The AI Revolution isn’t just about creating new tools – it’s about transforming how we learn, understand, and interact with information. And that’s exactly why NotebookLM has become the darling of the AI research community. As someone who’s spent decades observing how technology reshapes human behavior, it’s been fun for me to experiment with this new application.

Here’s what’s really going on: We’re drowning in information. Between podcasts, blog posts, and the endless stream of developments on social media, staying current is like drinking from a firehose. NotebookLM isn’t just another note-taking app – it’s an AI-powered research companion that actually understands context and helps connect the dots.

It’s as close to getting a brain extension as you’ll see (at least for now!).

What makes NotebookLM different is its ability to act as both a librarian and a study buddy. When you’re deep in research mode, it doesn’t just store your notes – it actively helps you understand them. It can summarize complex papers, explain difficult concepts, and even highlight connections between different pieces of research that you might have missed. This is game-changing for anyone navigating the complex world of AI development.

But there’s something even more profound happening here. In all my years of studying digital transformation, I’ve noticed that the tools that truly stick are the ones that feel natural – that work the way our brains work. NotebookLM gets this right. It’s not trying to force users into a rigid system. Instead, it adapts to your thinking style, helping you build knowledge in a way that feels organic and intuitive.

NotebookLM — But wait, there’s more!

A few months ago, NotebookLM users discovered they could use the voice mode to command the app to have a discussion with itself, something similar to a podcast episode. A few people have even produced AI-fueled podcasts with synthetic hosts!

While I have no plans to do this with The Marketing Companion, I did turn to NotebookLM to help me in a pinch this week. My podcast is now in its thirteenth year, and remarkably, I’ve never missed an episode. But this week was close!

My human co-host became too sick to record, and out of time, I turned to NotebookLM for help. The new episode provides extraordinary value in two ways: It’s a mesmerizing demonstration of AI voice capabilities. But what’s really cool is that I uploaded my upcoming new book “Audacious: How Humans Win in an AI World” and asked the “hosts” to review the book.

The result was more than I expected, and I think you’ll love this mind-bending podcast episode. If you haven’t experienced NotebookLM in action, this will get your head spinning. Ready? All you have to do is click here:

Click here to enjoy Marketing Companion Episode 304

Please support our sponsor, who brings you this amazing episode.

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This episode is brought to you by Brevo (formerly Sendinblue). Brevo gives you the tools to attract, engage, and nurture customer relationships.

Now any business can build automated customer experiences, email marketing workflows, and landing pages that guide your customer to your main message. We are here to support businesses successfully navigating their digital presence in order to strengthen their customer relationships.

Go to https://www.brevo.com/marketingcompanion to sign up for Brevo for free and use the code COMPANION to save 50% on your first three months of Brevo’s Starter & Business plan!

Illustration courtesy MidJourney

The post A mind-bending demonstration of AI and NotebookLM appeared first on Schaefer Marketing Solutions: We Help Businesses {grow}.

What a world.

Who could have dreamed that parents would be fearful of a phone?

Is there any other conversation so vital right now? Should our children have a smart device? How do we monitor it? Keep our children sane and safe?

This is one of the essential topics Paul Roetzer and I cover in the new episode of The Marketing Companion. Paul has created a new resource.

In Kid Safe GPT for Parents, an online safety advisor to help parents understand and manage risks their kids may encounter online.

The GPT’s goal is to educate parents on the risks associated with digital interactions—from gaming to social media—and provide proactive guidance to help parents protect their children’s mental health and safety.

Kid Safe GPT offers practical advice, empathetic support, and tailored strategies to encourage healthy digital habits for families.

(And, it’s completely free to use with a ChatGPT account.)

In this show we also cover:

• AI literacy for marketers
• The future of art and creativity
• The magic of NotebookLM

You won’t want to miss this! Just click here:

Click here to enjoy Marketing Companion Episode 302

Please support our sponsor, who brings you this amazing episode.

Bravo for Brevo!

This episode is brought to you by Brevo (formerly Sendinblue). Brevo gives you the tools to attract, engage, and nurture customer relationships.

Now any business can build automated customer experiences, email marketing workflows, and landing pages that guide your customer to your main message. We are here to support businesses successfully navigating their digital presence in order to strengthen their customer relationships.

