Jody Carey - The Future of Copywriting, Education, and the Workplace

The conversation this week is with Jody Carey. Jody says in her LinkedIn profile: “You can call me a copywriter or content writer or the person you need when you need words. Words that help you educate your audience, sell your product or service and share your expertise.” Jody is based in Minneapolis and Sydney, Australia. She helps clients on both sides of the globe. She's been a contributing writer, staff writer and senior content writer. at many organizations such as Schneider Electric and Engage. Finally, she's a guest speaker at Eden Prairie Public Schools, where she speaks with students in entrepreneurship and writing classes about marketing and copywriting.
If you are interested in learning about how AI is being applied across multiple industries, be sure to join us at a future AppliedAI Monthly meetup and help support us so we can make future Emerging Technologies North non-profit events!

• Emerging Technologies North
• AppliedAI Meetup

Resources and Topics Mentioned in this Episode

• JodyCarey.com
• Grammarly
• Loom
• Descript
• Khan Academy
• Khanmigo
• The War on Normal People by Andrew Yang
• Canva

Enjoy!

Your host,
Justin Grammens

Transcript

[00:00:00] Jody Carey: The majority of people are fearful of change, and that's basically what's happened. But when we look back at any type of job in any industry, there's evolution. Everything has changed. My father's first job was a pin setter at a bowling alley, so he actually set up every single pin after someone bowled, okay, we don't need that anymore, or a lamp lighter, or, you know, there's all of these jobs that I'm sure in those generations.

Yeah, they were fearful that their job was going away and it was being taken over by the next. Innovation, it's making us more efficient and we'll get through this. I mean, I feel like there's always already been some calming down of after chat GPT, especially in the copywriting world. A lot of people that I worked with thought, okay, I need to update my resume and go out and find a new job because we're done.

We're obsolete, but definitely not the case. It's just changing how we do our work and what services we offer.

[00:00:58] AI Voice: Welcome to the Conversations on Applied AI podcast where Justin Grammons and the team at Emerging Technologies North talk with experts in the fields of artificial intelligence and deep learning.

In each episode, we cut through the hype and dive into how these technologies are being applied to real world problems today. We hope that you find this episode educational and applicable to your industry and connect with us to learn more about our organization at AppliedAI. mn. Enjoy!

[00:01:28] Justin Grammens: Welcome everyone to the Conversations on Apply to AI podcast.

Today we're talking with Jody Carey. Jody says in her LinkedIn profile, you can call me a copywriter or content writer or the person you need when you need words. Words that help you educate your audience, sell your product or service and share your expertise. It's a great summary, Jody. I love it. You are based in Minneapolis and Sydney, Australia.

She helps clients on both sides of the globe. She's been a contributing writer, staff writer and senior content writer. at many organizations such as Schneider Electric and Engage. Finally, she's a guest speaker at Eden Prairie Public Schools, where she speaks with students in entrepreneurship and writing classes about marketing and copywriting.

Thank you, Jody, for being on the program today.

[00:02:05] Jody Carey: It's great to be here. Thanks, Justin.

[00:02:06] Justin Grammens: Awesome. Great. Well, since the overlap of generative AI and, you know, content writing or copywriting has taken the world by storm since the release of ChatGPT, I'm thrilled to have an expert copywriter like yourself on the program.

We'll get to many of these questions and really love to dive into your perspective and how it's been changing your career. But maybe for our listeners, maybe you could talk a little bit about the path of your career. It seems like maybe you've always wanted to

[00:02:29] Jody Carey: be a writer. Yeah, I always enjoyed writing in school.

My favorite thing was to do the research reports that most students hate to do. But I never had a teacher or anyone tap me on the shoulder and say, Hey, I really think that you should go into journalism or English major or go on to write. But it was always something that I, I enjoy doing. So I ended up going to school and getting a degree in marketing and I've always done marketing as a career.

And then I took some time off with raising my kids. We ended up moving to Australia and found that I had a lot of time on my hands and a web developer asked me to do the content writing for his website. And that's where my love of writing was reignited and I realized how much I enjoyed it. It's very cathartic.

It's a creative process that I enjoy, but it also requires a bit of structure and research and organizational skills. So it was perfect for me and doing it as a freelance creative. I could fit it in with all of the school activities. And so, yeah, I've been doing copywriting exclusively for nine

[00:03:37] Justin Grammens: years.

