Become a Creator today!Start creating today - Share your story with the world!
Start for free
00:00:00
00:00:01
Navigating AI Adoption: From Misconceptions to Technical Challenges w/ Harrison Painter
230 Plays10 months ago
In this episode of AI-Driven Marketer, Dan Sanchez interviews Harrison Painter, who shares his compelling journey from real estate and marketing to embracing AI as a transformative tool. They delve into the broader implications of AI across various industries, the entrepreneurial insights gleaned from overcoming personal and professional challenges, and practical strategies for non-technical individuals to excel in AI roles. Harrison and Dan highlight foundational tools like ChatGPT and Midjourney, discuss the evolving roles of chief AI officers, and emphasize the importance of emotional intelligence and creativity in leveraging AI effectively. Tune in to discover how AI can revolutionize your approach to business and marketing.
Resources Mentioned:
- ChatGPT: https://openai.com/chatgpt
- Google Gemini: https://gemini.google.com/app
- Midjourney: https://www.midjourney.com
- DALL-E: https://openai.com/dall-e
- Headliner: https://www.headliner.app
- AI fusion workshop conference: https://www.indwes.edu/news/2024/05/ai-fusion-conference-2024-harnessing-ai-for-innovation-across-education-non-profit-and-business
Timestamps:
05:30 Startup demands time, AI tools provided balance.
06:38 AI success relies less on technical skills.
10:40 Tech exhaustion from rapid technology changes and adoption.
15:22 Avoid mistakes, research thoroughly, and improve credibility.
17:58 Developing multiple chatbots to enhance factual debate.
20:37 Small businesses can create synthetic content using Oodio.
25:37 Finding the best, cost-effective solutions is essential.
27:01 Platform with multiple chat agents, time saver.
30:43 Headliner program quickly creates vertical videos from podcasts.
36:02 Value emotional intelligence over technical assessments, questioning.
39:21 New tech can be instantly useful or gimmicky.
42:42 Indiana Wesleyan developing world-class AI training platform.
43:56 Testimonials about AI tech, impactful on non-technical.
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction and Guest Welcome
00:00:02
Speaker
Welcome back to the AI Driven Marketer. I'm Dan Sanchez. My friends call me Dan Chaz. And I'm still on this journey to master AI in 2024. Thanks for listening to this episode to join me in the journey. I'm here with Harrison Painter, who's like, you're the chief AI officer for everybody now. And I found you through your podcast because it was a...
00:00:22
Speaker
It was an AI marketing podcast and I was looking through all the AI marketing podcasts because this is where this one gets found and saw that you were ranking up there, had a conversation with you, hit it off. I'm so happy to have you on the show, but I know you just shifted recently to being like everyone's chief AI officer and shifted from go broader from marketing to a broader conversation about AI from the training you've been doing. And I'm excited to jump into all your learnings, moving from marketing into a broader thing.
00:00:51
Speaker
with all the conversations you're having. So Harrison, I'm excited to dive into this.
Marketing's AI Evolution
00:00:56
Speaker
Welcome to the show. Yeah, thank you for having me. You know, it's funny that as a marketer, we're supposed to niche and then we're supposed to niche within a niche, right? And I'm going in the opposite direction.
00:01:07
Speaker
direction of that. But you're right. I'm speaking to so many different people in so many different industries that I just think it's a disservice if my podcast only focuses on just this one thing. Now, keep in mind, it'll still be foundationally about marketing, about sales. I mean, business is business, right? And that's what we need. But at the end of the day, like people need more than that. And I'll share some of the programs I'm working on as we talk about it.
00:01:36
Speaker
That's funny. I mean, I feel the pull myself just posting about marketing stuff and the GPTs I've been building the LinkedIn. I've started people coming out saying like, Hey, I think I'd really like to build a custom GPT around X and it's not even a marketing function, but I'm like, okay, yeah, that makes a good, that makes tons
AI's Rapid Advancement and Challenges
00:01:52
Speaker
of sense. Let's do that. So I'm already like, yeah, I don't know. Different people are reaching out about AI for different reasons.
00:01:59
Speaker
And the lessons you learn about how to run it for marketing apply generally across the board in a lot of different ways. Though this show will remain about marketing. Cause I'm like, someone's got to stay niche down. Cause even the, uh, the art, the AI marketing Institute, their show is broadened out too. I've noticed. So I think this is a general trend because there's so much. I think there's so much demand for AI that's waking up across the board and marketers were kind of the first ones to the game. Right.
00:02:27
Speaker
Everyone's talking about it, but marketers have been talking about it for a little longer and experimenting a little bit more heavily because it's had so many more applications for marketing first, I think. So I think that's what's going on, but we'll see. And the other challenge you have too is everything is moving
00:02:40
Speaker
So quickly, so once you kind of have this marketing thing figured out within a tool, either the tool is no longer valid or it changes so much that, you know, you got to do another episode because the tool is completely different from when you started using it. Just look at the evolution of chat GPT, where it's come just in the last, you know, 12 plus months.
