Will Artificial Intelligence Replace Us?
When is the use of Artificial Intelligence good?
Raj and Ben dive into the world of AI applications to explore the ethical and privacy concerns around AI and if it can replace creative careers, like graphic design.
What are the good things about AI in art?
AI allows artists, illustrators, and graphic designers to explore new concepts, new ideas, and new styles.
Digital art has been considered an artistic medium since the 1980s, and like other artistic mediums, it continues to evolve as new advancements and trends emerge. There is still some debate, however, whether digital art is authentic due to the infinite nature of the product, begging the question, “how do you put a value on digital art?”
The lines get blurry with AI artistic applications like Midjourney and Dall-E that take digital art to unethical territory, essentially having the ability to create a work of art in another artist’s style.
Art, by definition, is the expression of human creativity, skill, and imagination.
So an argument can be made that AI-generated “works of art” are just the next evolution of human creativity.
Check out part one of our two-part special episode all about the impact AI has on creatives and the ethics behind the medium where you get your podcasts.
Don’t forget to subscribe and share if you like what you hear! We, humans, appreciate it.
Ep. 19:
Will Artificial Intelligence Replace Us?
Automated Transcript
Ben Lueders:
Hey. Welcome to Growing a Fruitful Brand, where we discuss how to create and grow a brand that makes the world a better place for you, your customers and your employees. I'm Ben Lueders, founder and art director of Fruitful Design & Strategy, and this is my business partner and brand strategist, Raj Lulla. Today, we're talking about artificial intelligence.
What is happening in the AI space these days, Raj?
Raj Lulla:
Yeah, the big topic of the day is this platform called ChatGPT. Also, in the months leading up to this, there's been AI-generated art that's been all over the internet, and so that's where we find ourselves right now. It'd be good for us just to define a couple of terms real quick. ChatGPT, as I mentioned, it's an AI writing and kind of search engine that's great at natural language. You could ask it to write an email.
Ben Lueders:
In the style of Raj Lulla.
Raj Lulla:
Yeah, sales plumbing supplies or something like that, and it will return something that's halfway decent, and then, in the art world, why don't you tell us about those?
Ben Lueders:
Yeah, I mean, some of the big ones that I'm seeing are Midjourney and Dall-E, Dall-E, a letter E there. If you just searched for these hashtags, you'll see them all over the place on social media right now.
Raj Lulla:
Yeah, and the reason we're talking about them is because they are blowing up. ChatGPT reached a hundred million monthly active users in just two months. That is seven months faster than TikTok got there and 28 months faster than Instagram got there.
Ben Lueders:
That's very fast. Just so you know, I was looking up before we hopped on here, and they're estimating that this is going to be a $165-billion industry, artificial intelligence, this year in 2023.
Raj Lulla:
There are plenty of reasons, plenty of movies, where the robots come to destroy all of us, to not like AI. Is there anything good in AI?
Ben Lueders:
Well, it's funny. I was just telling Raj I'm actually reading I, Robot now, and it's definitely not making me feel very warm and fuzzy towards letting the robots win necessarily. There are some good things about AI for sure. When it comes to AI art, which I'm an illustrator, my background is in illustration, and so, as soon as I started seeing some of the stuff pop up, you get a little scared and you get a little worried.
I saw some people posting some very strong anti-AI things, and then a lot of other friends posting a lot of AI art that they're having a lot of fun making with the prompts, but some of the positive things that I see is, for artists and for non-artists, maybe especially for non-artists, it can help inspire you with fresh ideas or concepts. It can assist you with brainstorming and color palettes, getting different color palettes for what you're doing, more for artists. You can also explore with the prompts. You can explore unique combinations of things with just a push of a button. It's not just like here's this one thing, but here's one thing in this style with this other thing. I don't know. It can really inspire you to come up with new ideas.
Raj Lulla:
You, like me, grew up in '90s Christian subculture, and so-
Ben Lueders:
DC talk.
