11 Warnings About Using AI in Content Creation. Yes, that includes podcasting.
Thank you for joining me for The Audacity to Podcast. I'm Daniel J. Lewis.
Artificial intelligence or AI has made huge leaps in abilities within a very short time.
It was only a few years ago that I felt on the cutting edge teaching how to use AI tools
like Jasper, originally called Conversion AI, and even Jarvis. Even before ChatGPT
was released, I was playing with AI tools. Now AI has become so prominent that it's
almost surprising if a software company of any size is not offering some kind of AI-based
solution. While inflation has skyrocketed the prices of almost everything, the cost
for accessing AI has significantly dropped. When I first started using AI, a good plan
with access to only one central AI system and very limited abilities cost $99 a month.
But now you can use a tool like Magai to use a whole bunch of different language and image-based
AI tools starting at only $19 a month. Now, full disclosure, I am an affiliate for Magai,
but I'm also a customer. In fact, my yearly subscription just renewed. But if you purchase
through my link on my website, that is an affiliate link, I do earn a commission from
that. But I recommend things I truly believe in, regardless of earnings, and I'm a customer
myself. All this AI potential means we need to quote the line from Spider-Man, "With
great power comes great responsibility." And thus why I want to share these warnings
with you to advocate for a responsible use of generative AI, large language models, machine
learning, or whatever you want to call it. And these terms are often used interchangeably.
These warnings apply to all kinds of content creation, not only podcasting. It could be
blogging, it could be posting on social networks, it could be making videos for YouTube, which
is not podcasting. I'm still going to do an episode about that soon. And in case you're
wondering, I did not use AI to create any of this content. But I might be using some
AI to transcribe or help me market this content. In fact, I did ask an AI a question related
to this content just out of curiosity to see what the AI gave me. And I looked at the results
and thought, okay, that's content, yes, but that doesn't communicate what I want to communicate.
So I completely ignored everything it gave me and made my own content, which I was doing
anyway. And so no AI used in the making of this content. And a little aside too, most
of these warnings I'm going to share with you apply to generative AI, but not what we
could call repurposing or enhancement AI. I want this to be clear. Because if you are
using an AI to enhance what you do, that's different from this. I'm talking about using
AI to essentially create something from nothing. I still think AI can be a great assistant
on your content. And the emphasis there is on and your content. Not creating it for you,
but doing something with the content you already created. For example, processing audio or
video, clipping excerpts, suggesting marketing approaches, improving how things communicate,
repurposing, and more. All of these things start with your intelligence. And then the
AI works from that. But I see most of these warnings that I'm going to share with you
as applying solely to generative AI, or when you start with nothing but a prompt. So now
onto the warnings. If you'd like to follow along with the notes, they're a simple tap
or swipe away inside your podcast app or go to theaudacitytopodcast.com/aiwarnings.
Warning #1. Undisclosed use of generative AI can get you in trouble. YouTube, social
networks, and lots of other websites and platforms are starting to require you to disclose whenever
you're putting out content generated by AI. And I think this is a good thing to do as
it helps the potential audience know what kind of quality to expect. Even for things
like podcast transcripts, it's good to disclose whether AI was used to transcribe the audio.
As I mentioned in my previous episode about using podcast transcripts, and the link to
that is in the notes for this episode, someone on your podcast might say "I love to lil
puppies" but the AI might transcribe it as "I love to kill puppies". Sometimes
even omitting a single word can drastically alter the meaning. For example, imagine accidentally
omitting the word "not" in a sentence like "I'm not guilty". This doesn't
necessarily mean you must disclose every time you use AI in any capacity. Like you should
be disclosing whenever you're compensated for anything you talk about. I've done
a whole episode previously about disclosing when you're compensated. Go listen to that
episode, it's really important for you. Link in the notes. But you should be aware
of the requirements of the platforms and seek to always be above reproach. Don't seek
to see what you can get away with, but always try to be above that, and far above it so
you never have to worry about if the rules change. And if you're concerned about how
it might affect your reputation if you disclose every time you use AI, then here's a radical
thought – maybe don't use AI. And more on that in point 11.
Warning number 2. AI often hallucinates facts and citations. ChatGPT, Claude, Grok, Gemini,
and all the text-based AIs we know are also called Large Language Models or LLMs, which
is what I'll be using to refer to these types of AIs for most of this episode. And
I think that's a much better term anyway, because they're not actually intelligent.