Harrison's Journey to AI
00:03:04
Speaker
So I want to jump into what you're learning from being on the ground, talking with people who are like signing up for trainings and are eager to learn about their misconceptions, hurdles are running into and how you're helping them overcome that. But before we do, I'd love to learn a little bit more about your background. I mean, I know because we had a previous conversation about it, but I found it to be a fascinating journey. But how did you get to AI marketing today? Where did your journey start and give us like the highlights along the way? I know you've had like a lot of little things that have happened from the beginning.
00:03:34
Speaker
Yeah, I'm an entrepreneur at heart. I'm a military guy. I got out of the military. I did the job thing for 12 years and I just didn't fit into that world. I became an entrepreneur. I got into real estate
00:03:49
Speaker
sales and then I got into investing and then that's where I learned all my marketing chops was during that era of my life. Lost everything in 08, any of you out there old enough to remember the market crash of 08. But it was a blessing for me because I quickly pivoted into marketing because that's what I was passionate about.
00:04:09
Speaker
From there, I was able to build a marketing company that got acquired. It was acquired by a company in Los Angeles, a public company. We were working with different celebrities, iconic athletes, all those kinds of things, kind of 360 branding. This was the very early days of
00:04:25
Speaker
social media. So that was a blast. I had some health issues that brought me back to Indiana. It was kind of deflating on one hand, but on the other, it's been a blessing ever since. I kind of went through, as most marketers listening to this will relate to, it's a thankless job. We don't get a lot of praise for the work we do, and we're pretty expendable. If a CMO changes, we're typically all fired and
00:04:55
Speaker
and moved out. So it's just one of those roller coaster type jobs and I really feel for marketers and the emotions that we go through with that. But as I was trying to figure out what I wanted to do with the next phase of my life, I started doing live events and all these things and then COVID hit and that kind of another big speed bump there.
Non-Technical Roles in AI
00:05:17
Speaker
Then coming out of COVID,
00:05:18
Speaker
Again, started the events again. We had a lot of momentum, but unfortunately I had some personal issues that really threw me for a loop. My wife got breast cancer. My daughter was in a skydiving accident. So they needed.
00:05:32
Speaker
my time now, right? As a husband, as a father, I had to figure out how do I keep my business running and everything is dependent pretty much on me, right? As the leader, as the person doing this, but yet my family needs me. And any of you out there that have been part of a startup knows that's not a nine to five Monday through Friday gig, right? So what do I do? Well, this was exactly the time that chat GPT was released to the public.
00:05:59
Speaker
So i started playing around with different tools experimenting with them and all of a sudden i realized holy moly i can do four times the work in half the time.
00:06:11
Speaker
I can keep up with what I'm trying to accomplish and I can still have time now with my wife and kids. So that was, that was amazing. And then I dedicated now my life to educating people and getting these tools in front of folks, a non-technical, when you say chief AI officer, I'm a non-technical chief AI officer, really a facilitator, a trainer, and really helping people embrace these tools because it is the future.
00:06:39
Speaker
I find that a lot of AI work doesn't even need that kind of technicality to it. It's amazing how much you can accomplish with AI, but it requires almost this whole different skill set, right?
00:06:52
Speaker
Like a lot of the progress I've made with AI has less to do with my coding backgrounds. I know how to code in HTML, CSS, and I dabble with programming languages because I've learned how to manipulate the heck out of WordPress. Is that something I adopted early on in my career? But the thing that helps me the most with AI is actually running an internship.
00:07:11
Speaker
Like I learned how to break complex processes down into small little tiny tasks and delegate it as standard operating procedures that interns could follow and execute relatively well after a good training and understanding of what they're trying to do and why and when and how. That's helped me tremendously with AI, but that doesn't have anything to do with the technicalities, just learning how to like.
00:07:32
Speaker
I don't know, thinking in terms of processes and breaking down. So at least it makes a lot of sense that you can be a chief AI officer without having the code and development background. Well, and I think that's the future of companies, right? There's going to be, I don't know, what would you call today a CTO, CIO that's really going to have that chief AI officer technical
00:07:54
Speaker
And then the modern day CMO is really going to be more of a chief AI officer that's non-technical and they're going to deal with the synthetic media and keeping things ethical, staying up with the technology, managing.
00:08:08
Speaker
the teams, working on communication within the company through AI. And there's just so many different things that need to happen. And typically those technical guys, nothing against them, but they're not typically the best communicators, human to human, right? They're more the coder and they're more comfortable in front of that computer or speaking with their peers that are at their level. And those guys can make us feel stupid for lack of a better term, right? And they get frustrated with this because we don't have
00:08:37
Speaker
the foundational understanding that we have. So I feel that there is a huge role here in the future for guys like us that can reach out to normal folks, employees, just common people and share the message with them and get them the right training that they need.
00:08:53
Speaker
often found in press jobs, I was kind of like the bridge between IT and the rest of the company. Yeah, no stakeholder wants them to feel stupid. They'd speak technical to me and I'd try to reinterpret it back to everybody else sometimes, why we need this or why we didn't need that or whatever.