Go to https://www.brevo.com/marketingcompanion to sign up for Brevo for free and use the code COMPANION to save 50% on your first three months of Brevo’s Starter & Business plan!

Illustration courtesy MidJourney

The post How to talk to your children about social media and AI appeared first on Schaefer Marketing Solutions: We Help Businesses {grow}.

At the end of Marketing Rebellion, a bestselling book that served as a wake-up call for the state of marketing, I predicted what might be the next consumer rebellion. I believe I got it right, and the revolution could be coming sooner than I expected. Let’s take a look at what’s going on, and the implications for marketing and our AI future.

The First Three Rebellions

The thesis of Marketing Rebellion is that every time businesses and their marketing efforts push consumers too far, the customers rebel, resulting in a cataclysmic shift in marketing strategy.

The first rebellion came in the 1920s. The advertising industry had become a multi-billion-dollar industry, attaching remarkable claims to everything from cigarettes to toothpaste. But when these claims became TOO remarkable, they were outright lies. Consumers rebelled, and the industry was regulated through the Federal Trade Commission and similar agencies in other nations.

The second rebellion occurred in the 1990s. Companies made money on what you didn’t know. Profit margins were made on the public’s ignorance about the truth of insurance policies, used cars, and vacation plans. The internet ended all that. There were no more secrets. Today, it’s likely that an informed consumer knows more about your product than you do!

The third rebellion started around 2010 and the advent of social media. Historically, a “brand” is what a company told you it was. Advertising disrupted your view that Coke was colored sugar water and turned it into playful polar bears, for example. However, with social media, brand marketing was disrupted because customers owned the conversations. In fact, more sales occur through consumer social posts than traditional brand marketing. This was the end of marketing control.

The Fourth Marketing Rebellion

At the end of the book, I projected that the fourth marketing rebellion would have something to do with biometric data.

I wrote that the next technological revolution would depend on securing mountains of data on personal habits, down to every heartbeat. While consumers are normally resigned to the fact that we’re being tracked all over the internet in exchange for free search and social media, collecting and selling our bodily data might be a step too far.

In my recent post, “Are we creating AI, or are AI Agents creating us?” I summarized a research report on the ethics of AI. A few points pop out for me:

• AI Agents will monitor biometric data, facial expressions, and emotions to determine our state of mind. They will react differently to us if they know we are irritable or sleep-deprived, for example.
• AI Agents will have access to so much personal information that significant new levels of consent and security will be required. The threat level of information being used out of context is extremely high. Since agents will “plug in” to external services, we will place abnormally high trust in our agents and how information is stored and used. A data breach might mean that every fact of our life and health would be available on the web.
• The economic incentive will be to create bots that make the user happy in a way that cultivates dependence. Connecting with a bot in a deeply personal way could adversely affect user well-being and create the risk of infringing on user privacy and autonomy.
• As we become dependent on bots to take over daily interactions, humans will be “out of the loop,” and disconnected from many normal human interactions. If agents are designed to monitor our vital signs and promote “well being,” how is that defined? If we follow a path of automated, programmed self-improvement, are we improving as human beings or conforming to an algorithmic definition created by programmers? Will AI change society based on the coding preferences of developers?

Do you think this would push consumers into a rebellion? I think it is already happening.

Is the fourth marketing rebellion already here?

I can imagine a world where these bots are so useful that we ignore the vast data collection going on. But I think there are two places where we might draw the line:

1. If biometric data collection affects how we raise our children. For example, a new AI app called Ursula records a child’s response to information and makes money by interpreting potential emotional problems or learning disabilities to parents. It promises that “no kid will feel alone again.” Are we going to put AI in charge of that?
2. People will resist if data collection becomes required to function in society. A recent sign that the fourth marketing rebellion is upon us is that U.S. legislators are pushing for limits on facial recognition data collection at airport security, arguing that facial recognition poses “significant threats to our privacy and civil liberties.”

In the next few years, collecting and accessing customer biometric data could present revolutionary new marketing opportunities for personalization, customized drug therapies, and products that adjust to moods (and change them!). Yes, this is exciting. Yes, this can be profitable. But let’s not lose sight of history and the implications when we cross the line.

A note about that photo: “I am Robert Robot, mechanical man. Drive me and steer me, wherever you can.” These were the words uttered by Robert the Robot, a 1954 tin toy robot produced by New York-based Ideal Toy Corporation. Robert was run via a wired remote control, and about half a million units were sold. Robert is one of the staples of any vintage toy robot collection, with several dedicated fan pages on the web.

