AI: Exciting or Scary?

Nobody would describe me as ‘techy’, I’m a words person, not a technology geek, but AI definitely excites me.  The potential is almost beyond belief.  For small businesses it offers opportunities to do some things that weren’t possible without expensive expert help previously, professional images for social media, well-written articles for a variety of purposes, good quality video and much more.

However, it’s also scary – how do you tell when something is real and something has been created by AI?

Is AI spoofing you?

I’ve seen ads that appear to have famous talking heads promoting the product, but I’m fairly sure that these have been created without any input (or knowledge?) from the celebrity involved.

I know it’s possible to clone a voice on ElevenLabs, and an image on Heygen to convert to video.  Put the two together with a written script and you can create a video of yourself talking to camera without actually doing it.  That means you can create a video of anyone if you have a voice file (hello YouTube!) and an image (Google images).  I’m not sure how copyright might come into play if the image is copyrighted, as you won’t be publishing it, but, in any case, I’m fairly sure that anyone who you replicate without permission, may have a viewpoint – and probably a legal case!

I’ve noticed that some ‘clones’ can be spotted by their very slow blink rate, but technology is improving daily, if not hourly, and, by the time you read this, that may have been fixed.

The latest AI spoof is the rash of new dating sites – where you’re actually talking to an AI bot, not that girl or guy in the picture.  Try suggesting meeting for coffee and you’ll get all kinds of excuses!

How can AI help you?

On the other hand, AI can save a ton of time.  I used ElevenLabs to turn 8 video modules into text – in a minute or two each.  I had to edit it (there were lots of ums and ers – and nobody speaks as grammatically fluently as they write), but it saved me hours of listening and transcribing.

I use AI to help with headlines and ideas for email campaigns, where the same information needs to be presented many times in different ways.  I always edit it into the client’s voice and style, but it saves me time (and the client money).

I find that a detailed brief and links to existing material usually gets a better result than a short overview.  It’s worth investing the time in creating that brief.

There are so many new AI tools being launched that it’s hard to keep up with them.  I came across The AI Rundown, a daily email newsletter that is really good at short overviews of the AI landscape.  If you’d like to subscribe to that – here’s the link.