Raj Lulla:
Yeah, DC talk, and on the heels of that, VeggieTales and Relevant Magazine posted an article. Somebody I think on Twitter had fed the AI art machine prompt of doing VeggieTales-
Ben Lueders:
We're flashing these on the screen for those of you watching on YouTube. If you're listening to this, make sure you check out the video.
Raj Lulla:
Yeah, or Google this. They did the VeggieTales' version of the Book of Revelation, and there are some really bizarre, kind of Mad-Max-almost style, definitely apocalyptic versions of Larry the Cucumber. If you're not familiar with the show, it's okay, go ahead and skip the show, but it's funny watching your cartoon characters live through the apocalypse. It'd be really funny to see a Bluey version of that.
Ben Lueders:
A Bluey version? Well, here's another thing. I know obviously they're prompting that to be this Armageddon Revelation-end-times thing, but I have noticed, especially with Midjourney, a lot of the stuff just tends to look very dystopian-
Raj Lulla:
Yeah, really dark.
Ben Lueders:
... and dark. It's creepy. Is this the robots' view of us? I saw one when I was searching. Maybe you've seen it, too. I think it's making the rounds, but it's like the prompt is the last selfie ever taken on Earth. There's different versions of that, but it's really just dark and depressing. I feel like almost everything I'm seeing, a lot of what I'm seeing out of Midjourney is highly detailed and just dark stuff which is the opposite of inspiration in a lot of ways.
Raj Lulla:
Something else that we talked about was that, especially when people will feed their picture into it and then asked to be made into a knight in shining armor or something like that, and what we've noticed is a lot of times with women when they put themselves in there, it changes their body proportions to something, quote, unquote, more ideal, more conventionally attractive.
Ben Lueders:
Yeah, more like a Barbie or something.
Raj Lulla:
Yeah. It's funny because we started with what's good in AI and art, and you can see pretty quickly you can get into some tricky ethical territory here. I just read an article from Bill Gates this morning where he said that AI is going to be as important as the PC and the internet. I can definitely see how that's true, but you're going to run into a lot of the similar pitfalls as well.
Irwin McManus once had a quote about how the internet is the embodiment of our imagination, and I think AI is the next step towards that, and it's going to be both for great things. We get to see VeggieTales' Revelation and it's funny, but then it's also going to be for some disturbing things as well. You were Googling before the show, and there were a lot of just disturbing images, and not even graphic, just weird, stuff that's kind of unsettling.
Ben Lueders:
Yeah, unsettling is a good word for it. Yeah, there's a bunch of these. They're getting served up to me on Instagram right now, which I think you click on one and then suddenly this is all you're getting served up, but really just very dark, unsettling, unnatural stuff. Obviously, a lot of that I'm sure is the prompts that you're feeding it, of course, but it's the thing. It's like that black mirror. It's showing you what you're asking for, but in its own way.
Raj Lulla:
Getting back to what is actually good though, because we'll get to the negative stuff here in a moment, in writing, it can be helpful. I've messed around with... It used to be called Jarvis. Now it's called Jasper. I've also messed around with ChatGPT, and it can get you to what I would say is first or second base on menial writing. If you need to send an employee an email asking about, "Hey, it's time to schedule your annual performance review," then it might be easy to just say, "Hey, ChatGPT, can you write this email for me?" Now, sometimes it takes just as much work to write the prompt as it does to get to the email, but if it's something like that, then it might save you some time.
Ben Lueders:
Especially if you want to write that email in the style of Shakespeare or Mark Twain and really have a lot of fun with it.
Raj Lulla:
I was going to try to attempt a Shakespearian-
Ben Lueders:
Yeah. Don't do it. Don't do it.
Raj Lulla:
Let's not do it.
Ben Lueders:
Resist the urge.
Raj Lulla:
It might also be good for creating things like standard operating procedures or maybe even some language in your employee handbook, although I wouldn't recommend doing all of that.
Ben Lueders:
What do you think about scripts for podcasts? Maybe we should have done that today.
