THE INSPIRATION PLACE PODCAST
Miriam Schulman: Computers don’t have souls.
Candice Davis: The complete and total lack of humanity.
Miriam Schulman: It doesn’t make friends, it doesn’t make enemies. It doesn’t have screwed up childhoods to pull, to pull good stories from.
Candice Davis: Nope. Doesn’t have trauma, right?
Miriam Schulman: Never tried to die but failed. Doesn’t understand what that’s like.
Candice Davis: I do believe AI will reach a point where it’s much better than it is right now but I don’t believe it’s ever going to have the soulfulness that you’re talking about.
Speaker 2: It’s the Inspiration Place podcast with artist Miriam Schulman. Welcome to the Inspiration Place Podcast, an art world insider podcast for artists by an artist where each week we go behind the scenes to uncover the perspiration and inspiration behind the art. And now your host, Miriam Schulman.
Miriam Schulman: Well, hey there, it’s Miriam Schulman here. Welcome to the Inspiration Place. I’m your curator of inspiration, and this is episode number 313. Today, we have a returning guest. We have book coach Candice L. Davis. She was the editor I hired when I was struggling through writing *Artpreneur*, and she helped me basically coach me on my mindset, but also really helped make the book much more valuable. So, I’m actually having her help me with my next book, which I’ve been talking about for a long time, but doing more talking about it than doing it. Which is why I decided I need a coach, just like I tell my clients why they need a coach to work with me. So, it’s much easier when you have some help. You’ll get there faster and with just a lot more grace, ease, and flow. So, we were discussing my next book, and then we got on the topic of ChatGPT and AI and what’s wrong with it. And I said, “You know what, Candice? This is going to make an amazing podcast episode. Let’s get you scheduled so we can talk about it.” So, without further ado, I want you to listen in on our conversation: 12 Reasons why the copy you’re producing with AI still stinks.
Candice Davis: Hey.
Miriam Schulman: Hey, beautiful.
Candice Davis: How are you?
Miriam Schulman: Good. How are you?
Candice Davis: I am so good, thankfully. 2023 was wild, man. Yeah, it was wild.
Miriam Schulman: Still wild?
Candice Davis: It’s still a bit wild.
Miriam Schulman: But now I’m used to wild so.
Candice Davis: Yeah.
Miriam Schulman: Unfortunately.
Candice Davis: Yeah, yeah, I can imagine. You know, this parenthood thing. They didn’t warn us appropriately. I feel.
Miriam Schulman: No, no, they didn’t. It’s like we have the guidebook for France and we landed in Italy.
Candice Davis: It’s not working.
Miriam Schulman: No, it’s like I don’t have the guidebook for Italy. Like, Italy is a great country. But I didn’t learn Italian and —
Candice Davis: No idea what the hell I’m doing.
Miriam Schulman: I don’t know what I’m doing. What happened to Paris? You know, I know? Today we’re here to talk about all the things we don’t like about ChatGPT.
Candice Davis: Ugh.
Miriam Schulman: I love that noise you just made. I think we need to take turns on this. It’s like we’re not going to run out of things for a while.
Candice Davis: Oh my God. No. Okay, so like, be specific.
Miriam Schulman: Like. Yeah. Okay.
Candice Davis: Well my first issue is that it’s all other people’s copyrighted work that they have not been compensated for is being scraped together for you to create something that you’re being convinced is new. It’s not new. It’s stolen work.
Miriam Schulman: Yeah. Okay. So number one is it’s stolen work. Let’s just be clear, okay? Stolen work.
Candice Davis: It’s literally other people’s copyrighted work.
Miriam Schulman: Yeah.
Candice Davis: Would you like someone to come over to your website and copy your stuff and reuse it for their own purposes?
Miriam Schulman: No. Well, actually, somebody emailed me who attended, like, some summit I did. I’m sorry if you’re listening, ma’am. Whatever. I forgot your name. And she basically said, “I summarized what you wrote, and it’s 7000 words. Can I publish it on my blog?” I was like, “7000 words is not a summary.” I said, “Please email it to my team.” And then I didn’t even want to look at it. And my team says, “Should I look at this?” Not even knowing about the other conversation? And my team was like, “It’s word for word what’s in your book, Miriam.” I was like, “Yes. And you may hate on me if you’re listening. If that’s you, like, you can’t publish it. HarperCollins would be very unhappy if they found out that you basically lifted my talk and published it.”