Need a keynote speaker? Mark Schaefer is the most trusted voice in marketing. Your conference guests will buzz about his insights long after your event! Mark is the author of some of the world’s bestselling marketing books, a college educator, and an advisor to many of the world’s largest brands. Contact Mark to have him bring a fun, meaningful, and memorable presentation to your company event or conference.

Follow Mark on Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, and Instagram

The post A Prediction: The Fourth Marketing Rebellion appeared first on Schaefer Marketing Solutions: We Help Businesses {grow}.

I’m a big fan of Rick Beato (one of his 4 million subscribers!). He is a passionate, intellectual YouTuber who dissects and explains much of the music that I love.

He recently created a video called The Real Reason Music is Getting Worse, and as I listened to his reasoning, I felt as though he was talking directly to me as a marketer in the AI Age. If you haven’t discovered Rick and you’re a music lover, I hope you’ll check him out. But in the meantime, let’s see what he says about making music in the AI Age and discover if this speaks to you, too …

Music, and Marketing Content is getting worse

Here are the notes I took from Rick’s video:

Technology makes the act of making music too easy. It’s difficult to play an instrument, and it’s really hard to record it well and produce a record. Rick received this note from a fan: “I wrote this song using AI, and I think it’s pretty good, but I literally know nothing about music.” Music has been commoditized.

Technology allows you to save a lot of money and take shortcuts, but the artistry and soul are stripped from the music. He compared an original recording of John Bonham drumming to a loop of the drumming, and it’s a hygienic version.

A creative dependency on technology limits the ability of people to innovate because they don’t know the craft.

When everyone relies on the same tools, you create a homogenized sound and a lack of diversity in the music. Music today is formulaic because people follow trends of certain types of sounds that are in style in the moment.

Ease of production speeds up the process, creating an oversaturation of music and making exceptional work harder to find. AI songs will make the level of saturation even worse as record labels produce their own AI songs instead of using original artists. One new song is added to the streaming catalog every second.

Finally, he explained why human creativity is undervalued. In the golden age of music, you would have to have a job to make money to buy a record album. You had to expend energy to find, buy, and consume the content. There is no sweat equity needed to enjoy music today. You can pay $10.99 per month and have access to any song ever published. So music becomes value-less or at least under-valued for many people.

A record bought for your collection became part of your identity, part of your history. A record was something shared among friends. We would read the album cover and learn about who made and produced the music. The creator and creative team had value.

Lessons for the AI Era

See, I told you he was speaking to marketers. This is EXACTLY  the problem we face when AI churns out content at lightning speed. We risk drowning in a sea of mediocrity. The craft of marketing — the human touch, the unexpected twist, the soul — is in danger of being automated away.

AI presents many existential issues, but here is the one that haunts me the most: When we eliminate all the entry-level jobs, how will young people learn their craft? And if they don’t learn a craft, all we’ll have is “auto-tuned” perfect content, stripped of artistry and soul.

Like artists, will we become so dependent on the same technological tools that everything becomes homogenized?

Here’s what will drive AI adoption: cutting costs. Sorry, that’s the way of the world. So it seems inevitable that we’ll experience an AI pandemic of dull as every possible task moves to a machine.

The other day, I picked up my car from the shop and the technician had tuned my radio to a pop station. I don’t normally listen to current pop music, so I listened for a few days. The music today is truly awful, and I’m a person who embraces new musical ideas.

But here’s what excites me. True artistry still breaks through. I recently saw Jon Batiste in concert and no AI on earth will hold that man down.

As a marketer, you’ll have to be that Jon-Batiste level outlier to swat back the AI. Create work that no AI could dream up. Be so good they can’t ignore you.

There is still room for the crazy ones who push boundaries—there always will be. Start pushing, my friends.

Need a keynote speaker? Mark Schaefer is the most trusted voice in marketing. Your conference guests will buzz about his insights long after your event! Mark is the author of some of the world’s bestselling marketing books, a college educator, and an advisor to many of the world’s largest brands. Contact Mark to have him bring a fun, meaningful, and memorable presentation to your company event or conference.

Follow Mark on Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, and Instagram

The post The Real Reason Marketing Content is Getting Worse appeared first on Schaefer Marketing Solutions: We Help Businesses {grow}.

