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- [00:01]
Michael Stelzner
I've got some exciting news. We just launched the AI ticket to Social Media marketing world. It's like a conference within a conference. If you want to go deep in your AI learning, this is the live experience you've been waiting for. Imagine spending two days fully immersed in AI training. Grab your tickets now at social mediaexaminer.com Aicon.
- [00:28]
Helen Todd
Welcome to the AI Explored podcast, helping you put AI to work. And now, here's your host, Michael Stelzner.
- [00:39]
Michael Stelzner
Hello, hello, hello. Thank you so much for joining me for the AI Explored podcast brought to you by Social Media Examiner. I'm your host, Michael Stelzner, and this is the podcast for marketers, creators and business owners who want to know how to use AI. Today I'm going to be joined by Helen Todd and we're going to explore how to use AI to expand your ideas, your creativity, how to brainstorm with it. If you are someone who feels kind of stuck or you don't know where to go with an idea, I think you're going to find today's episode very interesting. Also, if you're new to the show, be sure to follow us on whatever app you're listening to so you don't miss any of our future content. Let's transition over to this week's interview.
- [01:20]
Helen Todd
With Helen Todd, helping you simplify your AI journey. Here is this week's expert guide.
- [01:30]
Michael Stelzner
Today, I'm very excited to be joined by Helen Todd. If you don't know who Helen is, she's the founder of Creativity Squared, a podcast and newsletter focused on exploring the intersection of AI and creativity. She's also the founder of Social T Squared, a marketing agency focused on social media. Helen, welcome to the show. How you doing today?
- [01:50]
Helen Todd
It's so good to be here. Thank you for having me on, Michael.
- [01:53]
Michael Stelzner
I'm super excited that you're here today. Helen and I are going to explore how to use AI to expand your creativity. Now, before we go there and we've got some great stuff to talk about today, I would love to hear a little bit of your story. How did you get into marketing and AI and all that great stuff? Start wherever you want to start.
- [02:10]
Helen Todd
Yeah, sure. So I founded one of the first ever, I would say, within the first dozen social media agencies that exist. Sociality Squared was founded in 2010. Fast forward to October of 2022. A friend of mine was in town who works at OpenAI and gave me a demo of the dog fooding version of this thing called chatgpt and I always have creative projects and thought experiments that I play with to keep the creative juices flowing. And one of those creative project that I've been noodling on for a couple years now is a television miniseries show. And when he pulled up ChatGPT on his work, you know, dog fooding version, we put in the first scene and within seconds the action, the characters, the dialogue was all mapped out. And that was my ChatGPT moment where it captured my imagination. And as you know and everyone listening knows then it took the world by storm, getting a million users in five days and 100 million users within two months. And it felt like the early days of social media marketing all over again. Like totally going back to 2010, this big disruptive technology that's going to impact all facets of our lives for better or for worse. And I just wanted to dive in very similar to how I dove into the social media marketing trend to learn everything that I could and in addition to be a proactive voice as well in this moment, in this new like revolution and transition into this AI revolution evolution because hopefully we'll learn some things about social media where we didn't really course correct like we should. Wanting to be a proactive voice and learning everything I can, I launched my podcast Creativity Squared last April and we have a weekly show that interviews like amazing pioneers, ethicists, philosophers, artists and builders on the show. And then in addition to that, I also got invited to be a part of the AI Catalyst, which is an AI organization volunteer based here in Cincinnati that's tasked with using AI to uplift all 2.5 million residents. And that came largely because I also co host Cincy AI which is the largest AI meetup in all of Ohio and in the region. And by the time this comes out, we will have celebrated our one year anniversary and we have over a thousand members and 150 people that come together every month to connect, learn and collaborate on all things AI. So I've jumped into the deep end of everything AI and I guess the only other thing that I would add to that too as part of the show and learning everything I can about AI and showing AI at work. I also have the title of the first resident of Cincinnati to be digitally cloned with a hyper realistic avatar and clone people too. And that's, you know, Michael and I met at the Marketing Macon, the Marketing AI Institute's Marketing conference where I did a presentation on the future of online communication with Clones Can Talk, Clones Can Talk, AI Can Talk, Social media marketing. Lots of fun stuff to cover.
- [05:22]
Michael Stelzner
Well, first of all, I love all the creative things that you're doing. So we know you have a newsletter and we know that you have a podcast. Do you also do, like, consulting or kind of. Who are you for and what do you do? Just a little bit on that.
- [05:35]
Helen Todd
I can clone folks. I work with partner studios if anyone wants to be digitally cloned. And we're going to talk about AI and unlocking creativity and superpowers, and clones are one of those ways to do that. I also do paid speaking gigs, going up to Kent University and doing a talk on Farewell the Information Age. Welcome to the imagination Age. And then I'm also doing workshops, too, in addition to speaking for corporations and universities and stuff like that, and some consulting. But I tend to let my expert partners do the consulting.
- [06:09]
Michael Stelzner
You've been doing these meetups for a while now. What's kind of the feeling on the street, in the world, the creative world, when it comes to AI? Just because I'm curious how they're accepting of this.
