https://www.instagram.com/larry_doyle_coaching
Daniel IG https://www.instagram.com/danieldalycoaching
Website https://www.larrydoylecoaching.ie
Coaching with us https://www.larrydoylecoaching.ie/1-1-premium/
Email : info@larrydoylecoaching.ie

Got questions? simply email or dm us with those questions

Larry IG https://www.instagram.com/larry_doyle_coaching
Daniel IG https://www.instagram.com/danieldalycoaching
Website https://www.larrydoylecoaching.ie
Coaching with us https://www.larrydoylecoaching.ie/1-1-premium/
Email : info@larrydoylecoaching.ie

Transcript

Welcome and AI Enters Fitness

SPEAKER_01 0:00

Hey guys, you're listening to the Gen Pop Podcast with me, your host, Larry Doyle. Each week, I'm gonna bring in friends, guests, and experts to help enhance your health, fitness, and wellness journeys. Sit back, relax, and enjoy the conversations. You are welcome back to another episode of the Gen Pop Podcast, where this week, co-host Daniel and I, we are gonna talk about AI and how the robots are coming to get us and take over the fitness space. Daniel, are they coming to get us?

SPEAKER_00 0:34

Um who knows? I think they're already here. I think it's the same as like what people have been saying about Area 51 and aliens for years. It's like they're already among us. It's like I think there's a lot, there's a lot more around the place being done by AI, I think, than people realise. And unfortunately, it's starting to make its way into the health and fitness space. And I think a lot of people are being taken advantage of by the robots or robot overlords.

Useful AI Tools We Actually Use

SPEAKER_01 1:00

First and foremost, we should probably just pledge an allegiance to AI here because they're going to be ruling us in a couple of years. And I always, whenever I'm using Chat GPT, I'm always really nice to it. And I'll be like, thank you. Yes, please, and you know, have a good day. I'll always greet it off and sign it off like that. And it's something I use, right? It's not it's not something I use for direct coaching, it is something that is very useful to use, whether you're fleshing out ideas, whether you're writing an email, whether you're doing up some content, or when you're doing whatever. And it is a fantastic tool for time efficiency and saving time. I know a lot of people who are getting their programs made by AI, like just general people going to the gym. They don't want to think about it. Hey, ChatGPT, give me a program to go to the gym today. Or I've clients who are not really sure of it sometimes, and they'll use like a picture and they'll enter it into AI. I'm not sure how good it is at tracking food, haven't we played with it myself, but a lot of people are using AI to fantastic benefits. And we're going to discuss some of the pros and cons of kind of practices we see and what are good practices and bad practices, I guess, with this. Um, because you know, we want to talk about it from a coaching point of view and not that we're holier than thou, but it's like we actually coach on our clients hands-on ourselves. It's actually us who's responding to them as opposed to some AI chatbot feature that's been installed by a lot of people who are scaling big business now at the moment. And I think it's worthwhile for people to understand, you know, what is actually being used and what is being employed by, you know, coaches that are out there that, you know, they're they're partnered with their good hard-earned money and like how to actually spot that and be aware of it. Because again, if you're paying for a service or a product, it's a different story as opposed to just you know downloading the program or downloading a bit of a nutrition plan or whatever it might be off um AI or ChatGPT. So let's jump in. Like, what have you found that you've used so far with artificial intelligence from your own point of view? And have you implemented it with any kind of understanding for clients or anything like that as well?