When OpenAI rolled out GPT4o a few weeks ago, it included the ability to speak — instead of just type — with the interface. The chipper voice assistant provided a first glimpse of an AI personality that could become our little employee, co-worker, and friend.

It also signals the next technological revolution: AI agents that will be integrated into every aspect of our lives. Agents that will do all the crappy admin tasks we hate, organize a vacation, fix our computers, and act as our daily coach and therapist … right in the palm of our hand.

But integrating technology into our lives at that granular level also means we’ll need to surrender all privacy. These bots will record our biometric data, facial expressions, arguments, secrets, and every movement in our lives. Microsoft just introduced AI built into computers (called Recall) that will record and retain every online interaction, every five seconds of your life.

This presents enormous ethical complications, and we need to start thinking about it now—for our businesses and for our families.

I recently read a fascinating research study called “The Ethics of Advanced AI Assistants.” It’s a monster report (as long as a book) sponsored by Google and written by 36 researchers from across the globe. Because I am a full-service blogger, I will summarize this significant report for you today.

As I read this report, I wondered: Are we creating AI, or is AI creating us?

Here is a brief summary:

AI Agents are coming

AI agents will have a profoundly personal impact on our lives, starting with an ability to incorporate personal information like conversations, email, and calendars, but also biometric data like health, wellness, and sleep.

It will interpret your facial expressions, tone of voice, and body language. For example, the agent may act differently toward you if it knows you are sleep-deprived. It will know when you’re sick before you do. It will know when you’re lying. It will know you much better than your spouse or mother.

AI agents will take direct control of your devices. You’ll edit images via voice command, for example. Agents will be “thought assistants,” creative directors, personal productivity assistants, personal trainers/coaches, and therapists.

Agents will be the primary interface between humans and the external world. The research team suggests that this will create a new paradigm of interaction with the web in which websites and content will be less important and perhaps irrelevant.

The Ethics of AI Agents

The research goes into great depth on ethical implications such as:

Access

Agents will provide such a cognitive advantage to users that the gap between the haves and the have-nots will increase. Using AI agents will be a life skill, like using the web effectively. Those with access to premium AI Agents might also have increased health benefits and economic advantages.

Security

AI Agents will have access to so much personal information that significant new levels of consent and security will be required. The threat level of information being used out of context is extremely high. Since agents will “plug in” to external services, we will place abnormally high trust in our agents and how information is stored and used. A data breach might mean that every fact of your life and health would be available on the web.

Agency

As AI Agents take action on behalf of users, it raises the question of how this impacts user autonomy. Agents will represent us in the world and negotiate with other bots on our behalf. What happens when bot-to-bot negotiations are at odds? What happens when computers make decisions for a company that result in financial losses or lawsuits?

Anthropomorphism

Agents will be human-like, with personality and “feelings.” How developers present these models to the world, especially defining the relationship between humans and bots, will raise ethical considerations. The economic incentive will be to create bots that make the user happy in a way that cultivates dependence. Should a bot be able to feign affection, or represent itself as something more human than it is to make you happy?

Connecting with a bot in a deeply personal way could adversely affect user well-being and create the risk of infringing on user privacy and autonomy. Anthropomorphic features may influence users to feel as though their bot plays a critical social and emotional role rather than a functional one (See the movie “Her.”)

As AI Agents are integrated with lifelike humanoid robots, these risks could increase.

Value alignment

If a bot is your representative to the world and follows your instructions, it must align with your ethics and worldview. What if you are a criminal? What if the user is engaging in self-harm? There is a risk that advanced AI assistants will be insensitive to local values and cultural contexts.

Decisions must be made to limit how an agent can be used in a way that puts society and others at risk, i.e. misinformation, harassment, and crime. The researchers name six ways values can be misaligned, arguing that this issue is extremely difficult and complex. Developers will have to determine ethical guidelines that are imposed on all users.

Moral implications

As we become dependent on bots to take over daily interactions, humans will be “out of the loop,” and disconnected from many normal human interactions. What is the impact on human socialization and mental health?

If agents are designed to promote “well being,” how is that defined? If we follow a path of automated, programmed self-improvement, are we improving as human beings or conforming to an algorithmic definition created by programmers? Will AI change society based on the coding preferences of developers?

