In this episode, I’m chatting with fellow dietitian blogger, Chrissy Carroll, about all things AI. Chrissy recently attended an AI conference and then joined me on this podcast to share her key takeaways from the event.
First, we chat about why Chrissy decided to attend an AI conference as a dietitian blogger and whether or not there was anyone else in even remotely similar fields that she met there. We talk about what she hoped to learn by attending and some of the key takeaways that she gleaned from the speakers.
We then transition to talk about how Chrissy is currently using AI in her blogging workflow, and we hypothesize a bit on where AI may be headed in the future and how it might impact bloggers in the food and wellness space. We end with some recommendations from Chrissy on where we can go to learn more about AI. Have a listen now!
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More About Chrissy Carroll
Chrissy Carroll is a vibrant dietitian, blogger, and social media enthusiast. She has grown her primary site, Snacking in Sneakers, to a full-time income. After finding success in building her blog, Chrissy became passionate about helping others start profitable sites. She shares tips to help wellness bloggers grow on one of her other sites, Build a Wellness Blog.
Connect with Chrissy
- Website: snackinginsneakers.com
- TikTok: @chrissytherd
- Instagram: @chrissytherd
- Twitter: @chrissytherd
- Facebook: Snacking in Sneakers
- LinkedIn: Chrissy Carroll, MPH, RD
Mentioned Links
Chrissy’s blog post – takeaways from the AI conference
Episode Transcript
Okay. So I know I tease that I was going to do an ask me anything style episode this week. But something super fun and timely popped up on my schedule and I just couldn’t resist. A few weeks ago, the AI company Jasper hosted an AI conference in San Francisco. And one of my long time online RD blogger friends, Chrissy Carroll was flying out to attend.
I had never actually met Chrissy in person, although she definitely was a guest on this podcast years ago when I first started. So if you scroll back to the beginning of the archives, I’m sure you can easily find her previous episode where she talked about what it was like to be a full-time blogger.
but yeah, we’d never met in person and this seemed like a really great and probably rare opportunity to do so since she lives on the east coast and I’m out here in California. So I made the track out to San Francisco for the afternoon and we had an early dinner and we caught up in person and it was just so much fun.
And the next day Chrissy attended the AI conference and we decided we wanted to hop on a call later that week to record a podcast episode with her key takeaways from the conference. It also sort of seems like perfect timing, because I just released last week’s episode about AI. So most of you should be familiar and up to date with everything that’s happening.
And we can kind of build off of that with this chat with Chrissy, about what she learned at the conference. So we chat today about why Chrissy decided to attend an AI conference as a dietitian blogger and whether or not there was anyone else in even remotely similar fields that she met there, we talk about what she hoped to learn by attending and some of the key takeaways that she gleaned from the speakers.
We then transition a bit and talk about how Chrissy is currently using AI in her blogging workflow. And we hypothesize a bit on where AI may be headed in the future and how it might impact. Bloggers in the food and wellness space. We end with some recommendations from Chrissy on where we can go to learn more about AI and how to keep in touch with her. If you want to follow along with her journey as sort of the dietitian AI expert, if you will.
She doesn’t call herself that, but I definitely see her that way. So I highly recommend friending her online, joining her Facebook group, whatever, keeping in touch, because she does a really good job of experimenting with this stuff and coming back and sharing her actionable insights. So I hope you enjoy this chat let’s dive in
Erica Julson: Hello. Hello Chrissy and thank you for coming on the podcast again. It’s been a few years since we last
chatted, so I’m really stoked to talk to you today about ai cuz I feel like you’re like becoming a little AI niche expert here. So I’m excited to hear your insights of, uh, what’s coming up in the future.
Chrissy Carroll: Yeah, I am pumped to be here. I think AI is such a hot topic these days, so I am excited to chat.
Erica Julson: Yeah. Uh, I know. So we’re doing this podcast because, Chrissy flew out to San Francisco recently, to attend Jaspers Jasper’s like an AI company, people listening. By the time this episode comes out, I will have actually just released my own thoughts on like the ai, stuff that’s happening.
so this is good timing. So my episode was more like what I think’s going on right now and, what we as dietitians might be able to do to like, Stay abreast of these changes. And then what we’re talking about today is Chrissy attended the Gen AI Conference, which stands for generative ai, I believe.
So we’re gonna chat about what she learned at this, like cutting edge conference, , talking about what’s happening in ai, where people think may see it going, um, and just get her insights into um, what she learned. Attending this somewhat exclusive conference. Like I don’t think it was live streamed, like you had to be there.
It was a one day on Valentine’s Day. I don’t know what that says about us, that like over a thousand people attended a tech conference on Valentine’s Day. But , yes. So we got to meet up in person and we were like, yes, let’s do a podcast episode about this. So, yeah, can you just fill us in? Like, this conference was called Gen ai, which I just said stands for generative ai.
So what is generative ai? Can we start there?
Chrissy Carroll: Yes. Yeah. So generative AI is basically like any kind of artificial intelligence where you can prompt it to generate or to create something. So it could be a prompt that you give an AI tool to create text. It could be a prompt that you give an AI tool to create a piece of art.
It could be sound, it could be coding, which I didn’t even realize was a thing until I went to this conference and learned a ton about some of these AI coding programs. So basically anything where you are, uh, giving the AI a prompt and it is generating something new.
Erica Julson: And this is like a somewhat new technology, right?
Like I think, when did Jasper come?
Chrissy Carroll: Yes. That is a good question. I think, I think I’ve been using Jasper since 2021, so I wanna see that sounds right. Either late 2020 or early 2021.
Erica Julson: Yeah, so not that old, you know, two years maybe max, that it’s really that this generative AI has been something that like the average consumer could use, I would say.
And then if you listened to my last podcast, I explained, you know, what was happening with chat G P T and that coming out recently, and then how it’s about to be entering search engines. So we don’t need to go into like a whole deep dive of that. I think if people are listening there, it should be up to speed.
but I wanted to know like, Made you decide to attend this conference as a dietitian blogger? Like was there anyone else, like remotely like you at this conference? ?