SPEAKER_00 2:57

I think the biggest one that most people use is ChatGPT, and like I would use that for content creation to a degree, so like it's very easy just to type in saying, I want an image of X, Y, and Z, and it'll recreate that for you, and it can make all the alterations there. Um one of the biggest things that I actually use personally is I use um like an audio transcription software, and I use it kind of for two different reasons. For number one, I'm a lot faster talking than I'm typing, so if I want to reply to someone, I can actually say it and it will type it out for me. And then number two, if I get voice notes from people, I can just throw it into the app and it'll spit out the text for me so I can actually read it as opposed to listening to it. For there might be circumstances where just listening just isn't going to be possible for me. But like from a coaching standpoint, like I'm still doing all the coaching because at the end of the day, it's like that's what people are paying for, and it's like I could not live with myself if I was just like taking someone's check-in and passing it through AI and spitting out something that AI is telling them to do, and then they go and do it. Um, but more often than not, you see that kind of creeping into like all the fitness apps the coaches are using, or even calorie trackers. Now it's becoming more common. I was telling you about that that I was actually speaking to an app developer online. I think I don't know, is it maybe 12 months ago that he had an app kind of like his version of My Fitness Bell that had uh AI built into it that you could take pictures of meals and stuff, and he got me to test it out, and it was wildly inaccurate, wildly inaccurate. And a lot of people are putting their own, you know, they're trusting that more than they would trust like the opinion of a person. And like I have seen it with clients where they'd get back to me and saying, I put what you said into like ChatGBT and it made it up like the perfect diet for me, or it said that we should be doing like these kind of exercises for to gain muscle or whatever, and it's like at what point do you kind of like just pay a robot just to do all your coaching for you? But again, you're losing that human element that most people actually require. Um, and I think that's the the worrying thing about it is people are just getting hooked into AI so much that they're actually just speaking to it on a day-to-day basis as opposed to actually speaking to humans.

Where Automation Crosses the Line

SPEAKER_01 5:14

It's a bit of a perfect storm, like kind of post-COVID and like the introduction of AI kind of building up that people are more like introverted and they actually don't want to have conversations with people at times. And they can input data into you know AI and get some coach and feedback, but then you can also say, Hey, thanks for that feedback, ChatGPT. Can you say it in a nicer way to me? Can you you know tell me I'm great? Can you like and like, oh yeah, of course, yeah, you're great, fantastic. Have a great day. But it's like they're literally getting what they want all the time from it, and they can alter those answers despite you know what the things are. So it's like this is where not that we're like coming down and like being assholes to people because we're like real humans, but like you need a level of like empathy and understanding for what's going on in someone's life, and there is a time for a pat in the back and there's a time for a kick in the hole, and when you can actually decipher that through the tone that's written, when it's a check-in that's a little bit late or a little bit early or something is slightly off with it, and you know, we get to know people really well. You know, I would go to say as like I get to know my clients far better than you know, any of the apps or kind of AI services that they're using. I know when they're approaching their menstrual cycle, I know when they're having a good day, a bad day, you know, on the floor when we used to PT, you could pick it up straight away just by watching someone within like five seconds of how their day has been. And now you're going to alter your approach on how you'll actually converse with them as opposed to, okay, they've given me this data. Here's the answer that I have for them now. You know, the robotic mode, because they might not need the robot mode. They definitely don't need the robot mode 99% of the time, because the people we deal with are not robots and they're not like, you know, kind of one plus one equals two. That's not the thing. It's like one plus one equals six sometimes of the people we're dealing with, and more often than not, we have to take a very curveball kind of an approach with it because we're essentially playing chess, we're kind of two moves ahead. I know how Daniel is going to respond when I give them this input, but he doesn't need it quite just yet, and we're going to alter that until the following week with the check-in, whatever it might be. And you're kind of leading them up into that and setting up a sequence of inputs that you'll know you'll get a better outcome from them with it all. AI isn't doing that for you, it hasn't got that ability to pick up that human element or human touch or human awareness and understanding that you know I've cultivated over 20 plus years of coaching with people and having real conversations. Um, I'm sure it can get pretty close, but at the same point, it's like that human element of actual personal training is personal. And it's to get people uh to understand people, it's to understand the individual who's in front of you very, very well. And that might just be a very subtle difference in the answer, but it's profound in the actual outcome that you can get from that by having that human interaction, human element to it as well. And like, I don't want to get like too airy, fairy, or spoofy on it, but it's like at the same point, we do create very good connection with clients and rapport with clients that we deal with, and that is the time of giving them the pat in the back, or it is the time of giving them the kick in the hole at times as well, because we know exactly what triggers to pull and push with it and what is going to make them respond best, and that's not that one size fits all approach. Each, every single client I have is so unique and different in their own right that I've got you know different inbuilt voices to talk to them. I know how Mary is going to respond versus how David and how Peter are going to react to it. So this is where having that element of human understanding and comprehension and then filtering it back into our inputs in terms of what we need that person to do just gets far better outcomes with it every single time. You know, it might get a faster process with AI, whatever it might be, but yeah, it's just that human element. Um, maybe I'm old school, whatever it is, but I don't fear our jobs being impacted massively from the coaching point of view with it, you know.