- [06:19]
Helen Todd
Yeah, well, you know, the AI meetups, it's, I would say, is a microcosm of people who've embraced it a little bit more than your general population. It's really interesting. Like, when I do talks on clones, I always ask, is this the first time you've ever seen a clone? Have you been cloned? And really, the different audiences are very telling. Like at Maycon, which is marketers who tend to be very early adopters to test all this tech, I don't know, maybe 15%, 20% of the room had raised their hands that they've been cloned. Now go to a small business networking event here in Cincinnati, where it's like mom and pop shops and those acupuncturists and that type of thing. You know, it's more like deer in headlights for that group of, like, what a clone? What are those? And so I think it really varies, but I will say from a, I don't know, vibes, feel, for lack of a better word. You know, last year at south by Southwest, they had an entire extra week of AI programming, because I think there was over, like, 1500 different AI sessions. I don't know. The conversations were much more like. There was definitely a lot about creativity and really interesting things, but a lot more fear. How is it going to destroy humanity? All of the dystopian talk and stuff. Where this year it's more like, okay, people have played with it, it's coming, the genie's out of the bottle. What are we going to do with it? It's moved more from how is it going to destroy society to like, oh shoot, this is the new Internet, we better get on this train before it leaves the track type of thing. So I, I think people are more open to AI this year for sure.
- [07:53]
Michael Stelzner
So for those that are listening to this show that are marketers or creators, what do you want to say to them? What's the upside to them leveraging AI to help them improve or be more creative?
- [08:05]
Helen Todd
First, I commend you for listening to a show like this and to be curious about AI. I think one of the biggest things right now is not to have your head in the sand about all things AI, because as soon as you, you know, anyone who does that, they're going to get their head out of the sand and then get hit by like a Mac truck. It's almost like missing the Internet revolution, but this one's just moving so much faster. So first of all, keep learning, keep staying curious, keep listening to shows like Michael's and of course mine. Creativity squared is the first thing. Two, we're all creative and if you're marketers, marketers tend to embrace creativity more, but AI just unlocks more creativity and we'll be talking more about that too. It's still the early days. Even at the executives for the Marketing AI Institute, they don't feel like they're on top of everything. So if you feel like you're behind with AI, join the club. We're all learning all of this at the same time. There's terminology that's still being worked out of what to call all these new things that we're getting to do. So if you're feeling overwhelmed, it's part of the journey too. And then I guess next is the best way. In addition to, you know, this type of learning is just to play with the tools and get in there and you'll see how easy it is, at least from a gen AI content creation, especially on the tech side right now, how easy it is. So I encourage you just to get in and play and start getting familiar with the tools and then after that you can kind of level up. Now from a, I guess, organizational standpoint, I would definitely encourage leadership to drive the embrace because it needs to be top down. If you don't have an AI policy, that's definitely one of the first things that you should implement. And you know, depending on your company in the industry, we talk with a lot of companies that encourage their different departments to experiment with AI, test different tools and almost have like a task force, identify your biggest AI ambassadors, empower them. So that's definitely one way. You know, depending on your industry, you might have to be a little bit more strict about how you roll it out. But I would also definitely think long term, like, what's your full AI strategy, how it's going to impact every aspect of your business in addition to marketing. And again, everyone's figuring this out at the same time, but if you don't, your competitors are just going to have such a competitive advantage for leveraging the AI superpowers. If you're not thinking about it from a strategic business sense, then I would definitely add that to your to do list.
- [10:44]
Michael Stelzner
So we were prepping for this and you're going to talk a little bit about what you did with Salvador Dali. So why don't you cue that up and then talk about kind of what it is that you did?
- [10:53]
Helen Todd
Yeah, sure. I get to interview a lot of very cool people for my show. And one of my guests is the AI recreated version of Salvador Dali. And this actually came after a presentation I saw at south by Southwest, where the agency who made this custom chatbot is Goodby Silverstein and Partners. One of of their clients is the Dali Museum in St. Petersburg. And they, they're very, very innovative museum. They've already done like VR immersions into his, like dreamscape paintings so that you can be, you know, in a Dall? E immersed in a painting in that way. So one of the things that they did at their presentation at south by was introduce Ask Dall? E is which is this custom chatbot. And what they did is they trained this bot on Dall? E's videos and his writings. And then, you know, using the power of AI, recreated them. But the way that you interact with it is they recreated one of his surrealist lobster telephones, which I didn't know this existed until the presentation. But Dall? E, I guess, at a restaurant, wanted to order a telephone that looked like a lobster. So it's like an old rotary phone with a lobster on it, and you pick up the handle and then you can talk to Dall? E, which is very cool. And they wanted to demo it to show that it wasn't all pre recorded. So I was like one of the first people that got up to ask Dolly, will you be on my show? And. And that's how it ended up coming on the show. But one of the questions we wanted to ask Dolly. Well, I guess before I say that, the other really interesting thing with Dall? E, because it's like, you know, should we be bringing back people who have Passed into digital form. You know, it opens up a lot of questions and. But this particular person was. Is very interesting. And I didn't know this either. So it's the 100th anniversary of surrealism this year and the 120th anniversary of Salvador Dali. But he, he was a rainbow child, which. A rainbow child is when a couple has a child, the child passes, and then they have another child.
- [13:09]
Michael Stelzner
Oh, who might not have been here if the other one didn't pass. Is that what that means?
