You're listening to the Membership Geeks podcast, bringing you

proven practical tips and advice from the leading experts on

growing a successful membership business. Well,

hello there. Welcome to another episode of the Membership Geeks

podcast. I'm your host, Mike Morrison, one half of the Membership

Geeks, and this is the place to be for proven

practical tips and advice on growing a successful

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right, today we're talking about a big hot

topic right now. AI.

Artificial intelligence. No, not the

Jude Law and Haley Joel Osmond movie from like,

2030 years ago. Although that movie is slept

on. I love that movie. That movie was cool.

That was heartbreaking at the end. No spoilers. I mean, it's

20 odd years. It's not a spoiler. No, we're

talking about AI, and particularly AI

in the context of you and your membership business.

Everyone is talking about AI. There's been such

huge developments over recent years, particularly within the last

twelve months. Some of those developments are extremely exciting,

some are pretty problematic, some are the stuff of

apocalyptic nightmares. But however you feel about

AI, there's definitely no sign of it slowing down. But what does that mean

for you as a membership site owner in real terms?

So in this episode, I don't want to do what everyone else who's

out there talking about AI is doing and

run down all the reasons why. It's amazing. It's a game

changer or ten ways to use AI. Ten

ideas for this. Instead, I want to get a little bit more

real with you and talk about, okay, how should you be

feeling? How should you be reacting? Should you be panicking?

Should you be changing your business model? Does AI mean the

end of online education or

memberships or courses? Should you be betting the house

on AI or should you be burying your head in the sand and hoping that

it passes by? Is it just another fad? Well,

the reason why a lot of these questions are coming up

and we literally get questions from people like, should I be panicking? Is my

membership dead? Is there any point starting a membership if everything is going to be

AI driven? And you are probably seeing

constant emails and social media posts telling you about

how AI should be your absolute number one focus and how it's

going to completely change absolutely everything about everything that you're

doing. So many news headlines about jobs being

instantly replaced by AI. And so,

understandably, people aren't sure what they should be doing. Like

regular everyday people aren't sure how they should be thinking or reacting.

So to all of that, for all the noise, all the hullabaloo, all of the

panic inducing clickbait, first thing I would say is

don't panic and don't get too sucked into the

hype. This happens every time marketers

find the next big thing. Nine times out of ten, the

next big thing is a big old nothing burger. AI

isn't that. AI actually is a big thing,

but that's just making marketers even worse. I mean,

you saw it, right, when everyone was on Twitter and in your

inbox telling you that you and your business had to adapt

to cryptocurrency or you were dead in the water.

Do you remember that? Do you also remember when everyone was telling you that

if your business didn't pivot to start offering

NFTs, it was going to be left behind? Do you remember

that? Are you thinking, hang on. Oh, yeah,

NFTs. I remember that few months where they were actually a

thing. Remember when everyone was telling you that your

membership needs to move to the metaverse?

Even Mark Zuckerberg doesn't care about the metaverse. Now, you

should remember all this because it was only a year or two ago. This happens

all the time. Marketers keep doing this. Now, the

AI boom isn't going to go the way of NFTs. It's not

going to go the way of crypto. It's not going to go the way of

the metaverse. It's real. It's bigger than that. It's

definitely different from those other things. But its impact on your member business

is being similarly overblown by

run of the mill marketers who are already

positioning themselves as AI experts or

experts on AI for business. The amount

of people who were up on the keynote stage

a year or two ago at social media conferences and marketing

conferences, talking about NFTs, talking about the

metaverse, who this year are up there

talking about AI.

It's just something that we have to deal with. Now, that doesn't mean you shouldn't

take AI seriously. You should. It doesn't

make it a fad. It's not. But

you must have seen all these posts. They

must be using chat GPT to write these posts where it's like

99% of people are using chat GPT. Wrong. Here's how you can

be part of the 1%. Yeah, and

you've got thousands and thousands of people writing the exact same

promotional content anyway, so

calm down. If you're panicking about AI, if you're

wondering whether it means you've got to totally change your vision for your

membership, you're wondering whether your great idea for your membership

is even worth bothering with. What's the point of starting a business in

anything that isn't AI? Don't get carried

away. Don't let marketers in particular,

and blogs and newspapers and

everyone who is really, really pushing this.

Don't let them shake you. Don't panic.

Don't throw out something perfectly solid with your

membership to go in some unknown direction

that is AI centric. So let's talk about what people are

actually using AI for in business right now.