Misconceptions and Critical Thinking in AI Usage
00:09:11
Speaker
Since you're working with people all the time, I'd love to know like what are the most common misconceptions you're running into about AI from those who are interested in learning and showing up to trainings, but haven't spent 20 hours listening to Sam Altman interviews.
00:09:27
Speaker
Well, let me share the four kinds of people that I run into when I'm out there, and then I'll kind of break down from there. So the first type of person that I run into truly is the rainbow and unicorn set. They think AI is going to solve all of their problems, right? That it's going to cure cancer, that's going to make our lives completely incredible and almost on autopilot.
00:09:50
Speaker
Then you have the, you know, the, the terminator set. These are the people that are absolutely gloom and doom. You know, the, the, the overlords are going to overtake humanity and we're all going to be slaves to AI.
00:10:04
Speaker
Then you have the two that are a little bit more normal, and the first one is people just have their head down, right? They're working hard. At the time of this recording, we're in a very high inflationary period. People's money isn't going as far as it used to. They're having to work harder.
00:10:24
Speaker
For less than their heads are down plus they want to spend time with their wife with their kids their spouse. Whatever that is they still wanna have a life outside of work so you know their heads are just down. Then you have the fourth set that is is is just exhausted i call the tech exhausted.
00:10:42
Speaker
We went through the internet boom, then we went through the smartphone boom, and then the social media boom, and then within social media, we go from Twitter and Facebook to Snapchat and TikTok and vertical video.
00:10:58
Speaker
you know, blockchain and cryptocurrency and all that happened there. And now all of a sudden we're asking people to adopt another technology. And this technology is moving faster than all of those combined. And even though humans say they like progress and change, we're typically more creatures of habit. So now you have that, that balance of, yeah, I want to change, but do I want to change this much this quickly?
00:11:25
Speaker
So you kind of have all that going on. Now, when I'm talking to most of these people, the ones that are interested, you know, they've might've jumped on the chat GPT and I find that they use it almost like Google, right? They'll just jump on there, ask a quick question, get an answer and move on. They don't know.
00:11:43
Speaker
I mean, we call it prompt engineering. I don't love that word, but they don't really know how to ask the right questions. And the output that you get is very, very dependent on the input that you give it. And once you start explaining some of that to people, you can see their eyes light up on how this is so much different from a Google. And then of course you can blow their mind with looking at how all of this stuff can be used.
00:12:10
Speaker
in the future, but my goal is just to get them to one, improve their self-awareness, because number one, we're gonna have to really discern what's real and what's not. And it's gonna get harder and harder. And at the time of this recording, we're coming into an election season. So we're really gonna see how people can manipulate with these tools, right? So we gotta discern that way.
00:12:32
Speaker
And then the second point is we really have to focus on critical thinking skills because it's that critical thinking that helps us give better inputs into AI to get those key outcomes that we want to accomplish with it. So really those soft skills are probably more important than they've ever been. And I don't think AI is going to take away the human element and I don't think AI can drive intent. That's going to be,
00:12:59
Speaker
a human that has to drive that intent. You mentioned that one of the common misconceptions is AI is like search. What's another misconception you've run into? Hmm. That's a good question. Another misconception
00:13:21
Speaker
You know what, that you can just jump into AI right now, let's talk to marketers, and it just put everything on autopilot. That's not the case. I mean, I'm watching too many marketers, and please, if you're one of these guys out there, or ladies, stop, we call it lazy AI. You're jumping into chat GPT, you're having it write a blog post, or a LinkedIn post, or whatever for you, or some automated system. It's being copy and pasted and just thrown
00:13:51
Speaker
out there, most of these articles are not good. Most of these LinkedIn posts are not good. They're formatted in a certain way where over time people are gonna know that you did not write that. They put 58 emojis in there in a certain way they're formatting and there's certain words. Can we please strike these words from the record please? Harness, unleash, unlock, dive, delve,
00:14:16
Speaker
all those things. You need to use things like chat GPT as an add-on to your creativity to make what you do better not depend on it to do it for you. And right there, there's the misconception that AI is going to do it all for you. It's not. It's not.
Creative Use vs. Over-reliance on AI
00:14:36
Speaker
It's you need to drive what it's going to do.
00:14:40
Speaker
And I really do think that marketers that hold on to that humanity, that emotion that kind of buck some of these automated trends, they're the ones that are really gonna succeed over the longterm. And their jobs are gonna be much more secure than somebody that's just putting it on autopilot.
00:15:01
Speaker
That's one of the reasons why I really like my internship running experience because nobody assumes an intern can accomplish anything, right? But I'm like, well, if given the proper parameters, it can. AI is just like, I call it the genius intern. It's Einstein smart and I know so much yet can't, it doesn't have common sense, at least not yet someday maybe. That's where they're hoping to go. We need to talk on that too, because even though it's an Einstein,
00:15:26
Speaker
If you're doing lazy AI and copy and pasting, there's still a lot of hallucinations. There's still a lot of outdated information. And if you put things out there, whether it's on behalf of you or especially your client and you make a mistake, now you're not only hurting your credibility, but you're hurting the credibility of the people that are paying you to do your job. So it's more important than ever to really have that second set of eyes to do a little bit more research. And look, you have time to do
00:15:55
Speaker
the research now. The way I use it, I'll write something out or a script or a blog post or an article, whatever that is, I'll write it out in my voice and then I'll plug in and say, let's make this better, make it more valuable, fact check this, and then I'll get the response and then I'll go back in and do the research to make sure everything is correct. Now we have updates. You know, you saw Google Gemini is coming up to 2 million tokens.