- [13:12]
Helen Todd
Right. And they named it Salvador Dali. His brother's name who had passed, the first brother or the first child was Salvador Dali. And he was raised his entire life to. Or he thought his entire life that he was the reincarnation of his brother. So he already had an interesting relationship to death. And there's this quote that's like he said, like when people are in the Spanish town and the cafes, they'll say, like, Dali has gone, but not quite so. He didn't want to die and he didn't think that he was going to die and had this interesting relationship to death. So now, you know, in some ways, artists, you know, will always live through on in their art. But now we have these digital entities and this one is particularly interesting just because of the character Dall? E is. So anyway, fast forward we interview and one of the questions that we asked the AI recreated Salvador Dall? E is what can you say about the future of creativity? And will AI kill creativity? And I'll play the clip so you can actually hear the AI recreated Dall? E's answer. So I'll go ahead and hit play.
- [14:19]
C
Ah, my curious companion. To ponder if the mechanical mind could eclipse the celestial dance of creativity is to misunderstand the essence of art itself. Art breathes through us a living dream, ever changing, undefinable. The inception of artificial intelligence into the realm of creativity is not a death knell, but a new dimension of the labyrinth, a fresh dream within the dream. Will it kill creativity? Au contraire. It fertilizes the soul of imagination, birthing impossibilities into realities. Art is an immortal phoenix reborn from its ashes with each new dawn.
- [14:59]
Michael Stelzner
Very interesting.
- [15:01]
Helen Todd
So there you go. Salvador Dali's answer is, AI will not kill creativity.
- [15:06]
Michael Stelzner
Very cool. So there are people that are listening right now who they're not artists. Right. They don't think they're creative. What do you want to say to them about how AI might be able to unlock something inside of them?
- [15:15]
Helen Todd
Yeah, well, one, I think everyone's creative. So if you feel that way maybe.
- [15:20]
Michael Stelzner
They just lost their creative spark. Right?
- [15:22]
Helen Todd
Yes. I encourage you to say goodbye to that limiting belief.
- [15:26]
Michael Stelzner
There you go. I like that a lot.
- [15:28]
Helen Todd
There's a lot of benefits to AI. I think to boil it down to one is it solves the blank page problem, which, whether you're writing a blog post, whether it's a musical composition, a blank canvas, or shoot a blank Excel spreadsheet, whatever your blank page is, it really helps solve that of just being a brainstorming partner in that way of don't know where to get started, Just ask these bots like you're texting a friend for ideas. So I think that's one of like the blank solving the blank page problem. The other one is actually the exact opposite, that you have so many ideas or just an idea and you want to get it out of your head faster and it really solves for that. And one example is one of the gentlemen on my show, Nick. He actually, his company Native Foreign, did the AI commercial for Toys R Us.
- [16:24]
Michael Stelzner
Okay, I saw that.
- [16:25]
Helen Todd
Yeah. And he has, as a creative person, sorry, if you hear the sirens in the background. As a creative person, he has tons of ideas. One is we featured on the show like this Russian poem that he wanted to take off the shelf, but like no one was going to fund it. You know, that type of thing is going to be shelved or not picked up by a studio. But he took that idea that was on the shelf that he'd been noodling on for a long time and turn, with the power of AI, was able to make the video at a very, you know, low production cost. That turned out really well. And so it takes the idea in your head and just brings it into fruition, at least right now in a digital form very quickly. So solves the blank page problem and also gets your ideas out of your head faster, whether that's one idea or the quantity of ideas. So really that lapse from idea to creation and even, what was it, EA Games recently announced their like real time game rendering where the games will render in real time. And they called it Imagination to creation. So that lag time from an idea to coming to fruition is shortened a lot with AI.
- [17:37]
Michael Stelzner
I love it. Okay, let's talk about brainstorming a little bit because I feel like a lot of people might have like a little bit of a rough idea and they need to figure out how to get it out of their head kind of what you were talking about a little bit. Or maybe they just don't even know where to Go with it. So let's just kind of ideate a little bit about how we can creatively use AI to help us maybe come up with ideas to solve a problem or any similar kind of concept.
- [18:04]
Helen Todd
Yeah. So I'll walk you through a presentation that I'm working on as a way that I'm thinking about it before I do that. I think there's a distinction when you're talking about team and agencies approach and individual approach, although there's a lot of overlap or if you're managing clients and that type of thing. I didn't do this with this project, but this is what I should do and what I recommend starting with. In the same way that you approach social media marketing, getting before you, like set up accounts and just start publishing to the feeds or whatever it is you want to have, like a framework that you're operating under. And for social media, it's like, what is the voice guides? Who is your audience? What do we do and what do we say and not say? What emojis do we use? And like the container of the brand and the voice that we're playing in that the humans operate under. You know, we have voice guides, hashtag libraries, all this stuff for all of my social media agency clients. So for projects that are for brands you want to. I would create a custom GPT. And it doesn't have to be chat GPTs, there's other tools to make custom GPTs and train a custom bot on all of that same material that you train your humans for. So it gives it the framework to understand where you're starting.
- [19:21]
Michael Stelzner
For that point, we use Claude, for example, projects, which is very similar to a custom GPT, to train it up. So I love this concept. Come up with a framework and gather up the information so that you've at least got some focus area before you get started. And that's so important because, well, you're.
