← This Can't Be That Hard
Loading summary
Transcript6 lines
- [00:00]
A
Several years ago, my son Oliver had this amazing teacher who taught him a lot about thinking traps. So he would essentially watch Oliver and his peers get themselves all worked up about something. And is normal for teenagers and really any of us, a lot of times the things that they were hung up on were more in their own head than they were in reality. And one of the thinking traps that Oliver seemed to fall into regularly at that time was black and white thinking, where it was kind of all yes or all no. Something was all good or all bad. It was, you know, a very clear cut distinction between if you haven't aced it, then you must have thought failed it. And this teacher did a lot of work with him to get him to a point where he could notice when he was thinking that way and feel around in that and see what it was under the surface that was causing him to feel that way. It was a hugely growthful year for Oliver. That teacher had a huge impact on him and by extension had a huge impact on our family. Not the least of which was that I started to have words for some of these things, thinking traps, if you will, that I found myself in sometimes as well. And black and white thinking is one that I feel like comes up a lot. When it comes to sticky issues like AI. I know that there are a lot of complications around AI. It's not just a matter of, you know, do I know how to use this technology? There's definitely this sense of like, are we creating something that is going to be our undoing? There's this kind of existential threat. There's also a lot of concern about things like how is this affecting my own ability to reason and think. Next level, never mind. If you're a parent, I'm sure that you're concerned about how your kids are going to be interacting with a tool that can allow them to outsource a lot of their thinking. Right. Is this going to cause humans to get lazier than is safe? Is it? What about sort of the bigger picture, ethical concerns when it comes to how these tools are used. And certainly there's the environmental impact that we're all grappling with these data centers and water usage and all of that. I 100% understand anyone out there who feels like AI might be more trouble than it's worth. But like I said on last week's episode, AI is here. I do not see this genie is not going back in the bottle anytime soon. And as business owners, there are so many ways in which this can be a huge benefit to us. That I fear that if you just sort of will it into non existence by ignoring it, it's going to come back to bite you. So last week I gave you this framework for using AI with intention. I called it the AI triangle, kind of like a play on the exposure triangle. And the AI triangle is comprised of purpose, judgment and voice. If you haven't listened to episode 369, I would probably say go back and listen to that before we listen today. Because in at least in theory, this is a two parter. They are distinct episodes. So you could just continue listening. But I do think that it's a nice framework to kind of come into this conversation today. Because what I want to do is use that framework to look at some of these complicated, sometimes scary issues surrounding AI and figure out how we are going to move forward with it. Because we all have different versions of these feelings, right? These concerns. And the thing that I want you to learn to accept is that your concerns are like a compass, right? But your compass and my compass may lead us to. To different conclusions. And that's okay. I said last week, and I'll say it again, these concerns, these questions are coming from that little Jiminy Cricket character on your shoulder who is trying to help you make sure that your choices and actions are aligned with your values. Because if your business and the way that you are behaving in your business isn't in alignment with your values, then you can never be an authentic business owner. You cannot be an authentic artist when you're operating inauthentically. So today I want to dig into how to use your instincts as a compass to guide your AI journey in a way that honors your concerns instead of ignoring them. And we're going to use that AI triangle as the lens for each one.
- [05:18]
B
Welcome to this Can't Be that Hard. My name is Annemie Tonkin, and I help photographers run profitable, sustainable businesses that they love. Each week on the podcast, I cover simple, actionable strategies and systems that photographers at every level of experience can use to earn more money in a more sustainable way. Running a photography business doesn't have to be that hard. You can do it, and I can show you how.
