The E-commerce Leader

[00:00:00] I think the reality is a few months later with chat G P T four is that doesn’t matter. What matters is are you turning bad actors into superhuman, uh, you know, actors who have literally the knowledge of the gods at their fingertips.
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[00:01:22] hey there folks. Welcome back to the E-Commerce Leader Hot Takes discussion with our panel, Chris Green, Kyle Hamer, Jason Miles, and myself, Michael Leek. Today we are talking about chat, G p T four and artificial intelligence. Just how deep does this rabbit hole go? Ha. Can it be useful to us as marketers?
[00:01:40] If so, how? And you know, is it really scary? Are we approaching some kind of singularity, all that and more in today’s discussion? So hope you enjoy this lively debate about chat g p T four and artificial.
[00:01:52] jason, what’s on your mind this week? What is top of your mind? I’ll chat. G p t, man, I’ll chat. G p t four. It is, uh, amazing, revolutionary.
[00:02:02] You know, you and I did conversations when Chat GB 3.5 came out about how this was the new Oracle of Delphi, whatever even that is, I don’t even know. I’ll have to ask chat GB t to define what that phrase is, but a super smart thing. Uh, and uh, and it, you know, it’s fascinating to see how it’s, um, influencing people.
[00:02:17] I’ve been listening to a lot of podcasts. I would just say that the smartest thinkers I follow are saying this is this shift. Online culture equivalent to the internet startup itself, equivalent to, uh, worldwide web, uh, you know, equivalent to mobile like the App store. Uh, this is a huge, huge shift and it’s just going down in the last two, three months.
[00:02:38] Uh, open AI is, um, is changing the game and it’s gonna be really interesting to see how this plays. Of course they’re already bestselling books about how the chat G B T Millionaire is the book I was, I was looking at yesterday, has great reviews actually, so I’m gonna get it. Uh, but it’s for business folks who wanna use chat G B T and I think that’s insanely important for us to tune into, understand what’s happening and really use it for business.
[00:03:05] Um, you know, improvements in every way we can.
[00:03:10] Yeah, it, it’s hard to know even where to start, isn’t it? Once you open that kind of worm, it’s, it’s so big. I mean, I think what’s interesting is it’s one of those things that has been overhyped for quite a few years, and then it’s being. Under hype. Sounds a dangerous thing to say, but I mean, you, you can see it as another thing because you’ve been burned by, oh, crypto’s gonna make everyone rich and, you know, AI is coming, AI is coming for 10 years.
[00:03:33] It’s a bit like the, uh, boy cry Wolff. You know, I think the Wolf’s turned up. I think, um, the fact that Elon Musk and, uh, Steve Wosniak, such huge luminaries in the world of tech are begging for it to slow down. Shows how serious this is. I think, and I don’t see it slow down. I think there is an arms race as we discussed right on our podcast, Jason, that um, yeah, I think there is an arms race and I think it will speed up.
[00:03:55] And what strikes me is that you don’t wanna go into a gunfight with a, you know, with a knife. Uh, that’s basically how the British and the French and so forth took over the world in the 19th century cuz they brought guns to knife fight. Literally. Yeah. And, and just dominated. And I think if we allow ourselves to fall into that trap and not arm ourselves with knowledge, um, the right tools if we want them.
[00:04:12] And, uh, understanding then we are gonna be vulnerable to that. So, in other words, the other side’s got robots. I, on the other side, meaning your competition or anyone you are concerned about. Yeah. We have to at least understand it, if not embrace it. Yeah, I think the caution that they’re bringing to the party at first, at first, like in December when I was really tuning into a chat, G p t 3.5, the, the buzz and the concern was, is this thing gonna be sentient?
[00:04:36] Like, when, when is this thing gonna in the singular. I think the reality is a few months later with chat G P T four is that doesn’t matter. What matters is are you turning bad actors into superhuman, uh, you know, actors who have literally the knowledge of the gods at their fingertips. And do you really want a ninth grader who’s dis grun?
[00:05:03] To have access to every possible way in which you could do anything you want. That is the power of chat, G p T four. And I think that it’s freaking people out. It’s like, oh wait, we don’t care if this thing’s alive or not. We just don’t want the evil people to use it to literally, you know, be malicious and and tear the world apart.