00:16:24
Speaker
And for anybody that doesn't know what that means, it's memory. So as you continue down these long chats, it's going to remember what you said two days ago or whatever, so you're not gonna have to keep reprogramming it.
00:16:39
Speaker
that doesn't fully prevent yet hallucinations and false. Look, it's scraping the internet for the information. And we know, as Abraham Lincoln said, not everything on the internet is true, right? That's right. It's funny because the hallucinations are often drawn out as bad, but I'm like, it's the hallucinations that actually give it its power.
00:17:00
Speaker
It's the same power that makes AI as wonderful as it is. It also leads to some of its weak points. Because without the ability to come up with and dream and create things out of nothing, because if you're asking for a LinkedIn post about sales, it's got to actually make up stuff. Because you've given it no direction to write said posts, so it will find it itself. The problem is it will find it incorrectly sometimes because you didn't delegate it well enough yet.
00:17:27
Speaker
I mean, to some point you're like, well, do I delegate, they'll write it for it. You're like, yeah, but it gets better and better as time goes on. It's proven to have less hallucinations as it's refined, but hallucinations is a funny thing because everybody talks about it like it's bad. I'm like, no, that's how it works. Well, you know how they're trying to fix that. You just have to be aware of its current limitations, but that's where spending more time with it.
00:17:51
Speaker
starts to build, you start to become more competent, is learning where it can and can't perform. Right. And you know what they're trying to do to prevent that? Like I saw an MIT article where they actually are making like, say 10 different chatbots that are going to debate
00:18:08
Speaker
on the facts around whatever is getting spit out. And then I think it was last week or week before, if you're familiar with, there's an app called Bumble. I've never been on it, but it's like a dating app. The CEO came out and said that the future is that I would have an AI chat bot
00:18:30
Speaker
the say woman would have an AI chat bot. Those two chat bots would actually date to see if we're compatible before it would create the connection. So yeah, the future is going to be a little bit weird for sure, but they are working on that too, to create a better overall system.
Democratization of Content Creation with AI
00:18:48
Speaker
I'm so looking forward to that. Not the bumble dating part, because I'm married and don't care about that part. But I'm like, to have your chatbot call my chatbot? I'm like, yeah, that's just going to be useful. Because how often do you're like, oh, let's get together. Oh, let's pull up our calendars. And you're just having to go through it. It becomes a whole thing. I know I run into people in the community, and it's usually like, hey, have your wife call my wife because they understand all the soccer schedules and all that kind of stuff going on. It'll be easier if a chatbot could just go and take care of it. That way, the right people are landing on your calendar at the right time in the right way, right?
00:19:18
Speaker
But look at it like this because dating is not much different than business. So you and I could have chatbots that talk to each other to see if we're compatible either for this podcast or to do business together or whatever that is. So, you know, look, typically adult entertainment and dating kind of does push the limits with technology. And then that spills over into kind of the business world and normal stuff.
00:19:44
Speaker
We have to look at it. They did until like the juggernauts of like Facebook and social media really changed the game. I remember walking through some conferences and studies. I remember I more like read the cliff notes because I probably wouldn't even show up to a session about that. But I remember hearing back about like how like they had all the industries and push the industries. But that's that was true in the 2000s probably less true over the last 10 years as Facebook and Reddit and Netflix and all those guys have really in Uber a lot of the more
00:20:13
Speaker
Really really big tech companies have pushed push tech along probably farther But it's still there and they're still pushing it along with some of these misconceptions about AI Treating it like search expecting it to automate everything and some of the buckets you've been able to classify people in How is that impacting their business adoption of AI? How is that coming into play when actually implementing it practically?
00:20:37
Speaker
Well, there's a couple of different buckets here too, right? So for small businesses, it's amazing because now you can create synthetic content. Okay, just for me, for instance, when I do my YouTube videos, Oudio is amazing.
00:20:51
Speaker
I can, I can draft a jingle and chat GPT. I can put it in Oodio and now I can create custom music for my videos, for my intros, for my outros to make something custom for maybe a segment that I'm doing. I just did a video on a graduation of an AI training program that we did. And I custom wrote a song that.
00:21:13
Speaker
kind of praise the organization that put it on and of course the students who graduated. So that's pretty amazing and that democratizes the playing field a bit on marketing because what would that have cost me before to get a custom jingle written? One, I'd have to have somebody write lyrics, have somebody write music, have somebody record it, get the copyright, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Now you just go on Udeo and do it in 10 minutes. That's mind-blowing. So democratizing.