Nine years. Okay. Out on your own. And you said you lived in Australia. Is that sort of how you've been able to, do you find some customers and some, some clients there, it seems like? Yeah, that's

[00:03:46] Jody Carey: where I started my copywriting business. And because Australia is a very small market and we were in a small town just outside of Sydney, it's really easy, I thought, to start a business there.

I didn't realize it would happen so quickly. But people want to use professionals and businesses that are local, they really value that. So it was quite easy and then just word of mouth, it took off.

[00:04:11] Justin Grammens: Good. And so this was nine years ago and I'm, I'm sure you've seen a lot of changes in the industry. Uh, you know, before the advent of like generative AI, uh, you know, there's always been sort of pieces of that.

I mean, people maybe know or don't know. You know, this is GPT 4 that just came out, you know, earlier this year. And so, you know, there's been four iterations. It's been around for quite some time, but it really wasn't until it sort of hit the market, I think, when anybody could start using Chat GPT 3, where it was like, aha, you know, this is, this is very, very interesting.

Had you seen any changes leading up to that at all? Or did it kind of hit you like a tsunami?

[00:04:44] Jody Carey: Yeah, it felt like a tsunami definitely last November, but now that I'm using it and I'm realizing what generative AI is all about, I've been using generative AI and other tools, but didn't know that it was called that.

So you know, I use Grammarly and Loom and other things where they're using different AI tools and those have been around for copywriters for several years, if not, you know, almost 10 in different formations. And we use them all the time and we love them, you know, I don't, can't think of a copywriter that who doesn't use Grammarly or I use something called, um, Natural Reader, so it reads my content back to me and, uh, Word and Google, they do the same thing, but that the voice is very robotic.

Yeah. And so now we can see over the past 12 months that all of these tools that we've been using are now incorporating more. AI functionality, and it's making the product better. So I can have my writing read back to me in, you know, a journalistic way or a child's storybook way or a newscaster way, or, you know, just different tones of voice, which really makes a difference when you're writing because we can take out a lot of second guessing and just are able to write more confidently and more efficiently.

Yeah,

[00:06:08] Justin Grammens: yeah, for sure. You're right. I have been using Grammarly for a number of years. I wish I had found it, you know, much earlier, actually. It saved my bacon so many times. And I think coming from, you know, I'm an engineer. I don't really write a whole lot. Writing has been a chore for me, but I have a lot of respect for people that take the discipline of it.

And sort of focus time on doing that. I actually did a writer's workshop at the University of St. Thomas last January. I'm going to do it again this January. And since I'm an adjunct there, I get a chance to work with the English professors that are there. And they will go through my stuff and, you know, edit it, give me feedback.

But the biggest thing that they do is they actually hold me accountable. That's what's kind of fun about this writer's workshop. There's so much stuff you're supposed to get done each day. And you kind of have to report the beginning of the day and the end of the day of what you did. How do you keep yourself accountable?

[00:06:57] Jody Carey: Well, the deadlines, clients holding me accountable for deadlines really makes a big difference. I mean, I've never written a book, but I can see how that could drag on for years and years and years unless you have a very specific deadline. So the copywriting work that I do is website content. So they have a launch date that we have to meet or their blogs and articles that have publication dates that they have to meet.

So yeah, the deadlines definitely help keep me accountable.

[00:07:25] Justin Grammens: Yeah, yeah, for sure. For sure. And you talk about the robotic voices, you know, I actually found an interesting tool that I think it's called Descript, but it basically allows you to type words and then it will actually read back what you've written.

And the voices are amazing. Like, you know, it made me think I could turn a lot of these Well, I am actually starting to turn blog posts into podcasts. Have you, have you seen tools like

[00:07:48] Jody Carey: that? Yeah, there's, there's a lot of tools out there and right now I think it can be a little bit tricky because there are so many tools and a lot of them cost money and take a bit of time to learn.

So we can jump down that rabbit hole of all of the tools and the shiny new objects in front of us. What I am most excited about with the introduction to public of, uh, mainstream generative AI is that it is opening the doors of communication to everyone in so many different ways. So when I was growing up, my grandfather was completely blind.