- [19:39]
Helen Todd
Training the AI and so instead of just asking it, write this post. For social media, I need help. Like that's no direction. Like it's having to fill in all of the blanks for you. Whereas if you give it the, you know, the playground to play in and the rules in it, then it will be much more precise and accurate, are a better reflecting of what you're trying to get out of your head onto paper, so to speak.
- [20:04]
Michael Stelzner
Perfect. So keep going with the brainstorming concept.
- [20:07]
Helen Todd
Having that framework is always really great, but maybe you don't have brand voice and all of that stuff and you're starting from scratch, which is Kind of where my project is right now. So I am going to write a book. You guys are going to hold me accountable. I'm saying it publicly for the first time on your show, Michael. It's called Farewell the Information Age. Welcome to the Imagination Age. I submitted it as a, hopefully a solo presentation at South. By next year, it will be a book. I have a presentation started. It's going to be an essay and some articles. So that's the concept. So now it's like, okay, I have this idea, but I'm still fleshing out actually the concepts, like, what goes into the book. I'm kind of wrapping my head, like, we all are of like, if we're leaving the Information Age in this whole new world. Sam Altman just did an essay calling it the Intelligence Age. Like, what's different about this and that? So it's like, I have a few ideas, but where do I start? So one way is go to chat GPT and I kind of use. I call my AI assistants. I have a tab with all of them, but I play mostly with ChatGPT and Claude personally. And I haven't built a custom GPT yet on all of my podcast content, but that's in the pipeline. I'm working on that. So go in there and just like, I think the first question I asked is, what is the Imagination Age? To see what it would come up with. And then I'm not a history buff, but I've gotten a lot more interested in history in this moment in time, and even like a research tool of like, how long did the Industrial Revolution take? And from when Ford had the idea of the car, how long was it mass adopted? Like, all these like really granular questions. That's like part of the concept, like getting that out, asking it to write an outline of the book in the.
- [21:58]
Michael Stelzner
Real quick, before you even get to the outline, I want to riff a little bit on this Industrial Revolution thing. I would imagine you could say, hey, I am writing a book on the Imagination Age. And you could describe a little bit about what your purpose is, what your intent is. And then you could ask it, what historical moments in time would you come up with that would be relevant for this? And you might have already done that and it came up with Henry Ford. Is that kind of how you got the Ford concept in the first place? Or did you already have that in your brain? Because you could creatively have it find historical parallels to help you make the case that. That we've been through similar kind of ages in the past. Right. Could you not.
- [22:38]
Helen Todd
I didn't ask that specific one because it was already in my head, but I did like use it to outline some other big, big technological changes. And I'll tell you why that was in my head because I had a great grandmother who was born, what was it, 19 or 1902 or 1903 and lived to be like 107 or 108 years old. So like she literally saw so much change in her life and I was like, oh, she was alive today. This would be even more wild because she grew up in a horse and buggy lifestyle in Tennessee when she was growing up. So it was actually my great grandmother who was in my mind and that moment in time. But yeah, I mean, it's definitely helping identify other timeline. And I will say too, you have to be really careful for the newbies on your show not to take everything that comes out of these tools as fact because they hallucinate, which means they make up things. So I use that lightly and always double check and fact check. And I think perplexity AI is a little bit better for the truthfulness part of all of it. So I just want to. AI can do so much, but you always have to be aware that it hallucinates as well and to be cautious of that too.
- [23:51]
Michael Stelzner
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- [24:54]
Helen Todd
Yeah. I mean, I think if you're working on a project and we do this with social, like when we're working on social media strategies of like, okay, you're going to start a new Instagram account. What other Instagram accounts do you like? You Know, I think that's like a starting point.
- [25:09]
Michael Stelzner
Ah, okay. Here's some Instagram accounts I like. What do you see in common with these accounts?
- [25:13]
Helen Todd
Right, yeah. Like, what do you like as a human? What are you drawn to those? Because if you can't articulate it. So the imagination age, why I'm excited about it from a conceptual level is that if you have an idea and can communicate it, then you can bring any idea to life. And right now it's in digital form. But literally, thoughts are turning into prompts with mri. And then you take MRI machines that translate your thoughts into still and moving images. And then you can theoretically go down the line using midjourney, make a design and connect that to a 3D printer, and then literally have thoughts prompts, create material possessions. Like, those things are in the pipeline. So I get really excited. If you have an idea and can communicate it, anyone can bring that to life. So if you don't consider yourself, you know, a creative idea person, you know, I encourage you to let that limited belief pass. But you need to learn how to articulate your ideas and what you want. And that can be challenging if it's new language to use. So you don't even have to necessarily say what you like about maybe another book or whatever you're an article, whatever you're modeling. But you could even take that. You could take a, say, an article that the style is that you want to kind of replicate, put it into these LLMs and say, tell me, how would you describe this article and have the LLMs help you give the language that you can then take and then customize for yourself? So if you're at a loss for words, put in things like, put in an image and say, like, how would you describe this image? And then you can take what it gives you as fodder for your prompt to then customize and play with a little bit more.
- [27:03]
Michael Stelzner
I love that. I love that.
