Why AI Continues to Suck at Original Content?

0:00I don't believe that AI today is very good at producing original content. I use it all the time for ideation, for like, what did I miss? Are there things that I should be saying here? Is there a research, statistics to back this up? So I use it in that manner when I'm creating content. But here's the way that we produce content. Hello, and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. This is Jon Jantz, and you got it, another solo show. Just me and the microphone. So I want to talk about content today. I used to stand on stages and say, content is king. Remember that? And then everybody got the message and really content became air.

0:41Really have to have it to play today. Pretty much every single industry. Obviously, there are a lot of industries that realize education, building trust, building authority. Those are things that go hand in hand with marketing period. But pretty much every industry today, regardless, local businesses, construction businesses, plumbers need to have content today. And I actually refer to content not as a tactic, but as the voice of strategy. All right, with all of that set up, I want to talk about something I'm seeing a lot of right now. AI is a tool that certainly offers a lot of promise around the idea of content.

1:20Some people actually say it can produce all your content for you. However, I believe that what I see a lot of people doing is using content or using AI and some of the various new tools in the wrong way. And I think actually backwards would be how I would refer to it. I was in a presentation the other day and somebody was demonstrating some AI tools. And really, you know, it's pretty easy. I'm kind of geek out on the coolness of some of the things that some of the AI tools can do and will increasingly be able to do. Kind of creepy, cool, I suppose, in some regards. But one of the things that I see a lot of people doing is there are now these tools out there that you can train to produce video with your avatar.

2:01It'll look like you. It will talk like you sort of. And so what people are doing is they're now just writing content or having AI create content, create scripts, feed it into this tool. And all of a sudden, voila, I've got video produced by AI. But then they spend a ridiculous amount of time trying to get it to sound like them, to say the things that they say, to have the tone that they have, even to be able to pronounce words in their industry the right way. And I think that while, like I said, you know, there's some coolness factor to it to be able to. I mean, I've seen people actually go and produce entire podcast with a host and a guest.

2:44Neither one of them actually does it. They produce the script. They produce the answers to the questions. They produce the podcast. And while it's one of those things that's like, look what we did because we can. I'm not sure it's look what we did because we should. And here's the main reason. I don't believe that AI today is very good at producing original content. I use it all the time for ideation, for like, what did I miss? Are there things that I should be saying here? Is there a research statistics to back this up? So I use it in that manner when I'm creating content. But here's the way that we produce content.

3:17And this is really more of a how to not necessarily the structure of the content, but I'll spend a minute on that. We produce what we call pillar content. So we come up with once a quarter, three core themes. And these are going to be themes that we know our ideal client or clients are looking for information on. And if they find it, I guess is another way of saying, if they find this content and read it, it's going to be useful in helping them understand why they might want to work with us. That's sort of the filter, I guess. It's not just, whoa, here we should write about this trendy thing or that trendy thing.

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6:01What are the subtopics that would go under this? I mean, you put in any industry and it's pretty good at actually saying here are the important things to know about any industry. So we actually do the same thing with clients. And if you're out there thinking, how am I going to produce all this? or you're an agency that says, how can I produce all this for my clients? This is an exact approach that we teach or in some cases just do for our clients that are trying to build brand and build authority. So at the end of this, if you would like to know more about how we might be able to do that for you, it's just john at ducttapemarketing.com is where I always tell people just write to me and we'll see what we can put together for you.

6:39But after we produce kind of that topic list, Then here is how we employ AI. I actually create videos, just like if you're watching this on YouTube, just like this one. I just stand in front of a microphone and I riff on the topic for five, 10 minutes. And when we have clients, we actually just interview them and let them riff for five or 10 minutes on the topic. And we can coach them that way and get great video. But here's what we get from that. First off, we generally speaking get good content. Well, or at least it's original content. It is from my thinking. It is from my point of view. It is the jargon that I use, the terminology or citing our own IP is going to show up in that video.

7:23So that's a great starting point. But it also is an incredible way to train then an AI tool on how I speak, how I pause, how often I say it. There's so many things that can be gained really just by having that original video on top of, as I said, the real starting point there is that we have good, high quality original content. So I might actually just pick out one day and spend 60, 90 minutes and record 10 of these videos, which will then give my team enough ammo, frankly, to produce all the social posts, email newsletters, original videos, of course, snippets from that video. Then we employ all those tools to actually repurpose the content.

8:07And I think frankly, right now, today, in what are we in? Almost in September of 2024, that is the best use of many of the AI tools is to produce good original content in the easiest way possible, which to me is video. A lot easier than banging out a thousand words. I can talk all day long. A lot of the folks that we work with, you know, that remodeling contractor, getting them to write anything would be next to impossible, but getting them to talk for an hour about how, what they believe, what their process is, how to get the best out of this new trends in appliances. I mean, they can talk for days on these.

8:47So it allows us to really capture a ton of original content. And then we turn it into everything, including, you know, blog posts, of course, snippets of video, I already mentioned, LinkedIn posts, Facebook posts, X posts, Instagram reels. There's just so many things that we can produce when we start with this video first. But then we can also take some of those videos and stack them. And now we've got, we can actually use the AI to say, create a course, to take these 10 videos and create a course out of them. Obviously, we had some thought into what the titles were and in the topic and the through line of the 10 videos, but it can actually produce a complete course outline, complete with questions, complete with quizzes, complete with checklists.

9:34And so we can create lead capture devices out of that. So we'll take a checklist or two, we'll take a tool or two, and we will actually put it into the GPT and say, here, fill this out, complete this, give me examples, samples. So we have something we call the marketing snapshot, which is our version of a marketing plan kind of all on one page. Well, I can upload that tool that we've created and ask the GPT to fill it in for X industry, in fact, for 10 different industries. And all of a sudden now we've got samples that people can relate to and really maybe more thoroughly understand. So if you start, my whole point, if you start with this original content in your voice or in your client's voice, you can then work backwards tremendously producing all kinds of iterations of that good original content that's in your voice, in your point of view, in your tone, using your industry jargon.

10:30So instead of thinking, how can I create these avatars to talk like me, talk like you and use the transcript of that, which pretty much every one of these tools now produces right off the bat, use the transcript of that than to go out and produce all kinds of other assets. We call this the content sprint methodology. It's something, as I said, that we do for ourself, but we also do it for pretty much all of our clients, either inside of a full engagement or as a standalone, we'd be happy to do it for you as well. So that's it for today. Use AI the right way. Use it for good. Hopefully we'll run into you one of these days out there on the road.

11:11Don't forget we love those reviews as well. If you've got any questions, comments, feedback, john at duct tape marketing.com. That's D U C T A P E marketing.com. All right. Take care.

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