TCC Podcast #334: How Copywriters Can Leverage AI with Sam Woods

Sam Woods is our guest on the 334th episode of The Copywriter Club Podcast. Sam is a copywriter who’s been leveraging AI for copywriting since 2019. This episode dives into how AI is going to integrate into our personal and professional lives over the next decade, and Sam shares how copywriters can use it to their advantage. Take a peek at what we chat out: How will AI create and eliminate jobs and reshape the economy. What capabilities does ChatGPT have and how can copywriters leverage it in their business? How Sam uses AI in his client projects and his process for writing sales copy. Using ChatGPT prompts for market research. What ChatGPT is and what it’s not. Can ChatGPT really write in your voice? Treating ChatGPT like a junior copywriter. Is AI a tool for creativity on tap? How to present using AI to a client. What else can AI actually do? Why your input matters more than anything. The benefits and value of using AI in your creative business. Can using AI make you a better copywriter? What are the first steps to start using tools like ChatGPT? Tune into the episode below by hitting play or reading the transcript. The people and stuff we mentioned on the show: The Copywriter Think Tank Kira’s website Rob’s website Sam's Twitter The Copywriter Club Facebook Group The Copywriter Underground Free month of Brain.FM Full Transcript: Rob Marsh:  You'd have to be living on a different planet to not have your inbox clogged with emails about AI. Talk about artificial intelligence is everywhere. Some people are saying that it means the end of content, copy, and copywriting. Others are saying the opposite, that AI is the biggest opportunity for marketers in generations. And the truth probably lies somewhere in the middle. I can't remember who said this, but I recently saw a comment that said, "AI won't take your job, but someone using AI will." So learning about these tools and how to use them is not just a good idea, but quite possibly the best way to ensure that you're still working as a copywriter in the coming decade. Our guest for this episode of The Copywriter Club podcast is copywriter and AI expert Sam Woods, and we grilled him with our questions about AI, ChatGPT, and what it all means for the future. You are definitely going to want to stick around for this one. Kira Hug:  Before we get to our interview, the podcast today is sponsored by, actually, it's sponsored by our new podcast. So we have a new podcast that is launching soon featuring other experts like Sam Woods, and so today is a preview of what's to come on the new podcast, which is called AI for Creatives. So if you like today's episode and you want more of that, you can just check out our show notes and there'll be a link in our show notes so you can get on the list and hear all about the new podcast when new shows come out. Rob Marsh:  And that podcast is we're interviewing experts in AI, experts who are developing their own AI tools. It's really all about how we get better at using artificial intelligence in our own businesses as creatives. Kira Hug:  And this podcast episode is also sponsored by the Copywriter Underground, which is our membership for copywriters, content writers, creatives. And we're creating a new series of AI trainings in the membership so that you can figure out how to use these tools, how to apply them to your business. And so actually, Sam Woods has a training in the Underground that you can access where he shows a demo of how to use the tools in your own copywriting. And so, if you want access to other trainings like that, definitely check out the Underground membership. Rob Marsh:  Yeah, listen to this episode with Sam, then go to the Underground, check out what he shared there. That's good for now. Let's kick off our episode with Sam Woods. Kira Hug:  How do you see AI impacting society and the economy in the next five to ten years? Sam Woods:  Yeah, I'll make a prediction and everyone will then tell me that I was wrong five years from now. No, well, so it'll have... And it's hard to say these things because it sounds like hype, and it sounds like overstated, and it sounds like everything else that's been hyped. Right before this you had Web3 and crypto and all this other stuff, right? NFTs. And they were all hyped and so on. But what's different about AI is that it's an infrastructure play, as it is being integrated into all the things that we are already doing. Web3 is not infrastructure, Crypto is not... Even though crypto could be infrastructure in terms of payments and coins and tokens and everything else, but it wasn't, and it probably never will be. But what you can do with AI is at an infrastructure level in society as it can be implemented into, not everything, but most things. And that's what we're seeing now. Like Bing. Microsoft made the