Example: I recently saw a demo of an AI bot designed for children that reports to parents on the child’s development and mental health. By who’s definition? Will our children be programmed to conform to standards established by a small team in Silicon Valley? Where are the medical and psychology experts in this loop?

Safety

The research covers the risk of accidents, malicious misuse, and unintended consequences. These AI systems are so complex that we cannot account for many risks. Early LLM models exhibited hostility and “hallucinated” lies, for example. Could a developer inject a ghost in the machine that causes harm? Could AI bots trick humans into aiding them in achieving a criminal goal?

AI assistants have the potential to empower malicious actors to achieve harmful outcomes across four dimensions:

1. offensive cyber operations, including malicious code generation and software vulnerability discovery;
2. adversarial attacks to exploit vulnerabilities in AI assistants, such as jailbreaking and prompt injection attacks;
3. high-quality and potentially highly personalized misinformation at scale, including non-consensual fakes;
4. authoritarian surveillance.

Economics

While agents provide valuable utility, they are likely to create massive job losses, especially for any profession involved in human services.

Influence

We have seen that large language models like ChatGPT can be very influential and skillful negotiators. Based on this competency, there is a risk of rational persuasion, manipulation, deception, coercion, and exploitation.

A personal view of AI Agents

Reading this post might seem like a science fiction nightmare. But this is real, and it’s happening now. So we need to start these conversations.

You might believe you’ll exert personal agency and protect your privacy by not participating in this intrusive new world. But history doesn’t support that conclusion. Especially in America, we’re resigned to the fact that we’ll just turn over our personal information in exchange for free access to news, entertainment, and social media sites.

AI Agents will be so incredibly helpful and cool that we’ll all want to jump in. Humanoid AI Agents will be status symbols and vital if we’re to participate in contemporary society. And once again, we’ll gladly risk all our privacy to play along. Half of America is happy to be tracked by the Chinese government in exchange for access to memes and pranks on TikTok. In fact, they will march on Washington to protect their right to be surveilled by a Communist dictatorship. Why would our AI future be any different?

A very small group of mostly geeky white men are determining the future of the human race. That is not a sensational statement. In essence, the human race will soon have a new operating system. What makes us special as human beings is being systematically stripped away. Who is checking the work of these people?

Regulation? Yes. We will need that, but the irony is that rules could only be enforced at scale through AI Agents. The government cannot act at the speed of technology, so we must depend on our tech leaders to guide AI development with ethics and compassion. And who are we counting on for this? Mark Zuckerberg? Elon Musk? Sam Altman?

These megalomaniacs have signaled that AI is coming, and there is nothing stopping them. They’ve surged ahead at a comet’s pace and a scorched earth approach to any societal norms and laws in the way. There is only one goal: Win this inevitable race toward super-human intelligence, and the consequences be damned.

Nevertheless, it would be folly to ignore this technology. I’ll embrace AI Agents and try to accept them into my life as problem solvers. I need to understand them enough to participate in a smart and ethical way.

Am I concerned about the existential aspects of AI agency? Yes. But I’m also concerned about North Korea having nuclear weapons and climate change jeopardizing my ability to get home insurance next year. On an individual level, there is very little I can do on any of these issues except be part of the debate.

And hopefully that started for you in a small way today.

Need a keynote speaker? Mark Schaefer is the most trusted voice in marketing. Your conference guests will buzz about his insights long after your event! Mark is the author of some of the world’s bestselling marketing books, a college educator, and an advisor to many of the world’s largest brands. Contact Mark to have him bring a fun, meaningful, and memorable presentation to your company event or conference.

Follow Mark on Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, and Instagram

Illustration Pexels.com and Tara Winstead

The post Are we creating AI, or are AI Agents creating us? appeared first on Schaefer Marketing Solutions: We Help Businesses {grow}.

We live in one of the most confounding and exciting times as philosophers and scientists grapple with an improbable question: “What is the role of humans in an AI world?”

It seems bizarre we would even have to consider the possibility of the shrinking relevance of a carbon-based human. In AI, we are creating something magnificent and frightening. Deep Mind founder Mustafa Suleyman (who currently leads AI for Microsoft) says AI is a digital species that can see, hear, think, and respond to its environment. In a new TED talk, he said “AI is us.”

