AI: Is it a Friend or Foe?

Chapters

• 0:00 AI Impact on Creativity and Authenticity
• 11:59 Google Search Engine Changes and Competition
• 19:23 Navigating the Future With Focus

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:00

Hey everybody, welcome to this episode of the NerdBrand podcast where we're going to talk about is AI your friend or your foe? Coming next. Welcome everybody to this episode of the NerdBrand Podcast. Where is AI a friend or foe? Oh, we love talking about this subject so much, so much, so much.

Speaker 1: 0:53

So you know, look, this is for some reason, I get, I get exhausted with AI because let's just focus on the generated content aspect. You know, the it's going to be a very crowded space very quickly and we're going to start seeing a lot of people fall away because they've kind of put all their eggs in this basket of. You know, having this robot do work for them, and I think a lot of content creators are also screaming about it. It's like you say a four-letter word when you mention AI in front of a graphic designer or anybody that does creative work. Quite honestly, a lot of them are starting to adopt it anyways, probably for ideas and things like that. So that's exactly what it's for. It's been making some serious waves in the content creation game. I mean, you've got articles and images and music that's composed by it and it's all impressive. But is it how? How good is it really? Um, you know, when you make the thing you're kind of focused on, like, oh, that looks really pretty. But when you throw that into a marketing or advertising campaign, now you have to really judge, like, okay, that is going to drive the success, on whether or not this campaign is going to be successful. So you can start stacking up five things made with AI, five things made by humans, and you can probably see a difference I would bet in performance, and it may be good in one way or bad the other way, or maybe it's a complete wash. Who knows? It depends on what you're putting out there. But AI really excels at the technical stuff. I do give it credit for that. If you need a product description whipped up, that's your buddy. If you want basic news summary, boom. It's efficient, it's fast and, opposed to six months ago, I found that it could be pretty accurate.

Speaker 1: 2:19

But when it comes to creativity like genuine creativity that makes your brain tingle and the heart feel light it's going to fall flat just a tad bit. You know it is a good mimic of style. It can analyze a lot of data and spit out something that looks like it was human created, which is fine, which is fine at the end of the day, that data still needs the discernment of a human to interpret and disseminate that data. And, whether or not you know, if you're a business owner, that's your business, it's your strategy. Don't turn the keys over to AI. If you're having issues with revenue, get a consultant. But it's really talented. It's just a talented mimic and you know it's technically proficient, which helps.

Speaker 1: 3:04

But you have to remember it's sort of like Star Trek, the Next Generation Data. You know, if you've ever watched that show, data is very. He doesn't even use contractions, he's just very anal, very straight, and in and out it's a one and zero. And until he gets this emotion chip and then now his character becomes more fun, I'm sure brent spiner, the actor, was really awesome to be like. Finally I get range to work with as an actor, um, and so ai is sort of in that. That's pretty much kind of.

Speaker 1: 3:34

What I see is happening is that it's getting really proficient at the basics and then eventually we'll start to maybe see it blossom into some other um. You know thoughts and and provocative things that you we would expect from a human to some degree. But all of this brings to the consumer side of things, so we are becoming more aware of it and more of us don't seem to care. You know, if the information is solid and you just want the thing and it's doing the thing and you don't really care what it looks like, care what it says, you know, good, that is something's out there, then Okay, um. However, at the end of the day, when you start to see revenue drop, when you start to see things happening you know what you've been doing for the last five years you may need to change and that may be a hard decision. You may have to spend more money to stay competitive. You may have to change out things to stay more competitive. It doesn't say that you have to change agencies, because if you do that now, you have to retrain that agency, its team, all about your business, to learn all about it all. You might want to consider other ones and not get all tied up into like one particular thing, like social media or email or, you know, direct mail or whatever you need to really have and really consider in this day and age of AI and omni-channel approach Um, something that many businesses should have been doing 20 years ago, but that's where we are.

Speaker 1: 5:04

So, as we become more aware of AI and some people don't care the value of authenticity, its quirks, the flaws even. I mean people want to connect with a real person and not a computer or a robot algorithm, whatever you want to call it. So think about it You're more likely to trust a heartfelt review from a real person than a perfectly crafted sort of generic generated one by AI. And that's the human element that really makes the difference in that, because that story, that experience they give you could relate not just to one person but a group of people. It's hard to do that, and human experiences tend to touch more and relate more, and that's kind of it. If you're just looking for prop value, you know AI will be good for that. But if you're looking for, like a story, a narrative that I think still you're going to have to rely on, you can get the idea of how to craft it, you can get the parameters so that people don't chase rabbits in their testimonials. But at the end of the day, you've got to really focus on like. You need that story, you need that face, you need that personality.

Speaker 1: 6:14

So the takeaway for content creators is obviously they're not. They shouldn't panic on this. It's not going to replace you. It's not going to replace any of us. In fact, it's going to enhance the services we offer. It's just a tool. When Adobe Creative Cloud came out with content, smart content or content aware they demoed a picture of a landscape and there was a tree in it. It was a picture, not a graphic, and they used the content aware tool to remove the tree from the image and everybody went whoa Well, that didn't devalue photographers. Use the content aware tool to remove the tree from the image, and everybody went whoa well, that didn't devalue photographers, it didn't devalue the image.