Candice Davis: I would hope Harpercollins would sue. And I’m not a sue happy person. I’m not into lawsuit, frivolous lawsuits, but there has to be some kind of consequence for essentially stealing someone else’s words, thoughts, ideas like that is not okay just because it’s easier to do.
Miriam Schulman: Yeah. And it’s not even okay even if you say Miriam said this, I don’t want it printed by you. It’s printed in my book. I want people, you know, Harpercollins wants people to buy my book, not read your free blog post.
Candice Davis: Well and also, if I wanted it to be a free blog post, I would make it a free blog post myself in my own site.
Miriam Schulman: Right? Exactly.
Candice Davis: That’s a lot, friend. I can’t that that took some boldness and some nerve to ask you to your face if it was okay to steal your work and share it.
Miriam Schulman: Yes, I know, I was like.
Candice Davis: And I’m sure people like, because we live in a world where it happens all the time, right? I’m sure in her mind she hadn’t done anything wrong. She had no idea.
Miriam Schulman: She thinks she’s helping me.
Candice Davis: Correct. She’s helping you. She had no idea. That’s not taking my work and distilling it down for other people. In my own words, it’s not helping me. No, it doesn’t help, does not. It doesn’t help. I’ll tell you about the most fun I ever had with, uh, I used Gemini as an experiment, which is a version of ChatGPT. Okay. And I said write copy about whatever, whatever for a middle aged, highly educated, professional black woman. ChatGPT does not know how to talk like people. What I received was honey child.
Miriam Schulman: Good lord.
Candice Davis: I’m sorry, this was Gemini. I don’t mean to insult ChatGPT, though I doubt it would be any better.
Miriam Schulman: Do you know what it is we’re really talking about why AI copy sucks? Okay, so I’m going to just say number two: It’s racist.
Candice Davis: It’s racist and sexist.
Miriam Schulman: Yes.
Candice Davis: It manages to be both. Yes. And it went through this whole thing. And I just kept egging it on, right? Like, it gave me this whole list of things in what was supposed to be a black woman’s voice. And it was pretty much every linquistic stereotype you could pull together, put into one piece of content. And so when I responded to it, I was like, “This sounds crazy.” Like, basically, I was having a conversation with it. And it was like, “Yeah, you know, probably every black woman doesn’t talk like that. And we shouldn’t use stereotypes.” But you just did. Like, this is not a human. This is like the scraping [inaudible]
Miriam Schulman: No. And we talk to it like it’s a human, but it’s not, so, okay, I’m going to go back to the first thing you said other people’s work. But this is so we said other people’s work. Number two, it’s racist and sexist. Number three is because it takes the entire internet. So yes, it’s stolen work. But number three is it’s basically if you were to say to somebody, I want you to write an essay, but before you do that, go read the entire internet. Yeah. And what makes the entire internet good writing?
Candice Davis: Most of it isn’t. Most of it isn’t.
Miriam Schulman: So what you’re getting back is like mediocracy.
Candice Davis: Yeah, correct. You’re asking for it and you’re getting it. You’re getting a scraping of all the mediocre writing on the internet with a sprinkling of what’s really good. But ChatGPT, any general generative AI software doesn’t know what’s good, right? So it’s just putting it all together. Anything it can find on that topic, it’s putting together.
Miriam Schulman: And then going back to your number two, you gave the racist example. So, I formed inside my Artist Incubator membership site these accountability pods, which has been amazing. And I wanted to give them cute names because I didn’t want people referring to it as “I’m in the Tuesday 11 a.m. pod.” Yeah, because that makes no sense. Also, because they’re all over the world. So, I was, you know, I wanted the pods to be named after artists. So I asked ChatGPT to make me a list of names. And then at the end of the list, it says, “Can you include a female artist in the list?” And it’s… and then it did know about female artists because once I said that, it gave me back like Carol Walker and Joan Mitchell, and like it knew. But the first batch might have had Frida Kahlo and that’s it. Like, come on, you can do better.
Candice Davis: Yeah. The assumption is that that’s what you wanted though, right? It was trying to give you what you were supposed to want. Not good, friend. Not good.
Miriam Schulman: No. Okay. So it’s your turn. Tag your it. Number four.
