AI and Social Media Content Creation with Lisa Zawrotny [Positively Living Podcast]

Intro (00:11):
Welcome to the Savvy Social Podcast, the show that blends stories and strategies to help businesses create engaged and profitable online communities using the unique power of social media. And now, your host, Andréa Jones.

Andréa Jones (00:28):
Y'all, we dove right in with the AI conversation. If you think about the timeline, ChatGPT really hit the scene November, 2022. So at the time of this episode, that was just over a year ago, and one of the questions that's always been in the back of my mind is how are AI tools like ChatGPT, impacting the way we create content and the way we do business specifically emotionally as well. Today I'm bringing you an episode that I did on Lisa Zawrotny's podcast, positively Living. In this episode, we talk about how AI can be a powerful asset for generating creative content, and also how to be careful around it and not really ignore the concerns around things like authenticity. So dive on into this episode as we talk about what makes me excited about AI and what makes me frankly a little bit nervous.

Lisa Zawrotny (01:27):
Welcome to the Positively Living Podcast, Andréa Jones. I am so delighted to talk to you today.

Andréa Jones (01:33):
Oh, thank you so much for having me. I'm excited to be here today.

Lisa Zawrotny (01:37):
There's so many things we could have dug into. I had so many ideas for us, but there's a big topic looming that we need to get into. But before we do that, if you could please tell us a bit about who you are and who you help and what makes you light up.

Andréa Jones (01:53):
Yes, so my name is Andrea Jones. As mentioned, I am a social media strategist and I help my clients use social media as a tool to grow their business. Oftentimes, my clients feel neutral or negative towards social media, so I help them realize that social media is awesome and it is that tool of connectivity, and that's what lights me up. I met all of my closest people on social media, my husband, my best friends, and so for me, social media and the internet have allowed me to find my people and connect with them. So that really, if I could do that for my clients, that's what lights me up.

Lisa Zawrotny (02:35):
And the way that you approach it and how we connected, we were just talking about this beforehand, is that through building a community and having amazing people surrounding us, and they really do become dear friends. And so that's the potential for social media, given that there are so many ways that we can approach it. One that you just mentioned is sometimes we can have different views on social media, especially as entrepreneurs and feeling sort of the pressure to show up with social media and a whole idea of content creation and how that can be overwhelming to us. And so with that, anytime you have a tool out there that's going to solve all the problems, this is that magic bullet kind of thing. Well, that's what's happening right now with ai, and that's what I wanted to dig into with you today. First of all, I would love it if you would just tell us what's going on, what AI is, what we're seeing in that context, and then we can talk about what's happening with it.

Andréa Jones (03:43):
Yes. So AI or artificial intelligence isn't necessarily a new thing, but it has improved drastically in the past six to eight months. So we have artificial intelligence in our day-to-Day lives. If I say, sorry, y'all, Alexa

(04:03):
Or Siri, okay, Google, we talk to our devices and they give us things back. I can tell mine to sing songs for me and play things on Spotify and add this to my shopping list. So we are interacting on a daily basis with artificial intelligence, even to the extent of things like Netflix recommending shows. For us that's based on an artificial intelligence algorithm. What has changed is how smart the robots are getting, and that's what can be concerning for a lot of folks. There is a program called ChatGPT, that really has shifted the capacity of ai. So ChatGPT is a chat-based artificial intelligence, meaning it will remember your conversation, it will remember all conversations and bring its knowledge to that conversation with you. And it is a people pleaser to the extreme. So it wants to help you so desperately that it'll try to give you all of the answers, even going so far as to making up things that it thinks you want to hear. So as a marketer, as a business owner, there's a potential to leverage this tool to create content or to get new perspectives for our business. But as marketer and as a business owner, it can be concerning because then we wonder, do our clients need us if they can go to artificial intelligence and get all the solutions to life's problems? So that's where we are today.