They're simply good with language. This is why you'll often see LLMs write something
that grammatically makes sense, but is conceptually nonsense. In other words, LLMs know how to
write sentences. For example, I sometimes like to ask AI "Who is Daniel J. Lewis?"
I don't do that because of any kind of ego complex, but because I'm an interesting
test subject for LLMs since I am a partially public figure, but I also have a name very
close to a celebrity, Daniel J. Lewis. Thus, the responses LLMs give me often conflate
the two of us (a mistake I wish my bank would make) and I've seen responses that both
describe me as a podcasting industry expert and highlight my roles in There Will Be Blood
and The Last of the Mohicans. I'm sure I'm not helping any LLMs scraping my content by
writing that information together in close proximity like that in my notes for this episode,
but that's where people have to look over this.
So for anything an AI or an LLM writes for you or creates for you or whatever it is,
I urge you to fact check it. I've even seen some responses completely make up citations
that don't exist. So even if it says "According to CNN or according to such and such study
by such and such doctor, this is the thing" look that up and if you can't find it, don't
use it. Make sure you fact check. Make sure you check any citations if it gives you one,
even if it looks like a valid URL, visit it. If it's a broken link and you can't find
the replacement, do not use it.
Warning #3. AI lacks humanity. From the moment of conception, you have been a unique being
of tremendous value and potential with unique DNA, unique experiences, unique thoughts,
unique emotions, and more. Like a snowflake, there will never be someone or something exactly
like you. Not even an AI trained on all of your content. Like a comedian recently had
done to him after he had died, it still wasn't him and it wasn't as funny as he was. That's
what a lot of people were saying. That even led to a whole lawsuit.
AI is not an actual intelligence and I believe it never will be. And AI will never be human.
But you are. You can feel, express, and empathize through emotion. You can question, explore,
change your mind, or change other people's minds. You can create things of great beauty
and originality with no outside prompting. And it's because of this that I think AI
can never replace you. While it might have better skills than you in some areas, it will
never beat the quality and personableness (which is an actual word) that you can offer.
#4. AI-created images can be humiliating. AI image models have produced some hilarious
or nightmarish results and lots of things that are physically impossible. Like how AI
can hallucinate facts and citations, it can also make images that look real until you
actually pay attention to the details. And sometimes you don't even have to look very
closely to realize how ridiculous it looks even though it looks like a real photograph.
Like the classic thing of a hand shaking a hand that's shaking another hand. Where
you see just this arm with two hands coming out of the arm in the middle. It looks like
an actual photograph because of the quality of it, the lighting, the shading, all of that.
But you know looking at it, that's impossible. That's not real. That's you using your
intelligence that is more intelligent than the "artificial intelligence". Emphasis
on the artificial part there. And here are some things, lest you think this is like old
models and I have seen some newer models that do things a lot better, certainly. So the
problems that you see and that gets made fun of. And I love the minions in a trailer for
Despicable Me that's coming out that makes fun of this whole AI thing. It makes total
sense. And also Babylon Bee has done a funny thing about what's behind AI. But on current
image models, as of April 2024, I've still seen some examples of problems I've seen
from images that either I've generated or I've seen other people generate with current
generation AI models. Backwards hands, limbs that seamlessly merge into the surroundings,
misspelled text that you might not notice unless you try to actually read it or you
pay attention to it, device parts that disappear into nowhere, placements that are physically
impossible, broken, slanted, or curvy lines that absolutely should be straight and connected,
incorrect size ratios between people or other objects, and more stuff like that, both in
picture form and especially in video form. Watch out for these things and everything
else too. And it's not really like I can make a list of here are the 10 things you
should check every image for because you just have to use your intelligence to check the
artificial intelligence. So for any image you generate or that someone else gives you
that they might have generated with AI, look at it very carefully to ensure everything
about it makes sense and isn't simply a pretty, but embarrassing, combination of pixels.
For this reason, you might actually want your image AI to make artwork that is obviously
not photorealistic because then you can get away with some of these things that aren't
correct. It's like the uncanny valley thing that some people talk about. Like the first
time that I watched the movie that stars Tom Hanks and Tom Hanks and Tom Hanks and Tom
Hanks and Tom Hanks and Tom Hanks is basically everyone in the movie, Polar Express. I remember
I was super into 3D animation at that time and doing some of my own 3D animation work.
And so this movie was heralded as this is the best 3D animated movie yet. And it is
so realistic. I watched it and I was freaked out because the facial animations just weren't
correct and the eye movements were really weird and certain stuff that even as I, a
very, very junior, inexperienced animator could tell this just doesn't look right.