00:21:43
Speaker
It is really good. I mean, I can tell you, I think the maximum I've ever gone is 10, 10 iterations of the song, but typically I can get it done in two to four and something comes out that's usable. You know, I'm not trying to write Bohemian Rhapsody here or anything. Yeah. It's not going to be something people listen to on Spotify, but as a marketing gimmick, it's absolutely working right now. And then of course it'll get better so that it actually,
00:22:10
Speaker
People might want to listen to it some of the songs I've heard some of the cherry pick songs They put on udio or stuff that I would just normally add to a playlist and listen to because it's that good It's that good now if you're a bigger business, you've got a whole nother can of worms and this opportunity is lately where I'm starting to find attorneys to work with to help craft policies for businesses because as these tools keep coming out and
00:22:37
Speaker
A bigger business can't keep up with everything that's going on, and your employees are coming into work and using these tools. Now, that opens up a whole lot of cybersecurity issues, IP issues, and these employees, they don't realize they're doing anything wrong, but they're using tools that aren't authorized. They're not under the firewall of said company. And if they're putting in things like spreadsheets or financials or client lists or any of those things,
00:23:06
Speaker
They might not be using a custom GPT or their own server. They might just be using the one that's on their phone downloaded from the Apple store. So you've got to create a policy now, just like we did with social media and make sure that the company is fully in line with everything that's moving forward.
AI Implementation Challenges in Companies
00:23:23
Speaker
They're training their employees and that they understand the risks and rewards that are here for using the technology.
00:23:30
Speaker
Do you have a boilerplate policy in place for people to check out or download or is that still something that's working? That's what I'm working on. Yeah, this just came up out of the blue and it hit me like a brick. So I started reaching out to a few attorneys saying, look, we need to hurry up and put this together because this is happening so quick. And I think it's a big opportunity for anybody that wants to jump on this.
00:23:52
Speaker
I'd be down because these companies will pay good money, right? This isn't a cheap fee to put it together And it's something not only can you help get the attorney in there with the policy? But now you could go in and physically train that company and generate revenue for yourself that way What are some of the technical barriers companies are running into faced with trying to get AI more into their organization?
00:24:17
Speaker
Well, look, small companies, it's not really cost, right? Because most of these tools are 20 bucks or, you know, that a month and so many of them when they launch are free. So you've got that issue. But if you're a larger company, it is the cost.
00:24:32
Speaker
Because one, you need private servers. You need now a whole new set of cybersecurity type functionality going on. You need to create these policies for your employee. None of that stuff is really per se cheap now because you have all these added protections, layers, training, everything going on, right? Where a small company has maybe one to 30 people to deal with, but if you've got thousands of employees, that's not cheap.
00:25:00
Speaker
Right. It's just not a cheap, fast or easy process for them to implement. What, how do you break down like the segments of rolling out AI organization wide? Like I imagine there is a technical stack. Like what's, what, how we layer, like what technology are we bringing in or enabling within our existing technology? There's a policy legal standpoint. There's probably an HR angle.
00:25:28
Speaker
There's with training and enablement on it. How do you organize all the facets that need to happen when you're rolling out AI in a company?
00:25:37
Speaker
That is the $64,000 question, right? I think that's what we're all trying to figure out right now. What's the best way to do it? What's the easiest way to do it? What's the most cost-effective way to do it? You know, for me, of course, it's working with marketing teams or sales teams. I'm not the technical side, but we do have people on the team that are the technical side. So they can go in and work with the CIO, CTO, whatever that is, and figure out what tools will benefit
00:26:06
Speaker
the organization has saved them time and or money. So I look, I think we still have a long way to go to figure out the best way to roll all of this out with anybody. I do think that what about with smaller teams? Let's say you have marketing teams of less than 10. So there's a VPN marketing, maybe a marketing director and a handful of like X people who execute like a couple of writers, designer,
00:26:33
Speaker
probably a paid media specialist. You know, it's a small team, but it's still big enough to be its own little department. How would you layer that in? The basic foundational tools, right? Chat, GPT, or Perplexity, or Gemini, or whatever your preferred is, or a mix of all
AI in Design and Creativity
00:26:49
Speaker
of them. I don't know if you've seen Poe yet, but that's pretty cool. It kind of blends. Poe is amazing for anybody listening to this. I want to say it's poe.com. What? P-O-E.
00:27:01
Speaker
And I don't know if it's.com or.ai or whatever, but basically this, this platform brings in like 30 different chat agents and you can ask each one of it.
00:27:15
Speaker
a question and then go through each one and see the responses based on all of them. And it maintains the memory throughout the entire thread. So you could ask GPT-40 or whatever a question, run it into Gemini, run it into all the other ones that are in there. And it's a big time saver because typically I got what, six, seven tabs open.
00:27:38
Speaker
doing it anyway. So that's always a foundational tool. For synthetic media, of course, you want to use mid-journey to create images. Now, for graphics people out there and marketers,
00:27:52
Speaker
Mid-journey does not replace your graphic designer, right? It just doesn't. Number one, you can't copyright any of that material if you're a company that needs to copyright things. But two, all it really does for me is streamline the process. Because look, I can barely draw a stick, man. That's my artistic talent.