Right now, the most common practical applications of AI as it

relates to most online businesses are

using it to come up with ideas for content or to actually create

that content. Now, that's not all AI can do, not by any

stretch of the imagination. And chat GPT, which is

the one you've probably heard of, the one everyone talks about, that's not the only

AI tool that there is. It's just one.

Now, a lot of people are just using it for content or for research

or for ideas. And when you

do see the marketers, send you emails and send social media

posts telling you how they're going to show you.

Join my webinar and learn how AI is going to revolutionize

your business. Basically,

it just boils down to getting you to use AI to write your blog posts

or your email subject lines. So the way most

people that you're probably seen out there raving about AI, the way they're using it

or teaching it, is still pretty narrow in terms of what

it can do and not helping

it is the fact that pretty much every other piece of software or tool

that's out there is rushing to add in an AI

component. But when you actually look at what those features are,

again, it ends up just being use our shiny new built in AI

tool to come up with ideas for blogs. The rush to

capitalize on AI is leading to a lot of pointless and

generic stuff, and it's leading to a lot of

pointless and generic content. So while the

idea of having AI write your content for you might be

appealing, it is already resulting in a lot of very samey

mediocre content being published because everyone has the same

idea. And also the content that's created

is actually quite inaccurate a lot of the time and requires a lot of

checking and correction. Now, as membership owners, most of us are trading

on our specialist expertise. So having AI write content

around specialized subjects can result in very,

very mixed outcomes. The important

thing with this, even if you follow the crowd and you just start using

chat GBT to write your blog posts, you just have to

remember these are just tools. It's just a tool.

But because it's this exciting, brand new thing,

people are turning that solution into a problem.

They're giving themselves that problem to solve, where they're like, okay,

where can we use AI in our business? And then they go and

try and answer that question, rather than using AI being the

answer to the question. So they're saying, how do we use AI in our

business? As opposed to looking at the

existing challenges and problems they have and asking,

could AI be the solution to this problem? We have

identified for a lot of people, AI is a solution

looking for a problem. Or in other words, it's not something they

actually need. It's something you've lived without.

It's something you could continue to live without.

You've got to remember, it's just a tool. You use it to fix something.

You use it to address a problem. You don't make it

the problem, you don't make your top priority. Let's try and find

a way to use this cool new AI thing. So

this episode is basically just should just be like titled just

calm down about AI a little bit,

understandable people, get excited, get a bit carried away, because it is cool. It

is like magic. I won't lie. Like every time

I've used an AI driven tool as a big old

nerdy tech person, my jaw hits the floor every time. It's like actual

magic. Now, in terms of how AI is

used, as I've said, the way most people are talking about it,

they are conflating AI with chat GBT

and most typically chat GBT for writing

stuff. That's just such a tiny little fragment

of what AI can be used for, like content creation and

ideation is what's getting the most focus, because

it does feel like magic. Having something created from nothing to literally just

type in, write a 1000 word

blog article about how mushrooms are

amazing, and it just writes

it. It just creates it. The

very first thing I had Chad GPT do was write a

poem about the famous wrestler Stone Cold. Steve

Austin going to buy a bagel

just because I wanted to throw something completely random and

it was magic, it made sense, it

rhymed, it was clever, it was pithy, it was good.

So no wonder it's getting the most focus. Same

with image generation. Although people aren't finding

most people are just like, isn't that really cool? Show me a picture,

know Santa Claus skateboarding on the moon. They're just using

it because they can, because it's fun, right? And it feels like magic having that

stuff created. But actually the more exciting applications of AI from

a business point of view, from a membership point of view, are in other things

like using AI to create transcripts or automatically generate podcast,

show notes and video summaries. Being able to use AI to

replicate your voice and actually create audio from

text that sounds exactly like you.

We occasionally use a tool called Descript

for edits on some audio, we have an editor who

actually edits the podcast in general. But for other stuff, like

if we're taking little audio snippets that we're going to turn into animated

videos for TikTok, I'll just do myself

in Descript. Now, I've taught Descript what my voice sounds

like. It basically had me read a chapter from Alice in Wonderland

and their AI can be used so that

if I just feed it some text, it will speak out,

that text in my voice. Now,

you'll probably notice a little bit of the difference. It'll be flat in some areas,

there won't be the inflection in others and stuff like that. But man,

it is scary and it is magical and it is

impressive and it's exciting. So much more exciting than just,

hey, can you write me some social media posts about how great email

marketing is? There's a lot of exciting applications of AI

out there that are still relatively young,

that are still early stage, but that are

going to enable amazing things. Like there could come a

day where this podcast

could be entirely written. I could pay someone to write for

me. I could then take that and feed that into an AI

tool which speaks it in my voice and 99% of

you won't be any of the wiser. Now, I did consider whether I do the

really smug smiley thing and do that for

this podcast episode, but man,

the thing that's missing is the human element. I like being on

this podcast. I like sitting with a mic and just shooting

off and having some little notes and just going for it.