Lisa Zawrotny (05:44):
I love that it's the ultimate people pleaser. And by the way, here's a pro tip. Whenever you want to talk about the devices that we mentioned before, we actually have a nickname for ours here. We call her Alejandra so that it doesn't always kick off, but with the chat option, what's great is we have a choice to use it or to not. And I've been seeing it in all kinds of different places. Google Workspace was just like, Hey, we got an option here. Do you want to be one of the first users? And I do some things in notion and notion was like, I have this option here, and all the different search engines are like, by the way. So it feels like there are variations on the seam on all different platforms, right?

Andréa Jones (06:28):
Yes, absolutely. Even Canva now has a feature where you can change your shirt, you can add a plant to the desk, all using artificial intelligence, which is so interesting. It feels like when the iPhone was just released and we all were like, why do we need an iPod and a phone? Why do we need to carry around both of those things? So it does feel like the evolution is here.

Lisa Zawrotny (06:57):
Yeah, it also feels a lot like just the whole filter vibe on social media, which I am both oddly delighted and freaked out about simultaneously.

Andréa Jones (07:09):
Oh yes, the filter. There is one on TikTok right now that you can't tell right away that it's a filter and they made it extreme enough so that the person looks different. But it does get me curious about how you can slightly add a filter, something that's just a little less obvious, or someone could use a filter anytime they create a video. So you would never know what they really look like. So there's lots of ways that this is bubbling up and it's so fascinating. Can I ask you, Lisa, how you feel about it,

Lisa Zawrotny (07:43):
About filters, about ai, about all the above, about all of it? I am a big believer in authenticity, so I like to look my best, but I also want to keep it real. And I also think that it's something that my clients and my people rely on. They appreciate about me, especially being in an industry or in an expertise that is often considered kind of a perfection area, being productive, being organized, being precise, having systems, and there is a precision to that, but it's more about leveraging things. And I love to show people how to do that in a very realistic way. So having extreme filters and having things that showcase a perceived perfection is very much against my values. Do I like them? Do I like to look good? But I use them with an abundance of caution.

Andréa Jones (08:40):
Yes. See, I love that perspective that you have. This is why we get a lot, because I think that as a human, my brain instantly goes to nefarious means, how is someone going to use this negatively? But there is a way to leverage some of these things and still maintain that authenticity. I like that you talked about presenting yourself in a certain way because I wear makeup, I like to wear bold clothes and colors and lipsticks, and that's authentic to me. And so I think it does require that finding the balance between these two things, which is why we're here.

Lisa Zawrotny (09:20):
Exactly, exactly. And we will get into that. We will get into the good ways that we can use it, but before we do that, it behooves us to talk a little bit about the nefarious ways. And yeah, I'm so bubbly and happy and people know me. I mean, I'm certified in positive psychology, it's how I work. And yet the skeptic in me is always like, what's going on here? But it's not just that. We also want to talk about things we need to consider to protect ourselves in the long run. And so let's talk a bit about when we have these kinds of options out there, especially when they're billed as being the end all, be all the answer, how you can create content in three seconds and then be done. What do we need to be worried about

Andréa Jones (10:06):
As we do build our businesses? And especially I look at this through the lens of social media marketing. There are tools out there right now that will scan through, say LinkedIn posts, you give it a LinkedIn influencer, it'll scan through those LinkedIn posts and then just remix the posts and you can copy and post it yourself. In fact, they have a one click post option where you can post it to LinkedIn. Those things I do not like. However, there are other tools out there. People are building tools right now that will be able to catch if something was written by artificial intelligence Currently. That's the only way I know to kind of battle this with technology. The bright side of this is I think human stories, like real human stories are going to be exponentially more valuable. When I share a story about my daughter loving Ms.

(11:03):
Rachel, which is one that I posted in my newsletter this week, I feel like other parents know what I'm talking about. We connect, we relate. Or I just wrote a newsletter about my mom wearing Crocs and how I always thought they were ugly, and then I tried them on it. I was like, these feel amazing. I feel like those human stories are what people are going to value even more, which is a good thing for us as business owners. So as people become more and more robotic, as content becomes more and more easily manufactured, the how-tos of life aren't going to be as important as the touchy feely side, the feelings, the emotions as we look through these tools and absolutely we can use them for our own good. I do. It's important to look at how people are using them as the villain because it helps us be the hero of the story if we can find the antithesis to what people are using them for.