It's because they tried to make it look realistic that it looked really bad. If they
instead went like the Pixar route, which has always looked cartoonish in their original
movies, their newer movies are so much better and technology's gotten a whole lot better.
But when you embrace something like that and you don't try to make it look realistic,
then you get a little bit more artistic license. Like it's totally okay for heads to be disproportionately
larger than they should be for adults or children or eyes or smiles or expressions or anything
like that. Animators know this kind of thing that they can get away with and that's totally
okay. You can do that same kind of thing with AI generated images when you are not trying
to make it look photorealistic. But anyway, even if you do make some kind of abstract
or cartoonish or illustrated or 3D looking or whatever it is kind of image, make sure
you check it. Check all the limbs, check all the text, check the eyeballs, all of that
stuff. Look very closely at it because it can be really embarrassing if you're putting
this bad image out there along with content that you're trying to get accepted as professional
content. And I see this happen quite frequently with businesses, very large businesses that
I think should know better and yet they make these mistakes. Sometimes want to make fun
of them and maybe I'll make a website specifically for that or maybe someone else will. Maybe
you should make a video podcast where you make fun of the bad AI stuff out there. That
could be really fun. But moving on to warning number five, AI is biased because it was fed
biased content and programmed by biased people. Now big disclaimer here, the following is
not intended to push a political or moral direction but just to expose some facts. So
that said, let me get into this. Please keep that in mind. I'm not trying to push a particular
political or moral perspective here. Most LLMs lean a particular political and moral
direction because they were trained with content that leaned that direction. Thus, even if
not intentional, the outputs will often have the same political and moral leaning. Imagine
it this way, if the majority of content on the internet, especially the most popular
sites said that 2+2=5, then LLMs trained from internet content would also propagate that
fallacy because of how much there is out there, how often that lie is spread, and how many
places are citing that lie, the LLMs would just also spread that. Furthermore, many of
the companies behind these AIs or LLMs also lean the same political and moral direction
as the majority of the internet and so they will favor content from that same echo chamber
and sometimes even intentionally train the AI to push that agenda. For a great example
of this, or really a shameful example of this, look at the bad images that Google Gemini
was originally generating, they later fixed it or tried to, even going so far as to render
Nazis as Asians or Blacks instead of Whites because of diversity, inclusion, and equity.
And that's why there's a market for LLMs that lean the opposite direction. Even taking
out the political and moral leanings, I see LLMs regularly put out "myth information"
(I just love saying that) even in the podcasting space, like saying that podcast ratings and
reviews affect your rankings in Apple Podcasts. That is not true. But it's been said so
many times on the internet that LLMs think it's true. It's the 2+2=5 and so many
people on the internet have said that, the LLMs think that too, and that's the kind
of information they will give you. And because of that, and sometimes it's just the nature
of what content is out there which doesn't necessarily reflect the thinking of the actual
majority or the actual population of people. It's just within that particular echo chamber.
Keep that in mind and that's why it happens. Sometimes it's intentional, sometimes it's
just the nature of the beast. And again, I say this not to push a political or moral
perspective but just to point out that that does exist and that is a fact of how some
of these LLMs operate.
Moving on to warning number 6. Content from AI always needs editing. It's because of
these previous warnings that I come to this one. Edit, edit, edit. I'd love to hear
your opinion on this too, but I'm starting to think it reflects worse on someone when
they put out bad AI-created content than if they put out authentic content with typos
or small mistakes. What do you think? Do you agree? It's kind of the direction I'm leaning.
For example, you might accidentally write about George Wishington instead of George
Washington, but an AI might think that George Washington fought in World War II. Which,
in case you didn't know, George Washington didn't fight in World War II. In this case,
your typo is a human error and your meaning could probably still be understood by your
context. But if you put out something that an AI hallucinated, then people have to wonder
if you're actually that misinformed, also known as stupid.
Number 7. AI-generated content raises copyright concerns. In the United States of America
and some other countries, anything you create is considered immediately and automatically
protected by copyright. And thus, you reserve all rights to it. That's right, it's really
not necessary anymore to write "all rights reserved" (at least most of the time). But,
you also share or forfeit some of your rights when you consent to using some tools or publishing
through some platforms. For example, most places have clauses in their terms of service
that allow them to use the content you provide, in whatever form that is, in their own marketing
materials. This could be as simple as your podcast cover art, visible, with 999 others
on a grid image for the app's homepage. You have to grant them permission for that.