So I remember him going, calling on the phone actually, and listening to the newspaper being read to him. And it was a very, very robotic monotone voice, but that was the only way that he could consume that information. But now, you know, you can tap and hover over a website and it'll read it back to you.

And you can change the voice or change the accent. So just thinking about in that 40 year time, how far we've come for people who have different learning styles and different abilities in how they consume information. It's revolutionary. I mean, I think it is absolutely fantastic. And I'm interested to hear what you're experiencing.

Do you think that people are as afraid of it as they were a year ago? Like the people on the street or people, cause you know, we did that AI town hall together. People were pretty optimistic at the beginning of the town hall.

[00:09:19] Justin Grammens: And I think people haven't used it enough to be blatant. I think I still find people that are not using chat GPT.

In fact, I just talked to one of my employees today and he was like, I'm struggling with this problem. I'm like, ask chat GPT, right? It doesn't come off of people's thoughts right away. They maybe might run a Google search or might, you know, dig through some stuff. But I found myself. Having to train myself to be like, no, I'm going to actually go over here and start asking this AI buddy is what I kind of call it.

But this thing that can basically help me where is, is needed. Now, all that being said, you know, I think it definitely is a generational thing, right? The younger people are sort of picking it up faster, people that it really is impacting what they're doing. I would say probably, you know, college students were the first ones to jump on this and start using it or anybody who is basically going to be writing stuff.

But it's interesting. After doing that town hall, I actually did a, I was on a panel, there was four of us, and it was actually focused on marketers. And at the beginning, the moderator said, who here has used Chad TPT? And I would say a minority of people's hands went up, probably 25 to 30 percent of the people actually raised their hand.

And I was like, this thing's been out for almost a year when that was, and people hadn't actually really adopted it or started using it yet. So, I still feel like people talk about it and they're like, Oh, that's interesting. But then it never bubbles up to like actually being a part of their workflow. It might be something that they touch here and there.

And then I think once people start using it, I think people find value in it. I think there's general happiness, but they probably aren't thinking the long term consequences. That's my perspective, I guess, that I'm sort of observing right now. And that's where I think the ethical debate happens. And that's where, you know, how could you use this for deep fakes and all that sort of stuff.

You know, occurs and that kind of remains to be seen, but I, I'm, I'm with you. I think it's a powerful tool. It's changed the way that I do a lot of things when it comes to writing and not only writing blog posts, but writing code software, it changes the way that I've actually written some emails, you know, it's given me good ideas and for me, it helps solve that blank

[00:11:14] Jody Carey: page problem.

Yeah, no, it definitely does. And I think, you know, it felt like it hit my area, like a tsunami because it is writing, it is the copywriting world. And then I have kids that are in school and the teachers were quite fearful of what does this mean and cheating and all of those things. But what's coming down the pipeline is so promising with Khan Academy and what they're doing to, with the tutorials for teachers, what is their product called?

I'll have to find it, but, or even in the medical field. So I know that there's some work being done with physicians. that are trying to create a database of all of the different diagnoses. And then therefore they can go into their version of ChatGPT and be able to diagnose much, much faster. So I feel like the efficiencies that are coming from the use of generative AI is I think it's a positive, I really feel positive energy coming from it.

[00:12:13] Justin Grammens: Yeah, I was, I was looking up, is it called Conmingo, I guess? Yeah, yes, that's it. Yeah, and we had an event here at Lab 651, like it was at the beginning of December. And we actually had somebody from St. Paul Public Schools who, who was here. She was interested in learning about what AI is doing sort of across industries.

And it was cool because one of the people that was on the panel was sort of painting this picture, telling a story about, you know, imagine if you could actually create 30 different lesson plans. for 30 different students in the classroom. And that is super powerful. And that's kind of what I think these, where you're getting at, you know, is what this tool does.

It kind of creates lesson plans geared for each student, correct? Yeah, it

[00:12:47] Jody Carey: does. Or the student can have it next to them and they're writing a research report and then the ChatGPT version of it will say, okay, well, what do you think about This part of it, or what, what else can we look at as far as, you know, if we're talking about World War I or World War II, like what are the inputs that caused this crisis in history?