Speaker 1: 6:51

Um, and in web, you know, for years, I mean, web was like one of the first to get hit with web design. You know, you had all of these platforms come out, like square and wix, and you can build a website overnight, and some of them I laugh at because I'm like, yeah, on a mobile device it's gonna look like crap. Also, where's the call to action? I mean, there's just all kinds of methodologies in web. If you want to know that, you can go to nerdbrandagencycom, slash web design and see it, but at the end of the day, it's like um, it's a great starter. It's a great starter, but it's definitely not going to get you to your goals. So that's and that's just being transparent.

Speaker 1: 7:26

So, when it comes to core creative work, you know you got to double down on what makes you you, um, your perspective, your passion, your weird little quirks that's what's going to set you apart. Some say that's your why. Now, if you need to figure out how to word that, how to say that that's perfectly understandable, anybody that is, as this of this week it's single awareness day on Friday you know you have to think about like, oh, I got this dating profile and I got to write a bio. Nobody likes to write a bio about themselves. So well, we'll do it for you. That's okay. We'll go straight, but we're going to interview the crap out of you, so you can kind of, we need to get what we need to get out of you to make that work and make it likable, and that's just a normal thing, normal thing. So you know, if you need a little help figuring out your why, that's what we're for, that's branding, so, anyhow, that's part of what services are.

Speaker 1: 8:18

So, if you're using AI in your processes, it's okay to let people know. You don't have to hide it, but authenticity of doing so that's going to be very important because people can spot the difference. I mean, we, as an agency, use AI. Now how we use it and how I prompt it, that's a secret. How we use it and how I prompt it, that's a secret. So therefore, meaning behind that is how I ask my questions to the robot, how I ask it, aka prompt. That is something that's definitely a trade secret for every industry, every agency or every business that uses it.

Speaker 1: 8:52

You don't have to be transparent with it. You can, because we're not talking about search. This isn't searching for something. This is literally like walking up to a concierge desk at a hotel or at a resort and it's kind of what's going on. And if you walked up and said I want to have fun, that person's going to look at you and go like welcome to Disney World. Or maybe they'll look at you and go like, uh, welcome to Disney World. Or maybe they'll look at you and go like, sir, this is a Wendy's, you just don't know. So you got to be very careful about how you prompt if you're going to expect to get a certain output.

Speaker 1: 9:27

So the future of the content I still believe is human, which means AI is a friend. It doesn't necessarily mean it won't become a foe. I think it will for some that aren't careful and, just, you know, using um decisiveness with regards to their business decisions and marketing or advertising to to look at something and say, okay, I could tell ai generated that and that's fine. Um, it gets us a starting point for a conversation, cool. But if it's turned over as in and out, this is it, have a nice day. Well, you know, there was work and thought that went into that before you were given that in regards to the prompting. But, yeah, you got to have a discussion and disseminate the data with each other. It's like you know data is. It can be pretty objective. I mean, you know, if you say 49% of marriages in divorce, it's kind of a given that 51% end in death. So we don't. Sometimes data is just that block, you know, and you need a little something extra, and I think that little something extra ai can't do. That's still going to be a human being, um, but it can help us get there to where we need, when it regard, when regards to try to create a connection or create a story or you know, that human spark and that element. I don't think you're going to get anything that's going to replace that.

Speaker 1: 10:53

So let's go to some Google news though, shall we? Because Google has had a heck of a month. You know there has been some problems with search. That has resulted in a lot of websites losing traffic. So if you see traffic drops, don't yell at your marketer. It's not their fault. There has been some problems with their business profile pages literally broken. So if you've been working on those and you don't know why, again it's not your agency or marketer's fault. There's something going on and they admit that. I guess somebody tripped over an internet cable and spilt internet all over the floor. Regardless, they're working on that. I haven't had an update to see if they fixed it. I believe by now they would. It's been like two or three days and then google's fourth quarter results came out, and now seo and pay-per-click people are kind of raising some concerns because they're starting to see um shifts in user behavior, and we saw that during covid, where d2c brands really took off and then they started tapering as everybody came back two, three years later.

Speaker 1: 11:59

Um changes to google search. I don't know if y'all have noticed this or not. Um really pay attention to what's going on on these pages. It's kind of a mess. Uh, I was looking for something the other day just to kind of have a little bit of fun, try to figure something out, and uh, there were three sponsored ads, but I couldn't tell they were sponsored ads anymore. It just said on one line sponsored ads and then the three underneath it. I mean, it was just.

Speaker 1: 12:22

It was hard to discern, like, okay, what's organic and what's paid here, and that's kind of concerning with search ads, which search ads are usually a loss leader anyway, but still it became a little bit of a mess. And then you always have your people also ask. And then there's SEOers that are like, oh, we got to do frequently asked questions and you should, but to try to get into that space, if it's already someone's already there, you getting into there unless you have a really really high domain with high authority, more than theirs, and the content is really good. I probably not. So, um, you know the competition to Google has arisen because of these issues um, errors, messy search result pages, um, shifting user behavior. It's all opened Google up to become vulnerable to competition.