They're not going to do that automatically without your permission. You're granting
them that permission in the terms of service. That's super innocent. Some people might
read something that allows that in the terms of service and think it's malicious, but
it's totally innocent. Or it could mean you granted the platform a license to clip
your content and use that in an advertisement for their platform. Maybe they're saying,
"Here are all the greatest podcasts!" and then they have a little clip of your podcast
and someone else's podcast and then someone else's podcast and then they promote their
own platform. Again, that's innocent. That could even be good for you because you got
featured! While most of these terms of service have been safe, despite some fear-mongering
and misinterpretations here and there, some places are starting to update their terms
of service, which require your consent in order to continue existing on that platform
or using that platform. And in so doing, you are giving them a license to use your content
to train their AI tools. Even if your content has a registered copyright, you are still
granting other places licenses to use your copyrighted content. And if you, the copyright
holder, share that license or grant that license to someone else, you can't just say, "It's
copyrighted! You can't do that!" Well, no, you actually said you agreed and gave
them the right to do that. However, it's been uncovered that many LLMs were trained
on copyrighted material without any license or permission of any sort from the copyright
holders. And if you use an LLM to generate new content from nothing, you might potentially
be infringing on someone else's intellectual property rights. And you would be held liable
for that. Just like if you hire a cheap "so-called designer" to make your podcast cover art
for you and they steal images from a Google image search, you would be liable for that
theft. And you would be liable for any kind of theft if you use an LLM to generate basically
stolen content. Some might argue that this isn't very different from going out and
reading all the content yourself and writing your own conglomeration of your newfound knowledge.
But even then, you can be guilty of plagiarism by putting forth something as your idea when
it was actually someone else's. And the more niche the subject is, the less information
there was to train the AI, or that there is now to train whatever AI models are learning
content currently, and thus the higher chance of it outright copying other information or
making up something factually incorrect. Go back to number two for that. Like, when I
first started using AI, none of the AI models knew anything about COVID-19. So if you asked
it to write about COVID-19, it would make something up, whatever it thought COVID-19
meant. You had to kind of tell it, "This is what COVID-19 is, now write an article
about this thing I just told you about." Now, though, the models are more up-to-date
on their information. But there's going to come a point where you might ask the AI,
"Who is the president?" immediately after the new president is sworn in, and the AI
won't know it because the AI is not a source of information, it just knows how to write
sentences. Or you might ask it certain questions, and it could be quoting from someone else's
article, it might have done just a little bit of word spinning. You really can't know
sometimes, because it could be very close, but not quite close enough to be detectable.
However, this is probably never a problem when you're using AI on your already created
content. Warning #8. AI might already be stealing
your intellectual property. And we could put quotation marks around "stealing" there,
if it makes you feel better. I've had my own original content and images plagiarized
or directly stolen before. But AI is making it only easier for that to happen, and harder
for me to catch it. For example, I often talk about my Podcasting P.R.O.F.I.T. Paradigm. P-R-O-F-I-T:
Popularity, relationships, opportunities, fun, income, or tangibles. I did an episode
about that just recently. If someone used an AI to talk about podcasting profit and
replaced only one of those words of mine, it's still theft. But it wouldn't be as
easy to spot because I wouldn't know which word they took out or what word they put in
instead. And because LLMs have been trained on a large percentage of the internet, it's
very possible your own content has already been scraped and used in the training, but
you might never know. That could be either your written content or your recorded content.
