Weekly CASual #29: a confused professor

Issue #029

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Hey friends,

Happy Friday!

Well.

I heard from so many of you on last week's issue, I decided I'm going to keep telling these stories.

Some of you were angry, actually emailing to say I'm stealing jobs. (I'm honored people think I'm responsible for that much mayhem.)

Some of you replied with stories of your own of trying to get your staff to adapt, and having to let folks go that wouldn't even fire up the AI machine–they were "too good" for that. ??

Goodness.

A new frontier of work is upon us.

We can't let our personal fears cloud the huge opportunity in the room. We will miss out, lose out.

So that's why I'm out here, ruffling feathers one by one. ??

For the foreseeable CASual future, expect an opening tale from the adapt or die frontier.

Because there's a lot of that happening right now. Everywhere I turn, everywhere I look.

It's almost like a dystopian war novel.

Reporting to you live... it's a bloody scene out here, some barely escaping with their lives...others going down right now on the chopping block...

100 million writing jobs are predicted to get completely cut. 300 million jobs in total are at stake.

On the flip side...

Half of all companies currently utilize AI in some fashion.

$15 TRILLION and 90+ million jobs will be created from the efficiency evolution that AI is bringing us.

One of my big questions, raising kids of my own, is – what is the educational industry doing about all of this? How are we preparing our young ones for what they will face?

(I've point-blank asked educational institutions why they haven't started teaching the use of ChatGPT in their classrooms yet. I get cold stares, or fumbling answers. I'll keep doing it. On the flip side, it did get me into a college helping a group of undergrads understand AI next February, which I am all about!)

In the news...

This week, there was a professor republished by Writer's Digest that said in his lengthy, essay-style dissertation on Why We Must Not Cede Writing to the Machines (that title alone... uhoh, someone's got a hill to die on)

"We should be wary of comparing writing, a vehicle for human communication and expression, to mathematical calculations. Using ChatGPT to draft a press release or legal document is prudent; such documents are meant to feel anonymous and to simply convey information. However, using AI to craft personal or even business correspondence is another matter, as doing so severely dilutes our connections with other people. In such cases, the technology isn’t merely helping you communicate; it’s communicating for you."

He went on to say if you "outsource" to ChatGPT, you may not be a genuine person at all.

Eek.

Here's why this is so terribly off.

Why are businesses adapting to AI in droves? Why is it becoming so widely adopted?

Because adapting to AI is like going from the world's worst dialup to the fastest internet on the planet.

It's like going from a tired old horse to a brand new tractor.

It's like going from waiting for a book to print on a press, to ebooks on Amazon that I can order in a second and read the next second.

It's THAT huge of an efficiency increase.

And I don't care how much of a "snobby writer" you are (I was one, too!)

And how much you think you might be better than the AI...

You aren't. It's that simple.

Someone on Twitter asked ChatGPT the number of different ways it can write.

And it did the math.

77,640,778 combinations of:

? Style

? Tone

? Format

? Purpose

? Language

? Point of view

This only scratches the surface. Because there's infinite potential with maximizing AI to do your job better when you're clear about what you want.

Can you match that?

Not even on my best day.

Let's be honest with ourselves and what AI can do, and find our new footing (skills, places, jobs) in a very much new and revamped frontier of how we do work.

Lots of you are doing this. Cheers to you. ?? YOU'RE the future – not AI. Because it's only as good as how we use it.

Interviewing Joe Pulizzi live at MAICON

One of my favorite people in content marketing is Joe Pulizzi .

He has had not one, not two, but THREE successful multi-million dollar exits from businesses he built with content marketing. This month marked his third official sale of a company (SocialTract in 2010, Content Marketing Institute in 2016, and The Tilt/CEX to Lulu this month!).

But more than that, he's a downright good person.

You can have all the money in the world – but if you're not a good person, you're not cool in my book.

In fact, Joe was the mentor in my life years ago that told me to go bigger.

And said that should be the Content Marketing Institute #CMWorld stage.

4,000 attendees. I did it. 2019.

At MAICON this July, I had the chance to interview Joe and get his thoughts on content marketing and the future (he made an eerily accurate prediction in 2017!).

Watch our interview now in a series of shorts:

• Part 1 with Joe Pulizzi
• Part 2 with Joe Pulizzi
• Part 3 with Joe Pulizzi
• Part 4 with Joe Pulizzi

TBEX 2023 keynote recording

The full recording of my TBEX keynote from this July is here!

I gave a 45-minute talk on How AI is The Future of Content & How to Win in this New World.

Promise, it's long but worth watching. You'll walk away with some lightbulbs like the attendees did. I cover how to think of this new world, a brief overview of how AI in content works, the technology involved, how to approach the tricky AI and copyright question, and a deep-dive on SGE.

Enjoy:

AI in the news

What's a newsletter on AI without some news? Enjoy this new section, more to come every week. I read a lot of AI news. Some of it seems repetitive. I'll share what really sticks out.

AI coding assistants have more than doubled the productivity of software engineers, according to a recent McKinsey study this June.

Think doubling productivity sounds like a lot? That number could go up to an astonishing 10x by 2023. AI is reforming more than just content creation – 300 million jobs will be either cut or changed completely. A lot of those are knowledge workers.

Leaping ahead by light years this year in particular – content creation (OpenAI/GPT), but also, AI image generation capabilities. Check out this timeline of how good Midjourney has gotten at generating images from text prompts in minutes. ?? (Hiccup: today's CASual image of the professor. AI still has its flaws.)

On the flip side, detecting AI images has gotten more important, according to Scientific American.

Want to test yours? Use our Content at Scale AI image detector to see if images are AI generated.

#StraightOuttaAI: Content at Scale blog

We are living proof of what we sell/teach/promote.

With 70+ blogs going out every month from our own website, we're raising our DA and growing our site authority with our own tool – because Content at Scale writes 90% of all of our blog content.

And we have ONE writer doing all the AIO/C.R.A.F.T. optimization. ??

Want to see how good AI content can look, for yourself?

Here's a list of CaS-written, humanly AIO'ed blogs fresh off of this week's press. ?? ??

• AI Prompt Engineering Courses: Unlock Your Potential
• How to Become an AI Prompt Engineer: Step-by-Step Guide
• Google’s Music Maestro: A Comprehensive Review of MusicLM, the AI Music Generator
• Beginner’s Guide to AI Video Prompts: Tips and Tricks
• The Definitive Blogging Guide for SaaS Companies

The hunt for treasure is ON ??

by Steven Harvey , Partner Manager

Our Content at Scale Treasure Island hunt is HAPPENING and getting heated in the last few weeks as our partners race to win a brand new Peloton, an Apple Studio Display and a Mavic DJI Drone!

It ends August 24th, so you still have a few weeks left to get in on this treasure hunt!

Simply refer leads to Content at Scale and claim your share of the pirate's booty! If you haven’t already joined as an affiliate partner, click here to join . And learn more about the Treasure Island contest here .

Looking for SEO case studies ??

Want to get featured in front of ~80,000 marketers and agencies on our channels? We're currently looking specifically for case studies from people that have ranked Content at Scale content in the top of Google.

Have content that's ranking? We want to feature you! Here's the form to fill out if you're in. This would get featured along with you/your business name on all of our channels.

Till next week,

xoxo

Julia