Speaker 1: 13:12

Uh, bing is not forgotten, though Many, many of us have. It shouldn't be. It should be in your strategy for both organic and paid, especially if you're running an e-commerce store. And so then you have water, economic and market conditions and those are probably more impactful because you know people won't make certain purchases if they don't feel that society is going in a direction that makes them feel like that. You know they will have security in two to three years.

Speaker 1: 13:46

Some of that's overblown and I'm not getting into that politically, but at the end of the day it's sort of the investor mindset. You know, am I going to invest in that? I've seen housing prices drop. I've seen more houses go up for sale. That could be a good sign. Just have to watch the rates.

Speaker 1: 14:03

So there's all these little minutiae factors that go into everything, and Google is. You know they suffer from that now as well. They used to be the king of the heat. Now it's going to get harder for them and in a way, that's a good thing. So you know a lot of organic traffic for is the parent company of Google they're making. You know it's becoming inexpensive for them to compute these results. But at the end of the day, you still have, like, the list here of meta, open AI, nvidia, aws, which is Amazon Web Services. Everybody's investing in AI to compute and provide the demand of people going into that and getting information from it.

Speaker 1: 15:01

You know, we would search for something and we would focus on keywords, and then we would focus on comparison keywords and then long tail and da, da, da, da da in search and the computation necessary in the data centers. For that was, you know, a challenge at first. But then here we are. Well, ai is, for all I know, quadrupling that necessity of need of energy and output. So there's infrastructure changes that are a challenge for Google now as well.

Speaker 1: 15:30

That used to not be used, to not be, um, and so you have a lot of factors in the market, um, that that google is subjected to when they're like okay, we can't, we're, we're no longer immune to competition because we need to build a data center and we need to build a power plant next to the data center, and blah, blah, blah, and somebody comes in and says you can't just build a power plant, you're google. What are you doing? That's probably an extreme hyperbolic, but it it's. You get the point. So it's just under pressure now from other AI competition. Um, it's no longer the king of the heap, um, so one of the things that the big picture is because of the search engine changes.

Speaker 1: 16:12

Um, buyer behavior is shifting, so what this means is that when you search for something, you're trying to find an answer, just like anyone else would. If Google gives it to you directly and quickly, you're good. If it doesn't, you keep looking on something else. You'll try something else. You'll try Firefox, you'll try another. You'll just try another browser, duckduckgo, whatever. You'll try something else.

Speaker 1: 16:37

Typically, that's happening more and more, I think because of Google's instability and it has some instability, in my opinion. Summaries of the search results are becoming a thing. We're seeing that across multiple devices, operating systems and just everywhere. I mean Google put out an ad campaign that I thought was interesting, that advertised its capabilities as Gemini in order to summarize results for people. So think of it as if you remember Google search results or a list of what we call blue links, and it's just a listing of recommendations based on the search result you entered in. Now the AI will plug into that page, that search result page, and it'll summarize all of those results for you, so you don't have to click on them. Well, what does that do to website traffic? Well, it's going to tank it for those websites listed on each one of those blue links, and that creates a lot of disruption in the industry, a lot of disruption.

Speaker 1: 17:40

So now, what do you do? Well, there's going to have to be a lot of thought behind what SEO and search engine marketing is moving forward. We're going to have to be very careful and pay attention and not just throw things on the wall. And if you're a business that's used to throwing things on the wall, I would say by June you're going to feel this in a very hateful way and don't yell at your agency. Um, technology and the internet is changing right in front of us. Uh, it's a good thing to bad thing.

Speaker 1: 18:08

Um, there's a lot of stuff happening in the news cycle that is overwhelming. Um, you know, did most of you even know there's an asteroid that's going to hit the earth in 2032? I'm not making this up. I'm not making this up. Go Google it. Apparently, in December, merry Christmas, we're going to get hit by an asteroid. I don't know how big it is. They're not really saying. Apparently, it's a a pretty decent-sized asteroid and it's like a 2% chance it's going to hit 2%. I know you're like 2%. Call me when it's 50. I think you should be concerned if it's any percent.

Speaker 1: 18:45

But I'm not sitting here going like end of the world and the content is getting that way where it's getting more and more sensationalized to get your attention Sort of a clue that things are getting very crowded. And Google search engine is not any different. It's getting very crowded when you just need the simple answer, and that's why I think the summaries happened. So we're all trying to figure out in our own organic brains how to consume content, but there's so much of it coming at us it's not possible.

Speaker 1: 19:23

So 2025, moving forward, is going to be a very interesting era, because what we're all plugged into, we all cannot know what's going on everywhere at once Unlike that movie. Going on everywhere at once, unlike that movie. So I would recommend that you pick a lane, you pick a profession, you pick a strategy, you execute that strategy and you stick to it, and that is your differentiator. If you like this episode of the NerdBrand Podcast, you know where to go to find more. We are at nerdbrandagencycom slash podcast, new episode every Friday, and I want to say good night, good evening, see you next week or whatever the things are. Keep your nerd branch strong.