Many places are proposing legislation that would require AI companies to disclose their
sources, allow people to have their content removed or exempted, or only use properly
licensed content for training the AI models. What a novel thought, right? This is why some
AI companies have taken an interest in purchasing publishing companies that own the rights to
large amounts of content, then they can use that content to train their model instead
of having to scrape content off the internet. And I think you should have this protection
over your own content even without having to do the technical process of blocking the
AI user agents from scraping your website or transcribing your audio or video. Did you
even know that you could do that, by the way? You could find out what are the user agents,
what are the bots that are being used from some of these models, and you can put in your
robots.txt file on your website to block those bots from accessing your website and hope
that they respect that. Or you could put in a firewall restriction that prevents any user
agent that matches that name from scraping your content, but that only works if that
particular bot is using an identifiable user agent. And I just now got technical for a
very specific reason. You should not have to understand any of that. You should be able
to just put your content out there and know no one is going to steal it. So I support
the idea of saying, companies, you need to stop scraping other people's content unless
you have their permission to do so. And we as content creators need to pay very close
attention to the terms of service we say that we're agreeing to. Because many of these social
media sites are already doing this same kind of thing, or they make some kind of non-obvious
change to their terms of service. And what do most of us do? We just click that checkbox
that says, "Yes, I have read and agreed to the terms of service," without actually reading
what we're agreeing to. And we're signing away our rights, and we don't even realize
it sometimes. You might be granting permission to these companies to copy your work, and
then if someone else used one of these LLMs to copy your work, you might not have a good
case against them because you granted the company to use your work, and that company,
in their terms of service, say something basically like, "You're also granting anyone who
uses their product to also use your content." That can get you in trouble, or it can prevent
you from getting other people, guilty people, in trouble for stealing your content. And
this is happening. For example, Reddit, Zoom, and XTwitter have used or continue to use
content on their platforms to train their own AI models, and we've probably given them
the right to do so. And more and more companies are going to start doing this, and your only
option is to say, "No, I don't agree to this," and probably delete your account,
and you miss out on the benefits of using that platform, or that tool, or whatever it
is. Also watch out for terms of service that allow the AI to train itself from whatever
you input into the AI. That's the case for ChatGPT, but supposedly not for the API that
accesses the same OpenAI GPT model, and that's what powers ChatGPT. The ChatGPT is just a
particular front face for the backend model, and many third-party websites, like Magai,
can access the exact same model through an API, and API is a way that programs communicate
with each other. And supposedly, feeding content to the AI and getting content back through
the API is protected from training that AI on anything. But, you need to read the terms
of service to know, so don't give it any kinds of special trade secrets or anything
like that. You might be disclosing something to the AI that should be kept secret. Watch
out.
Warning number nine. Claiming "fair use" might require a higher standard. I think anyone
using AI might face a more difficult time trying to use the "fair use" claim as
a legal defense if you're taken to court. Especially if you haven't properly disclosed
your use of AI, like I talked about in warning number one. One of my favorite things to test
on an image-generating AI is giving it the prompt "Harrison Ford as a pirate". That's
simple and innocent fun, and I'll probably never publish that for the public. It's
just something silly I do just to see what kind of result I get. And sometimes, the AI
models won't generate an image of a celebrity. I think that's sometimes a good idea, because
then that can prevent some malicious stuff from happening. Sometimes the AI systems know
how to recognize malicious content and can prevent you from generating that, but they'll
let you generate something fun, like Harrison Ford as a pirate. But imagine if I used AI
to make a realistic photo of Harrison Ford using or endorsing my products. That's illegal.
Using a real photo of them, or even just an artificial photo showing them using my products.
That would be illegal. Or maybe using a voice or video AI to make Harrison Ford say something
he didn't say. Indeed, I've seen some intentionally hilarious results with AI. And those kinds
of things are often excused when they don't cause harm and are obviously parodies. Now,
this is not legal advice. I'm not saying you can do this, only that this is an observation
that I see this happening a lot and it's obvious most of the time that these things are parodies
and I think that's why they're excused as fair use. That doesn't mean you can do it
too. It's just something that I see happening and it can be really funny to see some of
this stuff. There's a particular Twitter account that I follow of someone who has for months
made hilarious, obviously AI generated images of a particular person and it's been hilarious
to see. Just this person as a pirate, as an astronaut, as whatever, as a shoe, as a microphone,
as whatever. Things like that. And it is really funny to see. And people for years have been
doing that kind of thing with Photoshop or their own artistic skills with drawing or
paint or anything like that. So it's not like AI has enabled something to happen that hasn't
happened before. It's the accessibility of it and how quickly someone can do it and sometimes
how realistically it can look. So it's no longer just cutting and pasting someone's
head onto someone else's body doing something wrong, but it's now it can look exactly like
that person doing something wrong or doing something that they didn't give their consent
or license for you to make it look like they're doing. But AI lets things get far more complicated.
And far too easily. Copying or making a derivative have some clear limitations even within fair
use stuff. There are clear limitations of "no, this is not fair use". But generating
something that seems real and uses someone else's likeness or intellectual property
might be in a whole different category and we might see new laws about that kind of thing.
Thus, while I cannot give you legal advice as to what you're allowed to do, I can urge
you to NOT do anything that might get you in trouble. Maybe even just for the mental
exercise of this, pretend there's not even such a thing as fair use when it comes to
how you use AI to create stuff for you. And then that might help you to be above reproach.