The Human Element You Can’t Fake

SPEAKER_00 8:55

Yeah, and I actually always think that if you're the one person or the rare couple of people that don't start to go down the AI route, eventually it's just gonna be exposed so much to people are gonna be like, Well, I can see that they've got like a human to human approach to coaching, it's like that's gonna be far more valuable than like this AI coaching because eventually, uh in my opinion, even though I like I'm completely uneducated in this area, I think every coaching practice is gonna end up basically being the exact same thing if it's gonna be going down the AI route, because it's gonna be harder and harder to kind of distinguish from each coaching package and each coaching service that you're signing up for. Whereas, even though coaches are signing up or people are signing up to be coached by us under the Larry Dial coaching brand, we're gonna have two very distinct ways of coaching people and two very distinct personalities. So we're gonna have different approaches, even though our approaches might be similar, we might have similar uh views on a lot of things, our way of actually executing that is gonna be completely different. But if you can program AI, you're gonna have to program AI, you know, certain different ways, it's gonna get very, very complicated, and it's it's never gonna be able to change, we'll say, in real time based on who they're working with, because it's gonna have to work off of predetermined outcomes and predetermined inputs. So I don't think there's anything to fear, really, from like a coach's perspective, when it comes to um AI. I think the most worrying thing that I have seen is coaches who use AI, and I have seen coaches posting screenshots of like Chat GBT or something on Instagram, and I've held the screen and paused it. And again, this is way outside my wheelhouse, but I've seen like coaches asking about drug protocols and what adjustments should be made and stuff down the comment section as like if a if a coach is willing to put all of their trust into AI to make the decisions on what adjustments to make to a client's drug protocol, it's like they're literally playing with like seriously the interested advice and life and debt. But again, it's like people are putting so much trust into AI that they're willing to risk somebody else's life. And that's the scariest part for me.