And then it's more of a two way conversation with those students. And so you have 40 kids in a classroom, obviously one teacher can't help all of them. The other thing that I've been doing a lot of research about in the last year from a personal perspective is. The way, the learning styles, introverts and extroverts and how we process information.

So our classrooms are set up to raise your hand and ask a question and have those two way discussions with the teacher. Well, I have a child who's a deep processor, and so therefore he's not ready to respond until the next hour. Yes, yes. So, you know, kids are learning and processing at different levels, so if they can have their own little pocket teaching assistant next to them.

Being able to help work out these reports. I think that's fantastic. I think we'll leave a lot of kids behind.

[00:14:03] Justin Grammens: Do you think so? I guess, you know, the, the, the fear that you would see from a teacher, for example, is, is, well, then why am I here anymore? Right? You know, if this thing's doing all the lesson planning, then, then what's my role?

[00:14:14] Jody Carey: Yeah. Well, I mean, I think most teachers would be very happy to take some of the things off of their plate and, and have some assistance in the classroom. Definitely there's still a role just like there's still a role for copywriters. You know, we still have to look at the big picture, the strategic part behind a project.

So for example, I use ChachiPT to help me with the research. Like you said, you know, ask the questions and then I have it help me with the writing. So if I have to write something in a different tone of voice that maybe is not my natural speaking style, then I'll use it for that. And then I have it help me edit at the end, how take out the passive voice or how can I make this more concise.

As you know from using ChachiPT4, you put in some prompts, it's going to give you pretty much garbage. But you can use chunks of what it produces to create something in a more timely

[00:15:08] Justin Grammens: manner. Yeah, for sure. You mentioned about roles. Yeah, what popped into my head was, you know, people talked about self driving trucks, right?

And then actually, Andrew Yang has an interesting book called The War on Normal People. But it talks about this whole idea. He has this universal basic income idea that everyone should get a universal basic income. But the thing that he sets up, though, is just this world in the future when you don't need truck drivers anymore.

Right. And how that's going to completely, you know, kind of ruin their, their careers and their livelihoods. But it's interesting because once we actually dig into the research. Most truck drivers don't want to drive that much, right? They actually don't want to have to drive across the country and be away from their family, you know, six days a week and everything.

So people are all worried, you know, Oh my gosh, these people are going to freak out. It's like, no, they actually would rather do the shorter routes, the smaller stuff. And that's still going to be able to be possible. Someone's got to unload these trucks too, you know? So it's one of these things where I think people can dial it so far one direction that you think it's going to be basically an apocalypse.

We're actually getting rid of some mundane work.

[00:16:08] Jody Carey: Absolutely. And I think majority of people are fearful of change and that's basically what's happened. But when we look back at any type of job in any industry, there's evolution. Everything has changed. My father's first job was a pin setter at a bowling alley.

So he actually set up every single pin after someone bowled. Okay, we don't need this pen anymore. Or a lamplighter, or, you know, there's all of these jobs that I'm sure in those generations, yeah, they were fearful that their job was going away and was being taken over by, you know, the next. Innovation, but it's making us more efficient and we'll get through this.

I mean, I feel like there's already been some calming down of after chat GPT, especially in the copywriting world. A lot of people that I worked with thought, okay, I need to update my resume and go out and find a new job because we're done. We're obsolete, but definitely not the case. It's just changing how we do our work and what services we offer.

But yeah, it's interesting times. I just, you know, and I look to at. The photography world, this has happened with Photoshop. You know, we talk about the deep fakes. If you know Photoshop, you can make any picture any way you want it. It's just now generative AI is putting these tools in the hands of people that don't have Photoshop skills.

And I think that's a little bit scary to

[00:17:29] Justin Grammens: people. Yes. Yeah, for sure. So, I mean, some people say, well, it's different this time. Right? It's one of these things where you can actually ask the tool how to use the tool, I've heard some people say. You know, that it's, you know, you can't ask a hammer, how am I supposed to use a hammer?

But with ChatGPT, you can actually ask it, and it actually feels like it starts to nip at the creativity side that one of these, that a lot of these other tools haven't done in the past. I think you probably agree with that, but I think, you know, maybe I'd be curious to get

your

[00:17:59] Jody Carey: perspective. Yeah, I think that, well, I mean, we have to remember too that the, the information that's going into the large language models are coming from humans, you know, unless I'm misunderstanding, you know, they're not creating their own content, it's just collating the content that's been already produced and redistribute it in a different way.

