A while back, I wrote an email with the subject line:<\/p>\n
\u201cA love letter to people fapping themselves blind to AI\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n It was about my opinion of, if it is not obvious, AI.<\/p>\n And a long time Email Players subscriber\u00a0(who I did not get permission to use his name, so am keeping him anon) who is also an engineer agreed with my basic premise. Especially at AI\u2019s dismal ability to generate content. But at the same time, he successfully uses AI as a tool for other tasks. Like, for example, he said he used it to have a list of tons of stories he listened to in Sean D Souza\u2019s podcast, tons of metaphors he thought about, and tons of adjectives and synonyms for when naming courses. And he said a simple prompt can win tons of time there; especially when spending hours with online thesauruses.<\/p>\n My opinion:<\/p>\n I won\u2019t say he is wrong, or that it can\u2019t be a useful tool like that.<\/p>\n But, in my way of thinking and in my experience… when it comes to content creation sometimes time, money, emotion, and energy are better invested than saved. And in his case, I strongly suspect he is very likely not getting the full benefits of “Sean” he would by doing the manual labor he is avoiding by using AI \u2014 whether neurological, creative, experiential, or anything else.<\/p>\n Sean didn’t teach him what he learned by prompting AI.<\/p>\n He learned whatever it was he was teaching via hard, grinding, daily, consistent work.<\/p>\n At the end of the day AI is just swiping 2.0 at best.<\/p>\n I know, I know — \u201cGive it two years Ben!\u201d<\/p>\n You can give AI 2,000 years, it won\u2019t change anything.<\/p>\n Nor will it change the fact it has no real \u201cintelligence\u201d in the first place.<\/p>\n Even the term \u201cartificial intelligence\u201d is inaccurate for it.<\/p>\n Anyway, you do whatever is right for your business. But nothing will substitute doing the work. I wish it was not this way myself. But prompting will always be inferior to the long, slogging, grinding, and often boring work to fill your brain and mind with the info you need the hard way, where you \u201cown\u201d it. Like for example, I recently got done doing probably 100 hours of such grinding work to research a direct mail project we\u2019re doing at Low Stress Trading. I could have \u201cprompted\u201d all kinds of info with the 300+ pages of transcripts and content I combed through and took notes on probably.<\/p>\n But I did it the hard way:<\/p>\n 1. Listening to the dozen or so hours of content multiple times while on long walks<\/p>\n 2. Printing out, at home, 100\u2019s of pages of transcripts and data<\/p>\n 3. Reading through every word, making notes, writing down ideas (directly connected or not to the offer), and then tediously typing those notes on my computer<\/p>\n 4. Arranging all those notes, removing, sifting, sorting, combining it<\/p>\n 5. Pulling out the notes, reviewing them, playing with them, fitting them into an A\/B split test while doing even more manual sifting sorting, thinking, wondering, experimenting, then discussing, arguing, explaining, going back and re-editing, etc. Anyone who does a lot of writing (non-fiction and fiction alike) knows the real gold comes from the editing anyway, the unrelated ideas suddenly fusing, stray thoughts and experiences (you cannot prompt experience either) long forgotten slipping in, layers of depth added to ideas that never would have happened otherwise, etc.<\/p>\n The result?<\/p>\n I don\u2019t know yet.<\/p>\n We will see, they should be dropping in the mail soon. But I do know that whatever results we get \u2014 good, bad, or fugly \u2014 would have been a helluva lot worse if I had NOT done the work.<\/p>\n It reminds me of Arnold Schwarzlkdjljshjgger\u2019s \u201cBe Useful\u201d book.<\/p>\n Specifically, when he talks about James Cameron\u2019s attention to detail when making his Titanic movie. Everything was authentic on the ship \u2014 real antiques, everything built exactly to scale, and how it would have looked down to teacups and work staff uniform gloves probably less than 1% of people noticed watching the movie. Every extra, even if on camera for but a brief second, was given their own detailed back story. No expense was spared, and nothing was held back or half assed even if, by rights, they could have gotten away with creating cheap plastic knock-offs, \u201cgood enough\u201d sets, no back stories for everyone on the ship, whatever it was.<\/p>\n It all comes down to investing vs saving.<\/p>\n And that\u2019s a wrap.<\/p>\n See the paid Email Players newsletter here:<\/p>\n