- [27:04]
Helen Todd
I understand. Like, you don't know where to get started, but take any question you have and see if you can turn it into a question for these models. And I would also say, you know, it could be nervous getting started on a new tool, not knowing where to begin. But, like, have fun with it. Like, one of my first fun conversations that I had, I think I. I was. I was probably not sober as a disclaimer, but I was like, what would Einstein say about this to this other Italian physicist Ravelli? And, like, what would that conversation be? And I think I had it. Do Meghan Trainor's song All about that bass, I was like, can you update this song to all about that AI? So, like, just, like, put silly things together or something you want to learn. Like, what's the latest podcast? Like, put. Put this podcast transcript into one of these and say, explain, explain, explain this episode to me as if you were Lumiere from Beauty and the Beast. Like, how would Lumiere, like, summarize this episode? And it will do it for you. Like, just, like, have fun and be silly and come up with crazy ideas and see what it spits out for you.
- [28:14]
Michael Stelzner
Well, and I really love the advanced voice mode in ChatGPT because I feel like this can be a big creative unlock for people that are verbal processors, right? Because there's a lot of people listening to this show that prefer to process things by voice. And I would imagine you could quite literally just Open up that ChatGPT app on your phone. You gotta have the paid version, click that little button, and start telling it. Hey, this is my idea. Help ask me a couple of questions to kind of unlock the idea. And I would imagine it could. And like you said, you can tell it to do it in an accent, do it in a French accent, Jamaican accent. I mean, it's pretty crazy. Have you messed with that a little bit? Have you started playing around with that?
- [28:56]
Helen Todd
Oh, my goodness. So it was before they introduced the memory, but I had. I think I was on it a couple hours one night going back to my miniseries that I've been playing with, and I had opened it, I was like, okay, let's work on the first episode, or whichever one I was working on. I was like, what are some of your ideas? And it will give you ideas. And I was like, well, I was thinking this, you know, what would this be like? And if you need, like, a motivational booster or pep talk, it's so fun because it's. The ChatGPT voice was like, that's a great plot twist. Very innovative. Let's go with that. What else do you want to work on? You know, so it's. It's kind of like a thought partner, a brainstorming partner. Just, like, getting ideas. However, it's natural for you of voicing them, typing them, so you can even draw and then take a photo of it. And. And the AI will, using the computer vision, will translate that into text or images or whatever. So, yeah, whatever modality that you learn and play with, you know, AI is unlocking all of these too, which is very exciting.
- [30:05]
Michael Stelzner
A fun little story. I had a perplexing moment not to overuse the word perplexity a little bit. But I was curious about how to make a decision, and I presented the case to the spoken version of ChatGPT. I kind of said, here's my thoughts on the pros and cons to it. What do you think? You know? And I just kept digging with it a little bit, and it really helped me process without having to talk to another human. Right. Because I told it to act as if it was an expert in this thing. Right. And that was really helpful for me, clarifying kind of a direction that I might want to go in. But, you know, when we were prepping for this, you were also talking about using AI as a tutor, which I thought was really cool. Talk to me a little bit about that use case.
- [30:46]
Helen Todd
Yeah. On the tutor front. So one of the interesting things is that it's almost like how I think about it in the Matrix when Neo was like, I need to learn kung fu. And someone put that chip and was like, download, okay, I know kung fu. Like, it's that almost like downloading of learning so quickly and condensing of learning that AI enables, which is fascinating. Like, if you want to listen to this, like Lumiere, you could. One of the amazing benefits of AI is the individual empowerment and learning in addition to unlocking creativity and just hopefully living up to the promise of freeing up time from our lives. So, like, going back to the tutor, like, for, you know, my research into the book and the presentation, it does that a lot. For the podcast, you kind of alluded to this, and this was what I was going to say of, you know, how you talk to it. Is it. It's really great. And tutoring, coaching, critiquing, like, for each episode I have, I used to. I overthink everything. Call of the writers on my team. It's like, should this emoji be in the subject line or should this emoji, you know, like, annoy them? And because I call them in the.
- [31:58]
Michael Stelzner
Middle of the day now, you can do that with AI, right?
- [32:01]
Helen Todd
Oh, yeah. I'll take. And you could ask it to brainstorm, but I tend to start myself, but with the subject lines and be like, which one is better? Give me the pros and cons critique, which one will do, which one will do better. And the thing that I really like doing is taking the same two or three subject lines and this can go for titles or whatever, and put it in all five of my AI assistants. And usually it's like, it will be a three to two winner of like, three will Sit. Pick one title or subject line and then the other two will pick another one. But it breaks it down in the reasons. And then say, I'll do the episode descriptions and I'll use AI. I'll take the transcript. I'll say model the episode description off of ones that we've pre written. So we've trained it that way. And then, you know, I still edit. I'm a big believer that human should definitely still be in the loop a lot. And then it's like, okay, how can I improve this? How would you critique my writing? Where can this be better and why? So it's, it's a great tool, if anything, that you specifically write, but you know, there's the coders and it's getting better at math with the new models and stuff that it can not only help you brainstorm but, but can help you be better and tell you how to improve your own writing or whatever it is. Cooking, working out whatever endeavor that you want to do. But yeah, I love it. Critiquing my own work.