Lisa Zawrotny (12:08):
I love that. And the other thing that I wanted to add, and I welcome your perspective on this as well, is that even when we come at it with a very well-intentioned perspective, there's an element of the work that AI is doing on our behalf that people pleasing that you talked about in what it's actually doing. As soon as you said, oh, it collects posts that were done already, my plagiarism alarm is going off red flags everywhere. So my days in corporate America were as a communications manager, I have an English degree. So writing content and understanding that it needs to be your content is extremely important to me. And then I got into photography. So in that art world, people pulling things without acknowledging who created them. I feel like that happens a lot naturally. And again, not necessarily maliciously on social media. And now my concern is that this is going to take it a step further because it's trolling the interwebs for goodness and bringing it back and being like, here, hand this off as your own.

Andréa Jones (13:20):
Yes. And what's interesting too is something like ChatGPT will make up sources. So even if you try to say, okay, I need this information. Can you give me a quote from three different books and give me the author and the title because it's a programmed thing, it will try to make up an author or a title that doesn't exist, or it'll misquote things very often. So it could potentially be dangerous if someone's relying on these tools without fact checking them and then going off and having misinformation out there. And I think that this is an amplification of something that's already wrong with the internet, which is, I can't remember the comedian who said it, but they said, if you Google, I'm right, you're wrong. Google will give you information to support your argument. If you want to make some sort of argument and you want to prove that point, I almost guarantee you can find some website somewhere that will prove that point.

(14:24):
And that's what ChatGPT and other artificial intelligence tools are doing is they're trying to give you information, but number one, it could be sourced from places that don't exist or they made up. Number two, they're just literally pulling other people's IP and giving it off as their own. And to its credit, ChatGPT does have a warning when you log on that says something that nature, do not use this content without fact checking it. But we're humans, so some people are using it, copying and pasting it. Moving on. The last thing I'll add to this too is one of my concerns is if ChatGPT and other chat-based ais are combing the internet and creating content or creating information from it, are they also collecting the information we input? So for example, I can say, here are my top 10 Instagram posts. What should my next 10 Instagram posts be? Will it then take my Instagram posts and give them to someone else? I don't know. I don't know what they're doing with that information. Or if I say, I have an idea for a book, here's the concept. Here's the title. Can you outline it for me? Will it then take that outline and give it to someone else? I don't know. So this is the part of where I'm like, Ooh, this is kind of concerning to me.

Lisa Zawrotny (15:48):
So I think whether it's for ourselves or for the sake of others, because again, being like you said, the hero in this story or being at least the ethical warrior, if you will, it's just trying to do the right thing, right? That's all we're trying to do, but can we do the right thing and not have to do so much work? Well, yes, yeah, that's the whole point of productivity, but it's doing it the right way. And so thinking about ip, your intellectual property, whether it's yours, that's a really good point. And that wasn't even one that I'd considered. I was thinking about all the stuff that's coming to us. So yeah, all of these things. One that I will add to this mix is the idea that even if it collects the information on your behalf and you pull something together and then you make it your own and then you fact check it and you do all the things, it is possible we have the legality. It's easy for me to say legality of it hasn't caught up with all of this yet. There's concerns. There may be a, Hey, if this is produced by, or even possibly partially produced by ai, this may not be your content after all. Maybe you won't have IP protection on it. These are the things that we need to be sure of as we're moving forward, right?

Andréa Jones (17:09):
Yes. Have you seen these voice generated ais that sound like whoever Donald Trump or Joe Biden, right. So there was one that came out this week that was a Drake song that sounds like Drake. And it's so similar. If someone told me this was a song by Drake, I would go, oh yeah, okay. And so legally, Drake and his music agency company or whatever, they're fighting for this song to be taken down. But once it's created, people keep re-uploading it in all sorts of different ways. So this also brings that legality question into play, play. If you're mimicking someone's style and saying that it's them, how do we navigate that legally? We haven't caught up yet as a society, and I think it'll still be a few more years before we do.