Candice Davis: Oh, there’s no voice. Right. So, whether you’re writing website copy, marketing copy, or a book, interestingly enough, it’d be nice if it had an actual voice to it. ChatGPT, Gemini, whatever the system is, cannot give you a voice. And I’ve seen many people say, “Well, I’ve fed it enough of my content that it now can write in my voice.” If that is the case, friend, you might want to work on your voice. It can’t. It can’t. It completely lacks any kind of voice. It’s distilling it down into what it thinks is the most palatable for readers. The least common denominator.
Miriam Schulman: So my number five is going to be my tells. That you did this. Your subject line is title case with and the first word is unleash or something something.
Candice Davis: Oh, gosh.
Miriam Schulman: Do you know what I’m talking about? We get so many emails now that is unleash and everything’s a journey.
Candice Davis: Uh, if I have to take one more journey in my life. Your marketing journey. Your writing journey.
Miriam Schulman: Would that be number five that there are tells? It’s like there’s certain words it likes that are just so no.
Candice Davis: That real humans don’t really.
Miriam Schulman: Thank you. Oh. So it also likes to begin emails with “I hope this email finds you well,” but then it tries to get creative. “I hope this email finds you well in your artistic endeavors.” “I hope this email finds you well brimming with creativity.” And people will send me emails now that I know they used one of these AI programs to write because they don’t know me and they begin their email with, “I hope this email finds you well.” It’s like, but you don’t know me. Who are you?
Candice Davis: That’s definitely number five.
Miriam Schulman: Okay. Yeah. So number five is tells, right? Um, is there any, okay, so unleash, I hope this email finds you well, is there any other tell? Journey, endeavors or are there any other tells that stand out to you?
Candice Davis: I mean, just words that we don’t use in English. Like I had a series of emails come to me talking about why I wanted to be a part of this herd. I don’t want to be a part of any herd. Actually. I’m good. Like join this program and become a part of our herd. I literally in your life have has a human ever said that to you?
Miriam Schulman: No, yeah. That’s weird. That’s very weird.
Candice Davis: That’s AI written. It has to be.
Miriam Schulman: I know, and I’ll call clients out, like, “This little section here looks like you must have used AI.” And they’ll admit it. And I was like, “And I tell them, you’re smarter. These robots are stupid.”
Candice Davis: I had a client send me a whole chapter that we had to sit down and talk about. “Ma’am, this chapter of your book, you have a brilliant, beautiful, specific voice in every other chapter. And we hit chapter five and that voice disappears. This is so…did you use ChatGPT?”. “Well, yeah, I thought I should use it.” There was no like, she wasn’t attempting to scam anybody or anything like that. But everyone around her is saying, “Use your tools, use your resources.” And so she did. And it was so obviously not her writing. Everyone can tell, friend.
Miriam Schulman: And it’s not even that you can tell it’s not their writing.
Candice Davis: It’s that it’s not human.
Miriam Schulman: It’s like, yes. Okay so I’m going to put in here, um, so you when you said number four, no voice. There’s one thing that one of the AI programs I put in my writing, and it told me that my voice, they was able to describe what my voice is. It says your voice is unapologetically confident. Great. Good to know. So that part it actually was accurate. So when I’ve tested some things out or I’ve tried to do things and I said please rewrite this as unapologetically confident, it cannot do it. So number six. The one thing it cannot seem to get rid of is hesitant language.
Candice Davis: Oh, interesting. I haven’t paid attention to that.
Miriam Schulman: Even when I give it the prompt—so people say, “No, you just have to come up with the right prompt.” Even when I give it the prompt, “Do not use hesitant language,” it still does. So, for those who are listening who don’t know—I know Candace does—but it’s, “My mission is to,” “I aim to,” “I hope to,” “I strive to”… oh my gosh, just do it already. Yes. And my clients will write their about pages with that and I’ll like take that all out. Yeah. It makes you sound so beginner.
Candice Davis: Yeah. Yeah.
Miriam Schulman: It’s not good.
Candice Davis: It’s not a good look. It’s not a good look at all.
Miriam Schulman: And anyone of Candace’s people are listening to this. You don’t want that in your query letters. You don’t want that in your proposals. You don’t want that on your sales pages. “My aim is to teach people”. No, you teach people.
Candice Davis: You teach people, friend. Just do it already. Stop talking about what you’re going to do. This is what you do. It’s really that simple.
Miriam Schulman: Yes. Okay. So I’m going to make this a totally different category. So number six is hesitant language. But number seven and I see humans do this too. So this is just like the computers copying bad writing. So stop telling people how excited you are. Just be excited.