Now hold on. AI is not us. AI is not my mom, my child, or my spouse. “AI is us” makes a good sound bite, but that is just not true. So, what is AI? This is the question of the moment, and it made for a wonderful discussion on the new episode of The Marketing Companion podcast.

In this episode, my genius friend Mathew Sweezey and I begin to explore the role of humans when AI rules the marketing world. Some of our discussion points:

• Humans will still need to create experiences and human-to-human connections that deliver outcomes. Connecting to customers and the human touch.
• The new emphasis on artisanal — isn’t that what we cherish most?
• AI will make customers expect perfect things faster
• AI as an enabler for humans, especially smaller businesses
• The human skills that will be the most cherished
• The aspect of humanity that still defines our marketing

As you see, this is a fascinating and vital conversation. To listen in, simply click here:

Listen to Marketing Companion EPISODE 289

Please support our sponsor, who brings you this amazing episode.

Bravo for Brevo!

This episode is brought to you by Brevo (formerly Sendinblue). Brevo gives you the tools to attract, engage, and nurture customer relationships.

Now any business can build automated customer experiences, email marketing workflows, and landing pages that guide your customer to your main message. We are here to support businesses successfully navigating their digital presence in order to strengthen their customer relationships.

Go to https://www.brevo.com/marketingcompanion to sign up for Brevo for free and use the code COMPANION to save 50% on your first three months of Brevo’s Starter & Business plan!

Illustration courtesy MidJourney

The post The inescapable role of humans in an AI world appeared first on Schaefer Marketing Solutions: We Help Businesses {grow}.

Here are three colliding trends that seem to indicate a massive business opportunity:

1. AI models are running out of content they need to grow. Companies like OpenAI are so desperate they are bending the rules of copyright, or breaking them, to keep growing. AI companies are under attack by copyright lawsuits.
2. Some companies are willing to pay for new sources of content. Apple, for example, floated offers worth $50 million in licensing multiyear agreements with news publishers in order to train its AI models. OpenAI is paying the Financial Times, The Associated Press, and others for content. Here is a list of all the content licensing deals in progress.
3. We are at a unique moment in the history of writing. Individuals (like me) have been creating volumes of well-written, well-researched content for many years. Millions of creators are sitting on a mountain of content that could be monetized by AI, but its not.

Do you see where I’m heading here? This is a business waiting to happen.

The Content Creator Guild

“The biggest bottleneck today is data. We often have a pretty good sense of what are the AI algorithms that we could build if only we had the data to build them. But for a lot of applications, it’s just really hard to get the data.” — Andrew Ng, founder DeepLearning AI

Let’s look at this opportunity more closely.

Large Language Models (LLMs), such as ChatGPT, are revolutionizing how machines understand and generate human-like text. But these powerful AI models are only as good as the data they are trained on. They require vast amounts of high-quality, diverse content to improve their performance and produce more accurate and nuanced outputs.

The industry is so desperate for content it’s creating synthetic content — AI content fueling AI models — which represents an obvious long-term problem if most of the internet becomes self-generated.

Like it or not, AI companies require human-generated content to compete and grow.

This is where we, the creators, come in.

For years, we’ve been pouring our hearts and souls into blogs, vlogs, videos, and podcasts. We’ve amassed an enormous backlog of copyrighted material that sits idle, waiting to be discovered and appreciated by new audiences.

What if we could do more than just hope for organic traffic and a little affiliate ad revenue? What if we could actively monetize our content by licensing it to train the next generation of LLMs?

Let’s imagine this new content power. I have 15 years of blog posts, 12 years of podcast transcripts, and a dozen books about marketing sitting largely unnoticed, gathering pixel dust. Now pile on the extensive, multi-year assets of people like Seth Godin, Martin Lindstrom, Philip Kotler, David Meerman Scott, and hundreds of others, and you will have the most comprehensive marketing database on the planet.

Keep going. Gather the assets of the greatest content creators for music, home improvement, fashion, sports. This is a goldmine of nuanced expertise and opinion on any niche topic … just what the AI ordered.

The benefits of organizing

“I have content. Come and get it Elon.” — Mark Schaefer, a nice guy who enjoys money

No individual creator could get the attention of OpenAI or Google or Zuck. But a unified Creator Guild representing tens of thousands of creators could:

• Collectively negotiate with AI companies and other technology giants
• Set standards for data usage rights, royalty structures, and attribution practices
• Create a pool of money to compensate real humans in the AI Era
• Establish incentives for new human content creation
• Navigate legal gray spaces and establish precedents and guidelines around ethics and fair use. A Creator Guild could be a unified voice for our rights while providing AI content fuel that is free of legal ambiguity.