Raj Lulla:
This one was done that way. We're not even here. It also might be good for automated sequences like onboarding, those types of things for a software product or something like that. Even in those situations, I think that it's good for a first pass, but the really great onboarding sequences for software are the ones that feel really celebratory. They feel very personal. It's like, "Hey, good job for downloading this. You're ready to start being a sales rockstar," or whatever. It just infuses a little personality into that.
Ben Lueders:
A little bit of humor.
Raj Lulla:
Yeah, and ChatGPT, at this moment, I wouldn't just rely straight on what you get out of that. Now you might say, "Hey, that's great. Do a second pass, but add some humor into it," but it's a lot in the formula right now.
Ben Lueders:
Have you seen that video that's going a little bit viral right now, or it's getting served up to me anyways, I don't know if it's viral, Ryan Reynolds reading the-
Raj Lulla:
Yep. I was thinking of that.
Ben Lueders:
... ChatGPT-written commercial for Mint Mobile? He told him, "Hey, I want a swear word in there. I want some humor in there." He had some specific things he wanted. It was interesting to me. It's like it was funny, and it wasn't funny just because Ryan Reynolds was reading it or whatever or because it's a novelty. I don't know.
Raj Lulla:
I will also say I don't know if ChatGPT wrote that because it might have been a writer aping ChatGPT to just be funny. It might have been Ryan Reynolds himself or it could have been the AI. I don't know. It's a weird-
Ben Lueders:
It's hard to know. Yeah.
Raj Lulla:
... moment we're in.
Ben Lueders:
Exactly.
Raj Lulla:
Here are a couple of things that ChatGPT is actually good for sure right now, natural language processing, which is when you can just talk to a computer the way that you talk to a human. Alexa has been the leader I would say in natural language processing, at least commercially available. Up to this point, it's definitely better than where Siri is at. It's better probably than the Google Assistant. That's good. It gets us out of Google speak. I think sometimes we underestimate how much we've bent ourselves to the platform of Google. Back in the day when there were still this search engine wars between Google and Yahoo and those things-
Ben Lueders:
Remember Bing? Whatever happened... Is Bing still a thing?
Raj Lulla:
Bing is still huge actually.
Ben Lueders:
Is it really?
Raj Lulla:
It's crazy.
Ben Lueders:
Remember when we found out we were big on Bing? I need to check that out again. No. It was like someone was saying, "Oh, yeah, we went with you guys because you're number one on all the search results," and we were like, "We are not number one on all the search. We were number one on Bing for whatever reason."
Raj Lulla:
We're big in Europe.
Ben Lueders:
We're Big on Bing. Big on Bing.
Raj Lulla:
Big on Bing. Yeah, it's good for getting us out of Google speak. I was telling you before we got started that it used to be that if you search for a dentist near me that you would get whichever dentist was smart enough in whatever city to write, "We're the best dentist near you," and then Google will go, "Oh, okay," but it turns out they're in Phoenix and you're in Omaha, and that doesn't do any good.
Ben Lueders:
Raj always does the dentist analogies. I hope you guys noticed that.
Raj Lulla:
I don't know why.
Ben Lueders:
We'll have a compilation video a year from now, and it's going to be all the times when Raj said, "Dentist." Dental hygiene is very important.
Raj Lulla:
There are some good things. There's also a fair number of bad things.
Ben Lueders:
Which you're already starting getting into.
Raj Lulla:
Yeah. It's honestly hard not to get to the negative side of it because there's a lot of downside at the moment. What are some of those things?
Ben Lueders:
Yeah. I mean, one of the first ones that pops into my mind is the art is only as good as the prompt. You still need someone there really massaging the prompts and getting things just right. It still can take a certain level of creativity to know what to even ask for, too. I've seen certain people using it and getting really horrendous results, and then I've seen other people using it and getting really, really refined results. Not all the prompts are created equal for sure.