Lisa Zawrotny (18:03):
So again, these are all things to keep in mind. And with that, what can we be doing right now? How are you inspired to use it in a way that, yeah, there are going to be some things we still need to figure out, but at least for now, how have you been using it? How could we use it in a way where we can maximize it? And also, we'll keep in mind that we're trying to protect ourselves as well, but there has to be some ways that it can certainly be useful.

Andréa Jones (18:31):
Yes, it is useful. I actually really like it as much as I'm warning everyone against the downsides, I actually pay for ChatGPT specifically, their premium version and how I use it on a daily basis. I can just give you a few examples. If I'm sitting down to do a podcast episode, for instance, I will tell it, here's my idea for a podcast episode. What are some of the things I'm not thinking about? And then it'll give me some maybe suggestions and I may say, what are some concerns that my listener may have after listening to this episode? So then I can address them in the episode. But I've done that. I also do it to help with naming things. I am terrible, terrible at names. I love a good pun too, so I'm like, if I see something, I like that. So I'm working on a course right now about my podcast, and it's not a how to course, it's more of a behind the scenes.

(19:27):
Here's how I did my podcast, how I built it. And so I asked ChatGPT for some names and ultimately came up with behind the mic for the name of the course because it gave me probably about 10 different names. And it didn't have that exactly, but from the names it gave me, I was inspired with the current name of the course. So those are just two ways that I use it on a daily basis to help get over the hump of trying to come up with ideas. And as you mentioned, it's becoming embedded in the way that we work. Google has barred, Canva has their own ai, but even I use Grammarly to check my spelling and grammar as I'm writing, and they release their ai. That helps you reword entire sentences for clarity, helps you come up with new ways of doing things where you can even say, Hey, I need to follow up with this client on this invoice. Can you help me write an email? So it's becoming embedded in the way that we just navigate throughout the world, which I find incredibly fascinating and interesting as a human living in this time.

Lisa Zawrotny (20:37):
It really is. And when you're talking about the Grammarly version, for example, and so this is where you have to think about the nuances in each of the different platforms and what you're using it for and where it can really work when you have a sentence that you just need to reword. It reminds me a little bit of playing those word games where you're looking at the letters and it's not making any sense to you and you're like, shuffle it for me. Yes. It's sort of the grammar version of can we shuffle this around? Salt's really doing is being like, okay, it was a passive statement. Now we'll make it an active statement, and now maybe we'll add in a few more adverbs to the mix, or we'll do a dependent independent clause together to make it fancy.

Andréa Jones (21:18):
I can hear the English major,

Lisa Zawrotny (21:19):
The English just seeping through. But yeah, it's like it's doing all that in quick time for you so that you're not having to use that brainpower. It's not that you don't know it. It's not that you can't get there, but you can get there faster.

Andréa Jones (21:33):
Yes. It's very much, when I was in third grade, I remember our teachers going, you have to learn math because you will not be carrying a calculator with you around for the rest of your life. Does anyone remember this?

Lisa Zawrotny (21:47):
Oh, yeah.

Andréa Jones (21:48):
There's a period in time where we thought we would not be carrying calculators around with us. In fact, calculators were expensive. They were expensive items, and now we literally have calculators on our phones that we carry around with us all the time, everywhere, everywhere. So I do think there are use cases for this Grammarly being one where there isn't a question about IP or legalities or anything like that. It's just improving and helping us get to where we were going anyways faster.

Lisa Zawrotny (22:24):
And so to that point, I will add my favorite way to use it. And when we were chatting on LinkedIn and you were asking everyone, so what's the deal? What are you doing? This was my answer is when I'm faced with a blank page, I love it as a prompt. Quite literally, you're using prompts in AI in ChatGPT and others like it, and you're asking for something and then it's spinning back ideas. And then I've always found that it's easier for me to edit than it is to write. And that may be the case for you as well, that sometimes we're in a situation where we're like, okay, I have all these options. Where do I go? And it is so much easier somehow for us to take a look at something and be like, oh, that works. That does not. Sometimes it's just easier to be like, I can tell you what's not going to work when someone wants to design something for you.