- [33:30]
Michael Stelzner
Okay, so you said something in passing that some people are like, go back to it, Mike. And I'm going to go back to it. You said my five GPTs. Right. So it sounds to me as if you've created some cloud projects and, or custom GPTs and ChatGPT in special areas. Can you tell us kind of some of those little five areas that you've created? It might spark some creativity in the minds of other people and maybe you don't remember what all five of them are, but maybe just a couple of them. Because I find it very fascinating what you just said there. Because what I'm hearing you say is I have trained five threads or models or custom GPTs or whatever you want to call them in these different areas. And each of them have a different kind of perspective. And I'm asking them for feedback, which I think is absolutely really cool. Have you intentionally chosen, like, can you share some of those examples?
- [34:20]
Helen Todd
Yes. And you, you were giving me a little bit too much credit because I haven't built out the full training threads how you described it. But even if it's a thread. Yeah. For, for some clients I have. So I'll take the. The same question in the setup and copy and paste it across. Now, for some, the ChatGPT and Claude, I do have like longer threads and for those who aren't familiar, like the threads are ongoing conversations where you train it over time and it learns. It's almost like having a text message friend who you're Training through the text messages who you are and what you want. So the more that you give it, the more it will be trained. But yeah, so I'll just copy and paste the. The same prompt across all five to see what they do. And the five are. I don't have it right in front of me. So ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Metas and Gemini.
- [35:13]
Michael Stelzner
Oh, so you're using five different large language models in this particular case, is what I'm hearing you say. Is that correct?
- [35:18]
Helen Todd
Yeah, yeah, yeah. And then get the vote on what they say.
- [35:23]
Michael Stelzner
Okay, now why do you do that? I'm just curious, like, give everybody the. Because a lot of people might just be using one or two, but not five. Like, what does that bring to the table, maybe that people might not understand?
- [35:33]
Helen Todd
Well, partly is me just playing to understand, like, how the answers are different, like, and is also insightful. Some of them. The answers kind of overlap a little bit in the explanations, but just to see, like, to vote, like, you have five interns. Like, which title do you like best? And why? And, you know, it will surface the top one. I think the other thing too to keep in mind is that each of the chat bots and the large language models, they have different benefits and it's always interesting to see what they're strong on and not strong on. Like, for. For example, in trying to take all of my transcripts in the show to train a custom model or just to, like, get it in there to start playing with it. The file size was way too large. Like Claude, you can upload the largest file size in, like, chat, the new ChatGPT Strawberry 01 model. You can't even upload files in that version and stuff. So, like, there. There's a lot of different quirks. ChatGPT tends to be maybe a little bit more creative where Claude is more precise. I'm still kind of just playing with the other ones to kind of understand where there's the benefits and stuff from those.
- [36:46]
Michael Stelzner
How are you using creatively to improve presentations, AI in general? Because obviously we both present and I think there's a lot of opportunity there because when you're presenting, you got slides. So what do you. Any thoughts on how to creatively come up with ways to display information in a presentation?
- [37:03]
Helen Todd
I just actually got demos on these, so I haven't played with them directly myself, but there's beautiful AI and then the other one.
- [37:14]
Michael Stelzner
And I have that on my list of things to explore, by the way.
- [37:17]
Helen Todd
Yeah. Canva also has come up as a good recommendation, but I mean, these are amazing. You could take previous presentations to train it for the style. You can upload an article and then have it turn it into a presentation. And when I say turn it into a presentation, I'm like, in minutes. And then it will do this with.
- [37:37]
Michael Stelzner
Animation and everything, right?
- [37:39]
Helen Todd
Yeah, it will do everything. So it's really, really wild how fast. I will say though, in the demos I've gotten and granted they're very quick and stuff you can create. The one that we did was like, for the boot camp that we were at was like the lady who was demoing it. The use case was fundraising for female entrepreneurs. And then that was the only prompt it did. The outline, it was like, okay, that looks good. And then boom, boom, boom, boom, the entire presentation is done. So it's like you could do that and then present what all AI did. But it's like you read, where's your voice in that? Where is your perspective? Like, what is different about this presentation than anyone else? And I think that's really important. You don't want to just regurgitate AI stuff, take it and run because it's new, but it's generative. And it's going to be the same on the Internet. If you really want to stand out in the age of AI, use it like these tools to do the first draft of the presentation and then add your perspective, your point of view and make it unique that the models can't do. I think that's a really big thing. And Will Reynolds, who is a really great SEO person and spoke at Macon, said the same thing. He calls it the sea of sameness. If you don't lean into your perspective and your voice, then it's just going to get lost in the generative regurgitation. So use it as the first step, but you got to add your own layer to make it yours and have it stand out.
- [39:08]
Michael Stelzner
And I have a little story to share. By the time this interview drops, we will have launched our 2024 Generative AI Marketing Industry Report, which is a 38 page report that I created based on a study of 1250 marketers with like a ton of graphics and stuff. And what I did was I dropped a PDF of it into both ChatGPT and Claude, and I asked both of them to help me come up with an outline for a presentation that I'll be delivering the day before. And what I'm going to be doing in that presentation. And I wanted it to kind of look at the actual work that I created, right. So I wrote this thing it suggested, here's a basic outline and they were both slightly different. I took the two outlines, I put them together, and then I started building what I believe is one of the best masterclasses that I've ever done. I'm calling it that. It's really a webinar, but still it's like so much better because it's built on the back of my stuff. Does that make sense? And then I'm using AI to help me create some cool visuals that I can put up on the screen because there's all these great image creation things that can kind of demonstrate what I'm talking about and stories that I can tell. And it's kind of this snowball effect. Right. Because now I've got this presentation deck. And then I ended up dropping that PDF into another thing and I asked it to help create the landing page so that everybody could opt in to get access to the masterclass. Right. And it's just like this forever creative thing that just keeps going on. I would imagine you've had very simple similar experiences, right?