00:28:11
Speaker
from that, but I can go into mid journey and say, Hey, I want to create something that looks like this. Then I can get that to my graphics designer. And I just saved a week or two in back and forth of me trying to explain what I want. So that's a great tool for you. I don't find mid journey or dolly to be even be graphic design tools. They're more like illustration tools and I can't, it does replace illustrators. Like unless you're coming up with really custom like detailed illustrations, like digital illustration is
00:28:40
Speaker
dying. It has to be taking a hit right now because of mid-journey and those guys. Because I was a graphic designer and I use mid-journey all the time, but it totally gives me access to illustrations and photography and all kinds of things, assets I didn't have available to design around. It is good for mock-ups too.
00:28:59
Speaker
Like that's where it can do design work. Cause it can mock up a webpage. Is it good? No, never, ever, but it can get you pretty close. Yeah. Time save. Yeah. So I've used it to even do mockups of logo live with clients when we kind of get it down to the general idea. And we just go through like 50 iterations, find five, he likes, and then narrow it down to ones. And then I usually have to rebuild it an illustrator, but just getting to the point where we can look at mockups together instantly. So nice.
00:29:27
Speaker
Well I'm for your pitches, I love doing face swap. So if I'm doing a deck for somebody or some kind of pitch, I can create an image with say the person I'm talking to or their CEO or whatever put their face on an image of Superman or something like that and really customize now my proposal.
00:29:47
Speaker
And typically that blows them away. Most people don't know how face swap works or what it is and it's super easy in mid-journey. And you're right, for illustrations, as this face swapping continues to get better and as you can continue down the path of the same character, now you're talking about comic books and illustration books and things that could be done without that artist or illustrator. So that's pretty amazing.
00:30:16
Speaker
And I'm not an attorney, I'm not giving legal advice, but as of now, my understanding is none of this can be copyrighted. So you have to be aware of that. Yeah. Well, I'd all, anything I would be doing, I'd be doing for marketing purposes anyway, instead of rather than creating my own IP and my own Mickey mouse around the issue.
00:30:36
Speaker
but it'd be fun to come up. Like I've done kids books for marketing purposes. And I'd love to be able to do kids books faster. And to continue down the path to things like headliner, right? If you're doing a video podcast like this, now you can take this video and what used to take a long time. So right now we're in 16 by nine mode, right? But we want to get it on TikTok or whatever. Now there's programs like headliner where I can just take this long form video, put it in there. It'll chop up.
00:31:06
Speaker
10 videos that'll do it in vertical format. And that used to take me hours and days to put together, even when you start putting the transcript over the top of it and all that. Now it's like 10 minutes, 10 minutes. Like, like think of Gary Vaynerchuk would have had this 10 years ago. Cause he put out, I think more content than anybody. He's got to have some Guinness world record right there.
00:31:33
Speaker
He didn't have AI at that time. Now you can put out twice as much content as he did using all of these tools. It's true. He had a team of like 30 people just working on nothing but his content. I don't remember after that he was fluctuated, but last I checked it was 30 people. It might be bigger now. Yeah. You can use things like the GPT agents. How can I better SEO this page? You know, what keywords am I missing? How can I improve?
00:32:02
Speaker
what I'm doing. So all of these tools for a small team are invaluable because now you can take those creative meetings that used to be three, four hours. We can get them done in an hour because we have all that creative stuff to work from and everybody gets to bring it to the table. So that's, that's invaluable. How do the people that you're working with address their data and integration issues with their systems? So that's one thing I've run into personally is like you want to use AI, but it seems like it's still kind of isolated from people's tech stacks.
00:32:33
Speaker
Yeah. Well, the bigger company is a whole different animal. Small companies aren't really worried yet about that. Right. It's too new. That's not a focus. It's just not happening yet. I think we're going to see some major issues. I'm sure pop up in the next year. That's going to really get people's attention around that. But I think right now people are just having fun using the tools. They're not really thinking of any repercussions. It's not on the radar.
Cybersecurity Concerns with AI Growth
00:33:02
Speaker
Yeah, I think we're too early really, unless you're a larger company and just in that full protection mode. My wife works at a major hospital and they just, they're under ransomware right now. If you've seen the story about Ascension, they were completely hacked last week. These all across the country. So I'm sure it's some form of a terrorist attack or whatever, but they have these hospitals completely under ransom. None of their computer systems are working. The nurses are in chaos.
00:33:32
Speaker
The, I'm sure the records have been, we're just going to see a lot of negative things happen. And that's the challenge right now because the world is in this weird state of change and, and world war three is going on right now. People don't realize it, but it's a digital war. And the FBI even came out a few, I don't know, a month or two ago, and they even said, look, the cyber attacks are going to be increasing.