investment of the decade years ago when they invested into OpenAI, probably the investment of, not just a decade, but the century. And they're integrating ChatGPT into Bing, they're going to integrate it into Microsoft Word, the Office suite. All the tools that Microsoft has, they're going to implement this little chatbot type thing and have it be your writing assistant, your presentation, like PowerPoint assistant. In any tool, any app, any software you can imagine there, a lot of companies are integrating AI into it. Notion.so, the tool that a lot of people use, they've integrated AI into the tool, and it does simple things like summarizing or does whatever. So we're seeing that happen, and it's going to accelerate over the next few years to the point where five years from now, it'll just be a part of our daily routine of any kind, anything from work, to play, to family, to social life. It'll just be there in different ways and in different capacities. Now, the interesting thing is everyone thought AI was coming for the blue-collar truck driving jobs first, but they're coming for the white-collar information worker, creative works first or creative jobs first. It's coming for the creative class, if you want to call it that. So designers, writers, photographers, videographers. What we're seeing with generative AI is how it's becoming as good, and what we're seeing now is early. This is an early version of what it can do. Just imagine if this is version one, imagine version 50. And it can create texts, images, video, audio, either from nothing or just based on a minute of you speaking into a microphone. And then it can take your voice, analyze it, and then replicate your voice and have you say anything. So the capacity for you to create deep fakes of yourself is, unfortunately, for anyone to create deep fakes of you, is the tech is there and it is both good and bad. It's terrifying and exciting at the same time. But five years from now, it'll be part of everything we do, most things we do. Anything that involves a computer or a cell phone, somewhere in there, there'll be an AI bot doing different tasks, anything from writing to analyzing, to reminding you, to you name it. And it's going to create a crap ton of new jobs that didn't exist before. It already is. If you think about prompting, which is how you interact with something like ChatGPT and GPT-3, that is becoming a job where I believe companies are going to start hiring. And who knows what they'll be called? Some say they will be called prompt engineers, prompters, chief prompt officers. Rob Marsh:  Copywriter. Sam Woods:  Yeah, exactly. Prompt writer. I like to just call it the prompt librarian I've seen as well. So I just like to call it prompt craft, because you're really designing language that you then use to give instructions. So it'll create jobs like that. It'll create jobs for people who know how to integrate AI into any company's workflow, whatever it might be, and processes. So it'll create a ton of jobs, and it'll also eliminate a ton of jobs, and it'll reshape the economy in different ways. Not so much destroy it. It'll just change it. Everything will change. That's the short version. Rob Marsh:  So you're making a prediction. I want to actually take you back in time to 2015. We were together in Texas, I think it was the first time we met in person, and we were actually talking about AI at this conference. And a person at this conference, I don't know if you remember this or not, we'll call him Ed because that was his name, so we were in 2015 and he was telling us, he said... This was April 2015. And he said, "By October, AI is going to completely replace copywriting." And you and I both laughed. Sam Woods:  Yeah, because he was full of it. But anyway, go ahead. Yeah? Rob Marsh:  We're like, "No, no way. Not going to happen." But I think at that time we said, "Eventually, yes, it may happen, but we're years away from that." We were right. I mean, it has been years. It probably came a little faster I think than some people were expecting. The interface that ChatGPT in particular presents I think has scared a lot of people. But let's just go a little bit broader as we talk about AI, because ChatGPT is one tool, but it's not the only tool. And there are all kinds of different AIs. We should also mention, we say AI, it's not true intelligence, right? It's artificial, but these are algorithms, programs that are designed to do particular things. But let's talk a little bit more about some of those other applications, too. Sam Woods:  Well, so the funny thing is that the biggest game in town is GPT-3, which comes from the company OpenAI, and they also release ChatGPT. But ChatGPT is just a version of GPT-3. Now, all, most up until now, and I think that'll change this year, but up until now, almost just about every single text generating tool out there,