(23:20):
That's so tricky because you're like, okay, I think I like this. I think I like that. Here's some ideas. But if they show you something and you're like, oh, no, it's not what I had in mind, and I feel like that's a really good use for me is just tossing something out onto a page. And I'm either going to be like, oh, oh, I could take that idea right there and run with it, and then I write my own stuff from there. And to your point, and this I think is a beautiful segue into the really maximizing what will work best for us in conjunction with AI is that's where you can take those concepts or ideas and add the human side, the personal storytelling side to it.

Andréa Jones (24:06):
Yes, absolutely. So I love that when we're looking at a blank screen, it's so hard sometimes, especially when you're really comfortable in your expertise because sometimes you feel like you've said everything already. And so when we're looking at the blank screen we go, I don't know what to say. Asking artificial intelligence or getting support from it can be very, very helpful to reduce that blank screen syndrome. Absolutely. I love that.

Lisa Zawrotny (24:38):
Andrea, is there anything else that you want to leave us with just in terms of feeling inspired by ai and I suppose maybe less worried about it, but just more like, I'm trying to think of the word, I guess informed. Yeah, that would be the word.

Andréa Jones (24:55):
And I do think it's scary. I think it's okay to feel a little dubious about the direction of it, but I also think it's a very powerful tool. And I think ultimately just like any tool, when I'm thinking of social media, same thing. A lot of my clients think of it so negatively sometimes, but it can be a tool for amazing connections. It can be a tool for something that's bigger than what you ever imagined. And I do think that way about artificial intelligence as well. One of my favorite questions to ask ChatGPT is let's say I'm about to record a TikTok video and I have my little outline and I know what I'm going to say, but I need a hook. So I'll ask ChatGPT, okay, this is what I'm going to say, but I need to start this video with something. What do you suggest?

(25:41):
But before you suggest something, what other information do you need to know that question? ChatGPT will give you four or five different things. It'll ask you questions, and it always has me thinking in a different way than I originally thought. And then I'll type in my responses and then it'll give me 10 different hooks, different ways to start that video. So for me, that's how I love using the tool. It's just that it can be used for good and we need more heroes to use it for the power of good. And I think it can help those of us who do really great work with our business to do that great work even faster and reach even more people.

Lisa Zawrotny (26:25):
I love that. I love the idea of the prompt and asking it that question and what am I missing or what more do I need? And really getting meta in there. And so you're using that with your video content, which I love. I'm a huge fan. And while we're at it, talking about social media, any other couple of suggestions of something we might want to walk away with today and actually try in terms of creating social media content?

Andréa Jones (26:53):
Yes. So I mentioned about the data. So ChatGPT can process data. Now, there is a limit on how much data you can input. However, if you do have something like your top 10 posts that you can input or you have even your Instagram bio, you can say, here's my Instagram bio, here's my about page on my website. Is there a way that I can improve my Instagram bio? And it'll give you some suggestions or with your top 10 posts, putting those in and saying, here's what I've already talked about. People clearly like these posts. What else should I talk about? I did this recently with my podcast episodes. Every year my podcast manager will go through and list out the top 20 posts. So I have all the titles, I'll input the titles and say, these are the top 10 titles. Is there anything else I should talk about? And it usually gives me pretty generic responses, but I can then spark that idea into other ways to use this. So to me, it's an idea generation tool. And when you use it that way, it can help you think about things differently. The last one I'll leave you with is even doing research on certain things. So saying, who are the top competitors in my space? Or give me 30 hashtags around this topic. You can use it to research certain things that you can then liaison into more social media content and more assets.

Lisa Zawrotny (28:22):
Wonderful. And I'm thinking too that this has major potential when we're constantly on the search for SEO supporting titles and naming conventions and things like that as well.