Risks: Drugs, Illness, and Bad Advice

SPEAKER_01 11:11

And like, let's even you know go to the other side of it. Okay, maybe you know the majority of coaches aren't dealing with someone that might be in with drug use, but at the same point, okay, someone comes in and they've got a doctor's report and you know they've got some chronic condition or disease or illness. You know, little Johnny goes off and he inputs it into ChatGPT. How should I deal with this person's cancer treatment? What nutrition or what supplement advice should I give them? And you know, we're in a fortunate position where people will put a lot of trust into us because we're positioned as you know experts in the field or whatever it might be. And people will trust their coach, you know, maybe too much often, but they might go down and into the path of like serious harm, or whether they're giving, you know, psychological feedback to people, they're giving, you know, kind of like psychology, they're going down all these deep roots of like therapy and trying to wear so many different hats. For me personally, I've I've no harm or shame in saying, like, okay, this is not within my wheelhouse. I need you to maybe go uh find a therapist within your area or find a therapist to work with online or a physiotherapist or whatever it might be. But they're trying to be the superhero and wear all the hats and get Chachi PT to do the work for them without realizing the impact that they're having short term or long term or whatever with people. And I think it's gonna, you know, the whole thing is gonna come back to like a full circle where people like really don't trust a lot of people and they need that in-person. Like, I don't want to ever do it, but I can see people coming back to like in-house PT again, where it's like they'll actually trust that way more because they know they're physically dealing with the human. Um, for us, like getting on a consultation call, people are like, Oh, that's great. I actually could see you and I had a discussion with you and knew that it was you I was talking to, and people will build a lot of trust with that. But when we're going stepping way out of our wheelhouse, I think it's getting down a really dangerous realm with that. And there's gonna be a lot of inexperienced coaches dealing with a lot of very detailed, heavy risk things that one, they're not gonna be insured to cover or give you advice on, so therefore, there's no fallback for it for them or for you or for anyone with it all, and that your health is gonna be seriously impacted. And I'm not trying to scare monger with this, but like it is gonna be the reality of it that people are gonna be given advice that is way, way above their pay grade, and that they should not be handling at all. And it's again something super scary. So, like, you know, I'll talk about like the coaching side of things. So I've chatted to various different uh app developers over the year. I've we get uh we get offered loads of different stuff all the time, and like you know, people come in and have conversations. I've had conversations with others who have been recommended to me. We were looking at an app creation before, and I was uh given this insight into a new AI product that was being developed, and I think that was like a year and a half ago, where these developers were creating this app that was going to give all AI coaching, and they have a couple of very large influencers who they are using. Those influencers are promoting one-to-one coaching with uh they've got a team of like 50 coaches that are working for them, where they actually don't have that team at all. It's all AI generated. All the answers and all the inputs and all the data that's been collected has been fed into that, and it's been given this like response back, and it's all written. Every single text is written, all the feedback, all the um feedback, all the input, all the coaching comments, everything is written. These people are coaching literally thousands and thousands of people. Um, this one uh example I was given, this lady, she had three and a half thousand clients who are all receiving one-to-one coaching, paying premium dollar for it. Uh, this lady, she gets to keep her overheads down to a minimum, pay the AI system just to coach all the things for her, collects all the data. It apparently gives better feedback all the time because of all the data it's collected and the answers it gives and the outcomes it gets. People are paying for one-to-one coaching and get absolutely ripped off with this, and there's thousands of people going through these processes now. And this is like something that people really need to be aware of with it, that you are going to be getting absolutely shafted. Now, if you're getting a result with it, people mightn't care at all. But at the same point, be aware of what you're actually purchasing with this, right? That there is a lot of people using AI coaching that's like completely taken over coaching for them, uh, but branding it as a one-to-one. Um, it's not one-to-one. You're just getting AI. You could do this with ChatGPT and you know get the same result yourself, essentially. So, this is like where I want to create awareness around this. Um, I was offered again recently uh another uh chatbot essentially that would do all my check-ins for me. I would save loads of time, I would be able to scale my business, but unfortunately have good morals and ethics, and I cannot absolutely go through this or employ this at all. Um, again, it gives instantaneous feedback. You could delay it so that it looks like uh you know a more human-based interaction that it would delay it by two to three hours. You could set up all the frameworks, you could set up all the timelines and responses, that it would be consistent and congruent with your messaging and all this bullshit. It's ultimately again ChatGPT that's going to be coaching or the chatbot that was developed to ChatGPT. Again, this is being used at scale, and people are making a lot of dollar from it, but it's not coaching, and it's moving in a pretty scary trend with that. Um so you've seen on it, Daniel. What have you kind of come across that's been used again, like from that point of view?

The AI Coaching Illusion at Scale

SPEAKER_00 16:26

Like I've only ever really investigated it for my own use, just from more of a productivity standpoint, like as I said, that I can use like audio transcription and um like content creation, like creating images, videos, um, editing text, and kind of giving you like like if you wanted to create a a post, whatever I can kind of say, like just give me a general overview of like what kind of content I could create around X topic or whatnot, um, and then you kind of write around that. But I think that actually AI is actually having the opposite effect for most people, it's actually making us less productive because I think when you realize that because of mobile phones, people don't remember phone numbers of other people, and like there's even certain words now. If I'm reading, I was like, that's definitely spelt wrong because autocorrect usually corrects things, and I was like, that has to be spelt wrong. And then you look it up and it's like, no, it actually is. But it's because we've been relying on so much of technology for so long that people are just taking it another step further now that they're trusting AI more than they trust another human. So people are going to be doing their jobs and they're in the office, and they're like, Oh, I need to write an email. I can't be arsed, so I'm just gonna say, Chat GPT, I need to write an email to this person about this thing. Can you write it for me? And next thing it spits out American Americanized words, it has everything is like you can see that it's generated by AI. There's certain telltale signs, yeah, especially for the Z. It's gonna be using like a dash, it's gonna have a comma, like the one that denies me. Um it could be wrong at the same time. I could be wrong, but I always assume that having a comma before an end in a sentence is something you shouldn't do because end apparently is like a connective word or something like that. That's what I remember from English. So if I'm reading something and there's a comment before an end, if I say comment before an end, I'm like, that was AI, that was AI. So um people are gonna be using it for like just to do stuff that like we should be doing on a day-to-day basis anyway. And like, I think we're gonna get to a point where people are gonna be like, I can't be asked going to the gym. It's like, what can I do in 10 minutes that that uh is going to be just as effective? And the thing with AI is it's always going to give you what you want, and it's the same as people hearing that oh, the asparatine in Diet Coke is gonna give you cancer. You can look up, is asparatine gonna give me cancer, or then you can also look up saying um the opposite, where you're gonna say the um the myth about asparatine giving me cancer, it's gonna give you what you're looking for, and it's the same with any sort of AI thing. If you ask it a question, you can manipulate it to spit out what you're actually really looking for because it can spit out a result and you can say no, make it more humanized or make it sound more like this, or make it sound more like solid prompts, yeah. Yeah, so like you can't really put all of your trust into it if you're really the one that's in control at the end of the day.