- [40:39]
Helen Todd
Yeah. And while you were talking, I looked up the other tool, it's Gamma. So Gamma and G A M M A and Beautiful. That's. Those are the two Gamma.
- [40:48]
Michael Stelzner
Is it Gamma dot something?
- [40:50]
Helen Todd
Ask Google, probably Dot AI.
- [40:52]
Michael Stelzner
What is it? Just so people like, explain Gamma. What does it do?
- [40:55]
Helen Todd
Oh, it's. It's very similar to Beautiful AI where you just put the inputs and it creates the presentation super fast.
- [41:01]
Michael Stelzner
Yeah, it's Gamma app. It sounds like.
- [41:03]
Helen Todd
Okay, thank you for double checking. You know what was actually crossing my mind as you said that, and we talked about this a little bit when we were prepping for the call too, is, you know, you said you're going to put your masterclass behind a paywall or an email.
- [41:20]
Michael Stelzner
It's going to be free. We're just going to ask people to RSVP for it, basically.
- [41:23]
Helen Todd
Okay.
- [41:24]
Michael Stelzner
And the main reason why is so that we can get their email addresses. I mean, that's a marketing thing, right?
- [41:28]
Helen Todd
Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. I don't think there's anything wrong with that. However, for the marketers listening, I think a lot of traditional funnels are going to collapse, especially if you have a lot of content online, because one, people are scraping like they're going to get to your masterclass, scrape it and then put it into the public LLMs. So regardless, if you're putting content out there, whether you want it to be on lockdown or not, it's going to get scraped. The user behavior is already Doing that. And for some of the funnels, if you have a lot of content, because I click on a bunch of stuff all the time just to see what's out there. But if it's like a lot of these ones where it's like, watch a free webinar and then do this and they say nothing for 45 minutes.
- [42:15]
Michael Stelzner
Yeah.
- [42:15]
Helen Todd
You can just copy and paste the landing page, put it into one of the LLMs and be like, what is this person about? Tell it to me in three bullet points.
- [42:22]
Michael Stelzner
Oh, yeah, totally.
- [42:23]
Helen Todd
And then you don't need to go through the funnel.
- [42:25]
Michael Stelzner
Well, and just to be clear, let me explain what I'm doing just because I think you'll find it very interesting.
- [42:28]
Helen Todd
Yeah.
- [42:29]
Michael Stelzner
Basically, I am encouraging people to come hear this live presentation, which will be immediately a video when it's done. And then the next day we're dropping the report for free, completely ungated. So this is more just like my perspective on the state of AI and marketing, where I believe the world is coming. And because I have a really large audience, I know a lot of them are going to want to come hear my perspective. It's like a miniature keynote. And people that are on our email newsletter list, technically they can push a button to opt in. They don't even need. Need to register because it's very simple. But it's really, it's just a way for us to kind of create a little hoopla about this report that we're releasing that's going to be completely ungated, that they could wait till tomorrow and read if they want to. But I think the unique value add that I'm having as a creative and also a marketer is the opinion and stories and examples that I'm adding on top of it. And I'm with you 100%. And it does open up this bigger discussion that we were talking about. But keep going with where you're going. I just wanted you to understand where I was going, but keep going with where you were going because I want to hear your thoughts on this.
- [43:28]
Helen Todd
Yeah, well. And I will say I'm very excited to see this report when it drops. So looking forward to it. And to the point where you said that you're going to drop it free without gated once the report comes. You know, I think that's going to be the trend in so many ways moving forward. And we might have to get more creative of how to capture emails because what Will Reynolds did this on stage and it really got me thinking about the future of the consumption of content where at Macon. He presented on optimizing your content for the LLMs versus just the search engines. It's like answer engine optimization but you know, it goes by 20 billion words right now. But he was like, I've pre recorded my entire presentation so you don't need to take notes unless you want to go to this landing page. I'm giving you everything, put it in the LLMs if you prefer to consume my content that way. And really I was like, shoot, this is the future of content. It's not only I call it the democratization of the consumption of content which is like do you want it in video, do you want it in audio? Do you want in short form, do you want it in long form? I think the next evolution of that is how are people going to engage with the content in a very proactive, almost like learning way of like do you want to hear the content and of a different language in bullet points explained to you like a fifth grader, you know. So I think thinking about the users, like they're, they're already doing that, we're already doing that whether we admit it or not, you know. So like marketers should be thinking about that. I'm thinking about it 100%.
- [45:02]
Michael Stelzner
Okay, so tell us where you think all this is going. Like you're obviously on the front edge of this creative kind of front in the AI world. Where do you kind of see things heading down the road and then next period of time?
