ANDY BROOKS (00:02)
And the reason why I think it's going to go away is because AI is going to become so prevalent and so entrenched that they are not going to be able to say it anymore. Right. And once it's accepted that you can maintain your authenticity while using AI, it's not going to be an issue anymore.
Ben Ard (00:42)
Welcome back to another episode of Content Amplified. Today I'm joined by Andy. Andy, welcome to the show.
ANDY BROOKS (00:47)
Thanks Ben, glad to be here.
Ben Ard (00:48)
Yeah, Andy, I'm excited. This is a topic that everyone needs to talk about. Everyone is talking about, and I'm excited to get your opinion, expertise, and all that kind of fun stuff. But before we dive in, let's get to know your background, work history, career, all that kind of fun stuff so the audience can get to know you if you don't mind.
ANDY BROOKS (01:05)
So my background comes from radio and television, and I've worked on several feature films. I've worked for some major networks. And then sometime around the 2000s, I started my own business where I did software development and database development and never really thought of being in marketing for a while. And then I eventually came to work at a public health system in the Bay Area called Alameda Health System as their digital marketing manager.
And that was my first exposure to like a real marketing position. And I really fell in love with the entire process of creating content marketing for public health. And since that time, I have devoted a tremendous amount of my effort and energy into figuring out the ins and outs of marketing. And now I work at ⁓ UC Davis. I'm their director of marketing and communications for student health and counseling services. And
love what I do and I love working with students and communicating with them. And recently, since the advent of generative AI, I have dug deep into how generative AI can help marketers in all sorts of industries. And so I've got two books I've published and I teach courses on creating generative AI on Coursera. so along with my interest in public health marketing,
I'm now focusing a lot on how to help people use generative AI to increase their efficiency and their overall reach in marketing without losing any authenticity. So that's kind of where I sit at the moment.
Ben Ard (02:38)
I love that. And that's the perfect way to enter into the subject for today. We're going to talk about how to authentically use AI. I think it's something that people are struggling with. People understand the value of AI. They love the efficiency. They love the time savings. But there's just that one little piece about how do I do it in a very authentic way? How do you think, Andy, that we should use AI?
Either for like business use or personal branding, but keep ourselves really authentic in the process. How do you kind of like walk that fine line and know where too much is too much? How do you kind of look at that?
ANDY BROOKS (03:13)
Well, you know, if you look at it from a problem perspective, AI solves a lot of problems, but the problem with AI solving problems is that it doesn't do a great job of solving problems, but it seems like it does a really good job at solving problems. You know, when you look at past technologies, there was a huge learning curve to get involved with those technologies. So if you were, for example, a video editor or a cinematographer,
or ⁓ a producer of films and you wanted to get into filmmaking, there was a huge learning curve that you were required to go through in order to get to the point where you were outputting decent content that wasn't off of like an eight millimeter film camera. Or if you were a photographer, the expense of getting into photography was quite high, right? So it's not only the amount of practice and technique that you were putting into it, but it was also the equipment costs that you had to do.
in order to become proficient at it. And even if we look all the way back at desktop publishing, desktop publishing was supposed to revolutionize the world, and it did. But, you know, using InDesign or another tool like that, it's still quite a learning curve. It's not necessarily terribly easy to just go into it. Or if you look at 3D animation, everybody wanted to be a 3D animator. And the tools and the costs were so high.
that not everybody could do it. But even now that you have something like Blender, which is free and anybody can use, it's there's still a high amount of time you need to invest in learning how to do it well. And what I think is happening with ⁓ generative AI specifically is that it's so easy to get involved in. All you need is a chat GPT account. You don't even need to pay for it. And you can ask it to do things in a conversational way. And it'll just go ahead and output stuff.
And the problem that I see with a lot of people is these tools tend to be very affirming, right? So anything that you put into it, it's going to say it's the greatest idea it's ever heard. And you're so brilliant. And how could you not be the most successful person on the planet? Because this idea that you had is wonderful. And here's all the outputs for it, right? But it doesn't know whether it's a good idea or not. It's just a very affirming idea. And so what happens, I think, in industry and any industry
is that when they use generative AI tools, there's this feedback loop of affirmation that what they're producing is fantastic. And when you get that, it's kind of like doom scrolling. There's a little bit of a dopamine rush where you're like being told, ⁓ what I'm doing is fantastic. And then you go ahead and generate all this stuff. And it's all, I mean, we now have a term for it, right? It's AI slop. And it's just a bunch of quick, terrible things that are mediocre at best.