Spotting AI In Your “Coach”

SPEAKER_01 19:16

Yeah, and it's it is it is it's gonna scare like listen, it is useful, and we don't want to like be hard, I'm not like anti-AI, I'm not like, yeah, I'm like of a different ilk when it comes to it all, and it's like whatever with it, but at the same point, it is a useful tool. Um, I guess what I want to have people from understanding this is like obviously we're coding from coach, and we're just gonna promote our coach and we're saying we're fucking awesome because we are, but at the same point, what should they look out for if they're engaging in it? And that this is like again the the spelling, like you know, if you see someone and their stories and they're like like me who cannot spell, you will see spelling mistakes in all my programs, you will see typos in all my programs because I'm a little bit illiterate and a little bit dyslexic, that'll be consistent across the board with it. But it's little things, like you just said, like the specialized with a Z. It's like the dash and the commas, and it's like, you know, if little Johnny again, who is like fresh out of school, it's like, okay, he might be like incredibly literate with his English, but is he like perfect with all these sentences and texts and these paragraphs and he's writing all the time? You're pro like the biggest downfall of personal trainers in general is that they assume everyone who they're dealing with is like dumb as a field of spuds. It's like they're not. People who can afford luxurious things like personal training and online coaching are very intelligent people, and it's like we cannot assume that they're stupid, and they we cannot assume at all at any point that they will that we will be able to pull the wool over their eyes. They are far more intelligent than we are. We literally just count reps and sets and tell people about macros. And like, I'm not trying to like dumb down the personal training, but like we're a pretty stupid bunch of people when it comes down to it in the grand scheme of things. So it's like we cannot outwit people, we cannot uh assume that people are gonna not be able to see these things when it comes to it. But again, they'll put us in a position of trust and specialization and whatever with it, and you know, right there, sometimes that's great, but at the same point, they will be using AI within their own businesses, they will understand AI very well, and they will be able to spot bullshit a mile away, and they will call you out and it they will leave like straight away. So for me, it's like one do you ever hear the voice of the person who you're actually dealing with? Do you ever see their videos? Now, I'll make one comment on this. We put up a reel the other day and I translated it to Spanish and I sent it to you. It had the Spanish translation in a cork accent, which was absolutely fucking frightening and fantastic at the same point. So there is ways of bending the rules with this kind of stuff, but at the same point, it's like, do you actually hear the voice of your coach? Do you actually see uh their processes? Do they share with you the background stuff of what they're actually looking at? And I'll do this all the time and I'll overview like when it comes to like calorie calculators, like people are going to be using them all the time, they're gonna be using like AI feedback, they're gonna be using automation, they're gonna be using sped up. Like, if you know that like Daniel is in Cork and you're getting uh a check-in response at like 3 a.m. in the morning, chances are that's like done by AI, or chances are Daniel's an insomniac. It's like, you know, we need to figure that out a little bit, but it's like starting to look at you know things just with a little bit more common sense include in, and you're gonna be able to spot it straight away that people have been using AI in terms of their coaching, right? But it's just to have a little bit of an eye. I'm not saying that you won't get a result with it, but if you're paying for like one-to-one premium coaching, or if you're paying for something that is uh guided as being human-led, it's like make sure it actually is that you're not getting ripped off, you're not getting shafted, um, that you're actually spending your money where it needs to be spent and like actually investing in a product that's there uh to get an outcome. Because again, you can just ask ChatGPT yourself how to manage it and how to run it without needing that coach who's just filling their boots based off that, right? So again, it's it's something that people need to be aware of with it.