[00:05:24] I think that’s the big concern. You know it, and it’s fascinating. You’re right for Elon Musk and Wazniak and a thousand other thought leaders in the space to say, Hey everybody, we need to put a moratorium on releasing more powerful versions of this. It’s really, really a meaningful moment in history. Um, so anyway, so that’s top of mind for me this week.
[00:05:46] Yeah, it’s interesting. I mean, I don’t, you’re, no matter what technology it is, you’re always gonna have nefarious actors that find a way to. Take the technology and use it, you know, to their advantage and take advantage of other people. So, I, I don’t know. I don’t know if Elon Musk or Wazniak are gonna be able to solve that fundamental issue of, uh, human bad actors using technology.
[00:06:10] Oh, they already said, they already said nobody’s gonna listen to ’em, but they’re just making a point in time where they say, look, this is cadc Smic. And the difference is this orders of magnitude for sure. You know, orders of magnitude, you know, a gun or a knife is a gun or a knife. Yeah. Um, how to create your own nuclear bomb is different.
[00:06:27] A whole different order of magnitude for sure. Yeah,
[00:06:35] you’re muted. Mike’s muted. Some of us are gonna be overtaken by AI in about five seconds cuz we don’t even know how to work a mute button. So, uh, uh, if your, if your AI would’ve automatically unneeded you, wouldn’t it, would you need to employ a robot team? Maybe. Maybe they would’ve kept. Oh, hey Nathan. No, just in that regard.
[00:06:55] Kyle plugged in, uh, to Zoom, uh, the Reid AI tool, the meeting notes, that thing spits out for our clients. Now, have you guys seen that? Absolutely. Insanely good. That would say beautifully presented topics, bullet points, action items, the whole nine yards. It’s amazing. It’s searchable. It’s keyword topics and phrases.
[00:07:16] It’s crazy. Yeah. This is perfect. This is perfect. This is good. Check it out, Mike. Yeah. If there’s an AI tool that can listen to a video recording, right? Like your episode of your podcast, turn it into so you don’t have to transcribe and then. Edit and change it up if it just takes the raw audio and makes it into something much more readable with notes and searchable keywords and all these things.
[00:07:41] Now, it just made it easier for you to create content that can be published using platforms like KDP and all this stuff. And like I, I didn’t post about this, but I was, I’m not trying to be down on ai, but I think AI is a little overhyped, and I’m happy to be wrong on this. I don’t know, but AI is gonna help people create things that can.
[00:08:01] Offered sold use for marketing, all these things, right? It’s gonna help you create a book. Someone who couldn’t create a book now can use AI to create a book. Great. So what we went through this with merch by Amazon, where yes, anybody can have a design, good or bad, hire somebody for a dollar, $5, $10, create a design.
[00:08:14] You can have amazing looking products on Amazon for free. So what, until AI teaches people how to become great at sales and marketing and, and getting customers to be interested in and be willing to pay for product. It doesn’t matter. You can have all these tools creating your most amazing, you know, podcast summary book ever.
[00:08:37] But if nobody knows about it, nobody’s gonna buy. Right. Nobody cares about it. Yeah. Nobody’s gonna trade their money for it. So there are, um, you know, I’m sure I’ll be wrong on this, uh, skills that only humans can do. I don’t know how an AI marketer is gonna work. I get, I give an AI a TikTok account and say, Hey, get followers and engage with them in a way that’s gonna get them to buy my product when it comes out.
[00:08:56] Uh, you didn’t get my newsletter last week, did you? Mike was laughing cuz he knew I was gonna bring it up. So last week for my newsletter, I wrote a. Involved an awesome, uh, newsletter inviting people to get a free Shopify [00:09:10] site audit. And at the end I put. PS I was too busy to do this myself this morning, so I had chat.
[00:09:16] G P T write this for me. I think she did a nice job. And I got so many comments from people who said that was an amazing newsletter. And then at the end when you said you didn’t even write it, chat, G p t wrote it for you. I was like, dang. Um, and so yeah, these tools will do the marketing for you and it’ll only be a matter of time before they do more and more sophisticated marketing for you.