00:33:58
Speaker
You need to be aware of this. And it comes at a time, unfortunately, or maybe fortunately, but unfortunately when AI is really growing and people aren't really thinking about the cybersecurity risks involved with that. Yeah. Reading the coming wave, which was published last September, I believe after reading that one of the big insights I took away from that book was OMG, like,
00:34:22
Speaker
cybersecurity is going to be a huge problem because of AI. If I'm looking at investing in companies right now, I'm like, who's got the best hold on cybersecurity against AI right now? I'd be putting money into that company right now because that industry is going to blow up because it's going to become such a problem.
00:34:43
Speaker
Because there's so many of these attacks. Yeah, there's so many attacks that we don't hear about. I mean, Ascension, you heard about in the news only because they're such a large company, but these cyber attacks are happening every day. And I would assume they're happening at a top secret level with some things that we never hear about, right? It's a war. It truly is the cyber war that's going on.
00:35:06
Speaker
And it's, again, I think AI will be able to use to fight. It's going to be no different than Bumble. We're going to have our bots fight in their bots to try to figure out who can win to get into your system. That's what's going to be happening. Yeah. What do you think the fundamentals that business leaders need to understand about AIR in order to implement AI well across the team?
00:35:31
Speaker
The soft skills, it's not the technology, right? It goes back to that self-awareness. So people need to be focused on emotional intelligence. I absolutely recommend giving your team an EQ assessment, seeing where they are in their emotional intelligence. Cause what most people don't realize, unlike all of the personality assessments that are out there, your personality is locked in stone. You can't change your personality.
00:35:59
Speaker
Your emotional intelligence can be changed. You can work on it. You can improve it. So get rid of the, I'm not saying get rid of them because they do have their value, but the value of disc and all that is minimal compared to an emotional intelligence assessment. So that's number one. Number two is helping people learn how to ask better questions.
00:36:21
Speaker
Right? So critical thinking skills, understanding how to format a question to get the key outcomes that you want. To me, that's more important.
00:36:33
Speaker
for a normal person than the physical technology itself. And I can tell you, most companies aren't even thinking about that, right? They, oh, let's just look at this shiny new toy and how we can use it to improve the process or make money.
Emotional Intelligence and AI Culture
00:36:46
Speaker
They're not thinking about the emotional and look, a lot of employees right now are scared and you need to address and make these employees comfortable because there is a large set of America that feels AI is going to completely replace them.
00:37:01
Speaker
How do you deal with that and morale in your company? And it goes back to the old school team building and all those types of things that need to be done. So all of these things need to work in concert together to build that right culture that's going to succeed. That's good. What do you think the strategies they should use to increase AI literacy in the team? So you talked about building emotional intelligence. You talked about having to go through a team, go through the fundamentals of
00:37:32
Speaker
learning how to ask good questions. What would you do after that? Getting a whole team, maybe a small team of five to 10 more aware of what AI can do for them.
00:37:48
Speaker
Well, you need, there's some big marketing company, I don't know, I did a podcast on it a few weeks ago, but they created like a new position, if you will. It's like some kind of synthetic media marketing manager, if you will. I think that this is almost like a chief AI officer, if you will, but for smaller teams. That person is A, gonna have to keep up with technology for the team. Because again, it's moving so quickly, you can't expect all your employees to be
00:38:17
Speaker
Sitting in front of the computer like you and i are watching youtube videos watching three hour google conferences right doing all those things that's that's our role that would be the synthetic media manager's role. That same role also has to make sure that everything is in compliance.
00:38:36
Speaker
with company policies, make sure that everything is being done ethical and almost like an old school editor at a newspaper. They're going to have to make sure that everything that goes out the door is accurate.
00:38:49
Speaker
right? That there's no hallucinations, that the information in there is correct, or that it meets the proper brand messaging, you know, that you've set out. So I think that's going to be, there's going to have to be that pinnacle person that's in charge of that. It just can't be a team as a free for all using the tools. Yeah.
00:39:10
Speaker
gosh, it does take a lot of work to keep up with what's going on. I spent a lot of time doing it. It's interesting because some some things get announced and you're like, whatever, that's a joke. It's not a joke. It's just a funny little tiny use case.
AI Trends: Innovation vs. Gimmicks
00:39:21
Speaker
People are like, Oh, look at this new thing. And you're like, it's not helpful at all. But then there's things that like day one, when they come out instantly useful, people would start leveraging it would give you a competitive advantage if you figured out how to bake it into what you're doing within the next two weeks.
00:39:34
Speaker
But it's hard to discern sometimes which ones are which. Custom GPTs, as soon as I saw it, I was like, oh, that's going to, that's, that's something worth investing in right now. But like trying to think of like things that are like kind of gimmicky. I'm having a hard time coming up with them, but there's tons of them. I'd say Oudio is probably something that's interesting. If you can learn how to leverage it, probably not the most important thing to figure out right now.
00:39:59
Speaker
even though it's fun and exciting. Have fun with it, right? It's something to have fun with. Don't take it too seriously right now. Something new is going to come out or Oodio is going to improve. Video, text to video. I mean, we've all seen by this point what some of these platforms, you know, most of them haven't been released to the public yet, but if they're even half as advertised, just think you and I could get together and create a cinematic movie, just texting.