A Creator Guild is a slam dunk win-win that pays worthy creators and solves the biggest headache for AI tech companies.

Beyond the current AI opportunity, a unified organization could also have collective bargaining power to negotiate better terms with traditional publishers, platforms, advertisers, and others who are ripping us off.

A Creators Guild could create a support network for creators, offering resources, mentorship, and opportunities for collaboration. We could even fund our own research and development initiatives to explore new ways of creating and distributing content in the age of AI.

The time is now.

This is a good and obvious solution. My concern is that the train is already rolling without us.

Tumblr and WordPress are reportedly set to strike deals to sell our data to OpenAI and Midjourney. While users have an option to toggle a button and “opt-out,” there is no provision to “opt-in” to the money.

Hold on there Sparky. You’re going to take our work and monetize it … WITHOUT US?

Without a unified voice, creators are going to be squashed.

Plus, we don’t really know how our content is already being used in the planet-sized minds of AI supercomputers. If the tech companies are already skirting the law with YouTube and other platforms, chances are they’ve already scraped my blog and yours.

But here’s the problem — at some point, these companies are going to face the music with their reckless approach to copyright and guarantee safe, license-free results for text, images, and video generation. An agreement with a massive Creator Guild would be a huge step forward to provide lawful and ethical results.

To solve this problem, AI companies are already posting jobs for human writers (for less than $20 per hour!). They need quality, creative, niche content if they want these models to provide output that is less generic and more “human.”

But they will keep taking advantage of us and our work if we don’t have bargaining leverage.

An existential issue for creators

We are rapidly moving toward a post-link world. Today, if people share links to our content, we don’t get paid, but at least we are driving potential customers to our content. That benefit is vanishing.

Analyst Benedict Evans wrote (edited for clarity):

“If an LLM can read the internet and answer questions about it based on everything it’s read, then it’s not indexing pages and links anymore, but unbundling and rebundling the contents of the pages themselves. When we went from print to the web of links, we unbundled the publications: links sent us to one page.

“If I ask an LLM what credit card to get or what hotels are good in Rome, then it abstracts and synthesizes the answers from hundreds of web pages and doesn’t send anyone any traffic. It unbundles the job-to-be-done – was the aim to find a page, or to read some prose, or to get an answer? This is an existential question for the future of the web.”

The beginning of a Creator Guild

Here’s the part where you expect me to say, “Hey gang, join me and my new Creator Guild!”

Nope.

This is a big job … a complex job. It will take a sizable company with resources to organize talent and pay for lawyers to figure all this out. Perhaps this task might fall to an existing union like the Screen Writers Guild or the Writers Guild of America.

Or, perhaps some tech giant will get smart and create an opt-in contract that provides a monthly salary for the free use of content based on the size and quality of the assets (I’m sure an AI could figure this out!). Or, maybe a venture capitalist will read this post and organize a company around the idea.

I have faith in Adam Smith’s invisible hand. There is money to be made. Somebody out there will figure it out.

I hope this post is the spark that gets things going, and fast. Sign me up.

Need a keynote speaker? Mark Schaefer is the most trusted voice in marketing. Your conference guests will buzz about his insights long after your event! Mark is the author of some of the world’s bestselling marketing books, a college educator, and an advisor to many of the world’s largest brands. Contact Mark to have him bring a fun, meaningful, and memorable presentation to your company event or conference.

Follow Mark on Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, and Instagram

Illustration courtesy Unsplash.com

The post It’s Time to Unite in a Content Creator Guild appeared first on Schaefer Marketing Solutions: We Help Businesses {grow}.

You’ll probably want to hurt me after you read this post. My thesis is that authenticity might not matter as much as we say, and it might be more effective to be the best fake possible.

Let’s begin, with the future of fakes.

I love fakes

Slowly but surely, my Instagram feed is filling with AI-generated content …

• Musical mash-ups of long-dead rock stars
• Surreal science fiction landscapes
• Twisted art and images that make you wonder, “How did they do that?”

These images are so fantastic, beautiful, and mesmerizing. And of course, they’re all fake.