[00:09:36] I can tell you. Uh, analytics will be a big do fall where you interpret, for example, Facebook ads, Google ads, and on and on where the robots will take over for you. Um, and there are many ways in which they will start to do services for you. Yeah, that’ll bleed right into the communications. And marketing that we all depend on for scaling our business.
[00:09:58] That’s already happening. I saw, um, I think was last week, there was a, a service that will basically write your email newsletters, it’ll auto-generate them, and it all uses AI and it’s really interesting. So what you do is you basically set it up, you feed it sort of your topics, you feed it the thought leaders that you like, and then it goes out and scours the internet for the most popular.
[00:10:21] Articles that are like trending for that moment in time and then writes your email newsletter for you and has it ready to go. And it’s just like, and how much do you pay for that one because Chat g p t does that for you for free. Yeah. No, I mean they, they, yeah, they like, I don’t know what they charged for, but uh, I just thought it was super interesting cause it was all sort of built and wired to just send out your email newsletter, but it’ll actually send the email and do the whole shebang.
[00:10:47] Yeah, totally. I, I disagree on the record. How about that? Interesting. I, I would say it’s not generative. It’s still copying. Uh, well, no, actually, well, that’s an interesting debate. It’s not generative. It’s so like, go copy these thought leaders or like, Hey, let me feed in hours of my podcast or go read. It’s way more on my old books.
[00:11:06] No, it’s way more simple to get my voice, way more sophist sophisticated than that. You can load in all your own content and have your knowledge. You have to have that. Right. Yeah. So someone with no content who’s never been on the internet before, can’t just walk you in and say, Hey, look, I’ve got a generic sounding newsletter that’s in the voice of Mark Cuban, crossed with Gary V.
[00:11:23] Like, great. You guys looking forward to reading that? You guys signing up for that? Yeah, people do buddy, and you know what people do, but people are going to, in my opinion, evolve and look for those verified check marks from real people and something signed with an N F T, that means an actual person wrote this.
[00:11:41] What you’re, what you’re saying is not what I’m saying. What I’m saying is this will make your marketing faster, more efficient, and beautifully. Oh, I, what you’re saying is no one wants to follow a. I would agree. No one wants to follow Rule Pod. What I’m saying is someone with no experience. You can’t just come in and buy their way in with tech and tools and actually make it personal.
[00:12:04] And I do think that humans, for at least the foreseeable future, are gonna connect with personal, be like, yes, I know there’s an actual Jason Miles behind there. I don’t care that he’s chat G P T to write in his own voice. But you can’t just walk in. You spent years, decades to be able to do the things that you’re able to do.
[00:12:18] Everybody here has spent so much time that, yes, we can walk into these things. That’s exactly what we’re talking about at the. Someone could put out, Hey, you don’t need to learn marketing, just get this chat g p t course that I put together and people are gonna kind of fall for it. And they’re not gonna realize The reason it works for Jason Miles is because he has a backlog of content to where chat, G p t can write a newsletter.
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[00:13:25] That sounds like he actually, he not just someone, he, Jason Miles, the person they’re connected to, the person that they know, like, and trust the person they want to buy from is still involved, even if it’s at a minor. It’s not something like ghost behind, like some just kid randomly on the planet that’s just pushing buttons and collecting money, scamming people on a, selling a course, they don’t even know what it’s about.
[00:13:46] Here’s what I would just say. This is a moment in time where this is not Manny Chatt. This is a whole, this is mobile computing. This is the internet. This is a time where you wanna look at how these sy the systems working, or these systems are working and not ignore the. And you know, how you adapt it to your business, whether you’re a newbie or whether you’re a veteran, is gonna be one of a million different outcomes.
[00:14:15] But I guess my whole point is this is not, uh, this is not to be ignored in my view. No, that’s not, yeah, that’s not what I’m saying at all. Yeah. I would say, uh, one thing that people miss because the thing is of course, you know, we’re podcasters so we’re generating content in the form of words. And you know, if we write a blog about it or rather chat, g p t is gonna write the blog cuz we’ve already got a backend process that does that, by the way, for several weeks because, uh, I haven’t got the time to write it.
[00:14:40] And we’ve got a nice slip process down that I think is working. Um, so that’s helpful and that’s generative content, but analytical stuff is something that fewer of us understand. I don’t have a mathematical degree and um, you know, some of us are better with analytics and others. Carl, I guess you’re probably the best amongst the four of us, but the backend analytics have been guiding human decisions based on algorithms for couple of decades now, at least since the out the Google search algorithm has changed.