So yeah, I think the creativity part of it, that has to come from humans. It's just the, the generative AI is collating everything for us in a different way. You know, the information that I get out from when I write a piece, it's laughable. The things that it comes up with, nobody would ever publish. But at least it helps get you to that next creative

[00:18:45] Justin Grammens: idea.

Gotcha. Yeah. Yeah. And there's a lot of people that don't do the human in the loop, right? The human still needs to edit and make sure that everything's being written correctly. And so, yeah, as it stands right now, you still need to have that component to it. So imagine going back and going through school, I guess, you know, and like, what if you had this tool today or what if you had this tool back then?

That's what I'm saying. You think you'd leave school with the same, I guess, amount of mastery, I guess, or discipline or do you think it would change much, you know, net positive, net negative, you know, kind of net neutral in copywriting?

[00:19:20] Jody Carey: Yeah, no, I think I would have been further ahead. So I'm In the place where I have, my youngest son is a senior at high school.

And so a lot of memories come back. It's a lot of, well, in my day, well, when we were doing English, you know, and it's a lot of reflection of how we did it. You know, in the nineties versus how he's doing it now. And I think about writing a research report in high school, going to the library, going to the card catalog, finding these books and pamphlets and magazines and hoping that there's something about the topic that you're looking for.

And then having to type it, you know, and when I was in junior high, we're using the correction tape and having to go back. And then the other thing is the bibliography. How many hours I spent making sure that, you know, the references were correct, and then you'd get marked off if there wasn't a comma in the right place.

I mean, what a waste of time, you know? Very true. Very true. And so now you just put in, here's my source, come up with the Chicago style bibliography, done. I mean, those are not skills that any of us need, other than maybe attention to detail. So, no, I think that, you know, what my kids are going through as far as setting them up for the working world, they are much further ahead.

They're much smarter. They're more resourceful. They're more worldly than I feel like my generation was. Yeah,

[00:20:48] Justin Grammens: all said, yeah, no, for sure, and again, not having lived in the copywriting world and having to write a bunch of stuff, the only stuff that I've touched is, is Grammarly, like I would say that has basically been really, really good, although it's still not perfect.

Sometimes, you know, it changes words to different stuff and I'm like, I don't really like the way that that reads and I just overwrite it, you know, but I would say a lot of times. I just kind of hash out an email and then I go through and I go click, click, click, click, fix, you know, fix. So it's definitely helped me in that.

And then from a software development standpoint, it's been really interesting. You know, if I think back to, it's the same sort of concept, well, before the internet, good luck, right? Actually trying to figure out code, you know, again, it's, there was, it was all just books. It was the same thing. It's sort of flipping through.

Am I missing a semicolon somewhere or how does this function work? And then even with the internet, documentation can be very, very poor. You just are scouring, you know, open source websites and open source projects and others to find little bits of code that people have done. That's like, Oh, that's how you did it.

Right. And a lot of, you know, definitely a lot of in person, I guess, and this, maybe this is pre COVID days too. A lot of sitting down with other engineers and having them talk through the code in terms of what it did. And, you know, now, you can ask it to not only write the code, which isn't too bad, but the best thing that I've found is that it actually helps you document the code.

You can actually say, how does this work? And it will actually give you back reasonable explanations on what pieces of code are doing. So, yeah, I think software developers coming out, I have heard some of them say, and it probably would be analogous potentially to copywriters, is they're like, well, I want to figure out how to do it the old school way.

So like, it, it syncs in, and then I'm gonna use the AI tool. And I'm like, well, to each their own, I guess. But, you know, I certainly wouldn't take that approach, but that's what some people say. So

[00:22:32] Jody Carey: do you think that there's a need for less programmers in the future because you can create code? In generative AI?

[00:22:40] Justin Grammens: That's an interesting question. I think the mundane work of just somebody that's just going to sit there and type out a bunch of things, absolutely. That is what is typically called boilerplate code, you know? AI should be able just to dump that out for you right away. But I also feel like we're going to need to write more code.

As an industry, it's the same thing. Like, you know, there's not going to be less farmers per se. Everyone just needs to become more efficient. But the population is still growing, so we need to grow more food. And so I feel like, you know, there's going to be more code that's going to need to be written. And certainly the tasks are going to be changed.