Chrissy Carroll: Sure. I did not meet any other bloggers, but I did meet a ton of people in a lot of different industries. So I met quite a few freelance writers, which was pretty cool because that’s relatively similar to blogging.
So some of the same stuff that we do. I met people that own software companies, people that do AI hardware. I met this lady who was fascinating to me because she runs a series of cosmetology schools and she decided to attend because she had been using AI in her own content creation for marketing and things along those lines.
So, . I just really wanted to learn more about what was going on in the space. I feel like I was somewhat of an early adopter, I guess, to the AI trend. I think that when I joined Jasper, there were maybe a thousand people in this Facebook group, and you know, now there’s a lot more than that. So I think I just wanted to learn more about what was coming in this space.
Any other ideas for things that we can utilize this for? and just really like kind of where the world is going with regards to ai.
Erica Julson: Yeah. It feels like it’s changing weekly. Like every week there’s like a whole, like I have to listen to 10 podcasts and read 20 articles to like just keep up on like all the changes.
Chrissy Carroll: I know, it’s crazy. And if you think it’s, it’s nuts because, you know, two years ago if you had said, oh yeah, I’m using like AI as a blogger, it was kind of like this secret and you know, a lot of people didn’t know about it. And was it okay to do? Was it not okay to do? And now I think especially with the release of chat G p T, so many more people both in the blogging space, but also just like a layperson is kind of familiar with what AI is and, and the implications that might have on various career fields.
Erica Julson: Mm-hmm. . So this was hosted by Jasper, which we know is like was one of the early, AI tools that you could use as like a business person or like a layperson. Um, obviously at that point it was already using G P T three, so it’s not like it was the first, you know, iteration of this chat bot. Um, sort of like thing.
But yeah, I think. , it’s been around for a couple years. So they were hosting the conference, so I’m assuming they had a bunch of people from their company speaking like what other types of people did they have speak at the conference and like what type of topics were they covering?
Chrissy Carroll: Yeah, so definitely the Jasper team was there and they gave some updates kind of with what they were doing as far as their tool and what aspects they were adding to it moving forward.
So they’re adding things like the ability to utilize it for teams and add a brand. So that everything that you create is kind of like within your brand voice. So those are some functionalities that I think they’ll be adding on kind of higher tier programs moving forward. But then they had a lot of other people that were there from various AI companies that were either creators, that were journalists.
So, um, they had Zach King, who you may be familiar with. He’s a video creator. He does a lot of stuff. Of course, when I got home, my son was like, my son’s eight. He’s like, did you meet any YouTubers there? I was like, oh, there’s this guy, Zach King that spoke. And he was like, what? You got to see Zach King?
Like he knew way more about him than I did, which was just funny. But, He talked a lot about, you know, how he uses AI kind of in his creative process as a digital video creator, kind of creating this short form content and using AI for iteration and for storyboarding and things along those lines. So that was really interesting.
They had, um, Kevin Ru, who’s a New York Times journalist or columnist, I don’t know what the official title is, but he talked a little bit about future proofing yourself as far as the evolution of ai. So he’s got a book on the same topic. But his talk was really interesting because it kind of talked about these aspects of like surprising social or scarce and how.
When we think about ourselves and kind of future proofing ourselves within this AI space, those are three things to consider. So like, can we make our work surprising in that it’s irregular, it’s not as easy for an AI to do, or is it it something that’s social where people need that human connection and AI can’t necessarily replicate it?
Or is it scarce in that it’s either like a very rare skill or it is something that, um, is too high stakes that we wouldn’t wanna outsource to an ai? So that was kind of an interesting perspective, even as somebody that uses ai, but thinking forward to what that’s going to look like and how maybe we can incorporate those skills into whatever field that we’re in.
Um, so that was fascinating. They had quite a few panels. I mean, the guy. Is the CEO of Stability ai, which he’s the one that’s, uh, they did Stable Diffusion. So anybody that used, like, I believe the Lens app was built off that. So when everybody was like, I’m a warrior, I’m this, you know, it was kind of based on, on that model.
Uh, they had the guy from Relet, I think his name was Amjad. Um, I may be butchering names. I hope that I’m not, but he was there. And so that’s, you know, a software building, AI platform. They had one of the guys from Open ai, which is the, the, those are the people responsible for chat, G P T. Uh, so just lots of really big people in the space, kind of sharing what they, what their thoughts are, where they see things evolving.
There was definitely a panel that talked a lot about the tech side of things, which was quite over my head. Uh, you know, talking about like hardware and inference and models and all of that is a little bit above where I’m at, but, , interesting to hear nonetheless, as far as where they see things going.
Yeah, so those were the main people that, uh, were there that, oh, Nat from, um, he was the former c e o of GitHub. His presentation was actually fascinating. So I know I’m rambling a little bit here, but I’m gonna tell you because I think that some of the stuff he said was really interesting. So he talked about his experience building GitHub’s co-pilot, which is like a AI coding tool, so it kind of helps developers and some of the things that he said.
One comment that he made really fascinated to me, and especially in light of what’s going on with all the search stuff and some of the reports of being maybe providing inaccurate answers, are like being argumentative. and he talked about how, you know, we think, oh well, you know, we need all these AI tools to be like super accurate, right?
That’s like what people want. But in reality he talked about how there is this kind of like slot machine effect of, you know, it’s not gonna be right every time, but it’s fun. And when it’s right you get this little like dopamine hit. And so do these tools necessarily need to be accurate or can they be launched like this where there are going to be some errors and it’s not going to be right all the time?
And I thought that was just a really interesting concept as far as maybe a lot of these are going to be launched without full accuracy. And maybe that’s okay.
Erica Julson: Yeah. Really interesting to think about. I mean, it seems like it’s already happening, like , you know, like people are out there testing Bing’s, search bot.
And I’m sure it’s not perfect as we know. So . Yeah.
Chrissy Carroll: Have you seen some of the reports, like on Twitter where it’s like they’re arguing, you know, it’s like, no, it’s 2022 and people are like, no, it’s not, it’s 23. And things like Stop being rude.
Erica Julson: Yeah, with a sad face emoji
Like, please come back and with a better attitude. And start a new chat. Like, I saw one like that.