And what happens with your audience is your audience sees it and says, that's not you. And they kind of they kind of fall off. So when you look at authenticity, it's a matter of dialing it back a little bit and coming up with a plan of how you want to use it first. AI doesn't give you a plan. Right. And any plan that it gives you is going to be mediocre at best because all it does is predict. Right. It's just predicting the next word or it's just predicting the next pixel.
It's not really coming up with any solid ideas that you can use. It still needs to come from you. So when you're talking about authenticity, it's a matter of having a plan, just like anything else that you're doing in a business is where do you see generative AI making your narratives and your storytelling more, more efficient so that you can maintain the authenticity, not necessarily replacing
what you're doing right now as a real person in a real company, because I think you're going to lose your audience if you do that.
Ben Ard (06:51)
Okay. I love that. There's so many things there to kind of take down and really listen through. mean, I feel like I need to listen back to that segment several times in a row, but I love the example of really complex technologies that had a steep learning curve and people learn them to get exactly what they wanted out of those systems. The contrast with AI where it is a very complex system, but with the most simplistic interface.
but it still requires a high level of training and understanding to get the kinds of outputs that you're actually looking for. Even though you can get something, doesn't necessarily mean it's a good something just because you can write in some kind of a random prompt. So I think that's really important. So when it comes to authenticity, I want to kind of double click into like your actual process, right? So you have the efficiency gains. AI could just write everything for you.
There is some kind of back and forth. How are you practically using the technology to still authentically show up and be you, but gaining all of those wins by utilizing AI in the process?
ANDY BROOKS (07:56)
My biggest win on this is having the original idea. So if you go onto Reddit or you go onto LinkedIn or go onto these blogs where they talk about how you can use AI to come up with ideas, that's good. And I do that, right? Give me a posting plan for...
the next five days on this campaign and it'll give it to you. But at the end of the day, that requires a rewrite from you. And ⁓ so it's more about using AI as a partner and not necessarily a very smart partner, but a partner to make things more efficient. I like to think of the generative AI tools that I use when I'm creating things is it's kind of like a not terribly bright, but very fast
marketing coordinator, right? So you can tell a marketing coordinator, off and give me five drafts for five posts for this campaign that we need to run in December. And a true marketing coordinator is going to go off and they're going to look at the information that you gave them and they're going to kind of research what that market is doing. And then they're going to come back in a couple of days and say, well, here are five drafts and you can take those and then you can rework them.
problem that we face with generative AI is that if you do that, AI is going to come back not in a couple days, but in a couple seconds. And people say, well, that's really good. And I need to get it going. So go ahead and schedule it and let's get it posted. And so what you've done now is you've let AI take the wheel and drive your entire marketing campaign without you stepping in and rethinking everything that you do. It's really about the scope of service that you're providing.
And the discipline that you've acquired over time, that never goes away. And I is never going to have it. It's never going to have that intuition to tell you, you know, that's probably not a really good idea or a really good time to create that. Or that's not really sensitive to your audience. Even though it's trying, it's really still up to you to kind of figure out what that generated process means. And then how do you read?
Reframe it to fit your audience and that's where the authenticity comes back in. So one of the things that I find Is is that if I do use for example? image generation from generative AI the backlash From the Gen Z audience that I mainly speak to is tremendous. They know it they know what it is. They know it's not authentic we are a very large university and
As a result, we have a lot of people looking at us and they know when ⁓ this image that you produced in AI didn't take place in Davis and isn't a Davis student, right? They know it and they'll tell you that. And so you'll lose your audience that way. And I think that goes across every single discipline that you have. So if you, if you're running a small shop, you're not going to put up a generated images of inside your shop because that's not what you're
trying to make people aware of. You're trying to make people aware of who you are, what you're selling, and what your story is. And Generative AI can give you that foundation to start, but it's never going to give you the end product that's actually going to drive your audience to come and visit you, engage with you, come to your store, or buy something.