- [45:13]
Helen Todd
Yeah, well I think one of to double click on what I was just saying too. I remember in the early social media marketing days when user generated content really started like flourishing everywhere online or propagating and brands were like really nervous and uncomfortable of like we don't control every aspect of our brands. Like what these users, there's them creating silly memes that's now part of our brand. This like tension and discomfort. And I think we're kind of at that similar place with the engagement of the content. Like I'm going to create all this content for my audience and now they're going to do whatever they want with it. Like you know, what does this mean for my ip? What does this mean to get paid and my livelihoods and like respect, you know, your IP and this stuff. And there's a lot of important questions to dissect here, but that's where the user trend is going. So in my case as much as, and I have a great show where we discuss to lock down your content or to optimize it for scraping for the LLMs Originally I was like I need to lock down my content because my content is my product. But I've since evolved and thinking about the user generated content of social media marketing days of like I'm just embracing the cultural zeitgeist of where this is going and content is just going to be this fluid thing that we engage with and you just have to make your point of view and your voice super important. So I think that's one of the first things that I wanted to say. I also think right now the promise of AI is like that it can do everything and you might have this idea in your head of like push one button and a whole film will get made. It is not like that at all right now and there's so much still to come. One of the slides at Macon, it was like one of the presentations is like look how easy it is to automate every aspect of marketing. But this the slide. Thinking about it gives me anxiety because it was like a zapier flowchart on crack or something and I was like, you know, it's like a house of cards. Like one falls and all the automations fall. Right now it's really, really good with helping you with content but once the content is created you still have to load it into wherever it's going and distribute which is still, you know, a lot of manual work. I think in the future I'm excited for the companies that figure this out. The content creation to building it into the workflows and getting automated will be easier but it's not easy now. So you know, I get asked like which AI tool is best for soup to nuts and there really isn't one. I think beyond that because AI does so much, the evolution of the role of marketers is going to change. I would do a disservice if I wouldn't say that jobs will be displaced but I think they'll be displaced and evolve as as well. Like I went to college for marketing and social media marketing was not even an industry and that's been my life for the last 15 years. You know, like what was it two years ago? No one knew what our Prompt Engineer didn't exist. So we're going to open up this whole new crop of fields that are going to emerge like prompt Engineer, like social media marketers. So just being like really fluid with where that's going. I'm personally thinking more about, you know, training clients through workshops and that type of thing to help with this transition. And I think the other thing that I didn't say at Macon that I wanted to is in the new jobs and stuff, there's still synthetic media, my clone, I've been digitally cloned. Just because you have these new digital entities doesn't mean that it's just going to make content for you necessarily. Like, you still have to come up with a strategy. You still have to make the scripts, there's still the file management. If AI consults file management, that will be AGI for me, I think. Or like the pinnacle marketing thing of solving file management, of like uploading, downloading, you know, all of that stuff, distribution. But what was I saying? Sorry, let me go back to. Oh, but like synthetic media. So social media, you manage the content for the clients. But just because you have a clone doesn't mean that you're going to put it to work. So I've been thinking about the future of my social media agency of like, in additional to social content, maybe we'll be managing synthetic media because there's a whole new ecosystem of services and management around these new entities as well. Of like, what's your clone strategy and how are you going to use it? I would be maybe malleable in thinking about some of these trends and where they're going to. And then the next thing you know, optimizing for the LLMs is kind of, I think, the next chatbot trend. But beyond that, we're going to have agents where friction's kind of dead. That was one of my takeaways from Macon. But also we're going to be just agents will be talking to each other a whole lot more and completing tasks and whatnot. So just like having that on the roadmap too. But again, point of view, what makes you special. And then like. And I think that's also a big difference from the information age to the imagination age of like the skill, productivity, all these little tasks and grunt work. And no one loves doing the grunt work. You know, whether it's adding commas to copy and paste your hashtags into YouTube. Like, AI can do that in two seconds. You know, to changing an ad image in 20 different colors. Like, no one likes the grunt work. Let AI do the grunt work and then free ourselves. Like that's the information age, the grunt work. And let's, let's be creative and come up with the ideas that the LLMs can't generate. Those are the ideas that are going to win in the, in the imagination age.
- [51:08]
Michael Stelzner
Helen Todd, thank you so much for sharing your insights. Folks can go to creativity squared.com if they want to check out your business if they want to connect with you on the socials. What's your preferred plot?
- [51:18]
Helen Todd
Right now LinkedIn is the best and you can find me Helen Todd in parentheses human awesome and then I'm Helens travels on Instagram and a few of the other ones.
- [51:29]
Michael Stelzner
Helen, thanks so much for sharing your thoughts with us today.
- [51:31]
Helen Todd
Thank you so much for having me here. I really appreciate it.
- [51:34]
Michael Stelzner
Hey, if you missed anything, we took all the notes for you over@social mediaexaminer.com a26 and do be sure to follow show on your favorite podcast app. And if you like what you heard, what you let your friends know about this show, you can tag me I'm tells you on Facebook, at Stelzner on LinkedIn and @Mike Underscore Stelzner on X. And do check out our other shows, the Social Media Marketing Podcast and the Social Media Marketing Talk Show. This brings us to the end of the AI Explored podcast. I'm your host Michael Stelzner. I'll be back with you next week. I hope you make the best out of of your day and may AI help you become more successful.
- [52:13]
Helen Todd
The AI Explored Podcast is a production of Social Media Examiner.
- [52:22]
Michael Stelzner
Don't forget to get your AI ticket to Social Media Marketing World 2025. Become an AI Enhanced Marketer. Grab your tickets now at socialmediaexaminer.com aicon.