Goodness. Hilarious. Very good. Okay, so I kind of wanna ask you some more details about some of those topics before we maybe, um, dive into how we can use this as bloggers or dietitians. So just that Z King presentation, uh, I didn’t know who Z King was before. You were like Zach King’s there and I was like, shoot, I feel like I should know who that is.
So then I looked it up. , I don’t really spend a lot of time on YouTube. But it looked like he does like magic videos, almost like. , I’m sure. And I’m assuming since he’s using ai, maybe they’re like, he makes them with the help of AI or something, I don’t know. But yeah, it’s basically like short form videos where, you know, like, I don’t know, he’ll be like, he’ll throw something on the ground and then it becomes a hole and he jumps in through it, you know, like all in one video.
So obviously I don’t know how they edit that and make that look real, but that’s the type of stuff that he’s doing. So that was kind of cool. And so I was just curious, like what, how was he integrating AI in his process? Like, did he, did he share more details? .
Chrissy Carroll: Yeah. So a lot of the stuff that he does as far as the, the magic kind of stuff is like the magic of editing those videos, and whatnot.
So that, and, and there’s, he showed us some behind the scenes things from what he does. So he had this one video where, you know, he was like making a fort with his kids and then like he, he goes through the back and it’s like out in the wilderness. And the way that they set it up was they literally like built kind of like a mini living room out in like a mountain and then had that set up.
So it looked like they were inside a living room. And then they just came out the other side and there was the mountain. So I was like, oh, like this is just something they set up out there. That’s kind of cool. , he uses AI mainly for idea generations. So he talked about an example where he asked the AI, give me a list of 25 common pet peeves.
And then he got the list and he was like, okay. And then he asked it to clarify and said, give me a list of the 25 most visual pet peeves. And so he got this list and one of them was like people driving too fast around kids. And so then he did this little video where he, you know, like those, um, like those green things that are like drive slow kids live here.
Erica and I are on video right now and I’m like acting this out. Like’s going to be seeing me on this podcast, but. Those little green things that people put out on the street and he made this video where then he kind of like jumps up and you know, stops people as that little green guy. But basically the idea for that video came from artificial intelligence and I thought the use of like give me the most visual pet peeves was really interesting and gave me some of my own ideas about, okay, if I’m trying to come up with nutrition related videos, is that a modifier I can use in my prompts to give me some ideas that are gonna be more interesting to watch on video versus maybe writing about or listening to on a podcast?
Yeah, so I think that was really interesting. . And then the other way he mentioned using AI is that him and his team put together kind of these one pagers when they are planning out their content creation. And so it’s got the title of the video and a description of what’s going to happen and an image.
And so, you know, somebody used to kind of sketch those images and now they’ve said that they use AI for some of those images to be able to create it. And for me, I thought, well, that would be kind of brilliant if you’re pitching a brand on something and you’re trying to explain what you’re going to do on this video, and you wanna give them a visual representation ahead of time so they can like imagine what that’s gonna look like.
That using a i art could be a really interesting way of doing that. .
Erica Julson: Yeah. So I have didn’t really talk about AI art in my last podcast, so can we like share a little bit about what that is, how people can access those tools, and like what it’s capable of doing?
Chrissy Carroll: Sure. So there’s a lot of AI art tools on the market and there’s a few different models that most of them are based off of.
So Jasper has an art tool called Jasper Art, and I believe that’s based on the Dolly model. They may have some additional models weaved in as well. There is a tool that I use called Art smart.ai, which I believe is based on stable diffusion, which is another art model. And then there’s tools like Mid Journey and Mid Journey is incredible.
You can get some amazing art out of it. The user interface is a little interesting though because it’s all done in Discord and so I don’t find it super. Easy to use, like as a consumer that doesn’t know much about technology. Whereas the other platforms, I think they have this interface and you know, you type what you want, but then there’s all these like modifiers that you can select that are already there, so you can select it to look like a photograph or a watercolor, a sketch drawing or something along those lines.
And the way that a i r works is you’re basically just giving it a text prompt. So you might say, you know, I want a picture. I pulled one for a presentation recently and it was like, I want a picture of an older man in the kitchen with mushrooms because the presentation happened to talk about mushrooms.
And so, uh, that was something that it was able to give me. It was a very obscure image that I wasn’t finding a stock photo for. And so boom, then I was able to generate what I needed with ai. And I think that you can use a lot of those images for blog content, social content presentations. Children’s books.
I think if anybody wants to do any kind of like nutrition children’s book, there’s a lot you can do with a i r in that regard to be able to illustrate something quickly. Um, so I think just, you know, you can play around with some of those tools, but it’s really just about prompting it and you do have to get pretty specific in the way that you prompt prompted as far as what, the visual should look like, what type of visual it should be, exactly what’s in it.
Mm-hmm. , um, to be able to get the kind of image that you’re hoping for.
Erica Julson: Yeah. Like maybe as an example, instead of just like, man, older man in a kitchen with mushrooms, you could say like, You know, older man with a beard and a hat standing behind a marble countertop holding a mushroom and smiling or something, you know, like. Yeah, .
Chrissy Carroll: And then you’d wanna add on like, okay, is it a photograph, is it a watercolor? So, you know, in that case I was like photorealistic and kind of those cues to be able to get it to the style of image that you want as well. Yeah,
Erica Julson: yeah. And I believe I saw something where, Google said that they were fine with AI images, like in the context of blogging, they consider that to be like an original image.
So if you’re worried about that, I don’t think that’s a concern for people listening. Uh, yeah. Although I did see an interesting thing where, cuz um, all. image generation models are trained on real photos. Like that’s how they are able to generate their own versions. So they’re trained on like stock sets of photos and I saw one where they , they included the shutter stock watermark in the photo.
So people were like, Ooh, I wonder if that’s gonna cause problems. Um, so I, yeah, I definitely think there’s still like some kinks to be worked out in some scenarios, but yeah,
Chrissy Carroll: there’s, there’s some legal stuff mm-hmm. that we don’t have precedent for right now. And so I know that there are some potential lawsuits in the works with some of the models and how that’s gonna play out.