Candice Davis: Yeah, yeah. I do see people do that as well. But yeah. And of course a so what we forget is that artificial intelligence isn’t yet really intelligence. Right. It’s not coming up with stuff on its own. It’s just taking and putting together different things other people have written. So of course it’s grabbing the bad writing. As we said, it’s grabbing the mediocre writing to put out there. I always like, feel like I tend to underwrite because I come from a literary fiction background, we tend to be a little more reserved in our writing than some other people, and I have to really push myself. But if one more person is thrilled or excited in my inbox, I’m going to just like, scream. But, um, okay.
Miriam Schulman: So I mean, ChatGPT does this, but I’ve been reading emails like that.
Candice Davis: Oh, for years.
Miriam Schulman: For years, and from people who should know better. Probably because they have a team who did. What?
Candice Davis: No argument from me.
Miriam Schulman: I know like I’m so excited that I have an online class to announce. You know what? We know you’re excited because we know you’re about to make a lot of money from it. Please tell us why we should be excited. We don’t care that you’re excited. Just announce it for us.
Candice Davis: No. Just announce it for already.
Miriam Schulman: Okay, so what do we call that? What is that called?
Candice Davis: Oh, gosh. Um, it’s kind of—
Miriam Schulman: You know what it is? Okay. No, it’s telling instead of showing or something like it’s something like that.
Candice Davis: I agree. Yeah, it actually is. It actually is. It’s telling, it shouldn’t be showing.
Miriam Schulman: Telling instead of showing. Okay. Yeah. Because we’re going to summarize all these at the end okay. All right. Number eight.
Candice Davis: One of the big issues is so in our world of coaches and online entrepreneurs, people want to be seen as thought leaders and experts. Right. You cannot pull thought leadership from generative AI. You can’t. You cannot come up with new ideas. You can’t come up with new concepts through generative AI. You cannot. It doesn’t have the capacity to do that. It cannot create thought leadership material for you. It can’t.
Miriam Schulman: So how do we say that it’s not creative.
Candice Davis: It’s completely lacking in original ideas.
Miriam Schulman: Yeah, it’s not original. It’s not creativity.
Candice Davis: Right. [Inaudible]
Miriam Schulman: It cannot be creative ideas.
Candice Davis: Yeah.
Miriam Schulman: It can come up with an idea that you didn’t think of, but only an idea that’s all over the internet.
Candice Davis: Correct.
Miriam Schulman: That doesn’t make it a new idea, right?
Candice Davis: It’s not new at all. All right. It is not creative. Not even a new expression of an old idea. It’s someone else’s expression.
Miriam Schulman: That’s right.
Candice Davis: Nothing new about it. Nothing new about it.
Miriam Schulman: And the word salad you’re going to get is also not new.
Candice Davis:: Nope. Nope. And you’re getting the same word salad that someone across the country who’s putting in the same similar prompts, they’re getting the same one you’re getting right. Like you’re getting almost the same content as another person. You have no idea how many people are saying, give me a blog post on the ten best steps to whatever and are getting almost the same thing that you’re getting. And then posting it so you don’t have original content and everyone can tell you don’t have original content.
Miriam Schulman: That’s right. And it’s so boring.
Candice Davis: It’s boring.
Miriam Schulman: There are people who used to be interesting who have started using this AI stuff and I’m like, “Oh my God, do you know what you’re doing?” And it’s so sad—they don’t. They really don’t. It’s people I used to like, too.
Candice Davis: They’ll come back. They’ll come back, they’ll come back. I have to believe.
Miriam Schulman: How about, so good writing. Good copy is about breaking the rules. Yeah, and AI only knows how to follow rules.
Candice Davis: Yeah, and I’m all for knowing how to follow rules. Right? I feel like, really, you can’t really break them unless you at least intuitively know them. Right? You don’t don’t have to study them and be able to rattle them off. But understand the rules so that when you sit down and write, you can do it your way, which allows you to break the rules. I can’t do that.
Miriam Schulman: Yeah.
Candice Davis: It can’t do it.
Miriam Schulman: All right, we’re up to number ten.