Andréa Jones (28:33):
Yeah, absolutely. You can say, I'm on TikTok and I want to be found for this reason. What keyword should I include in my TikTok caption? Things like that can be very helpful using it even outside of social media for blogs or for YouTube channels. Here's my video topic. What should the title of this video be using this keyword? That can also be very helpful.

Lisa Zawrotny (28:58):
I love that. And again, all of these ideas are things that don't necessarily pull us into that chasm of IP concerns, especially in fairness, because when we see titles of blogs and podcast content, even podcast names, I mean everywhere, there's so many repeats, but what you bring to the table is your expertise, your perspective, and that's where the magic was all along Anyhow.

Andréa Jones (29:26):
Yeah, and I'll say this thing too. The feedback or the response that you get from these artificial intelligence tools are only as good as the questions that you ask it. For example, I was trying to come up for a name something, and I told you I left puns and titles, and so I asked it to give me a name for a social media course, but use a Shakespeare pun. So I don't know if anyone would think to put those two things together, but I did. And it gave me some names that I was like, oh, okay, I see what you're doing there and I'm probably never going to do anything with it because I was just having fun. But I think those sorts of creative ways that you can use these tools, something that it would take your brain maybe months to figure out. It's just so fun to me. I just love it.

Lisa Zawrotny (30:18):
Right. And much better than TikTok as you like it. As I said, thank you. If you ever need the human help, I am here for the puns, but I love it. Okay. I think this is a wonderful place to finish off here because this is really hopeful. It's exciting, and it's like anything else where you have beginner, you have advanced, you have places that might be troubling for you, but you have plenty of space to play that isn't, and that's definitely where you're, so I'm actually really excited. And you're right, it's only as good as the prompts, right? The things that you ask. I know this is something that you can continue to support us in. I know you have podcast episodes about this very topic I'll make sure to have in the show notes, but let us know before we get into our fun rapid wrap up where we can find you online.

Andréa Jones (31:09):
Yes. So I am everywhere at onlinedrea. That's online DREA. And if you appreciate my perspective and approach, I do have a free course that you can check out. It's onlinedrea.com/free, and it walks you through my methodology behind using social media as a total grow your business.

Lisa Zawrotny (31:30):
Fantastic. Alright, you ready for this rapid wrap up? Yes. Okay. It's easy and it's fun. Speaking of prompts, you're going to be the answer to these prompts today. Fill in the blanks to a song that lifts my spirits, always makes me dance is

Andréa Jones (31:48):
I am loving Lion King right now. I just can't wait to be king. My daughter and I have just been dancing around to that one.

Lisa Zawrotny (31:57):
Such a good one. How about a quote or a mantra that inspires me that I love to share?

Andréa Jones (32:04):
Yes, and I always butcher this one, but it's from Brene Brown and it's, you deserve to be loved and you deserve to belong.

Lisa Zawrotny (32:14):
Okay, let's sit with that for a moment. Yes. You show up here worthy and you deserve those things. Alright, now how about a resource besides ChatGPT? It could be a book and app, anything. It doesn't even have to relate to today's topic. This just made your life better.

Andréa Jones (32:32):
I'm a huge fan of meditation and the Headspace app has helped me a lot. I like meditation that's voice only. So if you like voice only, we've got some great voice artists on there that I really enjoy and it helps ground me, especially in this wild world that we live and this new cycle that we live in right now.

Lisa Zawrotny (32:51):
So true. And many options in terms of time doesn't have to take a long time for it to be effective. There are days when I take five minutes if I can get it, and it does make a difference.

Andréa Jones (33:00):
Yep, absolutely.

Lisa Zawrotny (33:01):
Okay. And last but definitely not least, what are you grateful for today, Andrea?

Andréa Jones (33:08):
I am grateful for summer. I am excited for the sunshine. I feel like my mood is lifting.

Lisa Zawrotny (33:15):
Well. Send some my way. Please.

Andréa Jones (33:19):
I will.

Lisa Zawrotny (33:19):
And I am so very grateful for you and that we've been connected, and I want to thank you so much for shining your light so bright in this world and for sharing it with us today.

Andréa Jones (33:32):
Oh, thank you so much, Lisa.