We have yet to be seen, uh, comes down to, you know, is it ethical for them to be using the training data on images that belong to other people? And how does that look for us and using it? I would say yes. Right now, I think everything is, Quote unquote safe, but whether lawsuits result in new regulations in the future with that kind of content, I think we have yet to see.
Erica Julson: Yeah. Okay. Well that was super helpful. It, it actually reminded me, I was just listening to a podcast, about TikTok from Kenia Kelly. , uh, she was a guest and she was using AI very similarly to how Zach King was using it to generate short form video ideas for TikTok. So, yeah, and obviously you can do the same for blogging.
Um, yeah, so I’m sure we’ll get more into like, ideas of how to use this with blogging, but, okay. My last thing I wanted to talk about based on the presentations, um, was a little bit more into that future-proofing topic. You said according to that speaker I, for, I forgot what his name was, um, . That, okay.
Yes. . You can make, your content or your brand, like more surprising social or scarce, then possibly that could help protect you a little bit from the AI onslaught. So like, did that jog anything for you In our industry, like, , you know, food and wellness content creators online. Like how could we make our stuff more surprising or social or scarce?
Chrissy Carroll: That’s a good question and I don’t know that I have a great answer for it. I think if you are developing, so I think it depends on if you’re developing your blog as a brand, right? Like of yourself and you’re involved in it. I think that that naturally lends itself to making it a little bit more social, because you are part of it and you’re creating maybe video content or social content to go along with it, and you are a part of your brand and nobody can replace you.
You’re uniquely you. I think if you’re developing blogs like you and I may do in the sense of I’m gonna grow this kind of without my face on it because I wanna grow content. I don’t know how to necessarily make that more surprising social or scarce.
I think that there are certain niches that lend themselves a little bit more to that.
Uh, so I think that when we think about AI and kind of the impact on search, you know, certain niches definitely require more in-depth content, maybe more visual content. So things like recipes where you’re taking photos and you’re posting those, I think that that’s gonna require, uh, a little bit more visual content that maybe, at least initially those AI search results won’t serve up.
So I think that that might be help, a helpful differentiator in the meantime. Maybe creating video content to go along with things like recipes. But yeah, I don’t know if we’re just kind of your average niche site, how we really go about that.
Erica Julson: Yeah, I know that’s something I wanna think on too, but I like those, those buckets.
So another like, I feel like another bucket that maybe would go along with that, that Google’s kind of hinting at. I think you know how they added, now it’s E E A T, and they’re like going and saying like, oh, experience is helpful too. Obviously AI doesn’t have experience in anything. And I feel like also in their guidelines, they keep bringing it back to like trust, trust, trust.
Like that’s the biggest of the E E A T factors. It’s like trust and then everything else is like supporting this idea of trust. And as you just said, like maybe the trust is a little lacking in the accuracy of some of the AI answers. So I do think that if you’ve established yourself as like an expert authority in whatever topic and people trust your opinions, you know, perhaps they would seek you out as a resource too.
So maybe we could leverage that cuz we are like experts in nutrition. So if you build yourself up as like a thought leader, I believe people would still care what you think , you know, and not solely focus on an AI generated response. .
Chrissy Carroll: Yes, exactly. Yeah. I think that if you, if you have that name recognition or brand recognition and people seek you out, that that’s definitely going to be helpful moving forward in search.
I don’t know, for people who are just kind of Googling random topics, you know, somebody that’s like, I want a gluten-free diet guide, or something along those lines. Are they going to go to the AI or are they going to go to the search result? And I don’t know. I think it’s something we just have to kind of wait and see.
My hope is that people are interested in kind of seeing who is behind content. Like I know if I look at like Google something, I’m more likely to either seek out if it’s a health topic, certainly. Healthline
or Cleveland Clinic or Mayo Clinic, you know, one of those
big name people or somebody that I know is an expert in that space.
Similarly, there’s certain recipe sites that I know if I see them in the search results, I’m like, oh, everything I’ve made from them is good. I’m gonna go ahead and go there. So I hope that, you know, we can continue with some of that brand recognition, but for the average person using it, I don’t know.
We’ll have to like wait and see how that goes.
Erica Julson: I know. I feel like that about. I’ve seen some, a, a good amount of people saying that. Like they would totally, and these are mostly like SEO people, so maybe they’re not like really foodies, but, they’re like, I would cook a recipe that the AI made. Like, I don’t wanna read a blog.
And I’m like, I would never do that. Like, I have zero confidence that an AI recipe would be good. Like,
Chrissy Carroll: so I am always sur surprised, and I’ve seen this in like SEO Facebook groups too. Like, oh, I would ne I, I can’t wait for AI to take over so it can gimme recipes. The first thing, two things that I do when I Google a recipe is I am looking at the picture.
Does it look good? And do I want to eat it? And then I’m going and looking at the reviews of what people said. So did the recipe work. And you can’t do either of those with I know eyes. So my mind is always blown by that though. I’ll say. I think for us as dietitians, Using the AI to help with the initial generation of recipes might be a way that we can really kind of speed up recipe development.
So I do think that there is a pro and a con to that.
Erica Julson: Yeah, I was also listening to something recently and it, it made a lot of sense in some ways, like, if AI is actually like, kind of as good for some niches at creating content as maybe like a cheap freelance writer, like as experts, will we sort of be transitioning from writers to more like editors?
You know, I mean that model’s already kind of there with, you know, like expert reviewed by blah, blah blah in a lot of big sites and they do like pay less experienced people to do the first draft and then they have an editor come in and like fact check it essentially. So I wonder if that’s gonna like continue to pick up steam and trickle down.
Chrissy Carroll: I think so. Interesting. Yeah. I know even from my own experience and sometimes outsourcing to writers, sometimes I find that the amount of time that I spend editing a human written piece is the same amount of time that I spend editing an AI written piece. And so obviously as a business owner, it would make more sense.
Not that I wanna kill off human jobs, I don’t wanna do that. But from a business perspective, I think it does make more sense to then edit the AI content. There’s there’s exceptions to it though, right? Like so nutrition writing is very scientific sometimes, and the AI doesn’t always do a great job with that.
So there’s certain types of content AI writing is better with, and certain types of content that I think we really need, like even from the first draft stage, the human to be there for it.