There's also a little bit of suspicious quality. Famously, AI has struggled to render human hands for some reason. That'll probably get better, I imagine. There's also some just weird blurring and stuff going on on some faces and stuff. Again, I've seen others that are a lot better, but it's not consistent necessarily, and especially, like we were saying, with Midjourney, there's this suspicious just look to it. It just has this consistent feel that just feels like AI. You see it and you know it's AI now. Again, that'll probably get better, but I think, when you see a piece of art or you see an illustration or you see a design, I don't think you want people immediately to be like, "Oh, yeah, that was made by a robot." Now, again, some better than others, but those are some of the things that pop into my mind.
Raj Lulla:
Yeah, and that's mostly on the art side of it. You have similar issues on the writing side where, again, it's very dependent on the query or the prompt. The Ryan Reynolds thing, if it was truly written by AI, it had a very specific prompt. It was, "Write a Mint mobile commercial," so now it can pull from existing Mint Mobile commercial transcripts so it knows what elements to include in it, but then in the style of Ryan Reynolds, lots of movie scripts out there, lots of video of him. Even then, he had to make sure to include a swear word, and then he asked it to include a joke as well. Again, I'm not a hundred percent certain that it was written by AI, but if it was-
Ben Lueders:
I trust Ryan. I trust Ryan.
Raj Lulla:
If it was, it took a lot of creative energy to get to something that was usable. In fact, I'm curious how many drafts of the prompt there were.
Ben Lueders:
Yeah, I did think that. I did think that.
Raj Lulla:
Was the first one, "Hey, ChatGPT, write a Mint Mobile commercial"? You would assume, because he's been in most or all the Mint mobile commercials, that it would do it in the style of Ryan Reynolds. Maybe we have to say, "Oh, specifically in the style of Ryan Reynolds," and so it was like okay, so they did that, "Oh, we want it to include a swear word." "Oh, okay," so maybe that was the third, fourth, fifth draft of just the query. At some point, it's faster to just write the commercial yourself. I'm not saying that's always true. Especially if you're writing a whole standard operating procedure or something like that, it could be a little bit faster to lean on AI to speed you up, but there's still a lot of human work that has to go into feeding the machine correctly and, to be honest, I'm not sure if those are jobs that we all really want to spend a lot of time doing.
Ben Lueders:
Well, what comes to my mind is, in the field of graphic design that I was trained in and still live in, a lot of the things that are just a click of a button in Adobe Illustrator or Photoshop or Procreate, those were things that people had that took hours and hours for people to do, cutting things out, taking photos of, scanning things. There's all these steps that graphic designers in the '80s and the '90s that we don't ever have to do. We have automations for those things, and we still have jobs, but we don't have to do the parts of the jobs that we don't like. I think that's one way to think about AI when it comes to creative things like the writing and the design as. Just because AI is going to maybe take out some of the more menial parts of our job, it doesn't mean that we'll be replaced necessarily.
Raj Lulla:
That's a really great point because I actually love, in Lightroom now, which is a photo editing software, it is way easier based off of their latest update to outline a subject and then only edit that part of the photo. If you want to make the person a little bit brighter than the background, you can do that super easy now, and that makes my job easier when I'm taking photos.
Ben Lueders:
Oh, yeah, and creating all the graphics for this podcast, that's gotten way easier. Literally, up until a year ago, I was by hand on my iPad tracing, trying to go around people's hair and stuff like that. Now, it's like, literally, with a click of a button, AI does that for me. That's great. I don't miss those days.
Raj Lulla:
Is that why I had less hair in some of those?
Ben Lueders:
Yeah, that's right.
Raj Lulla:
It's not because of age.
Ben Lueders:
I was not at all being very kind to you, but now AI is more precise.
Raj Lulla:
You can accidentally miss some of the body though if you'd like to.
Ben Lueders:
That's right.
Raj Lulla:
That's fine.
Ben Lueders:
You used to have me do that a little bit. AI will not.
Raj Lulla:
It will.
Ben Lueders:
Unless you're a woman. Unless you're a woman.
Raj Lulla:
It will make me look like Ryan Reynolds is the great thing, so welcome, our new robot overlords. In writing, you also have the quality problem where you don't necessarily know if what is being written is accurate. A Mint Mobile commercial, for example, it could introduce a deal that Mint Mobile is now free or whatever.