Ben Ard (11:14)
I love that. It's interesting where I had always done, and I think you articulated it way better than I have in the past, but there needs to be a human element either on the front end or the back end of AI in order for it to be authentic. If it's on the front end, it's something like this. We're having a conversation. There's a transcript. There's original thoughts. AI is just helping you compile, organize, and do something with those. But it was still original thought, human conversation.
On the flip side, if you have AI come up with the idea generation, you're going to have to edit the crud out of that to be able to get it to a point where it feels and looks authentic. Same with like image generation. Some of the most powerful AI stuff is when you give it a photograph and you need to enhance that for the right format, the right size, the right things, but not being like, just create the image and we're off to the races. It needs your inspiration.
ANDY BROOKS (11:57)
Yeah, absolutely.
Ben Ard (12:07)
And I love your analogy of like, it's a really good marketing coordinator. What I've looked at is it's like the world's smartest person who has zero hands-on experience with what they're doing. And we are the hands-on experience that can craft and turn that into usable opportunities. So I think that's so powerful. Andy, we are almost out of time. These episodes go by so quick. If you're looking and talking to someone in marketing today.
ANDY BROOKS (12:29)
They really do!
Ben Ard (12:34)
You know, a business, an individual at those businesses, and they are trying to figure out how can I be even more authentic and use AI? What is something that they can do today that will actually make an impact on their workflow, their efficiency, but still maintain their authenticity?
ANDY BROOKS (12:53)
Keep it real when it needs to be real. And what I mean by that is that if you have employees that you want to highlight, if you have products that you want to highlight, or if you have a real story that you want to convey, keep that real. Don't put it into AI. You can have AI organize it, and that's fine. But don't use AI as the crutch to create your content. Use it as a foundation to create the real content that you need to create.
If you're creating a testimonial from a customer, make sure that's a real customer. Don't invent it. If you've got a product, make sure it's a photo of the real product. Don't ask AI to invent it. So at the end of the day, it's always going to come back to authenticity because no one wants to see something that is emotionless and AI cannot generate emotion. That's only going to come from you as an individual.
or your organization.
Ben Ard (13:46)
I love that. Okay, one quick follow up question. This might be a little longer of an episode, but I don't care. It'll be good. Do you think brands and people are going to use the claim that something they created is not touched by AI as like a badge of honor in the future? Do you think there's going to be a place where creators come to the table and are saying that, you know, it's almost like the no filter on social media.
ANDY BROOKS (14:10)
Sure.
Ben Ard (14:11)
No
AI was used in this process. Do you think that's going to be a thing?
ANDY BROOKS (14:14)
I think it's going to be a thing for a while. I think it's going to be a thing for a while. And then I think it's going to go away.
And the reason why I think it's going to go away is because AI is going to become so prevalent and so entrenched that they are not going to be able to say it anymore. Right. And once it's accepted that you can maintain your authenticity while using AI, it's not going to be an issue anymore.
It's like Instagram. Instagram didn't use to let you schedule your posts way back in the day because they wanted it right now. And this is what it was. But
people decided that's what they wanted to do. And so that's the way the market moved. So that whole thing is going to be here for a while. No, we don't use AI actors. No, the backgrounds are all ours. And that's fine. But as long as a message is getting across and the emotion is there and the narrative is good and the storytelling is good, all things that AI can't do yet. Right. It's not going to matter whether you use AI here or you used AI there. It's just not going to matter. So for a while, yeah, that's going to be like
The moment I don't use AI, but eventually it's just going to be an accepted practice.
Ben Ard (15:16)
Andy, this has been absolutely amazing. I really do appreciate it. For anyone listening who wants to reach out and connect with you online, how and where can they find you?
ANDY BROOKS (15:24)
⁓ You can find me on LinkedIn. I'm very active on LinkedIn. I've got a YouTube channel that's just full of AI slop because I'm experimenting so don't go there but you can you can find me Andrew Brooks on LinkedIn and Feel free to connect. I post a lot of stuff on news about artificial intelligence and marketing how to use AI You can sign up for my course on Coursera. So there's lots of ways to get a hold of me I'm sure we'll put links some somewhere in there
Ben Ard (15:48)
Yeah, look at the show description for anyone that is listening to this episode. We will have Andy's LinkedIn profile right there. Andy, thank you so much for the time and insights today. I really do appreciate it.
ANDY BROOKS (15:58)
Thank you, Ben. I appreciate you having me on the show.
