Crystalee (00:02)
But we've done several pilots where we use seven different types of AI tools and our writers timed themselves. We paid them for this study. We gave them topics to cover.
They did one completely written themselves and then one using AI. And across those seven tools, it was basically sixes. It was almost negligible because if they produced a thousand word piece, for example, a blog post with AI, the time that it took for them to revise it and make it actually work for the brand, it took just as much time as if they started from scratch.
Benjamin Ard (01:01)
Welcome back to another episode of Content Amplified. Today I'm joined by Crystalee Crystalee, welcome to the show.
Crystalee (01:07)
Thank you.
Benjamin Ard (01:07)
Christali, I'm excited. This is an episode that we should have recorded ages ago. You and I are both in the Utah entrepreneurship scene. We know each other from all sorts of different opportunities, but I'm so excited for the audience to get to know you, what you do, and to dive into this discussion. So let's kind of get to know Christali a little bit. If you don't mind sharing with the audience, tell us about your background and all that fun stuff.
Crystalee (01:32)
Sure. Well, if someone asked me, what do you do? My new answer is I play at the park with my kids. We're very good at playing at the park. We know all the parks in the 10 mile radius. Professionally, I own Comma Copywriters, which is a content marketing agency. And we're at year nine in business. next year, we're preparing to celebrate a decade in business. And I turned 40. And it blows my mind that I've been doing this for a fourth of my life almost.
So I'm a mother of four. I'm very passionate about stories that connect and compelling content. Words have always mattered to me since I was a little tiny girl. And it's really a dream come true that I now have a team of writers and editors and we get to help companies with their content and connect in compelling ways through words.
Benjamin Ard (02:21)
I love that. That's exciting. I'm a big fan of the organization and everything you're doing. And I think today's subject is something that not only marketers need to hear about, but potentially the people that are in charge of making budgetary decisions with those marketers. What we're going to talk about is when, where, how humans still and always do need to be a part of content. So the big trend right now is to have AI written content all over the place.
And people have various levels of, you know, human interaction and all this sort of stuff. They'll train their models a certain way with voice and tone and brand. Christali, how do you keep the human in the loop? How are you taking advantage of that? And why does it matter to have human, you know, elements and a human centered content strategy?
Crystalee (03:11)
Well, this is something I have, I will say outright, I have a self interest in this topic because I do own a content agency and I have a team of writers and want to make sure we have work to do. But even if I didn't own the brand that I have, I still would have the same position that quality content that connects always needs to have the human touch.
And as we've experimented and done our own pilots and we do have some AI offerings that we are working with our clients on projects, there still has to be a set of human eyes that review anything before it's published. So I'm actually working on getting the trademark for the term publish ready, because I believe that in order to be published ready, any content
has to have that human touch. You need to do that because while AI models are very powerful and they're so helpful and can compress the time it takes to come up with blog posts or LinkedIn posts or whatever it is that you want to publish, if you're not adding in your own flavor, then you're just contributing to an ocean of vanilla content.
Benjamin Ard (04:24)
So that's one question I have is, and I agree. I mean, I'm 100 % on board with this concept. And I love AI. I run an AI SaaS company and all sorts of stuff. But I do know as a consumer of content, especially if I'm on LinkedIn or somewhere else, if I get a whiff, even just like a little hint of this was written by AI, I immediately skip it.
I don't want to participate in it because I don't feel like it's going to add value and it's not connecting to a human being. But at the same time as a content producer, I would love the efficiency gains of AI. How do you recommend the marketers listening to this podcast episode who agree with you saying humans have to be in the loop. have the perspectives, the point of views, the stories. How do they talk about AI with their bosses?
and with our coworkers and kind of find the balance of not ignoring that technology, but also keeping the integrity when it comes to their content creation.
Crystalee (05:23)
The way that I see content, there are phases of production. So before anything is even written, there is the pre-production phase where you're deciding what topics you want to talk about, where maybe you do research on your audience. Then there's the actual creation of the writing itself, which could be a human or AI. Then there's the editing, polishing. Then there's the publishing. And there are different phases that are
more appropriate for AI than for others. For example, in the pre-production phase and research and deciding what topics work, that is a genius time to use AI. It cuts time so much to look at your audiences and you can literally take the hyperlinks and say, so say that there's a brand that you really want to work with, you can put that brand in your prompt and say, I'd like to work with marketers at this
brand hyperlink, stick it in there. Do the research for me to find what are the topics that they are currently researching. I mean, AI can do that for you in a split second and help you know what are the topics they want. So that's a use case where it makes a ton of sense to cut down on pre-production. Even in the writing, depending on what it is at Comma Copywriters, we've really focused.
mostly on long form content, things that are 500 to 2000 words. And AI is not as effective for that type of content. It's really good at headlines, for ad copy, for short things with bullet points. It's super effective for that.