Concluding number 10. Affiliate marketing with AI might get you in trouble. AIs, LLMs,
or whatever you want to call them, are very good at creating a lot of content very quickly.
And that is very alluring to people who want content only for the purpose of promoting
their affiliate links. I even saw that years ago when I was among the early users of what's
now called Jasper. I would see people frequently talk and ask about what kinds of inputs could
be used to get an AI to write a full "review" (massive quotation marks around that) of an
affiliate product. But remember that thing about how large language models are good at
writing sentences? But newsflash, they're not actually good at testing products, or
sharing experiences, or offering opinions. They're good at writing sentences. Thus,
using AI to write a "review" could lead to misleading information about the product,
about its uses, about who knows what. Is anyone actually reading the stuff that's created
by the AI? Doesn't seem like whoever's publishing it sometimes. For probably this
reason and more, some places will probably start to forbid using AI to create content
for promoting their products through affiliate links. For example, and I haven't heard
anyone talking about this, the Amazon Associates Operating Agreement was updated effective
March 1st, 2024, and in their "What's Changed" note, which I link to, might be
replaced at some point in the future, but I link to it in the notes for this episode,
it has this point as "This is what's changed." It says this, and I quote, "Revised the
language in Section 5 of the Participation Requirements to clarify that program content
and special links (special links are your affiliate links, really) should not be used
in connection with generative AI." Now at first glance, that sounds like they're
saying that they are completely forbidding the use of generative AI to promote your Amazon
affiliate links. However, the actual points in the operating agreement seem to restrict
using AI on the Amazon site content, and especially training the AI, maybe not necessarily on
creating content that promotes the Amazon link. It's a kind of grey line, and this
is again where I talk about "you need to be above reproach." So here, this is going
to be really dry, but I will quote to you the two sections that I thought seemed relevant
to this idea of generative AI or machine learning as it relates to the Amazon affiliate program
called Amazon Associates. From Section 2.E, and I have the links to this in the notes
by the way, at theaudacitytopodcast.com/aiwarnings, it says, "You will not, without our express
prior written approval, access or use product advertising API or data feeds for the purpose
of aggregating, analyzing, extracting, or repurposing any product advertising content
or in connection with any software or other application intended for use by persons or
entities that offer products on an Amazon site or in the direct training or fine-tuning
of a machine learning model." Wasn't that a wonderful long run-on sentence. That's
very technical and it is specifically talking about the API and data feeds, not simply a
link. However, moving on to Section 5.D, "Distribution of special links through software and devices,"
it says, and I quote, "You will not use any program content or special link or otherwise
link to an Amazon site on or in connection with any client-side software application
e.g. a browser plugin, helper object, toolbar, extension, component, or any other application
executable or installable by an end user." You know what, let's just skip to the interesting
part. "You will not, with or express written approval," yes, that's actually what it
says, they have a typo in there. I think it should be "without our express written approval,
use or allow any third party to use any special links," again, special links are your affiliate
links, "or program content to develop machine learning models or related technology." These
are the Amazon program policies that were instituted on March 1st, 2024 and as I extracted
them on April 14th, 2024. And the emphasis in the notes is my own emphasis added. Now,
after that super dry section, you can look at the notes to read that again and also get
the link to the actual policy. The first part is clearly forbidding using the Amazon API
with an AI model to programmatically create content for you. For example, you can't set
it up that whenever a new product comes out that matches this particular keyword to automatically
generate a blog post for you from that Amazon link. That would be forbidden. However, it
seems to still allow you to use AI to create your content about the product itself and
even use your Amazon links in that content, but you should not give the links to an AI
system that reads the content on the website and generates content for you from the content
on Amazon's website. So, kind of technical there, but even if you're just creating your
own original content with an AI and only linking to Amazon's page for the affiliate links,
I still think you shouldn't use AI to do this. I, for one, would love to see a stop to all
the AI-generated worthless "reviews" – again, massive quotation marks around that – on
YouTube and other places. For example, I've got one in the notes for this episode. It's
from the YouTube channel The Smart Kitchen. You can look them up if you want to, but it's
just AI-generated garbage. It is a computer voice, low-quality recording at that, and
it's stock footage or footage from the commercials of these different products. And all that
they've really done, probably, is just looked up what are the top 5 search results for this
or what are the most rated products on Amazon for this, and then they run it through an
AI, maybe even violating the Amazon Associates Terms of Service. And then you end up with
content that repeats itself that's ridiculous. I see this often. I hate it when I run into
a video where it looks like it answers what I'm looking for, and it's comparing these