Ben Lueders:
This podcast is brought to you by Mint Mobile, by the way.
Raj Lulla:
Thanks, Ryan. It's like we don't have the kind of research or the sources. It doesn't tell you. With Google, one of the things that's different is that you have to go to that site to get the information. Now, Google has surfaced some of the information of is this business permanently closed, that kind of stuff. Again, all of that is being fed from other sources, and you can ultimately get down to the sources. ChatGPT is not currently providing that, and so there's a lot of question of, "Do these symptoms equal pink eye?" and it's like, "ChatGPT says so," but is it based off of what blog is that off of or what medical website?
Ben Lueders:
Yeah. Well, yeah, and we're in this age, of course, of fake news, disinformation, et cetera, et cetera, and competing views on science and whatever. Which sources is it pulling from? If you have, let's say, very, very vocal people saying things that are not true across the internet, are they going to start pulling from those sources? Aren't those blacklisted? It gets into some interesting territory there where it's like, yeah, where is it getting its sources? What's considered to be true? Is it just whatever is the greatest quantity on the internet? I really don't know how that works.
Raj Lulla:
Yeah, that goes into another issue with AI is that this now is allowing anyone to create content, and that's fine. This is the direction that the Internet has been moving in general. It used to be that the only person who had a camera pointed at them was a famous actor or a news anchor and-
Ben Lueders:
Now we do.
Raj Lulla:
Look at these guys. Anyone can do it. Yeah. Some of that is obviously good for businesses, for individuals to have platforms that wouldn't have been otherwise accessible to them, but as we continue to move in this direction, we're already overwhelmed by content. I was just telling you this week that I'm still catching up on some episodes of our own podcast that you did interviews. I want to hear the content, but then the holidays happened and we're getting back to the office. I was listening to an audiobook, and it just took me some time to get back around with the content.
There's a lot of content out there already, and the increase in that is going to cause it to be harder to stand out in some ways. I think in some ways it'll actually make it easier to stand out because it'll allow humans', humanity's just creative qualities and weirdness to rise to the top. The things that stand out because they're unique are going to have a little bit more value, but, overall, we're just going to see continuously an increase in content, and some of that's good, some of that's bad.
Ben Lueders:
The other thing that comes to mind, I was just talking to my kids about this about what makes something valuable, and we had a conversation about scarcity. It's not that gold or diamonds or whatever that they're... just because they look so pretty or... There's a limited amount of this stuff, and that gives it value. There's something about how you're able to just create this stuff at a click of a button and anyone can do it and how fast it is. There's always going to be a separation, I think, between that and true art, for example. I think there's something about having a book written by a real person who has real life experiences and a real human perspective that'll always be more interesting and more valuable to people than something that they know was created by a robot, and same with when it comes to actual art.
This last year, my family, we've got this big, beautiful landscape painting that a friend of mine, Emily Davis. I'll have to throw her web address into the show notes. A beautiful, imaginative landscape painting that she did is hanging on my wall. Could AI create something that looks somewhat similar in that style? Well, yeah, probably. I could have printed it out on some kind of a canvas or something like that, but it doesn't have the same value to me. It's not the same. This was someone that I knew that has honed in this style over many, many years and much practice and gotten her hands dirty to create that. There's something so much more inherently valuable to me there. That's more in the art space though. I think, for creating something quick and dirty first draft of an email, something to inspire a later design, totally fine, but I think that there is something to be said when I see artists especially getting worried that they're going to be replaced. I just don't really buy it, and I don't think I'm alone in that.
Raj Lulla:
Some of that comes from, again, what is this for? It's like, the increase in volume, is it good? I think for a little chuckle like VeggieTales doing Revelation Mad Max style or whatever is funny, but I'm going to forget about that. You're not going to forget about this painting. There's other experiences, too, with a painting, seeing individual brush strokes and sometimes, not exactly the fingerprint of the artist, but almost. There's just this quality to it. It doesn't matter that the computer might actually be able to do it better. There's great, beautiful Photoshop artworks out there, but it just doesn't mean as much, and that's a huge piece of it.