Erica Julson: Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So let’s dive into what are some ways that you are currently using AI tools in your business?
Chrissy Carroll: Sure.
So I’ve been using AI as far as a writing assistant for quite a while now. I think I’ve gotten very good at co-creating, and I still do use Jasper for blog content. I know some people have asked like, oh, now that chat G B T is out, do we really need Jasper anymore? I still really like Jasper, and that is because I feel like you can co-create in Jasper very well.
Whereas chat, G B T, you’re kind of prompting it with, you know, okay, write a blog post on this, or write a section about this, and then you’re like, finagling things together. Whereas Jasper, because you’re working in this long form editor, you can write a little bit, then you can press the composed button and Jasper can finish a little bit and then you can add a little bit more in.
And I just feel like it’s a more seamless process for me at least right now. There is another tool I’m going to test out this month that, um, I’m curious to see how it goes. It, it just works a little bit differently, so maybe I’ll have updates on that. If it works. Well,
Erica Julson: what, what tool. It’s called Zim Writer. Have you heard? I thought that might be, yeah, I have that written down. It’s like, but it only works on Windows. I was looking at it last night and I don’t have a Windows computer, so ,
Chrissy Carroll: I’m, I’m on Windows, so I’m Oh, perfect. Out. They’ve got a great lifetime deal right now, so I’ll probably go down for that and just play and see how it goes.
And, and you do have to pay then for, you know, your open AI usage on it, but that’s, that’s relatively inexpensive once you buy the tool. But I’ve ha I’ve heard great things about it, so I’m excited to play around and test that out. Um, yeah, so I use it for blog content. I use chat g p T a lot actually for email content, especially if I just need somebody, somebody, I’m acting like it’s a person, especially if I need the AI to create just like a quick draft that’s there and then I can kind of plug things into it.
So for example, after I left that conference on my plane ride home, I sent an email to a lot of the speakers that I felt had like really interesting messaging just to thank them for their talk and kind of just, you know, make connections in that area. But yeah, I used AI to like write the initial draft of all the thank you emails and then I just kind of went in and plugged in some other things and like some interesting stuff that they had mentioned.
So that was really useful. I think idea generation, like you talked about, uh, your interview with the woman who was using ideas for TikTok videos. I think that that’s really useful. I would love to get to be more consistent with social media. I know we were talking about this at dinner the other night, that that is I, my downfall is consistency with social.
Hopefully I will use it more for that so that I can get a, a log of content going and be able to plan for that. I use it for, I use the art tools for images, so sometimes for presentation images, sometimes for a blog post image. I was updating some old blog content recently, and I was missing a couple process photos, so I used the AI to add in those process photos that I was missing so that I didn’t have to necessarily make the entire recipe again, just to photograph the process photos.
So I thought that was,
Erica Julson: did you find that it matched your style? That would be like my biggest concern. I feel like,
Chrissy Carroll: yeah, it’s hit or miss, so it’s, it’s very hard, especially if you had multiple, this was one where I just like needed one in a couple different places. It’s hard if you need multiple that have the same look to them.
Mm-hmm. , at least right now, I believe that they’re, Is some work on these models that you’ll be able to get like a similar setting, uh, moving forward, but it, it can be difficult for that. But there’s one that I can think of where it was like, I just needed cream cheese and a pie plate. And so it was like, I don’t wanna waste a brick of cream cheese right now.
So that was a very easy one to just like, generate quickly. It was just plain on a table and I was like, perfect. So, but yes, it is hard to get a certain style. I would say though, for final images, and this is controversial, whether to use, you know, AI for final images of recipes, I do think you can get some really nice final images in your style by prompting, right?
So like light and bright white backdrop, kind of giving it those, those tips and clues. Um, so yeah, blog content, social media ideas, social media copy, emails, emails for guest posts, networking, follow up, thank yous, Cover letters. I know that not everybody. Listening might be like a full-time blogger, but I just applied for this ambassador program recently and it needed a cover letter and so boom, I like told it to include a couple of things.
It came up with a great draft. I edited it and the whole thing was done in 10 minutes. So I think that that was a great time saver. Um, that’s mainly what I’m using it for right now. Do you have any other ways that you’re using.
Erica Julson: I’m just starting to dabble in, in using it. So I don’t, I haven’t used it really.
I mean, I’ve played with it, like to create art and stuff, but I haven’t actually used any of the things I made in anything . I’m just curious, you know, on, on what it can do. But yeah, so I mostly for idea generation right now and emails, that’s what I’ve been gonna, I, I would use it for social, I’m just kind of like ignoring social at the moment until I get my course updates done, and then I’m hoping to like switch gears and like do more social.
So that’s on the agenda. I haven’t gotten there yet. But yeah, I saw like on your blog post that some of your screenshots had the A I P R M for Chad, g p t, like, uh, watermark on it, and I was like, oh, I totally played with that one too. So, so I don’t know some people might be interested in, in checking that out.
Um, can you explain maybe what that tool was?
Chrissy Carroll: Yeah, so it’s just this like integration with chat G P T that gives you these set things. So it’ll be like one click blog post. And so you click that and then you put the topic and it’ll just generate, you know, your title, your meta, your keywords, and then a draft of this blog post.
So it basically just is something that kind of runs along with the prompt that you give it to be able to get what you’re looking for without having to know exactly how to do all of those prompts.
Erica Julson: Yeah, and my understanding is that it’s kind of crowdsourcing, so like it’s. people can submit prompts that they’ve enjoyed typing into chat G P T and they liked what they got back, and then they can submit it to be kind of featured in.
And I think it’s a Chrome extension. Yeah, I think that’s how I installed it. Yeah. Um, so you like installed the Chrome extension and it was free? Yeah. Yeah. It’s been a little bit since I, yeah. Okay. It was free and then you install it and then when you open chat g p t on your computer, it just has like extra stuff there that you can click on.
Like as you were saying, like pre-made prompts kind of that people like, and there’s like up votes on them, kinda like Reddits, you can see like whether other people liked them. And then I think what you see probably changes based on whatever’s like most popular at the time. Yeah. So that’s a good idea.