products when it's just this AI garbage. And, for example, if it's a knife, one section
will say "Are you looking to cut things?" Then look no further than the such-and-such
knife. It's great at cutting things. Now, it's not that stupid with how it creates
the content, but it's that kind of thing. Where it's like saying "Are you looking
to cut vegetables and fruits?" Well, yes. Why would I want a knife? What do you think
I'm going to do with the knife if not cut food with it? And then they have the sections
for the different products, and then they present them in different ways with different
lead-in introductions like that, as if one product is designed for cutting vegetables
and the other one isn't. They're all knives. They're all designed for cutting vegetables
and fruit and meat and whatever else. It's not like one is designed for vegetables and
one isn't. They're knives. They're all the same style of knife. They're just different
brands. Can you tell? This whole episode, I know I've gone on several soapboxes and
had several examples of bad things, but I do have a good example coming up in just a
moment because as an owner of a couple of affiliate programs myself – did you know,
by the way, that Podgagement has an affiliate program? So if you're a member of Podgagement,
I would love for you to join the Podgagement affiliate program if you think that you might
reach an audience of other podcasters. But because I have multiple affiliate programs
myself that other people can promote my products and earn from any sales that come through
those links, I know that I would not want anyone promoting my products with AI-generated
content. In fact, I think I'm going to update my affiliate terms to explicitly forbid that
kind of garbage content. I want real people with real experiences promoting my products.
For a good example of this, among all of these bad examples I've given and this big soapbox
of an episode and soapbox against this AI-generated trash that I see all over the place, here's
a good example. Danny Brown did a very nice thing in his recent episode where he authentically
promoted my Podgagement service in his episode of One Minute Podcast Tips about two ways
for podcasters to get feedback from their audiences. He promoted Podgagement and he
promoted one of my competitors. That was awesome. And he shared genuine thoughts, human-inspired,
human-created thoughts. That was a great example of it. And I link to it in the notes for this
episode too, where he is authentically recommending it and he is a customer of both products so
he can speak from his experience. An AI cannot do that. An AI cannot tell you why this feature
might be better for some people than others. Yes, it can write sentences, but it can't
actually communicate what people want to know or most likely can't. And even if it could,
I don't think you should use it for that. I think when it comes to some of this stuff,
you should be creating the content yourself. That's why I consider this a warning. Because
originally when I first read that, and I read only that brief note from Amazon of the short
"What's Changed?" when I read that thing that said "Program content and special links should
not be used in connection with generative AI." I actually thought that meant you cannot create
a blog post with AI that links to an Amazon product. That's the way I read that. I don't
think that's actually the correct reading of that based on actually reading the actual
terms of service, operation agreement, and all of that. But they could change that. And
I don't think you should create content in that way anyway.
Moving on to number 11. I spent a lot of time on that one. Can you tell? I am passionate
about this and I want you to succeed. And that's why I come to this. Last but certainly
not least, relying on AI can cost your authority and influence. I urge you to consider the
intangible cost of relying on any kind of AI as you create your podcast episodes or
any other kind of content. I've said for many years that what I love about podcasting
is that it allows you to communicate with your voice. So people can hear your authentic
emotions and they can hear how well you communicate your thoughts. Even if you do some editing,
they can still hear you. Imagine if you used an AI to create and communicate all your,
quotation marks around that, all your content. And then you're put on a stage in front
of a live audience and you have done no preparation, aside from any stage fright that you'll
get in that situation. Could you actually communicate your message authentically, understandably,
and memorably if you don't have any notes, you haven't prepared, just speaking from
what you know and your expertise and your passion. Practical example of that.
Several years ago, I was invited to speak in person about podcasting to a Cincinnati
business group. And for the first time ever in my life, I completely forgot about it.
I remembered only because about an hour before I was supposed to speak, the organizer sent
me a kind message just to say how excited she was to have me and I think to give me
a heads up about parking or what door to walk through or something like that. It certainly
wasn't she was reminding me that I was supposed to be there. The event was about 45 minutes
away so I had only enough time to throw some stuff in my car and think about my presentation
on the drive up. Now imagine if AI was my crutch and most of my content had been created,
organized, or even optimized by AI. What kind of predicament would I have gotten myself
into? Instead, I was able to speak for about half an hour and confidently and thoroughly
answer 15 minutes of questions, all with no notes except a 5 word outline in my head and
I think I nailed it. I could do that because I know my stuff, inside and out. I've created
how many thousands of hours of content and pages of content about podcasting and still
so much more that I want to share and teach you about podcasting. And I don't share this
to brag about me or try to make you think I'm some amazing thing or anything like that.