So they're going to be focused more on people that can architect. You talked about strategy. That's what's going to be important, is that somebody that can basically architect a software system the right way and figure out the strategy for it. And then they might fling it off to some AI or a bot to write a lot of the stuff.

And then, again, I view computer programming language as just another language, just like French, just like Italian, whatever it is. Somebody needs to still needs to review it and be like, is this really doing the right thing? Are there bugs introduced? How do we test this? And so it still needs to be kind of be fact checked and sort of run.

But, you know, at the pace in which software is being generated, you know, I don't even know the stats, but my guess is, you know, next year we're going to generate twice as much software as we did the year prior. And the next year, you know, probably five times more, the next year, 10 times more. So it's just this exponential curve of software needs to be written and more and more systems need to be built.

And I believe we need these tools in order to actually be efficient and effective as an

[00:24:08] Jody Carey: industry. Yeah, that's a good point. I mean, it sounds like for both, you know, your industry and mine, we're just almost taking out that entry level job. And I mean, to be quite honest, what they're teaching the kids at university now is beyond entry level jobs anyway.

So yeah, I think we're advancing in a, in a good way. And like you said, taking out those mundane jobs that no, nobody really wants

[00:24:32] Justin Grammens: to do. Yeah. I think if you are going into the industry, no matter what the industry is, and your intention is, is just to sort of stay at the bottom of the ladder, you know, not actually try and advance as quickly as possible, then you're probably in the wrong industry.

So. So anyone that's coming out of school thinking, well, I'm just going to write a bunch of code. That's not what you're supposed to be doing. You're actually supposed to be thinking intelligently about how you can pull together various systems and engineer a solution. And so, yeah, that's the mindset you have to have coming into this industry.

And if you keep that in or front of your mind and you continue to learn newer and better ways to build things, then I think you will have a career for sure going forward. And I also think, you know, I'm focused on software, but I just. I think there's a lot of time, at least that I spend, just responding to emails.

I've been thinking more and more about that, like, you know, Google has ways that they're, have claimed, and with their latest project, their project Gemini, it's going to be really interesting. There are going to be a days in the next year, I believe, where I won't even need to respond to these emails, actually.

There's going to be select ones, and I'm going to train certain ways, and they will just happen. And it's, It's going to save me a lot of time. I literally open up my email at the beginning of the day. And I was thinking about this today. My joke is, is, you know, the moment you open up your email, someone else's problems become your problems, right?

That's the way it is in my industry. Somebody needs me to do something, right? So the moment I open up my emails, I'm like, okay, here we go. Like, here's the stuff that I need to do. And so I spend the first X number of minutes or hours, whatever it is, responding to stuff. And I can't wait for a day when that is just off my plate and I'm more in solutioneering, you know, and building new things rather than.

Having to spend a lot of time with my fingers typing responses.

[00:26:08] Jody Carey: Yeah. I mean, if you think about how the retail world, especially online retail world is doing that with the chatbots, you know, they take those frequently asked questions and take that out of the queue for an actual person to respond to. And it just generates that.

Yeah. I think we're almost there. Yeah, absolutely. We get so tied down with the little details that you're right. You can't work on the big picture projects. And then by the end of the day, you don't have the brain capacity to even focus on the strategic stuff. So, yeah, no, that's a good point. And, you know, thinking about email too.

And I look at, again, my boys who they're just texting and chatting and. It is so hard to get this next generation to read their email and respond to their email and the confidence is not there. They're like, what do you mean I have to write a full sentence? So, you know, putting that into chat GPT, I'm like, well, just write.

Bullet points, what you want to say and say, make this into an email. So the coaching part of it and the mentoring part of it, I really like to give people that confidence that they can write, or if someone's asked to write a press release and they've never seen a press release in their life. There you go.

In 30 seconds, done. And then you go in and edit and change it. But the template is there for you in a matter of seconds. Yeah.

[00:27:27] Justin Grammens: Have you played with any of the generative like, uh, images? Like tools? Like Dolly? Or anything like that? No,

[00:27:33] Jody Carey: I haven't. I don't do anything with, um, graphics at all anymore. I mean, I used to do social media stuff, so I would do things in Canva.