Ben Lueders:
This is a shoutout to her, but it does speak to the human side of when you're working with an artist. She has this kind of a established style. I told her a few of the pieces that I liked the most of hers, but she actually would be... She painted little thumbnail versions of what she wanted to do for us, came over to our house with the actual paintings she's considering and wanted to see how the paintings looked in the room and looked with the paint color we had on the wall and the color of the furniture. I mean, that's an incredible level of detail, care, thoughtfulness.
To me, it just raised the value of that piece. It was customized somehow to our family, and not that every artist does that or should do that necessarily. She was thinking I think more like a graphic designer or a brander in a lot of ways, but, again, you're not going to get that level of just human personality and care, real human care I think from AI.
Raj Lulla:
Yeah, it's going to be on you if you print one out and you go, "It doesn't look right in this room," and you go, "I need it with 30% more blue or something," and then, again, you're back feeding information to the machine to get that right.
Ben Lueders:
You're the one bringing that value. I think that's the important thing is that's why it's only as good as the prompts because it's on you to really get that out of the machine. The machine can get it probably eventually, but it's going to take a lot more massaging and fine-tuning.
Raj Lulla:
Yeah. I will say I'm not totally down on AI. Like I said, there are some good things. I don't want to sound like I'm just negative on this. Again, I love the natural language processing and all that, but I think, when you get into some of the little bit weirder, creepier side of things, then it definitely becomes concerning. For example, with art, there are things that humans would know not to paint or not make. No. They might do it anyway to be subversive or to be provocative, but they would know that they're doing it. I'm not sure. Will these AI things have filters that it won't transgress certain things that may even be illegal to create?
Ben Lueders:
Well, I think some of them do right now, but what happens when those get turned off or you make your own? Yeah, you're getting into some weird moral territory pretty darn fast.
Raj Lulla:
There's movies like Blade Runner 2049 and Her that illustrate our potential to have a weird relationship with AI. I mean, think about if you lost someone and you fed it all of her emails, all of her text messages, all of that, and then you wanted to continue to text with that person after they were gone.
Ben Lueders:
Oh, yeah. Wait, doest that exist?
Raj Lulla:
Oh, there are things-
Ben Lueders:
What was that thing? Is it Alexa or something? It can do the voice of a loved one or something you can talk to. I feel like that was supposed to be a heartwarming story, but I feel like to me there's just-
Raj Lulla:
Dystopian and weird.
Ben Lueders:
Yeah, I know. I don't find that-
Raj Lulla:
This goes back to your point that scarcity creates value. Our limited time on earth with people really cements the value of our relationship. If we had unlimited time with people, then you could invest that time with anyone, and you could get to know every person on the planet and you could go deep with everyone, but part of what is valuable about our relationships is our commitment to someone and saying, "Hey, I want to spend time with you. I want to spend time getting to know you for the rest of our lives." Some of these other things, I'm not saying they may not have a therapeutic value in helping somebody get over a loss, but, at the same time, it can definitely enable us to not process the things that we need to process about our own humanity, our own mortality. I think that's concerning.
Ben Lueders:
Yeah. Oh, for sure.
Raj Lulla:
I know that's deeper than we usually get on the podcast, but-
Ben Lueders:
Yeah. Sorry, guys. Yeah. I forgot to put it out there. I forgotten about that, but, yeah, that was a weird one, but not too far off. I feel like at the time it was kind of like, yeah, right, and then now it's like, oh, geez, maybe.
Raj Lulla:
Yeah, but now Alexa can do it for you.
Ben Lueders:
Yeah.