Candice Davis: Oh, gosh. Hmm. I feel like this should be a big one, but I’ll be giving you my best. I feel like I mean, at the end of the day, my big question. And this is not a reason why your AI copy sucks. But my big question is why do you feel like you need to use AI? What is it that’s lacking in your either your creativity, your skill set, your belief in those things that makes you feel like you have to use AI. So you using AI makes me question what’s missing here. Like do you not care enough about your audience to invest your actual self in the copy you’re writing?
Miriam Schulman: I’m gonna drop number ten.
Candice Davis: Do it.
Miriam Schulman: Computers don’t have souls.
Candice Davis: Oh. Humanity, friend. The complete and total lack of humanity. And I do believe AI will reach a point where it’s much better than it is right now. Like I just have to go based on what technology has been in the past in other areas, and that it will get better. But I don’t believe it’s ever going to have the soulfulness that you’re talking about.
Miriam Schulman: It doesn’t make friends, it doesn’t make enemies. It doesn’t have screwed up childhoods to pull, to pull good stories from.
Candice Davis: Nope. Doesn’t have trauma, right?
Miriam Schulman: It doesn’t have PTSD, doesn’t have any eating disorder. I mean, like come on. Never try to die but failed. Doesn’t understand what that’s like.
Candice Davis: Not kidding. I did probably my very best, most prolific writing when I was deeply, deeply depressed. And I’m not recommending depression. No, right.
Miriam Schulman: No, right. We’re not saying that. You can be happy and have good writing.
Candice Davis: Correct. And I feel like I’m I’m happy now and I have great writing, but I was incredibly prolific. It just it just honed my focus during that time. Right. And I grew as a writer a lot, and that is an experience AI doesn’t have. In fact, it’s trying to have all the experiences. It’s trying to have all the experiences. It’s almost like when you write for everybody, you’re basically writing for nobody. Yeah, AI is a version of that. It’s trying to be everything. So it ends up being really nothing. Bland, boring. Yeah, yeah, that works out.
Miriam Schulman: Oh, you know, I found I have an 11, which means we’re going to have to have 12 because 11 is a weird number. So number 11 and you’ll think of one I know. Number 11 is that it’s repetitive.
Candice Davis: It is repetitive.
Miriam Schulman: It like repeats itself over and over again. And I’ll say to my clients, like, “I know you wrote this with ChatGPT because you said the same sentence three times.”
Candice Davis: Oh my gosh.
Miriam Schulman: Like you just said it with different words.
Candice Davis: Oh my God. Oh. Okay. So number 12 for me is similar, but different is that it is dumbed down. There is nothing in it that reaches for the next level of anything. Intelligence, articulation, nothing. It is so dumbed down once again trying to be what everyone it thinks wants, right?
Miriam Schulman: Yeah, yeah.
Candice Davis: It’s dumbed down content. You’re not dumb if like if you have a product or a service that you’re selling, whether it’s your art or your coaching or whatever, you’ve got to have something happening in your brain. And this content is so dumbed down. Is that the copy you want to send out?
Miriam Schulman: So now we talked about why it does not write good copy. It cannot write your book for you. I mean, it could, but is it anything anybody wants to read?
Candice Davis: People are doing it every day.
Miriam Schulman: I know, I know, I know, I know all about that. Yes they are. But it’s just so our audience knows that it’s not that we’re technophobes. How are you using? Which I didn’t prepare Candace for, but I’m sure you can give me like five things that you use AI for.
Candice Davis: I don’t need a lot of preparation. Yeah, that’s fine. Like, so it is, sneakily. And I don’t think there is any malice in stuff that we use all the time, right? So, if you use Grammarly, which I don’t, because Grammarly and I don’t get along, but some of my clients do, right? So if you use Grammarly, then they have an AI element to that, that’s just what it is. It doesn’t turn off; that’s what it is. I have no doubt that programs like Microsoft Word will try to catch up and will, you know, do that. I don’t particularly want AI making suggestions to me, but I know a lot of people who are maybe developing writers don’t have a problem with that. I will occasionally use AI for something like, “Give me 20 keywords about something that I want to go research.” I will use it to start my research, but I trust nothing that I get from it.
Miriam Schulman: Oh, I’ve argued with it. So, there’s this artist, and I went to the Guggenheim, and the curator was saying how she began her—so this is Gego. She’s an artist. I’m just going to give context just because. Artist left Germany in the lead-up to World War Two and went to South America. So she’s a South American artist, and I went on a tour of the Guggenheim and of her work, and the curator had mentioned that she really began her career after she was divorced. So, I was trying to get more details for a podcast episode, and I was asking ChatGPT, and they were like, “Oh, no, no, she was never divorced.”