I think it’s been growing like exponentially. Like I, every week they’re like, we have like x many more people joining downloading the extension. So,
Chrissy Carroll: I think it’s a good tool to use, especially if you’re not comfortable. The whole topic of prompting, I think is just fascinating. I mean, there’s jobs being posted for like, prompt engineers, just people that are good at prompting, which is incredible and something to think about moving forward. But yeah, I think
Erica Julson: it’s creative skill. Like, yes, I was listening to somebody else say that they would, so they’d put their prompt in and then they didn’t quite like what they got, so then they like put commands, like to tweak it, like, oh, you know, change this, write in this little more of a style like this, like make some bullet points or whatever.
And then when they got it to how they liked it, uh, this was in, um, I wanna give proper credit. I joined, uh, Kyle Roof’s, internet marketing, gold membership recently. And so, hadn’t really consumed anything in there yet. So I was listening to their latest, like, kind of like ask me, ask an expert video. And the guy who was speaking said that, so he goes through all those tweaks and then at the end he says, what should, hi, I have typed in to get this type of response initially, and then chat.
G p t responded with what he could have prompted from the beginning. So then that’s how he’s getting. about coming up with the prompts. I was like so smart. Like .
Chrissy Carroll: That is so brilliant. I, yeah, I love it. There’s some good Facebook groups where people talk about kind of the, the prompts that they give and for images like Mid Journey, you know, you can kind of see a lot of the, the prompts that people are giving there, but it’s definitely a skill.
It’s funny because my son and I worked on a children’s book over the summer. He like wrote the book and we used AI to illustrate it and whatnot, and it is so funny seeing him at eight, like he’ll sit down and he’ll be able to prompt probably better than a lot of adults could, just because he is practiced with it.
So I think a lot of it is just practice, but he’ll sit down and be like, boy, in a red shirt, digital illustration, hyperrealistic, you know, like all of these words. This is just so funny to hear him doing it. . I think, you know, the more you practice with it, the more comfortable that you get with it. Yeah. And I think if you have background in anything, right?
So if you have a background in design, you’re gonna be able to tell the the prompt, you’re gonna be able to write the prompt in a way that is so much better than probably I can without a background in design. Because you know what you’re looking for, you know what to say. And same with people that have experience in writing.
Using that AI tool can be really efficient for speeding up your writing process because you know what needs to be included, you know how to structure it for seo, you know, what should be in this outline. So I think that there’s a lot of value in what we already know and then applying that to these prompts.
Erica Julson: Yeah, and I really liked, I was reading over your, cuz you wrote a blog post about your takeaways from the conference, so we can link to that as well, uh, in the show notes for the episode. But one of them was kind of, resisting the urge to like shun AI entirely from higher education and kind of maybe we’re better served by embracing the reality that like people might be using this as like a skill to have in their jobs and like their workplace.
So, you know, how can we help people like become good at using AI rather than being like, no AI or whatever , you know? Yeah. I thought that was interesting. ,
Chrissy Carroll: there’s so many conversations in the education space right now. It was funny because my husband works at a college and he had forwarded me, he knows that I love ai, so he had forwarded me an email that was like, how to deal with ai.
And one of the suggestions was, have your students hand write their papers. And I was like, holy moly, please do not let this be the solution. You know, like making people just hand write an entire paper because they’re afraid that people are going to use ai, I think is the wrong approach to take, in my opinion.
Um, I think that this is going to be a part of our world. Like the, we thought that AI was gonna be replacing like factory workers and stuff, and in reality now it’s coming for like white collar jobs and, and coding and all of these things. So I think that if we can utilize it in the classroom, Teaching the limitations, putting guardrails on it, but showing how we can incorporate this to enhance creativity or to enhance efficiency.
I think that that’s probably a, a smart way of going about it. And certainly that’s going to come with challenges, right? So we don’t want students to just go off the rails and only use AI to do things and not understand the content that they’re, they’re writing about or they’re prompting it to write about.
Um, so I think that there’s, there’s challenges to that implementation, but my personal opinion is that I think we are going to need to be teaching it in education.
Erica Julson: Yeah. And also like, can we adjust the way that we evaluate our students? Like maybe a paper is not the best way to test someone’s understanding, you know?
So that brings up like stuff like that for me too.
Chrissy Carroll: Yeah, I think there was an, there was an interesting takeaway that one of the speakers had mentioned, which was, what if you do a paper and then you put it in. AI and ask the AI to critique it, and then you evaluate the critique. Was it accurate? Like, what did they say about your paper?
And I thought that was kind of an interesting approach to it.
Erica Julson: Yeah, I think there’ll be a lot of innovations, which yeah, I know I was a tutor for like 10 years, so my mind’s like buzzing on, like how, how that could be used in the right way.
Chrissy Carroll: and I think if there are educators listening, you know, one of the things people I see a lot of people going to is like, oh, we’re just gonna use these AI detectors.
And what I would caution with those is a couple edits, a couple typos, and all of a sudden now this doesn’t look like it’s written by AI anymore, according to these detectors. They’re not insanely accurate and a little bit of editing can make a, a massive difference in their, their prediction of whether or not it was written with ai.
So I don’t think that just going to detectors is the best way of approaching that in education either.
Erica Julson: Like it doesn’t work the same as, all those, uh, I’m blanking on the right word right now.
Chrissy Carroll: Plagiarism detector.
Erica Julson: Yes. I was like, not copyright, like, that’s not the right word. . Yes. Uh, plagiarism detecting tools.
Yeah, it’s not quite as easy as that. Um, I did see you also included a screenshot of a slide, I think from a presentation in your post that I thought was really a cool way of breaking this down. And it, um, in sort of how AI is changing the business landscape or the online business landscape, I guess I should say.
Uh, so it was sort of like five quote unquote turning points that have defined modern business. So I’ll just read them and then we can talk about maybe. How you think the last point goes. But, um, number one was the internet removed barriers to starting a business, which I definitely think is true. Like it’s never been cheaper or faster to just like get something going.
Then the number two web 2.0, which is like social media removed barriers to connection. That’s cool. Then three mobile removed barriers to purchase. So now we’re just like walking around, just like buying things on our phones. Number four, cloud removed barriers to collaboration so we’re all able to access like the same document and work off of it or whatever, or do calls and things like that.