And I know that Canva now has their own generative. But no. I haven't, I know Photoshop, but I haven't done anything with the AI part of it. Yeah,

[00:27:51] Justin Grammens: yeah, sure. It's not a part of my major thing, but I, I have two boys as well. They're nine and 11, so younger ages, but we started playing around this weekend. It was interesting.

We were at a restaurant and they love corgis, you know, they want really want to get a corgi dog and they love going out and Googling around for corgi photos. But I'm like, Hey, why don't you ask chat GPT to generate you a corgi? Right? So they did that. And then it became this game. They were like. Let's put a twins hat on it.

And so it generated a twins hat. And then it was like, let's put it in the twin stadium. And it totally put it in target field in the center of there. And their mind just expanded and they created a whole bunch of different stuff. They were like, let's give it a six pack. So there was like this buff Corgi that was there.

And so. I was just laughing the whole time about what they, what they wanted to do. And then, you know, I will say this, I haven't even told people about this, but they, I think they said, make it have a sword or something like that. And it said, no, it basically said, I will not generate something that has violence in it.

Right. So I was surprised the guardrails can be pretty tight on that. And so I was like, interesting, they're putting that stuff in, but it was, it was really fun and they had a chance to start playing around with some of the image generation and I used it for that talk that we did in Eaton Prairie. All the images that I did were sort of generated out of that tool, which I think is very, very interesting.

And I've seen some Photoshop things that are actually really cool around where people have been able to. Generate just a, you know, put a bear in the picture right now. And it basically blends this real life looking bear, you know, in this camp scene. And we actually had somebody at our last conference who went through this whole thing.

They also, they'd go out and do photo shoots. So they work with a customer that is in the agriculture thing and they need to go out and take pictures of them, you know, picking corn out in the fields. Well, no longer, right? I mean, these photo shoots that could be 50, 000 now. He can just do it in keystrokes, you know, which is, which was like amazing and really, really awesome.

Really, really awesome. Awesome presentation. Interestingly enough, sort of the end of that is. Yeah, the lawyers decided that they didn't want to use it mainly because it's still ambiguous on who owns the content for some of these things that are generated. So do you have that content concern at all? No.

[00:29:57] Jody Carey: Ownership? No, no, I don't. So when I work with a content agency out of Australia, and they do have, they do have Guidelines for us. So, and how we can use chat GPT so we can use it to get past the blank page. We can use it for editing, but we definitely can't just plug in information and then pump it back out.

So there are like, you know, you're saying that you can't put a sword in the picture, there are guardrails going up from agency perspective all the way to the, the software itself. But then what I do worry about is I do work with a client who has private information. And I would love to take that content and put it in ChatGPT and have it edit, but somehow I'd have to take out all of the people's names and anything that could be maybe possibly recorded.

So I don't use it with all of my clients if there is sensitive information that shouldn't be out there for the world to see. But I know that they, you know, they're getting around that too. So now companies are able to have their own generative AI that has. safety mechanisms installed.

[00:31:04] Justin Grammens: Yeah, yeah, it sort of stays within their own, their own data center.

So it's not actually publicly available. You know, one thing that I was thinking of was this company that I mentioned that was doing these generative images of like real life photos, you know, of people out there. They put together some guidelines very similar to I think, you know, what you're doing. Yes, you can use it here.

No, you can't use it there. And, you know, one of the things that they said is you cannot say in the style of so and so. Right. He said that there's certain ways that images can be processed around, I think it's around like basically aperture, you know, like the way that the photo lens is basically set up, which is fascinating that you can tell it to change the aperture and actually understands that and generates a different image based on that.

But anyways, yeah, they can't say in the style of, because that would actually be infringement. Like it actually would be generating something in this person's style and they're worried that that that would be a. A lawsuit, you know, if you knew that you actually generated it following an existing style.

[00:32:00] Jody Carey: Yeah, that's interesting because I've been listening to a couple of podcasts from people who are fiction writers, novelists. And that's been a big issue where their books have been uploaded without their consent. And so someone could go in and say, in the style of, and put an author in there and then someone can just create their own story.

So I think that that is. a little bit of a worry for writers. It's not the type of writing that I do, but if you're into that creative fiction writing, there's really nothing to say that whose work it is and whose style it is. But in the copywriting world, you know, everything is specific to a client or a company.