Candice Davis: *gasps*
Miriam Schulman: And then I would call it out on it. I was like, “Well, don’t you think blah, blah, blah.” And then it was like gaslighting me because I was like, “Oh no, that’s not what I said it was. It’s actually, you know, it’s this.” Oh, you know what I mean? It’s like, and I’m like arguing with the computer.
Candice Davis: It’s right there in writing. I can go back and see what you said. It’s right there.
Miriam Schulman: It’s like, stop it.
Candice Davis: But they do give a disclaimer that this may be BS, whatever you do.
Miriam Schulman: If it doesn’t know, it’ll just make something up.
Candice Davis: That’s the whole reason why they have to give a disclaimer. So I do use it as a starting place sometimes. Honestly, not that often, but sometimes as a starting place I will use AI like to give me ideas of what I want to research, but never, ever, ever, ever, ever trust it without verifying from a really good source.
Miriam Schulman: You do realize, Candace, that that’s number 13 now that you can’t trust the facts, right?
Candice Davis: You can’t trust it.
Miriam Schulman: Can’t trust it.
Candice Davis: You can’t trust it.
Miriam Schulman: God.
Candice Davis: You can’t. Um, I don’t use it for other work stuff. I will use it for like, hey, give me some ideas for, um, places to have a writing retreat, like things like that. Just, you know, to see what it spits out. But I don’t really use it for work a lot. Not because I hate it, but I just don’t find it useful for me right now.
Miriam Schulman: I use it for things like we had an Ask Me Anything session, and I was asking them if they wanted worksheets to supplement the trainings. I personally have never used a worksheet in any online training I’ve ever taken. Therefore, they weren’t in my course. But other people don’t feel that way. And I do have worksheets for my boot camp. I was like, well, you know, I had them for the boot camp. Maybe I should have them for the course. So I had asked one of my team members, could you make a poll? But I didn’t really give her enough time to make a poll, so this is not any shade on her. And so when it came time at the meeting, there was no poll. So I was like, okay, just put it in the chat. So then what I did was I took the recording of the meeting from Zoom and I put it into ChatGPT. I said, “Would you please analyze it?” And it was able to do that. So like, and then I asked, “What do you want the next training to be?” And it was able to do that. So it’s really good at analyzing data that you give it.
Candice Davis: That you provide for it.
Miriam Schulman: That you provide that you know, aren’t lies. You know.
Candice Davis: Right. Some of my die-hard authors, like some authors I really admire, some of those die-hards are like, “You’re just feeding the beast.” Like, the more you… But at the end of the day, the beast is getting fed, whether we feed it or not. So I don’t have any problem with using it for that type of analysis. I love worksheets, by the way. It cracks me up that you don’t like them. I’m a worksheet person; I will use all the worksheets in a course or program. But, so something like that, no, I don’t have any issue with that. One of my clients does a lot of workshops. She will use it to create itineraries for seminars and workshops and things like that, stuff that she could do, but it does it much faster for her. And it’s not substituting for her own creativity in any way, shape, or form.
Miriam Schulman: It just can’t. It’s so bad. And it actually got worse. Like when it first came out, whenever that was. When did it come out? No, it came out right at the same time. Yeah. ’22, right before my book came out. So I always think January ’23. But, um, when it first came out, it was better. And then they put all kinds of guardrails on it when it started, like, making passes at that Wall Street Journal journalist. You know what I’m talking about. Yes. Right. And then it got dumber.
Candice Davis: Yeah.
Miriam Schulman: It did. And it’s like, you can’t even have it come up with things like it used to. You could have it come up with like five titles for podcasts, and now every single one is “Unleash Your Creative Endeavors.”
Candice Davis: It’s the same thing that everyone else got.
Miriam Schulman: It’s like, no, I don’t want to unleash my creative endeavors. It’s horrible.
Candice Davis: Nothing’s worse than herd. I’m not joining the herd. Like there’s just no, there’s just no way. Yeah.
Miriam Schulman: Your creative journey.
Candice Davis: Like, when you think about what’s on the internet, there’s a lot of harmful, nasty, hateful stuff on the internet. Yeah. And does ChatGPT, or whatever the other one’s called, like, do they know enough not to scrape and include that? Like, where are the—I’m hearing what you’re saying—guardrails did not help, but I don’t know that there is… I feel like there is a potential, like when I ask it to speak like a black woman, and it gave me all these stereotypes, for it to contribute to some of that hate-filled language that already exists on the internet.