And then now they’re sort of layering on generative AI as the fifth turning point, removing barriers to creation, which is totally like aligned with I feel like what you were saying. when you were talking about social media and you’re like, I hope that now that I have this tool, you know, that I can create more consistently on social media.
So I, I think, I think that is how it’s gonna be used in a large part for a lot of online creators. Just like increasing your productivity and your output, which I mean, there’s already an overwhelming amount of content, so I don’t know , how that’s all gonna go down. But it is interesting to think about cuz I feel like we’re both kind of latching onto that idea of like, oh, sweet.
Like now I can just ask it for ideas and my content calendar’s done in like five seconds instead of, you know, two hours that it would take me to think of these ideas or whatever.
Chrissy Carroll: So, Yeah, I agree. I think that from a business perspective, enhancing productivity, increasing innovation, I definitely think that AI will be useful in those ways.
I also think that it can be helpful for people that maybe had a medical issue or something. Maybe they’re not a native English speaker, and being able to use the AI might be able to help them with creating good content that, for whatever reason, wasn’t as easy beforehand. So I do think that it can be really useful in some of those situations as well.
They talked a little bit about this at the conference.
Erica Julson: Yeah, yeah. I also saw, I haven’t tested this, but it’s on my list of things to try. Have you done this where I’ve seen people say like, you can copy paste like your entire first draft. Into chat G P T and say like, make this better, or like , like, optimize this better for SEO with X, Y, Z keywords.
And then it’ll spit out like an enhanced version basically of whatever you wrote. I really wanna try that, but I haven’t done it yet.
Chrissy Carroll: Yeah, I’ve, I’ve done it a couple of times. It’s fun to see what it comes up with.
Erica Julson: Did you like it or were you kind of like, no, mine’s better.
Chrissy Carroll: I liked it. I think it did a better job than me on a lot of parts.
There were certain things that I wasn’t a fan. I mean, it’s a, you know, a big document, so there’s always going to be certain things. So I kind of just took what I liked and left what I didn’t. But I definitely think it improved my writing on a f on a few things.
Erica Julson: Nice. Yeah, I was thinking, I, cuz I’ve seen a couple people ask that, like, if they’re not super confident in their writing skills, like can they use AI to kind of like, help them , you know, improve the flow or whatever of their writing.
So that’s another innovative way for sure. It’s like cha Grammarly on steroids. Okay. So yeah, I guess I kind of already asked, we’ve already been sort of chatting about new ways we could possibly use ai, but any other ideas that came to mind after attending the conference? .
Chrissy Carroll: Yeah. One idea that I had, because I didn’t even realize some of these coding tools existed, and there’s one tool, I believe it’s replica and they have like a bounty system, so kind of like a platform for people to post jobs and then somebody can take it.
So like an Upwork, but basically specific to this like AI coding development program. But I thought that for any blogger or dietitian or anybody that’s thinking about maybe creating an app or something along those lines, I was like, oh, this would be a brilliant way to be able to do this at probably a reduced cost compared to hiring like a full fledged developer that’s doing everything themselves by hand.
Because in this case, you’re getting a developer that’s utilizing the AI to speed things up. So I thought that that was a really interesting thing and I’m like, Ooh, maybe I should learn to code. And then I’m like, no, I have 10,000 other things I’m trying to learn to do. I need to take a step back. But I do think that potentially creating.
Softwares or platforms or things along those lines might be an option for people. Um, however it might fit in your business model. There was another thing that I saw. I don’t know, do you get, uh, John from Fatt Stacks his newsletter?
Mm-hmm. , he does a really good newsletter and he had talked about potentially utilizing, AI as like a chat bot on your blog for people to ask questions within your site.
And so you’re kind of training it on data and then it’s giving responses. And I thought that could be a really innovative way for bloggers to use it. I don’t know that I would personally do that on my sites, but it might make sense for some sites. So that was kind of interesting. There’s also some sound programs coming out there.
Uh, so you might be able to, let’s say you’re doing like a sponsored video for a brand and you need royalty free music. And instead of buying a royalty free track, maybe you create your own royalty free track. And it has, you can tell it, you know, like, make the beat drop at 30 seconds and do this. So it kind of goes along with whatever you’re creating, which I thought could be an innovative way of people doing more video content where they need that background music.
And then there’s like definitely like some voice narration things, you know, text to voice. So I don’t know, Erica, maybe in like two years your podcast will be you, but it’s really you just typing and then it’s you talking based on this model that’s been trained to speak, like you, who knows?
Erica Julson: Yeah, actually I use D script, um, and they have that, I have overdub.
So if you mess up and it’s just like one or two words and you’re like, dang it, that’s not what I meant to say. . I haven’t really, I, I had needed, I think I needed more, um, audio to train it, to get it to, to work. So I haven’t actually like done it yet. But I saw that they have that feature where you can say like, okay, I, I, I said this in the transcript.
I’m gonna rewrite it what I meant to say. Like, switch the word out and then you can click this over dub button and it will say it in your voice. So like it, you can try to like edit your audio without having to rerecord, which is super cool.
Chrissy Carroll: Fascinating. Yeah, there’s another tool, I haven’t downloaded it yet because I’m semi worried.
It might be a, like crypto miner, . I’m not a hundred percent confident in the tool, but I’ve seen a few people use it and you can narrate in anybody’s voice, which is somewhat scary, but I’m like, oh my gosh, I wanna like narrate my son’s book and the voice of Morgan Freeman and, you know, things that’s more fun playing around with stuff.
But, uh, I do think there’s just a lot of potential for, for ways to speed things up or, you know, somebody that maybe like lost their voice for some reason, but they have old voice recordings that they can train an AI on and they can get that back. I think there there’s so much potential out there.
Erica Julson: Yeah.
And the music ones, are they out yet?
Chrissy Carroll: I think there’s one. that’s out. And I don’t know that it’s widely available yet, but I believe there’s going to be a lot more that are coming out. I know the, uh, c e o of stability, AI mentioned that they were even gonna be doing some video training. So he was like, yeah, we’ve got all these like Bollywood videos that we’re gonna be testing a model on, and then kind of creating your own video out of AI models.