00:40:29
Speaker
That's mind blowing. But here's the one thing that I think people forget. I don't think AI is going to be able to truly craft anything out of an optimized story. Like it's gonna take the creative people to come in and guide it into creating better narratives. It only takes looking at Hollywood today to see what happened, right? The last decade has been fully optimized movies.
00:40:55
Speaker
basically 936 Avenger or Marvel movies, right? But people now are tired of the formula that they're craving something different. They're craving something new. And optimization isn't always great. Modern music today, it's so perfect.
00:41:13
Speaker
then honestly, it all kind of sounds the same now. Like we've lost that 70s, 60s, 70s, 80s, even 90s vibe in music because it's so perfect. It's all to a click track. It's all, there's nothing in the quiet areas or however they, I'm not a musician, but you know, they always talk about the space like jazz works within. AI in this modern music takes that out and it can't really create that. That's a human element.
00:41:43
Speaker
Well, can't create it yet. Eventually. Yeah. I mean, and then it will, the future is kind of like, that's, that's what happened with the images with mid journey, right? At first they were garbage and then they got better with some errors. And then they got so good that you're like, Oh, it's obviously I it's perfect. Like you can't make it any better now for it to get better. It actually has to get worse.
00:42:09
Speaker
Right. It has to become more realistic, like it was shot in an iPhone, which it can accomplish now. But you have to actually like, you have to engineer your prompts to get it to look like it was shot in an iPhone and an everyday photo that's good, but not too good, you know, to actually be stock photo worthy to fit in a university website as a student interacting with the teacher kind of a photo, you know, but
00:42:31
Speaker
It's almost like it has to become perfect and then it has to come back. It has to come back to be more realistic. But that's where photos are at right now. So it'll happen with video. It'll happen with music. It'll come back. And I want to touch on this point too because this is something that I found that's fairly fascinating. So I work with the Indiana Wesleyan University Accelerator and we have a few programs. And right now we're revamping the programs. We're trying to make a world-class AI training platform is what we're doing.
AI Education and Literacy
00:43:01
Speaker
We have curriculum that's going into a certification program. We have curriculum that's going into a master's program at Indiana Wesleyan. We are doing in-person and corporate workshops. We're doing virtual workshops. We've even created a AI fusion workshop conference that we're launching on January, I'm sorry, June 28th in Indianapolis. So that's gonna be amazing.
00:43:27
Speaker
It has three tracks is gonna have one track for educators for teachers. It's gonna have one for nonprofits and it's gonna have one for. The business set so we're covering all that gamut there and then last week and this is the one that really warms my heart. We just graduated what we call our community a training program we did it at a local inner city church.
00:43:53
Speaker
And it was an eight week program and we just graduated. So I went and actually shot some testimonial video and everybody there was smiling ear to ear. They said I had no idea we could do this. One guy had been trying to write a book for 15 years and he got it done because of what he learned in that class by editing and doing everything he needs to do in the GPTs and whatnot. But here's what I found that's very interesting.
00:44:22
Speaker
The less technical the person, the more their eyes light up around AI. And when I work in the tech world, the first thing I get is, oh, I already know everything.
00:44:34
Speaker
And I mean, maybe that's some bravado. Maybe that's just, you know, look, we work in tech and we don't want people to know, we don't really know what's going on. Or we don't have time to keep up with what's going on. But then the tech folks, once you sit down with them and really start breaking down everything, typically they'll go, oh my gosh, I had no idea.
00:44:54
Speaker
that you could use the tool at this level. Because again, their focus is typically the coding and all that stuff. They're not really using these tools to create a recipe for their spouse or the little things that you can use it for to make your life easier. So I just found that kind of interesting.
00:45:13
Speaker
Yeah, it's like they went, they had the misconception, they used it as Google, found something factually wrong and wrote it off as like, well, this tool is inaccurate, so why would I use it? You're like, no, you used it wrong because of that misperception because I don't know, like one of the first things I did when I was testing chat GPT, when it first came out in December, 2022, I was like, okay, let's give it a creative curve ball. Let me ask it something that I'm pretty confident is not, it just doesn't exist on the internet.
00:45:40
Speaker
There's no way to know this. I'm like, create me a recipe to make Mediterranean flavored ice cream. I googled it to make sure it didn't exist. It didn't exist. And it came up with a freaking recipe that I'm like, Oh, that would actually work. Like there's your new product. I could create that and make, I would be able to build that and I could tell those flavor profiles are going to work. And I'm like, there it is. It has the creative ability to go places that normal algorithms can never go.
00:46:09
Speaker
Dan Chas Mediterranean ice cream company. Mediterranean ice cream. I love it. Yeah. So Harrison, thank you so much for spending some time with me today on the show. Where can people go to learn more from you and about what you're doing? Go to harrisonpainter.com. I keep things simple. I'm Harrison Painter on all the socials. We do have another website, efand.org. And that's where a lot of the events and different things we're doing on the local front if you're in Indiana, but if you're not Harrisonpainter.com.
00:46:40
Speaker
Fantastic, again thanks for joining me. Thank you.