[00:15:02] How people shop, how people find love, how people do, you know, find restaurants, you know, how they live in some ways. And that’s been, you know, tweaking. Experience is based on an algorithm, an artificial intelligence engine that learns from experience for 20 years. Facebook has profoundly changed the world.
[00:15:19] It’s creating a lot of social misery, I think, and so is TikTok. And so is, you know, particularly with, you know, amongst teenage, uh, kids or whatever, there’s so much, um, social, bad and good and, and everything that comes out of it. So what I would say is AI has quietly been changing. Human interactions for years, and one of the interesting things that strikes me about internet marketing is simply that as humans, we have been trying to use human ingenuity.
[00:15:40] To your point, Chris, which I think does count a huge amount to tweak algorithms to get ranked, whether it’s on Amazon or Google or TikTok or YouTube, send things an algorithm. To be then engaged with by humans. So I think all we are doing in some ways is inserting a bit of, uh, a a robot in between me trying to rank on Google manually.
[00:15:59] It’s really hard if I can get a super smart robot to try and work with the super smart robots of, of Google. It’s basically a Google ranking wars and on the other end of it there’s a human. So there is a human to human interaction, but there’s always been AI in between a lot, always the last 20 years.
[00:16:14] Yeah, and I think now we’re just introducing another AI actor, which in some ways evens up the fight because little old me can now use some pretty sophisticated technology to try and beat the hugely sophisticated technology of Google to try and get ran, for example. Totally. Should you, anything you put out be the number one result on Google for anything you personally.
[00:16:33] Uh, I don’t think anything I’ve put out has been, well, yeah, maybe for the odd, very, very niche thing. Yeah. Where, so very, very niche thing. Okay. Yeah. But, so we don’t need people using AI to, you know, get the algorithm to put them on the front page of Google. Right. Like, I want to trust that Google’s putting the best actual results for what I’m looking for.
[00:16:50] Mm-hmm. Uh, not, Hey guys, it’s super easy. Use chat g p t and, and use ai and you could be on the front page of Google. No, that’s a bad idea. I don’t. I don’t want anybody trying to do that, even though it sounds great. I want, I, I believe myself’s the best. Eh? We all think our stuff’s the best. No, I agree. But the truth is I’m not, most of us are wrong.
[00:17:06] I’m not saying it’s desirable. I’m saying it is inevitable. I think it’s like arms races. If, if China and us, if it comes to us, useful people are gonna, they’re not gonna use Google Truth. That’s true. I mean, I guess it comes down to, uh, an age of fight. I mean, Google has been fighting people using various forms of manipulation to try and rank, um, you know, for, for, um, 20 years.
[00:17:26] And, and you know, there’s been an ongoing answer race, and I think this is just up the arms race. I don’t think that people should manipulate Google rankings. I think they inevitably will because there’s so much self-interest driving it, unfortunately. Yeah. I don’t think it’s a question to manipulate, but if you ask chat G P T, how do you.
[00:17:42] The best practice in long form blog post for seo, you know, uh, purposes. It’s gonna give you an amazing step by step how to do that. If everybody who wants to do that does that, then it is an arms race and everyone has to raise their, then Google’s like, dang, all over the internet just got really good. But, or at least 5% of it did, you know?
[00:18:04] But yeah, that’s, those are the people who want to go after that kind of pursuit of knowledge and e. Most people, it’s a different thing. We’re looking for content. We still need curation and coaching and mentoring because that information is already out there. How to do [00:18:20] long form SEO ready content is already out there, but we don’t know if I’m looking for it.
[00:18:24] I don’t know who to look for it from. I don’t know who to trust. I could stumble onto it and not know it’s the right thing. Yeah. Uh, because, but if I had a mentor and maybe Chad GD becomes the actual mentor to where it’s like, Hey, would you let it be your. If it was good enough, if it proved it was actually right, if it actually understood my needs and then, you know what I mean?