And I think that’s fascinating as well. I think that’s a little bit down the road, but crazy stuff.
Erica Julson: Wow. Okay. Well that’s exciting, . I do. Yeah. I mean, and the podcast that I recorded, I was kind of like, I do think that this is like something that’s gonna lead to really big changes and most of it is speculative at this point.
But it’s just so cool. Like I, I feel like. . Do you ever think back and you’re like, dang, like, I wish when I was 15 I just bought like 500 domain names because like , I didn’t understand what was happening at that time. Like I was so young. I just thought that in everyone had the internet. Duh. Like it wasn’t a new thing.
Like this is just how it works. Like I’m coding my live journal right now. Like, but there was so much opportunity that I didn’t see and I feel like now I’m older and this is like that happening now. And I’m like, okay. Like I’m trying to be a little more like engaged in the conversation and trying to be smart, like, and what innovations could we be ahead of the curve on this time? instead of wait. Yeah. .
Chrissy Carroll: Yeah, definitely. And I think that’s part of the reason that I wanted to go to this event is I, you know, there were, I would say I was probably the dumbest person in the room and that’s a good thing, . Cause I met so many people doing so many cool things and like I wanna be connected to them because who knows how all of this is gonna play out and what the internet’s gonna look like in 10 years.
And I can’t picture myself ever going back to other forms of, of dietetics after this, but like maybe in 10 years, yeah, maybe I won’t be blogging, but maybe there’ll be some AI nutrition app that I’m working on. And so have, I think having these connections and staying on top of the technology is an important skill.
And we’ll put all of us ahead of the curve.
Erica Julson: Yeah. Okay. So for people listening to cap this off, do you have any recommendations for places people could continue to learn about? .
Chrissy Carroll: Yeah, so I think there’s a lot of Facebook groups out there. I think the Jasper Facebook group, even if you’re not using Jasper, I’m pretty sure you can join their Facebook group.
There’s a lot of, um, content that’s posted there, just about prompts or how to use AI or things people are doing with it that it’s great. There is, a Facebook group called
Chat, g p t plus seo. That’s a good one. AI, prompt Craft Facebook group. I think you’re in the SEO Signals Lab. Facebook.
Erica Julson: Yeah. I love that one.
Chrissy Carroll: that’s a great one. I think that that, you know, that’s a combination. Obviously. It’s like more SEO focused, but I feel like the last few months it’s been like AI and search and all this stuff. So it’s, that’s, that’s a good one. And then there’s been some recent podcast episodes on Authority Hacker, on Social Media Marketer on Hustle and Flowchart.
So if you go to any of those podcasts and look for the things that are on AI tools or on chat, G P T, I would say download the episodes and give them a listen. because they’ll talk a little bit more about, you know, a lot of the different tools that are available. There was a really good one on Hustle and Flowchart that talked about some of the different tools.
Uh, and I believe that the guest, I might be wrong, but I’m pretty sure the guest on that is the guy that owns the website, future tools.io. And that’s a really fun site to go because you can go to the site and it’s basically just an aggregation of all the AI tools out there. And so you can sort like voice or sound or writing and it’ll give you a list of the tools that are on the market right now.
So I think that those are some of the best resources currently.
Erica Julson: Do you have any other ones that I’m missing? Mm, no. I mean, I, yeah, I’m, I’m like a. Writing, like I like to read, um, and listen to podcasts. So who knows? I’m not really tuned into like, perhaps there’s like great people on TikTok. I don’t know cause I’m not there.
But yeah, I feel like we’re, we’re similar in that regard. So we probably are in a lot of the same, Facebook groups and I do listen to those podcasts, but I kind of like when Hustle and Flowcharts started turning into like web three, whatever, I kind of like stopped listening. So I’ll have to go check back in.
I know they like tried to rebrand or I don’t know. I have to listen back again and see what’s going on.
Chrissy Carroll: Yeah. I think they rebranded back to Hustling . Cause it was like a change the image and I was like, what is this? Yeah. Then it went back and now it’s the guy. And like the last few episodes have been pretty good and like kind of in line with the good to know entrepreneurial focus.
Erica Julson: Nice. Good. Yeah, that’s pretty much I what I, where I listen to my content too. So, um, I didn’t get a chance. I saw someone in your Facebook group. Oh yeah. We should plug your Facebook group. Can you give that a name? Drop ?
Chrissy Carroll: Yes. If you would like to join my Facebook group, it’s build your Blog.
I think it’s like, build your blog, grow Traffic, make money. You would think I would know the full name of my , but yes, we can put it in the show notes. Um, yes. Cause I do try to talk, I try to talk a lot about just blogging in general there, but I do share a lot of AI related stuff.
Erica Julson: Yeah. And I saw somebody in there posted a link to like a New York Times, uh, podcast, which I didn’t have time to listen to before this, but Yeah.
Chrissy Carroll: Yeah, it was, so it was a recent podcast that talked about. Basically Google and Bing’s kind of race in this ai, you know, battle, war, whatever. And there was, it’s two parts. So there’s one that kind of talked about the basics and then the most recent one that was out was actually they had Kevin Russ, who’s one of the speakers at the conference.
He was on there kind of talking about his experience with Bing and Bing trying to like, get him to leave his wife and like just this weird AI chat scenario, . So it’s, it’s a good listen, .
Erica Julson: Alright, well, thank you so much for chatting about this with us today. I know people are gonna love it. Um, I’m glad they got, you know, the name of your Facebook group to hang out with you more.
Um, anywhere else that people should go to connect. .
Chrissy Carroll: Sure. If you want blogging, ai, social tips, I share a lot of that over at build a wellness blog.com. You can join my email list. I am semi consistent with that , and hopefully we’ll be more consistent with that moving forward, .
Erica Julson: Great. All right. Well, I guess that’s it.
I’m really bad at ending my podcast, so, uh, . Yeah. Thank you again. Thank you for having me. Erica.
Erica Julson is a registered dietitian turned digital marketing pro. She has over 12 years of experience blogging and building online businesses and has taught over 900 wellness professionals inside her signature program, SEO Made Simple.