AI can't do that. AI doesn't have that human

element, that ability to improvise that

feeling of enjoyment when they're talking, when they get into a flow.

And I think that shows. I think there's a little uncanny

valley element creeping through into

AI generated content. Videos, images, text, audio,

whatever. But yeah, stuff like that. And

also things like chatbots, AI driven chatbots. AI is making

chatbots a lot smarter. AI powered

search, obviously the main search engines like

Google, Microsoft, whatever, they're using AI now to inform

or they're going to be more focused on using AI to inform search

results. Now that could be impacting traffic to your

website because it's another way that they're going

to keep people on the search engine, keep people in Google

rather than them clicking off to somewhere else because hey, why

click through this website with a full article when our AI can just give you

that answer? So that's a challenge we're all going to have to face and that's

why you're going to want to look into other content outlets that don't

rely on Google podcasting, video, social,

that sort of stuff. But there's also

tools that can use AI to empower the search side

of things on your membership. There's

AI functionality where someone on your

membership can search for a question and the

AI will look at the content you've created

in your membership and use that to provide

basically the answer that you would give them based on

the knowledge, based on the stuff that's inside your membership. Still a little hit and

miss some of these tools.

It's coming out that actually the answers are partly

based on your content, but it's also pulling stuff in from third parties, which kind

of goes against the whole point of it, but they're getting there, right?

These kind of things are far more exciting for membership owners than just having Chat

JBT write you some generic email content that's probably

only 50% accurate and doesn't fit your tone of your

brand. But of course, just because these exciting and useful tools are out

there doesn't mean you should bend over backwards to implement them just because you want

to find some way to use AI in your membership. Again,

these are just tools, they should be used as such, which is to

say they should be used to solve actual problems, not just for

the novelty factor. If you find yourself scratching your head trying to

figure out where AIpowered tools fit in your membership,

then the good news is that there's probably not a huge need for them right

now. Now of course, this is an area that's moving quickly

and that is very, very vast. So for today's episode, I really just

wanted it to be a bit of a sanity check on how membership owners

should be viewing things and approaching AI. Particularly because

of how much marketers are banging everyone over the head with it and

making people think that their business will die

within months if everything isn't suddenly running on

AI. And all your blogs aren't being written by a robot. However,

if you want to dive deeper into specific practical uses

of AI within the membership world, the broader range

of how AI might impact it, how things might change, then we

actually recently published a blog series on AI. For

memberships over at the Membership Geeks website, where we look at the

impact of AI on the membership site industry. Looking at trends,

looking at predictions. We looked at ways to improve membership site

management with time saving AI tools, how to use

AIpowered chat bots to improve membership engagement, how to

use AI for efficient member onboarding and enhanced retention.

And, of course, how membership owners can streamline content

creation with AI. So this is a

real in depth series that gives you a lot more of the

meat of how to use it. The tools that you could be

utilizing, where things might be going long term. Today was

just really a leveler. It was a sanity check.

It was the typical thing we like to do, taking the

shine off all the nonsense that the marketers are putting out there, all the hype

and the spin, and giving you the real perspective on

where you should stand, where your head should be, how you should be thinking, how

you should be reacting. So hopefully it's been useful for that. And if you want

to dive deeper into our series on AI for memberships, go to

membershipgeeks.com AI.

Membershipgeeks.com AI. All

right, I can put that soapbox away. Hopefully, you

found today's episode useful. Hopefully it's calmed you down a bit if you've been losing

sleep about the rise of the robots, of course, this is a fast changing world,

so no doubt I'll be back again in another two or three weeks in cancel

everything I just said and bow down to our new mechanical

overlords. But hopefully it won't come about that

soon, because we've got a lot more tips and advice to give you from the

wonderful world of memberships. And I'll be back again with another installment

of the Membership Geeks podcast very soon to do just that. Hope you