[00:18:40] Like which mm-hmm. Is actually a great way to use AI to actually understand. I didn’t need it yet for your to be your mentor. No. Okay. I challenge you to do that chat, g p t four, pay for the. Pay for the new one, the four, and you go interview it and see if it’s, it’s worthy of being your mentor and let us know.
[00:18:58] I mean, it’s an interesting thought experiment. It is. It actually really is. If we could have a question, say, Hey, ask Chad GBT these questions about you and see how right it is. Because answers need to be curated. Like the things that you know, things that I know, things I’m looking for, the answers should be different based on who’s asking it, and I don’t know if it actually does.
[00:19:15] Yeah. It depends on what information it’s got, isn’t it? To be fair, a human researcher, just like a a, a computer would be garbage and garbage out. If, if I went to somebody mm-hmm in, you know, India and hired a VA who worked incredibly diligently to find out stuff about me that wasn’t online, there’s no way they can find it out unless they break into my house in London, that’s not gonna happen.
[00:19:33] And I think to be fair, if we can compare humans and, and machines in that way, we need to start with the data we we’re giving them. But to that point of how good are these things? Chat G P T three score, something like the 10th percentile on the bar exam in the us. They used a few humans of intelligence tests on them and and chat G P T four, as I understand it, it was got on the 90th percentile.
[00:19:53] It basically would become a lawyer in the US if you didn’t actually see who was filling in it. That gives you serious supports for thought. I think. I mean that I don’t think the idea of general AI is not here. Yeah, but I think within a, a wider area than it was before. I think it’s kind of here, I think, I think it’s the layer than that, that chat G P T has put on all this is.
[00:20:17] Natural language on top of data. Mm-hmm. That’s really the fundamental thing that is happening. Like the data’s existed on the internet. All that data is there. How do we access it? Now we have to type in Google search, like, you know, we have to actually use language and Google as interpret that language and then, you know, find a result.
[00:20:36] Now we’re just asking a que, it’s like, star Trek computer, please. Mm-hmm. You know, do this thing and it can figure it. Because it understands the, the language, and I want a fifth grader’s level response. Right. Not a PhD dissertation paper. That’s the difference, you know? Yeah. It’s. Oh yeah, I think chat. G P T is just the, the surface of the surface, honestly, I can, if you can do things.
[00:20:59] Somebody was saying that on a podcast. I think it’s all in one podcast, which I’m, I listen all in podcast rather. The somebody said they did a rough sketch of what they wanted the website to be like. Took a photo of it and uploaded it to chat g p t four and said, make a website and it’s sped out code. I mean, it’s not just a, a, a language processing thing.
[00:21:16] Mm-hmm. It, it is amazing at code. And code is what the Internet’s built off, right? Mm-hmm. So I think this goes. Very deep, very quickly. I mean like, like at Lump It, to your point, Chris, I mean I, I share some of your misgivings and also your hope that people want to connect with people and a unique voice.
[00:21:30] But I dunno how unique voices are. I mean, just to end on this thought, literally a voice, right? I’m a person that does podcasting and listens to Voices for podcasts. And I listen to podcasts the other day and I’ll put it in the show notes and I’m gonna say who it is, just to give a bit of intrigue to the listeners.
[00:21:44] And we did this in the, the, uh, deep dive the other day. And, um, he consciously. Few prompt into chat two p d at probably three at that point and read them out. And then at the end he said, by the way, it wasn’t me reading it, this was a artificially generated voice from Ms. Lab. I can’t remember who it was.
[00:22:00] And I swear I went back and listened to it and I could not tell it was not the person talking. That gives me pause of thought. Good or bad. I dunno. We, we better wrap things up here guys, cuz we’ve gotta get back to life as we know it. Fascinating discussions. I, I really. Look where we’ve gone today, guys.
[00:22:17] Love it. Um, if you have enjoyed this at home, don’t forget to subscribe to the e-commerce leader. We, we’ve got show notes over at the e-commerce leader.com, written by a blend of yours truly, and Jack g p t, and, um, hopefully, therefore not entirely made up and truthful facts at least. And then we also, of course, can be found on any internet, um, based podcasting app near you.
[00:22:37] So don’t forget to subscribe to the show as well, just, just to surprise you. I’m actually in ai. I’m not actually here. My AI constructs actually been running this entire, entire conversation. Bye guys. Bye. Can’t prove it’s not.
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