A long time ago, Buzz Sumo did a study that showed the most common emotion associated with viral content was “awe.” Awe comes from seeing something that you’ve never seen before. And AI is pretty good at that. These addictive Instagram images and videos are proving it.

Fake stuff is amazing Fake stuff rules.

How to be the best fake possible

I could argue that fake is the future of content and marketing.

Most of us are trying to get a consumer to stop what they’re doing and spend a few moments with us to become aware of an idea, product, or service. The content that’s stopping me the most these days has no authentic human element whatsoever. So why wouldn’t we embrace the fake?

If you haven’t been dazzled by fake content yet, you soon will be. It’s showing up everywhere. Of course AI-generated content will be used to disrupt elections and perpetuate lies, but it can also provide great entertainment value, at almost no cost.

One of my favorite movies is Avengers End Game. The thrilling final battle scene is jaw-dropping … and almost entirely fake. Does it ever enter my mind that it’s fake? No. I just love the experience.

In the coming months, we’ll be able to make cinematic, movie-quality videos on our computers. If you could make Avengers-quality content for your business, why wouldn’t you? Is it fake? Yes. Do your customers care? Not if it’s great.

Embrace the fake. Be on the cutting edge of fake. Bring the awe!

But what about human authenticity?

There is probably no marketing consultant on the planet who has advocated human-centered marketing approaches more than me. Famously, the subtitle of my book Marketing Rebellion is “The Most Human Company Wins.”

Am I selling out?

I don’t have an agenda. I’m not the LinkedIn Guy or the Facebook Ads Guy trying to sell my services. I’m the Whatever Works Guy.

Authentic human connection has been at the heart of marketing since the beginning. In early history, it was the only thing we had, and there will always be a place for it.

In fact, I’m counting on it. I’ve included a badge on each of my posts that says “100% Human Content.” I want to assure you that what you see is what you get. It’s me, and only me. No AI. You can trust what you read.

My business is built on trust. I want to be the most trusted voice in marketing. And that means, NO FAKES.

My message today is, don’t go down the “authentic” rabbit hole so far that you can’t recognize great content — and great opportunity — when you see it. Use every storytelling technique you have available to you, even it derives from the imagination of artificial intelligence.

P.S. About that image

I used MidJourney to create the image at the top of the post. It had to be a dazzling fake, right? Here is the prompt I used: most dazzling image imaginable, insane detail, awe, surprise, beautiful, dazzling, gorgeous

Here is the image that came in second place:

Crazy stuff!

Need a keynote speaker? Mark Schaefer is the most trusted voice in marketing. Your conference guests will buzz about his insights long after your event! Mark is the author of some of the world’s bestselling marketing books, a college educator, and an advisor to many of the world’s largest brands. Contact Mark to have him bring a fun, meaningful, and memorable presentation to your company event or conference.

Follow Mark on Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, and Instagram

Images courtesy MidJourney

The post How to be the best fake possible appeared first on Schaefer Marketing Solutions: We Help Businesses {grow}.

This has been a tough couple of weeks with a heavy dose of international travel followed by my third bout of COVID. It was time to produce a new episode of The Marketing Companion.

What was I going to do? I was sick.

I had no energy.

I had no voice from the violent coughing.

But I did have AI.

What you are about to hear is my first entirely voice-synthesized podcast episode. You’ll just have to hear it to believe it. It’s either the coolest show you’ve heard, or the creepiest! Maybe both.

I probably won’t use this frequently, but it saved me in a pinch. The technology for this short episode can be found at Eleven Labs.

You’ll just have to hear it to believe it. Let me know what you think! Listen here:

Click here to enjoy Marketing Companion episode 278!

Please support our sponsors who bring you this amazing episode!

Bravo for Brevo!

This episode is brought to you by Brevo (formerly Sendinblue). Brevo gives you the tools to attract, engage, and nurture customer relationships.

Now any business can build automated customer experiences, email marketing workflows, and landing pages that guide your customer to your main message. We are here to support businesses successfully navigating their digital presence in order to strengthen their customer relationships.

Go to https://www.brevo.com/marketingcompanion to sign up for Brevo for free and use the code COMPANION to save 50% on your first three months of Brevo’s Starter & Business plan!

Illustration courtesy MidJourney

The post The first voice-synthesized podcast episode appeared first on Schaefer Marketing Solutions: We Help Businesses {grow}.