- [05:48]
A
All right, so I want to start with the issue that I think is most personal and sort of very quickly comes up for photographers. Specifically, we build our businesses with a voice, right? It's our perspective, it's our view, it's our. The look of our photos, the feel of our photos, the thing that our art is trying to convey. This is the specific way that we see our clients and ultimately how we describe what we do for them, and the thought of anything diluting that, of someone reading an email and thinking, oh, this is automated, or, this doesn't sound like her, it's not a small thing. There are ways to mitigate that. Obviously, we're running a business. We need to have things like email templates. But that's the reason that many of us get nervous about automation and certainly AI, is that it calls into question the. The heart behind the work that you do. Right. So it's a totally valid concern. But I think that when we apply that AI triangle to the question of authenticity with AI, we can navigate it in a way that feels true. So if you bring purpose, meaning, you know, doing the thinking before you do the typing, if you bring purpose to your interactions with AI, you are already bringing your point of view. You already know what you want your client to feel when they read the thing that you're writing or view the images that you're editing. That doesn't come from AI, it comes from you. AI kind of gets the brief. You are supplying the vision. And then judgment is that term that I used to talk about staying engaged the whole way through. So not just plugging in some directions at the beginning and then looking at it again at the end, but really considering each piece as it comes back, noticing if something's off and redirecting specifically. Because by the time you get all the way to the end of whatever it is that you're trying to create with AI, oftentimes it's gone far enough away from what you put in that the process of getting back to what you meant is hard. And you end up either not doing it and just letting AI kind of take the reins, or you end up scrapping everything that was created and saying, well, I should have just done it on my own in the first place. Which, again, doesn't really get us closer to having AI work with us in a helpful way. The final step is voice, and that's where you get that final piece that you started with purpose and then went through multiple iterations using your judgment at the end, you still want to polish it up. So your voice piece is kind of that fine grit sandpaper where you're just putting that extra polish on it. And when you do that, when you really participate all the way through, I believe that whatever comes out on the other side is yours. And I want to be clear about something here. There is no shame in using tools. And AI is a tool like any other tool, right? It's not a person, it doesn't need a byline, it doesn't need credit. But nor should you be using AI if you feel like you have to lie about it, right? I'm happy to say when I am writing a blog post, even this podcast episode, I brain dumped all of my thoughts about this. And then I had AI help me organize it, put bullet points out so that I wasn't wasting your time with a lot of casting around and I wasn't honestly wasting my time trying and failing and trying and failing to record. This tool has sped up my podcasting process. But if you have been a listener since 2020, you know that I wasn't using AI for the vast majority of it. These are my thoughts, they are my words. It's just a tool that's helping me speed things along. But if you feel like you have to hide when you're using AI, if you have to tell people, oh, no, that's mine, that's my work. I did it all from scratch. If that's the case, that is your compass steering you in a different direction, right? Lying or avoiding the truth about the tools that you did or didn't use is inauthentic, no matter how you spin it. The authenticity concern is real, but it is navigable as long as you stay in charge. The second issue that I want to address is this idea of, like, brain rot, right? Where using AI makes you or thinking about using AI, you get concerned about, am I going to lose my ability to think independently? Is my higher reasoning and my cognitive function going to decline over time? Certainly I have had concerns about my ability to write because I've always prided myself on being a strong writer. And these are muscles, and muscles can atrophy with disuse. So this is another real concern, another one that I think we should all be taking seriously. But to me, once again, as long as you are using this triangle actively, the idea of brain rot is kind of the most straightforward one to address. So I think about the different corners of the AI triangle as sort of you stepping into these different roles. So when you first sit down to work with AI, and you are coming to that with purpose, you are stepping into the role of CEO, right? The CEO of a company doesn't come up with and execute all of the company's ideas on her own, but she does set the mission, the vision, the values of each project. She has veto power over individual projects, but also the company as a whole. Like, how are we steering the ship? Where is this company going? That is purpose. And that role of CEO, nobody would say, oh, the CEO is just sitting around, right? That there's a real driving force there. Throughout your work with AI, once you've sort of established the purpose and you're going through the process, that's where you step into the role of attorney. You are not sitting passively through this hearing, you are staying actively engaged. You are raising objections, you're cross examining, like your job depends on it. And that is you embodying this role of judgment. And then finally, once whatever it is that you're creating is done, that's where you step into editor role. That is where you apply your voice, make sure that everything is just the way that you would say it and think it and do it. And this is actually where I think that AI has made me a better writer. Because not only has it forced me to become hyper vigilant about fluff or garbage slop, whatever, when I land on something that I do like, when AI produces something that I'm like, yes, you got it, I often will stop and ask the tool that I'm using to analyze that, what is it here that's