And a lot of the things that I do is I have to interview people. So generative AI can't interview people yet, or they can't like pull in that human emotion. So to say, I want to write in the style of Ogilvy or some other type of advertising person, I mean, maybe it would work, but I mean, copywriting is all kind of the same anyway.

But yeah, I think that creative part of it from either a graphic designer or a photographer or a novelist, that can be tricky. So that's good to hear that they're saying you can't say in the style of, there's a guardrail that will help with all of this.

[00:33:17] Justin Grammens: Yeah. And again, it was self implemented, right, by themselves.

But yeah, one of the things that they realized, that they needed to make sure that whatever they generate doesn't follow these other things that someone else already has in the public domain that they own. Well, for people looking to get into the field, I guess, for people looking to start exploring with AI and copywriting tools, imagine somebody's coming out of school, let's say.

I always kind of like to ask this of people that are on the program, kind of rewind back to when you were out of school. You know, is it just a matter of just Start using this stuff, or do you have other areas where you've gone or things that you've seen where you think somebody would be, it'd be valuable for somebody

[00:33:51] Jody Carey: to do?

Yeah, I think in copywriting, yeah, there are a lot of books out there. There's a lot of online classes and things that you can do, but it seems like it's more about running a business, being a copywriter, or it'll give you some very basic information, even. In school, you're going to get kind of that high level overview, more academic.

So I recommend, this is what I tell my kids is to go and work for somebody, either an ad agency or a big company where you have a marketing department or you have a PR department within the company. That's where you're really going to learn the day to day and you're going to be able to see the results, the A and B testing, and if it's pulling in sales and how it's driving the market.

So that hands on experience, in my opinion, for content writing and copywriting is really important. So reading books and listening to podcasts will help, but you have to do it. You just have to dig in and do it.

[00:34:52] Justin Grammens: Totally. Totally makes sense. Well, this has been awesome. It's been a great conversation. How do people find you?

Reach

[00:34:58] Jody Carey: out to you, Jody. Yeah, I'm on LinkedIn, Jody Carey, J O D Y C A R E Y, or I have a website, Jodycarey. com. So those are the two best

[00:35:07] Justin Grammens: places. Awesome. It's been great. I always also like to ask, is there anything we didn't cover, I guess? Was there, there's something specific you wanted to talk about that? I think we covered a lot of stuff, but you know, obviously if there was an area you wanted to focus on in the last couple of minutes we got here.

[00:35:21] Jody Carey: No, I think we covered all of it. Yeah, there's a lot going on in the last year and more to come in the years.

[00:35:28] Justin Grammens: Yeah, I guess maybe that's just one question. I guess by interview next year, a year from now, what's your feeling? What do you think is going to have changed or maybe hasn't changed?

[00:35:37] Jody Carey: I think the tools will get better.

We'll lose the hallucinating and the making up. of facts or quotes just to fill the page or the word count. The research will be a little bit more in depth. Right now, I think there's a lot of repetition in what it says. So yeah, I think we'll just have a better, better product a year from now.

[00:36:00] Justin Grammens: That's probably, yes, I would definitely, definitely agree with that.

I think we'll still be talking about a lot of these same things around, you know, how's it going to affect our lives and our future roles, but hopefully it'll be a little bit of a Clearer picture, I guess people won't be as afraid of it. And maybe that's what happens with new technology too. It's just the more people start using it, adopting it into what it is.

It's not as scary. Yep. Well, this is great. Again, Jody, thank you so much for being on the program today. I'll put links to a lot of the stuff that we've talked through here. I should have mentioned that earlier, but yeah, we, we run through entire transcript and we have liner notes and everything like that.

So I'll be sure to link off to your website, your LinkedIn. Well, that's where stuff so people can find you. Thanks again. Thank you so much.

[00:36:39] AI Voice: You've listened to another episode of the Conversations on Applied AI podcast. We hope you are eager to learn more about applying artificial intelligence and deep learning within your organization.

You can visit us at AppliedAI. mn to keep up to date on our events and connect with our amazing community. Please don't hesitate to reach out to Justin at AppliedAI. mn if you are interested in participating in a future episode. Thank you for listening.