Please understand that and hear my heart in this. I share this to point out what a catastrophe
that could have been if I was merely a fraud using ChatGPT. And if I got there to the event,
ChatGPT and even some of these AI models didn't even exist back then. But if I got there to
the event and I was glued to my phone while I was speaking because I had typed something
into ChatGPT and I was trying to speak from what ChatGPT told me to say, imagine what
would have happened then. So don't let AI cost your authority and influence. Certainly,
artificial intelligence can be a really powerful tool to help you do many things or save lots
of time. But don't trade your value for artificial intelligence. That's what this really all
comes down to. These 11 warnings. Undisclosed use of generative AI can get you in trouble.
2. AI often hallucinates facts and citations. 3. AI lacks humanity. 4. AI created images
can be humiliating. 5. AI is biased because it was fed biased content and programmed by
biased people. 6. Content from AI always needs editing. 7. AI generated content raises copyright
concerns. 8. AI might already be stealing your intellectual property. 9. Claiming "fair
use" might require a higher standard. 10. Affiliate marketing with AI might get you
in trouble. 11. Relying on AI can cost your authority and influence. It really comes down
to that. I don't want you to pay that price. The $19 or whatever dollars or yen or whatever
you pay with per month to use AI and whatever time that saves you to create content for
you. It's not worth it. Put yourself authentically out there. And that is so much better. Going
back to that soapbox example of those super frustrating videos that I find on YouTube
about products and stuff. You know what that does for me? Well, I downvote those videos
obviously. I dislike them. I never look at videos again from that channel. And instead,
because of that darkness that AI has created, instead that makes the people who share genuine
content despite their mistakes or as Mike Dell likes to quote "warts and all" when
they make content that is authentic and sharing their opinions, even if it's not thorough,
even if it's not comparing every option out there, even if they didn't test every feature
of the product, but because it was authentic, it was them, it was their original perspective,
their experiences, their opinions, their expertise, even if they're not experts in it, because
it was authentically them, those kinds of pieces of content, videos, episodes, articles,
anything like that, those become shining lights to me in this darkness of all this cheap AI-generated
content or garbage that's out there. The authentic people then shine. And I've purchased products
because of that. Not because of what some stupid AI video recommended or what some badly
written AI article that starts off telling me about why Amazon is a popular retailer
and offers many details. It's like, just get to the actual content and tell me about the
product I want to know about. Instead of that kind of garbage, seeing someone authentically
communicate why they like that product, that bears so much more weight. So in this world
where people are relying more and more on AI to shortcut stuff and create their content
for them, if you continue to put in the work and create quality content, well the bar has
been lowered so much by people using AI, your quality content can stand out. Then if you're
stuck in front of an audience and you don't have notes, you can speak from your authentic
knowledge, your passions, and become an authority and an influencer in your space, or make change,
or inspire laughter, or share stories, whatever it is that you are doing, whatever that profit
is that you're pursuing for yourself and for your audience through your podcast, I will
tell you this, you are far more likely to achieve that by doing things authentically.
Even if there are some mistakes here and there, I think you're far more likely to achieve
that authentically than with AI. Use your authentic intelligence, not an artificial
intelligence to create your content. I want to be clear about that. I'm talking about
creating your content for you because you know your topic and you have passion and AI
does not. For the sake of time, because this episode has already gone on so long, I'm going
to skip the community corner for now. That will be in an upcoming episode, but certainly
please if you found this content valuable, inspirational, if this has given you energy
that you needed, because I'm certainly enthused right now, put a number on that. Consider
giving it back to the podcast and I'd really appreciate that. If you're in a modern podcast
app, you can send satoshis, maybe even a donation, or go to theaudacitytopodcast.com/giveback.
Or if nothing else, share this episode with someone else. Get someone else listening to
this podcast and I would be very grateful for that. The notes and the links that I mentioned
for this episode are at theaudacitytopodcast.com/aiwarnings. Now that I've given you some of the guts and
taught you some of the tools, it's time for you to authentically go start and grow your
own podcast for passion and profit. I'm Daniel J. Lewis from theaudacitytopodcast.com.
Thanks for listening.
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