happening? What's working? I have gotten clearer over the past couple of years working with these tools on what it is that makes my writing uniquely mine, right? My metaphors and analogies, the way that I pace things, the way that I word things. A lot of that prior to my interaction with AI was really unconscious. It was just the way that I thought and talked and wrote. Now I feel like I'm more aware of it, and because of that, I've been able to lean into it more. So I would argue when it comes to brain rotation, that as long as you are once again using this manual mode version of AI, you are not only not rotting your brain, you are stepping into an elevated role as a CEO, as an attorney, as an editor. Those people may not be doing all the little nitty gritty work, but they are running the show in the real world and in this world. So again, as long as you are embodying those roles and staying in those roles, brain rot is not a threat when it comes to ethics and the environment. I'm going to kind of lump those two together because I think they can be addressed with the same basic approach and they're connected by the same underlying question, which is how do I participate in something that has these very real problems attached to it without just pretending that those problems don't exist? And here's where I think that we need to remember that we participate in Things like this all the time. We all, most of us at least, drive cars, right? And we all know that cars contribute to pollution and environmental issues. Most of us fly. We know that airplanes are pretty high up there in the carbon footprint department, but most of us fly. And most of us own cars, but because they're kind of a necessary part of modern life. And the key thing to remember is that not all of these things are created equal, right? Not all cars have the same environmental impact. There are more efficient options. There are hybrids. There are electric cars. You can bike or walk or carpool. When those things are available, AI is the same. The concerns are real, but they are also not black and white. For every single one of these concerns, the answer lives in the same place. So when it comes to ethics, not all AI companies are operating with the same values, right? There are real concerns happening about privacy, about safety, about intellectual property, about regulation and oversight, corporate politics, who benefits, who doesn't. They're big issues. And if you are worried about those things, you are right to be worried about them. I am worried about them. What I have done is become a very active and choosy user of tools. I made it very public earlier this year that I switched completely from ChatGPT over to Claude because ChatGPT was making decision after decision that I really could not in good conscience stand behind. Claude was going the other direction and saying, nope, we are not gonna open up our information to the government and all these other things. I appreciated their willingness to stand behind their values. So what do you stand for? What do the companies and the products that you are subscribing to stand for? Not just what they say in their marketing copy. Read the news, right? What's going on in their actual track record? Those questions have different answers depending on the tools that you're looking at. So tool choice is where your values become practice, not just fluffy principles that you like to roll out. That's going to be your purpose. Know what you're agreeing to when you use a tool, check the settings, understand what happens to your conversations, be thoughtful, certainly about what you share. I am extremely careful about anything that I am analyzing or asking Claude to look at. Never holds any sort of identifying information about me, but also about certainly my clients and things like that. So personal details, anything sensitive you want to use, your judgment about that. And your judgment extends to the setup, right? Not just the output. So if something feels off about a tool or company, then again, that feeling is your compass and I want you to trust it. The same standards that you Bring to your photography business travel. With you here, we can't control an entire industry, but we can control who we do business with. And those individual players are not all the same when it comes to the environment. Obviously the data centers that power AI tools are consuming enormous amounts of energy and water. And that is problematic at the scale that these tools operate. It's adding up in ways that are truly worth thinking about, worrying about, voting about. But we as individuals, and certainly at the scale, I have that word in quotation marks right now. At the scale that most photographers are using AI, this is like arguing that you shouldn't carry coffee with you in the car because it adds to fuel consumption. Like we are very minimally using AI. And not to say that small acts of defiance or intention don't make an impact, they do. But I do think that within reason, the most environmentally impactful thing that you can do is be intentional about your use, right? Don't reach for AI out of habit or boredom. Use it because you have a specific thing to create and AI can help you get there. That is using AI with purpose. The next thing you want to do is match the tool to the job. If you are going to your neighbor's house, you don't get in your car, drive to the end of the driveway, take a left, and then take a left into their driveway, right? You just walk across the yard. Same thing. If you log into Claude and you have a two line caption to write, you definitely don't need to select Opus as the tool that you're going to use. You want to use Sonnet, right? Use the lightweight tool that uses a fraction of the energy that the one that's designed to like build an entire website. That's where you're using your judgment. And then finally I want you to, and I talked about this last week, I want you to give AI, when you choose to use it, as much context from the beginning as you possibly can. Not only does that demonstrate more purpose because you are coming with the ideas and the context and the, you know, all the parameters and all that sort of stuff, but you are also reducing your energy usage because you end up getting much better output much more quickly. So fewer rounds means less to compute, less