Note: This transcript was auto generated then some poor soul sat and listened to it, and followed through correcting any mistakes they spotted. Please however expect human error and shout if you spot an issue. Email: lee [fancy curly symbol] trailblazer.fm.
Verbatim text
Welcome to the Trailblazer FM podcast. This is your host, Lee. On today’s show, it’s you and me. I just want to sit here full of cold and feeling sorry for myself and have a little rant, I guess, to myself all about AI and just outwork what’s in my head. You see, I think AI is wonderful and marvellous. It’s an incredible invention, and yet I have so many concerns. As I reflect on the episode that I just put out, episode number 395 where I shared how exhausted I was with Trailblazer FM and this constant churn of content. I also think of how AI played a huge role in that, and actually that concerns me. You see, I was ending up leaning on AI as a crutch. That was something that was helping me to consistently churn out more and more content, especially for things like just automating poor quality show notes. Poor quality, in my opinion. Other folks may have loved them, but I was essentially feeding in the transcript to generate show notes so that I could cut corners. I was using AI to help me figure out some questions to ask that weren’t really even from my heart or out of my interest anymore.
I was just leaning on AI because I’d gotten myself to that state of pure and utter exhaustion and burnout with the podcast process itself so that I was just outsourcing my ability to think, my ability to be rational, my ability to just even enjoy what I was doing. That’s leading me to this episode where I want share some of those concerns and want to talk about AI. This is not an episode where I sit here and hate on AI. It’s great. It’s a fantastic tool. But I do want to highlight some of the concerns that I have. I think one of the things that I want to make sure that I do with this particular podcast, and also my other project, which is the offline reboot. I’ve shared, first of all, that I’ve lent on AI in the past in order to allow me to continue to churn out content. I felt with Trailblazer FM being my job, being something that I felt I had to monetize and grow to be able to help more people, that I had to keep pushing out content, so AI became that crutch. Looking back, I saw that the quality of content was definitely dipping.
My own enjoyment wasn’t there anymore. This wasn’t my creation anymore. This was a pseudo-creation, as it were. There was a part of me still there, but there was also an algorithmic generated a good version as well going on behind the scenes. Also, I just noticed one huge glaring thing, listenership dipped. Shock of all shocks, listenership was dipping. That doesn’t matter now because I don’t plan on growing this podcast. This is for me. I am right now sitting here talking to my microphone, outworking some thoughts and ideas that I have. If you’re listening, you’re probably just interested in this, too. Feel free to have a conversation with me, [email protected]. I’m not on social media. I’ve lost my train of thought. But yeah, I noticed that listenership was dipping as well. When your hobby becomes your job, episode 395, you take these sorts of things really seriously and it robs you of your joy. I think listeners also knew that the joy was gone and that AI was certainly playing a role in the poorer quality content, et cetera. That leads me to some of the concerns about AI. I do I think AI has a tendency to make us lazy.
For example, I would put the entire transcript in to AI and say, Hey, generate me my show notes, and I would give it a a quick read through. If it sounded pretty much okay, I might make a couple of amends, and then wham, bam, onto the website it went. Here we now have some automatically procedurally generated show notes based on the transcript. No no real thought or care was going into that. That was me just trying to make a quicker shortcut as I possibly could in order to keep the machine going. Whereas with episode 395, I listened to the entire transcript. Priya helped me by correcting any mistakes in that transcript, which was awesome. Thank you, Priya. You’re listening more than likely now as you’re probably going through the I’m in the script right now. Priya, you’re a legend. I wrote the show notes from scratch, and it was a wonderful process. I enjoyed that entire process of listening to my thoughts, outworking them, and then outworking some of my own show notes rather than procedurally generating. Disclaimer, I don’t think my show notes for episode 395 are anything amazing, but what they are, Lee, and they are my heart, and they are something that I created myself with my own time and attention and thought and care, as opposed to a large language model, which is essentially estimating and guessing the next viable word to create something that is generally acceptable as a few paragraphs of text, which may or may not add value into somebody’s life.
All that to say is that I am concerned that AI is making folks lazy and is also potentially pushing people to hang on and hang in there into something that’s essentially dying. For me, Trailblazer FM was dying, both for me as an internally, I was losing my love for it. Also, Trailblazer FM just was not captivating the audience anymore either for several reasons. Lots and lots of other people doing the content, for example. And COVID also had a huge part to play in all of that as people’s habits changed, et cetera. But I definitely think as well that AI had a big part to play in that for the last year, especially because I was leaning on this new technology. I think it was ChatGPT 3 back then or maybe 2. I can’t remember. The quality wasn’t great, but I was definitely leaning on it because it felt like a shortcut. And all that aside, Another concern I have is that I feel like it’s stealing the work of other people. Because as we look at AI and how it’s trained, it’s been trained by scraping content off of the internet. It’s been trained by utilising other people’s ideas, other people’s words, etc.
That is actually a huge concern to me because as a content creator, as I put my own stuff out there, it is very likely that the transcript to this podcast, perhaps even my voice at some point may be used by AI, by a large language model, by something out there to train. That’s a massive concern because these are my own thoughts. These are my own words. This is my copyright for me to do what I want with and as I please. The idea that AI is actually training on other people’s stuff so that other people can benefit and nobody’s getting paid other than these big AI companies. It’s crazy to me and makes me feel extremely uncomfortable. I’m comfortable with the idea of the written word essentially being stolen and repurposed, and also with video and with images. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not preaching. I don’t understand all of this. I I know there’s lots of grey areas, et cetera, but also I know how my brain works, and I’m a very on and off binary person. It is or it isn’t. To me, it does feel like it’s stealing. To me, I’m not comfortable with it.