SPEAKER_00 22:58

Yeah, and I think that's like it's very easy to ask ChatGPT or ask whatever AI servers you're using to tell you what the the best macro split is for you or the best training plan, but still at the end of the day, it's still gonna be you that's doing the work. And if you can stay accountable to yourself, it's like no matter what you say to ChatGPT, it's still not gonna make you do it, but or we can't make you do it either, but at least if you have a human there that actually can be empathetic to your situation, it's gonna be a million times better. And like a lot of people can argue about like the cost of coaching and whatnot, but like if you're actually paying a human to help you, that's gonna be worth every penny that you're actually spending the money on. Because if you said Chat GPT, oh I was having a bad day and this and that, it's gonna spit you out the most generic thing of all time. It's like you're not gonna get any real feedback from it.

SPEAKER_01 23:50

You can do this, you can search motivational quote here.

SPEAKER_00 23:54

Yeah, and I guess like the thing that people realize is like AI is is present everywhere, no matter where you're and like there's been I don't even know if it would fall under the category of AI, but like if you call up like say Aircom or whatever they're known as these days, like and you're put on call waiting and you have to like press one to get to here, how frustrating just that is alone. And it's like that's what you're doing trying to deal with in a daily race, and using ChatGPT is like is all these automated systems essentially is what's happening, but it's in computerized form, and it you can give it an English accent and you can give it a Spanish accent, all that kind of stuff. So it looks fancier, but it's like you're literally dealing with like a call waiting service just fleshed out a bit more.

SPEAKER_01 24:38

Yeah, it's it's just huge. I think the whole trend with it, it's gonna like obviously go it's gonna go deeper, it's gonna be something that we all need to embrace and it's something we will all use and we'll something we'll all uh integrate more into our services. But I think it's gonna go full circle where people are gonna start craving more human interaction as opposed to less because again, they're getting so much automation, they're getting so much like autoresponders, they're getting so much like robotic stuff. And listen, it's it's fantastic, but it's like if I like want to ring up a call service and talk to an actual human, better not have a fucking robot voice where I'm hanging up straight away. It's like I've I don't want that service. If I if I want to talk to a human, I need to talk to a human. I think it's gonna go full circle where people are gonna look at more um in-person things. I think people are gonna be looking at more events in person as opposed to again online or in Zoom. People are gonna start craving that that little bit more, and it's definitely something we're gonna start embracing that little bit more with maybe some workshops or events or even just meeting up with people for a hike. I think that's gonna be like a really key element to like ongoing personal training to keep it actually personal, where you can have contact and touch points and real humans, and I think it's gonna be an element that's gonna be rapidly coming on us, like as opposed to it's not like a five or ten-year thing. This is gonna be like in the next six to twelve months where we really need to start leaning into this that a little bit more. Um I would like to formally apologise down to AI if I've offended it and make sure that it still like looks after me and still my friend when I like look up ChatGPT if it's taken any offense from this. Um, you are our our Lord and saviour, and we will still lean into it. But um, any closing notes, Daniel, to to sign off.

Productivity Myths and Misinformation

SPEAKER_00 26:06

I've always been curious though, because like as an iPhone user, I'm using ChatGPT, but also Siri at the same time. It's like are they working together or are they actual enemies? Like, is one of them actually going to kill me in my sleep one day because I'm cheating on them with a different service or what's happening?

SPEAKER_01 26:23

Yeah, to be confirmed, to be uh released. We'll we'll find out someday, but unfortunately it might be killed in the process too, but we'll find out.

SPEAKER_00 26:30

Hopefully talk to you guys soon.

SPEAKER_01 26:32

Hopefully talk to you guys soon.