energy that you're using, less water. And that's your voice doing double duty, right? Good prompting is not just better for your output, it is genuinely more efficient. Worry less about the cup of coffee in the car, instead choose to drive a better car. Intentional use truly is more efficient and that's actually kind of a Good summary of this entire series. Because tools are just tools. Your clients don't hire you because you wrote every email that you ever sent from scratch. Right? They hire you because of how you see, they hire you because of how you make them feel. And your compass is part of that. So follow it, let it guide you toward the tools and the practices that are aligned with your values. And wherever AI can support you in doing work that matters, the relationship work, the creative work, that irreplaceable stuff that is you, I think that's a good thing. The AI triangle keeps you in manual mode, purpose so that you know what you're building, judgment so that you stay in the driver's seat and voice so that what comes out actually sounds like you. And that's it. That's the whole framework. And it can be applied to every concern that we talked about today because every single one of them points back to the same thing. Being intentional, staying engaged and trusting your instincts. So I am bringing all of this up and have done my own thinking about this. Most of all because of the switch to AI that we made in the Consistency Club back in January of this year. I felt a lot of big feelings about it and was, you know, did a lot of research about how much usage it was going to require and all these different things. I have also spent so much time training these tools and getting them set up so that they are flexible enough to serve all different kinds of photographers with different voices and backgrounds and all that sort of thing. But I have also spent a lot of time researching the tools within the tool. Right. So again, everything that is AI related in there is being run on claude. But I've also done a fair amount of work to try and make sure that every time that these automations are run, they have all of the context they need from me and from our members to create really high quality output in as little time as possible. And I am so proud of these tools and I really want more people to try them because I think what I'm seeing out there is a lot of people trying to do it themselves with AI and using a lot of AI going back and forth and back and forth and still not getting the kind of output that we are getting with this highly trained tool, which makes sense, I mean, picking the right tool for the job if you are really into AI and you have figured out how to train things to the nines. Awesome. I have several members who say that they have or they thought that they had their chat GPT or their CLAUDE trained really well. And then our tools are still giving them better output. So I created this trial that we are just rolling out. We just started running ads for it and, and if you haven't seen that and you haven't tried it, I wanted to invite you to try it. Even if you're a member of the consistency club, this would just be sort of like a bonus. But we're calling it the five Day Content Challenge. And what happens is you go in, you answer a few really basic questions about like your niche, your business name, your business location, because it does give you some SEO output stuff as well. Then you choose a topic that you think that your ideal client would be interested in, you answer a few questions about that topic where you're sharing your personal stories, you're sharing your expertise, your recommendations, those kinds of things. And then you hit submit. And for five days you get five different pieces of marketing content that you can use in your business. And this is sort of a bite sized trial version, like the fun sized candy bar version of what we do in the Real Consistency Club. Because inside the Consistency Club you have a really detailed brand profile. Here it's sort of using a starter profile that's just based on your niche. So it's much less specific to your voice and the brand voice that makes you. But I think it's getting people pretty darn close. We've had a lot of very positive feedback about the quality of content that people are getting for such little input. If you want to try it, the number one request slash recommendation that I can make is that when you go to answer the questions that we ask, after you choose your topic, use your voice to answer the question. So click into the box and turn on your voice to text and talk it out. Give the tool as much context. Don't worry about editing yourself. Just like brain dump your answers to all three of those and it doesn't matter if it's five paragraphs long. Great. The more the better. When you give it more, you will get better content on the other end. And if you are in the Consistency club or if you join the consistency club, I would definitely say that's the best way to use the tools inside the club as well. In order to try this, you can just go to this can't. Bethard.com five the number five DCC so five day content challenge. You can only use the tool once. If you try and use it again, it's going to send you a little like, hey, sorry, it looks like you've already done this message, but it's pretty fun and I would love to hear your feedback on that. If this conversation about AI and intentional use and creating this AI triangle has resonated for you, I think you'll like this tool a lot because it essentially forces you to to be in the driver's seat and it reduces your usage. So I believe that it's a tool you can feel good about. I feel good about it and I'm pretty excited to share it. I hope you guys have enjoyed this month's topic. We will be back next week with a brand new series and yeah, kicking off a new season.
- [27:00]
B
Well, that's it for this week's episode of this Can't Be that Hard. I'll be back same time, same place next week. In the meantime, you can find more information about this episode along with all the relevant links, notes and downloads@thiscantbethard.com learn if you like the podcast, be sure
- [27:18]
A
to hit the subscribe button.
- [27:20]
B
Even better, share the love by leaving a review in itunes. And as always, thanks so much for joining me. I hope you have a fantastic week.