I don’t want to lean on AI anymore as something that will be the final output of my work. I do worry that other people are doing that. It’s robbing them off the joy of their own creation. It’s also ensuring that they put out poor quality or poorer quality content. I think it’s potentially dragging things out for people. What you can’t hear, folks, is that my daughter’s downstairs now and probably getting a pan of chocolate. Hey, Ella. Another concern I have, and I don’t pretend to know much about this, but it’s just the environmental impact in general. If we’re putting in multiple prompts and utilising tonnes of processing power, I can only imagine that that must have a negative impact on the grid. I think I said in episode 395, I’m turning into a bit of a hippie. I think I hit the microphone in excitement there. I’m turning into someone who likes to save the planet in whatever small way that I can. If me writing a prompt rather than perhaps looking in a book is going to negatively impact the planet, even in a micro, tiny, tiny, tiny way, I think I’d rather look in the book or use my own brainpower rather than keep relying on AI.
One of the things I’ve been asking myself recently is when I’m about to open up ChatGPT or Claude or something like that, I’ll think, does this have to be a prompt? Do I have the knowledge already to write this thing on a piece of paper or on my computer rather than relying on AI? Or do I have the answer to this bookmarked because this is something I’ve done in the past, and do I really need to use AI to do this? And I know it’s super small and probably silly, but I don’t know. I am genuinely worried. I see the amount of investment that’s going into all of these extra data centres, and I’ve read quite a few news articles about the amount of electricity that’s needed for running said data centres and the cost and impact of all of these AI queries. So yeah, there’s that as well. I don’t want an episode where folks think I’m bashing AI. I really am not. But I am sharing how AI has affected me in not so great a way and how I do want to use it in limited ways rather than it being what I completely lean on, which I have lent on in the past.
It was the golden goose at one point. I was like, Holy moly, this is amazing. This is going to allow me to produce tonnes and tonnes of content and be super hyper productive, et cetera. I was totally on that bandwagon. And now I’ve definitely fallen off of it. But let’s wrap up my ramble here with some of the positives of AI. I mean, AI is a fantastic ideation tool. If you need to brainstorm and need to brainstorm maybe with some context of a document that you’ve written, et cetera, and with knowledge that you already have, then, well, wow, AI is an incredible tool. It is. I think I simplified it earlier down to a autocorrect on steroids. But it is a great tool like that to reorganise your thoughts or even to add some extra ideas that you can then work on that you may not necessarily have considered. It is useful. It’s great for generating ideas. It’s great for fixing a bug in your code when you just can’t see what it is. It’s also incredible for folks who have disabilities. I’ve heard some wonderful stories of how AI is giving people their new life and allowing them to either communicate or to consume content or even to be able to physically move because of wonderful advancements in AI.
I am not here to bash it, but I think when it comes to me doing things like my podcast, my hobbies, and running my business, I want to be really, really intentional as to how I use it. I want to be as ethical as possible, both with regards to to what I said on stealing other people’s work, but also the impact environmentally that I think overuse of AI is having. That’s where I’m at. And full disclosure, I’m not anti-AI. I’ve used it today. I needed to know what to do with my boiled eggs. I asked AI, and yeah, I had really nice boiled eggs this morning. Like I said, it’s a great tool, don’t get me wrong, but I definitely have those concerns. But AI is great for eggs and for recipes. Actually, that is one thing. I don’t know what the science here is or the calculations, but if you add up how much mental energy plus physical energy it takes to load a recipe page which is full of an entire story, which is irrelevant to the recipe you need and all of those ads. I actually imagine an AI prompt is actually better for the planet.
I base this on nothing at all other than my own assumptions and my frustration with going on websites for recipes when AI can just give me it in a heartbeat. So I am not here ribbing on AI. I am just here sharing essentially how AI helped rob me of the joy of my hobby and listened to episode 395, what my concerns are about AI for content creators and business owners and on into the future, and how I feel AI has its place as long as it’s used with thought and care. It’s used intentionally, and I believe as well, used with the knowledge that you already have. I think as we wrap up, that’s the big I have is there is an awful lot of incorrect, awful content now out there being produced by people who don’t have knowledge on the subject they’re creating content on because they are heavily reliant on AI to essentially become a content-generating machine in the name of SEO and driving traffic and affiliate links and selling courses or whatever else it is that they’re using it for. That, again, is driving down quality and is tremendously toxic, I think, for a nice internet.
Because I miss the internet of the ’90s with the gifts and people sharing their own thoughts on little random hobbies that they have. Nowadays, the internet is just full of junk. Anyway, on that positive note, let me know your thoughts. My email address is [email protected]. We don’t have comments on the website, and we aren’t really on social media. That’s fine. So if you want to share your thoughts about this, then just ping me a message. This can be a two-way conversation. I’m up for that. Have a wonderful day. No call to actions. Take care. Bye. Oh, yeah. One call to action. If you want to to check out old tech from the ’90s, then my little hobby is this YouTube channel called Offline Reboot. I’ve only done one video so far, but I share how I think you can use a product from 1997 in today’s day and age. Just want to showcase that we’re all in this thought process. Not all of us, but many of us are in this thought process of, Oh, I have to have the latest and greatest software. I have to upgrade. And using a product from 1997 is great because it shows that even back in the ’90s, products back then had everything that we needed, and we probably don’t need to keep upgrading.
And the beauty of that particular product that I’m using is there’s absolutely no AI. It actually forces you to use your own mind as part of the creative process. So it might be worth going ahead and checking that out. I’ll pop a link in the show notes of this episode. You find all that on Trailblazer FM. So there you are. There’s a call to action. See you.