But we've done several pilots where we use seven different types of AI tools and our writers timed themselves. We paid them for this study. We gave them topics to cover.
They did one completely written themselves and then one using AI. And across those seven tools, it was basically sixes. It was almost negligible because if they produced a thousand word piece, for example, a blog post with AI, the time that it took for them to revise it and make it actually work for the brand, it took just as much time as if they started from scratch.
that's kind of a unique.
use case from our standpoint and the types of content that we write. But I would say that in the, like working through those production phases, we're talking about writing now to the editing and polishing phase before you publish, before it's published ready, I would assert that there has to be a human in that editing slash polishing phase before you publish. You can even have publishing done by AI. can like,
your content, can automatically publish it. There's so many tools and ways that you can do that. So out of these phases, mean, many of them AI can touch on, but I would say that you need to protect, protect that editing polishing phase fiercely because that's when you are preserving the human element in your words. And if, if you don't do that, if you skip over and just say,
Benjamin Ard (08:08)
you
Crystalee (08:20)
will this have AI do every one of these phases? Then you no longer are original. You've lost what makes your brand unique.
Benjamin Ard (08:28)
Yeah, I love that. I think that makes a ton of sense. And one of the cool things that you talk about, you know, in that test, these individuals, it was sixes when it came to producing a certain quality standard of content. Obviously they could have produced content through AI a lot faster, but there is that layer that I'm sure you set out to say the quality has to stand up to this certain level. How, as an agency and a group,
Do you figure out that threshold and know if something has met that threshold of quality? Because I do think this is a part of marketers in this conversation to say, Hey, can everyone agree on what quality looks like? And we won't do anything below quality and we'll try to do our best to make sure that we hit it as effectively and as efficiently as possible.
But there's always a quality standard, because I think people that invest in AI and for just content, the quality bar just goes way lower. How do you set quality? How do you measure it? How do you look at it to make sure that you're always hitting those limits?
Crystalee (09:33)
⁓ such a good question. So at Comma, we've always had...
one of our three brand promises is that anything we write goes through two sets of human eyes before it gets to our client. So in our process, we have a lead writer and then we'll have an editor who reviews and edits. So it's peer review before it gets to our clients. And at this point in time, we have a few different ways that we work with clients where we do do that full scope of we write it, we edit it, we get it to them. But then we also have some offerings where we're doing the
editing on the work that they've created. And we're having more and more of those types of opportunities. And I do see us becoming more and more of an editing company. We'll still always have original writing too, but where in the past, this is an exact metric, but I would guess that in past years we were like 95 % writing, 5 % editing. And this year, I did do a check a couple of months ago and we were at like 18 % editing.
the percentage of the work that we do that's editing and doing the polishing for our clients work is increasing. And I'm okay with that because there's always that need for the human element. to your question on how do you agree on what is quality, how do you maintain that standard, it's a hard thing to answer only because there's so many different ways to measure it.
So first of all, there's that like original sniff test that like you said earlier, if I get a whiff that it is AI, I immediately skip over it. And, and more and more and more of us are doing that same thing where like our eyes glaze over when we see something and, it actually takes away from the reputation of that brand or that person that were like, ⁓ they didn't take the time to create this. They, they just,
outsourced it or AI'd it and it actually has a net negative impact on our view of them instead of a positive impact. So my personal opinion is that it's better to not post at all if you're not going to put your own touch on it than to just publish something straight from AI. okay, but back to your question about quality control and measuring and keeping the standard high. We have a...
a global client who's here in the Silicon slopes area. It's interesting because they're an AI company. So what they offer for their services are AI services. And they've just grown like crazy. They're doing amazing. It's an honor to work with them. But when they hired us to do content for them, they specifically told us, we do not want you to use AI at all for our content.
We want this to be completely human written. So it almost felt ironic to me that I'm like, that's what you sell, but that's not what you want. Because they had a lot of concerns that they would be dinged by Google, that they would lose credibility, that the content would, if it was done by AI, that they wouldn't get their maximum viewership and that it would hurt them. And so we were happy to create completely human created content. And then,
they had their own internal quality control where they had an AI checker that would check our content to like, which was a new thing for us. I mean, we're all learning as we go here, but that was something that was important to them. They wanted to make sure we didn't use AI and we didn't. We had a team of four or five writers and I mean, for years AI wasn't even an option. So we're very used to human written contents.