Raj Lulla:
Another thing that we definitely need to talk about is that we don't know what a company like ChatGPT is doing with our data. Okay, so let's take the, "Hey, write an email to plumbing business customer trying to sell this service," and then it's like, "Well, what do you have to feed it to get it to know how to write this email?" Do you have to include the price of the service? Do you have to include the detailed descriptions of that? Well, now, think about even just that, if you do that, the price of the service and detailed descriptions of what you do. Now, if another business says, "Hey, write me a description for this plumbing service and suggest a price to me," is it giving your processes and your information to somebody else because of what you've already said?
Ben Lueders:
It's in the pot. It's in the pot.
Raj Lulla:
Is it private?
Ben Lueders:
Yeah. I don't know.
Raj Lulla:
Where does this data go? Think about if you go way deeper than that. Okay? Write an email to the top 10% of my best customers advertising this new service that is this price and includes these deliverables. Now, if you have to feed all your QuickBooks information into it or all that, no, I don't think it's even capable of doing that right now, but the more you train it to be specific to your business, you're giving it a lot of information that you maybe wouldn't give Google or you wouldn't give somebody else, or at least you have a better relationship with those. Yeah, there's a lot of online products that have a lot of information about us, but right now they're all pretty siloed, and that information is private to me, or it's supposed to be. That's a big concern that I have with giving a platform like this too much information.
Now, somebody would probably correctly say, "Well, we've already given Google too much information," or, "We already have in Facebook." That's probably true. I just don't think that we should just walk blindly into that. Do we know for sure if they're giving our hard work, we talked about how human-dependent this is, to other people and making it easier for our competitors to use what we've worked really hard to do? I just don't know that that's necessarily a good idea.
I'm probably going to have us wrap here because we actually have a whole nother part to this conversation talking specifically about marketing, "Can I replace my marketing team with AI art and AI writing?" but we're going to bring that to you in a second episode, and so, at the end of this one, what's our general sniff about AI art and ChatGPT? Is it all bad? Is it all negative?
Ben Lueders:
No. I think, yeah, a probably good way to wrap this one from my standpoint, Raj, tell me if you think I'm wrong, is just shifting your perspective and just thinking of AI as more of a tool and to not be necessarily afraid of it, and to see in what ways it could help you and your business and your processes and, at the same time, being a bit, I don't know, guarded or cautious, and then that's okay because, as technology has, advanced security has continued to be a really... and privacy has been a very, very important part of that equation, and so I wouldn't go in with a ton of fear. I think we've all been, at least I have been, hesitant to adopt new technology at times. I told myself I would never have a smartphone. I have one. I said, "I would never have an Apple Watch." I have an Apple Watch.
Raj Lulla:
You said that really? You have an Apple Watch? Oh, I love my Apple Watch.
Ben Lueders:
Oh, yeah. When it first came out, I was like, "I never want to have a phone on my wrist," or whatever. I remember even thinking, when cell phones started having cameras on them, like, "I've got a camera. I've got a cell phone. I don't ever want to have a camera in my cell phone." I think some people can get scared of new technology and think that it's going to change the way that things are for the worst necessarily. I think just entering in with maybe a cautious curiosity would probably be where I'd steer people.
Raj Lulla:
It's not the devil, but it's also not your savior. It is a tool and, just like anything, any tool, that could be both used for good and dangerous, it's something to hold with responsibility.
Ben Lueders:
Exactly, much like the internet itself. Like you said, the internet can be, from one perspective, an absolutely terrible cesspool, but whereas on another hand it's the thing that's giving us our livelihood and the livelihood of so many people and connecting people in meaningful ways that were previously unimaginable, so, yeah, much like that.
Raj Lulla:
All right. We are sort of halfway in, halfway out on AI. There are definitely some good use cases for it, but it's something to be cautious about. We're going to bring you another episode about how to use it with marketing, if you should use it with marketing, and we look forward to bringing that to you.
Ben Lueders:
Thanks for joining us today on Growing a Fruitful Brand. If you found today's show helpful, don't forget to subscribe and consider sharing it with someone who might also enjoy it. If you'd like to work with Fruitful on a branding website or messaging project of your own, you can always reach out on our website, fruitful.design. Until next time, don't forget to grow something good.