Miriam Schulman: And the, um, the image generator is also anti-Semitic, by the way. So like I, I did some segments with my friend Jen Lehner for the, the podcast, my podcast called Kvetch and Kvell, which are Yiddish words for complain and praise. And so she loves AI. And so she said, “Please create me an image for the Kvetch and Kvell for Miriam Schulman and Jennifer Lehner.” And it came back with these goblin-looking—
Candice Davis: No
Miriam Schulman: No. I’m serious. Like it looked like Nazi propaganda. And the only hint that we were Jewish was the Kvetch and Kvell, because they’re Yiddish words. But it came back with, like, these monstrous looking women.
Candice Davis: Oh. That’s great.
Miriam Schulman: Yeah, yeah. So I was like okay?
Candice Davis: Again, see, but this is my point, right? There’s no control because of what’s on the internet. We don’t know what type of racist, anti-Semitic, homophobic, transphobic, whatever it’s scraping that it’s compiling for people. Just more of the same.
Miriam Schulman: All right, so, my friend, um, if they do want to write an original, what do you what do you call it on your podcast, you have something like a great… No, it’s not a great book. It’s a—
Candice Davis: A transformative book?
Miriam Schulman: No, no. Your husband says it in the intro. That is your husband, right?
Candice Davis: That is my husband, yes. It used to be his best friend did it for me for a while, and then I was like, I need to change it too often.
Miriam Schulman: No. You have a tagline. If you want to write a—It’s not transformative. That’s something AI would say. It’s something better.
Candice Davis: I literally don’t remember. But if you want to write a book that actually makes a difference and actually sounds like you and actually is of good quality, those are the people that I like to work with.
Miriam Schulman: Yes. So you have more than one way to work with you? I worked with you one on one. You also have a community that’s called.
Candice Davis: Authors Ignited. And I love that community.
Miriam Schulman: Beautiful. Yeah. Love that. Okay. So we’re going to link to Authors Ignite in the show notes. Candice and of course, in case people don’t know, I’m sure I’m going to say it in the intro, but I’ll just say it again. Candice was my private book coach for six months, and I had such imposter syndrome. There were so many times that, like, I wanted to hand back that advance and that would have been such a mistake.
Candice Davis: Oh, you got through it and you did an amazing job. Imposter syndrome or not.
Miriam Schulman: No, I’m very I’m very pleased with the impact that I made with that.
Candice Davis: That’s awesome.
Miriam Schulman: I’m proud of the work we did together.
Candice Davis: Me too.
Miriam Schulman: So you can work with Candice? We’ve linked her all her details in the show notes. Oh, wait. You know what? We promised to give them a list. Let’s do that. And then you’re going to do your last words.
Candice Davis: Absolutely.
Miriam Schulman: Okay, so we have 12 reasons why your AI copy sucks, plus one bonus reason. Okay. Number one, you’re stealing other people’s work. Number two, it’s all the isms. Number three, it’s mediocre. Number four, no voice. Number five, we can tell. Number six is hesitant language. Number seven, you’re telling instead of showing. Number eight, it’s not creative. Number nine, good copy is about breaking the rules, not following them. Computers can only follow rules. Number ten, computers don’t have souls. Number 11, it’s repetitive. Number 12, it’s dumbed down. And bonus number 13 is you just can’t trust it.
Candice Davis: Yeah, yeah. Okay. Good list. Very good list.
Miriam Schulman: Very good list. Do you have any last words for our listeners?
Candice Davis: I do. I will say this. If you’re using AI right now to write your stuff, don’t beat yourself up. We’ve all tried to use tools that will make our job easier, but I will promise you that you don’t need it. You don’t need it. Whether you’re writing a book or emails or social media posts, you can learn what you need to know to write great copy that people actually want to read, and that actually gets the results that you want. You don’t need AI to do it.
Miriam Schulman: Beautiful. Okay. Like I said, everything we talked about is in the show notes. And I will see you the same time, same place next week. Until then, stay inspired. Bye for now.
Speaker 2: Thank you for listening to The Inspiration Place podcast. Connect with us on Facebook at facebook.com/schulmanart, on Instagram @schulmanart and of course, on SchulmanArt.com.
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