AI and Jobs: The Truth You Need to Know from an Expert

Full video transcript

So for someone like you, what are your predictions, or what did you see? Because I’ve seen the AI Revolution—I heard you, you typed it somewhere—where do you see it, maybe six months from now, or a year from now, two years from now? Before you answer that question: one thing that a lot of folks were talking about was that places like Google were going to penalize folks for using AI, and now flip it—six months from now, Google has come out with their own AI type of tool. So where do you see AI, or what are your predictions for the next 6, 12, or 24 months?

Yeah, I mean, it’s hard to know where anything is going in the next six to twelve months, much less something that is changing so fast. I think that to start with, understanding is that so much is going to happen at such a fast pace. Right now it’s going to be so easy to get overwhelmed as more and more people come in over the next year or so and just get introduced to this idea, and are rightfully overwhelmed and, in a lot of cases, scared about what this is going to mean for where we’re going to be as humankind.

A lot of people are going to get left in the dust if they don’t keep up with the speed, and that’s just the truth of the matter—people are going to lose jobs because AI is replacing certain things that people have done, just as technology has replaced work humans have done since we’ve been building new technologies. But what AI is doing is giving us the ability to collaborate with something and think in new ways. I think the people who are going to succeed are the ones who understand how to literally think and talk to AI, whether it’s a conversational AI and you’re working with a tool like Jasper, or you’re learning how to build and create your own models.

These skill sets and understandings are something we can increase with our ability to learn, to practice, to hone a skill set, and to enhance our ability to think about how to write and how to create. As a result, pushing ourselves to really level up our thought process is going to matter, because we’re going to have to be smarter about working with these tools. But by approaching them in a collaborative way, we can put ourselves in a position to come up with more good ideas—and ideas are going to be everything.

Just because you can generate an idea doesn’t mean you can execute on it. So you’re going from creating an idea, to researching, to actually curating good content, because the content you get from these AIs, no matter how much smarter the models get, still needs your own human perspective and direction. Now, because it doesn’t take ten times as long to write a blog post, we can reallocate our resources to things that actually matter more.

Editing is going to be a huge focus—you become the chief editor in charge, with AI producing first drafts and your writers using them to put out better content faster. You still need a human editor to make sure the content hits all the right points, sources the right articles, and brings in the right people who add valuable information for your audience. You’re going to get penalized if you just put out junk content—Google has always penalized junk content, and Google isn’t saying they hate AI, they’re saying they don’t want spam or irrelevant content. If you’re using these tools to create utility and add value, you’re going to succeed.

Over the next six months, especially if you’re just getting into AI right now, there’s going to be a learning curve, and it’s going to feel overwhelming at times. But understand that, like any skill set, it takes practice. I think specific types of practice—especially with writing a blog, an email, a book, a course—matter, because just because you can create everything with this doesn’t mean you should. Start by focusing on one thing you can do in your current workflow. If you don’t know what your workflow is for creating content, figure that out first without AI. Once you know your workflow without AI, you can identify where you’re spending more time—coming up with ideas, writing introductions, writing blurbs for your podcast, breaking down content—and audit your process. Once you’ve audited what you’re already doing, you can identify the right tools to streamline that process more effectively.

As a result, so many entrepreneurs in this space are going to develop really cool products because they’ll have the ability to leverage tools more powerful than anything available before. I’ve seen people talking about the one-person or solopreneur style—one or two people doing work that used to need ten. This is going to become a lot more common through automation and leveraging these technologies. But at the end of the day, if people don’t get your content in front of them through distribution, that’s the key to pretty much everything anyway. If you can spend less time creating content and more time on editing, marketing, and distribution, you’re focusing on the levels of exposure for yourself as a business owner, or having your team do that so they can operate more effectively.

If you just want to push this off to the side and say you don’t want to adapt, you’re going to get left behind. I hate to say it, but that’s the reality—a lot of people will not be able to keep up with the speed at which this is evolving, and the things that come along with that aren’t pretty. That’s why, especially with what we’re doing at The AI Author, the conversation on the front end is: how can we improve our ways of thinking with these tools, how can we understand how to make better choices when working with them that lead to better outcomes, because you’re still the one in control, at least for now. You’re the one choosing what content to put out and what not to put out. You’re the one choosing which ideas are good ideas from Jasper’s generator or ChatGPT’s generator, but it’s your choice—your choice whether to type another word or let the AI type the next word and go from there.

So distilling it down: improving our ability to think with these tools, and how to interact with them, is going to be critical. From there, are we making the right choices in terms of what questions to ask, what words to use, and how to direct it so we get the results we want? It’s going to come down to that. If you let the AI do the thinking for you, I think we’re going to see the dark side of it, because that starts to take away from the creative side of things, and it’s ultimately going to hurt more than help. I think that’s my take.

What stops a lot of people is they don’t know how to do something. You’ve mentioned a couple of times some of your personal clients—if someone wants to learn more about how they can create content or improve their content with AI, do you have any… I know you just mentioned your latest book, and do you also have programs or tools—what would you say is the first thing someone could get to help them learn about AI if they’re not familiar with it, or take it to the next level if they’ve just started?

Yeah, if you’re just interested in learning, our YouTube channel is a great free resource—The AI Author on YouTube. We have lots of videos on all sorts of things you can do with Jasper, so it’s going to give you a broader approach to start testing it out, and lots of other ways to search stuff on YouTube. Our book that we just released last week, “Create Content with AI,” is on Amazon, and that’s really a Jasper 101 introduction to how you can use AI to create content, walking you through the entire Jasper experience. We wrote that book before ChatGPT was even a thing, and I still recommend Jasper, especially for business use, because it has a lot more easier-to-work-with templates to get the outcomes you want, rather than just free-flowing inside ChatGPT and learning prompt engineering from scratch.

That book will show you a ton of these different recipes and walk you through the Jasper bootcamp as well, to help you understand how Jasper thinks—what to do, where to start. I’d say at a minimum, an hour or two going through that book plus the free Jasper bootcamp—the book itself is about $2.99 on Amazon Kindle—will give you a solid, fundamental understanding of what you’re walking into.

Beyond that, we have a course called Autoscripting, a two-hour crash course on taking Jasper to the next level through specific visual demonstrations—how to create a mini video sales letter if you’re driving leads for an offer, how to use it for Twitter threads or short-form content like TikToks, writing books, writing chapters—using the same kind of recipe, pre-built workflows. If you’re looking to invest the time, I recommend dedicating about five hours spread over a week.

We’re actually doing a course with UC Berkeley live right now—week one was exactly what I just described. Wait, you just bypassed that—that was no big deal? Can you say again what you’re doing? There’s nothing—okay, everyone—yeah, UC Berkeley, we’re doing a course with their makers program this semester. It’s a pilot for using AI in education, and it covers where it applies in writing, marketing, education, and sales. It’s an eight-week course we’re doing right now.

This is a big deal, Darby—that’s a huge deal, congratulations, you deserve it. I had to stop you because I didn’t want that to go any further without acknowledgment—that is a huge deal, and you deserve it. So I’m sorry for interrupting, but when I heard that, I had to stop.