Benjamin Ard (12:50)
Hmm.
Crystalee (13:08)
dart to finish. So that's what we did. But their AI checker would ding us that it would say that we had like a high percentage of AI.
And then all we would need to do to remove that because it became this like thing internally that I'm like, are our writers telling the truth? Like what's happening? Which I fully trust my team. But they're like, I did do it myself. I didn't use AI. But then when we went in and would make one or two
grammatical errors, then it would say, oh, all good. This isn't AI. This was done by humans. So we'd almost polished it so cleanly that they thought it couldn't have been done by a human, which, I mean, we're professional writers. mean, my team, I think the average is like seven to 10 years of professional experience. So this is what we do professionally. This is what we went to school for. This is our expertise.
Benjamin Ard (13:47)
Yep.
Crystalee (14:00)
And so it was this kind of funny situation where the AI company didn't want AI and they thought we were using it even though we weren't. so that's a very long story to try to say that. I think the quality control, there is like a gut check, first of all, like the first review, like, does this feel like AI? Does this feel human? And then you also can use AI checkers if that is something you want to do. But I think the gut check.
is almost just as valuable as the an AI checker because AI checkers aren't always accurate.
Benjamin Ard (14:34)
I love that. That makes perfect sense. And so one of your points there, the imperfections is a part of the content. I think that's so fascinating. When I was a kid, ⁓ my family went on a trip to Europe and we went to the country of Turkey and Turkey is really known for their Turkish rugs. And so we're in this open air market and eventually there's a salesman trying to sell us a rug. And as we're sitting there,
He tells us this story about if you look at every one of the rugs, you will notice at least one imperfection. And it's not that their quality standards are low or things like that, but because of their beliefs, they believe that only God is perfect and they are not perfect. So they build in those imperfections into their rugs and things like that. But it is interesting that as time goes on, we've had podcast episodes about creating
Honestly content with like iPhone cameras more than professional cameras because it looks authentic because it's not as nice and polished. Do you think that's going to be a trend? Like when it comes to content that people are going to start writing like more conversational, I don't want to say like poor quality, but like maybe not as nice of content because they're afraid of it feeling like AI.
Crystalee (15:47)
You know, I think that's already happening on
a national level, at least here in the United States, that there, I'm thinking in the Twittersphere slash X, there are a lot of very loud voices on there who do not abide by the laws of grammar. And for someone who's named her company after a punctuation mark, ⁓ it's it's glaringly obvious to me that there there's very little care or respect for the rules of grammar on Twitter. And so
Benjamin Ard (16:08)
Ha ha ha ha.
Crystalee (16:16)
⁓ How many millions upon millions of reshares do certain posts get that are not actually written with like quality in mind? It's more about the the message and the idea behind it than the presentation. So I would say as much as it it pains me as someone who values who values a well-written sentence, I truly value
the time and the craft that it takes to put thoughts together in words. But I also can say, like you can be extremely effective and also share messages very widely without being grammatically correct. Like that happens every single day all around the world, especially in the United States right now.
Benjamin Ard (17:01)
Well, and I think going back to the whole point of this episode, though, it comes back to the human element. It's authentic to that person, to that brand, something like that. And I think that's why it's so important that no matter what we're doing with our content, there's a human involved. And like you're saying, you know, it could be in the editing phase, you know, it could be in all these different sections, but as soon as you lose the humanity in your content, nobody cares to read it. And I think that that's such a powerful note.
Honestly, a lot of marketers are fighting the good fight to make sure that people know we need to have actual human insights, perspectives, stories, things like that in our content. So I love this. Crystalee we have run out of time. These episodes are short on purpose so people can get back to their normal activities every single day. But if anyone wants to reach out and connect with you online, how and where can they find you?
Crystalee (17:51)
So our website is teamcomma.com and I spend my social media energy on LinkedIn. So my name is Crystalee Beck. I would love to connect with any listeners on LinkedIn and Comma Copywriters is my business and I'm, yeah, I would love to connect with fellow marketers who care about content that connects.
Benjamin Ard (18:11)
Love it. For anyone listening, scroll down to the show notes. We will link to everything there. You can find Crystalee's name, click on the link and connect with her on LinkedIn. Crystalee thank you so much for your time, insights, and honestly, for just coming on the show today. I really do appreciate it.
Crystalee (18:26)
Thank you for having me. Super fun. I love what you're building,
