.png)
Coffees & Content | Marketing, Social Media & Digital Strategy Podcast
Coffees & Content | What's Actually Working in Marketing Right Now
If you want straight-to-the-point marketing insights you can actually use, you're in the right place.
Hosted by Loren Tomlinson, founder of The Social Collective, international speaker, and social media strategist. Loren and her team run marketing every week for service businesses across NZ and Australia. The ads, the content, the email, all of it. This podcast is where they report back.
Coffees & Content covers what's working right now, what's changed, and what they'd do differently, straight from inside the accounts. Expect real talk on the digital space, the strategies delivering results this week, and honest conversations about what it actually takes to make marketing perform.
No fluff. No textbook advice. Just the stuff that matters, from people doing the job in real time.
Grab a coffee, hit play, and let's get into it.
🎙️ Presented by The Social Collective. Follow & connect: @loren.thesocialcollective
Coffees & Content | Marketing, Social Media & Digital Strategy Podcast
The Questions Everyone's Actually Asking About AI
Use Left/Right to seek, Home/End to jump to start or end. Hold shift to jump forward or backward.
We opened the floor at our Cocktails and Conversations event and let a room full of business owners ask the panel anything. What came out was way more honest than we expected.
This week's episode is that Q&A, in full.
What's covered:
- Choosing between Claude, Gemini, ChatGPT and Copilot
- What actually happens once a client's face or product photo goes into AI
- Handling clients who think a $40 plan replaces a marketing team
- Skill poisoning, and why that free download isn't as free as it looks
- Getting your business found and recognised by AI, not just Google
- Building an AI policy that doesn't need rewriting every month
- Protecting creative work from screenshot plagiarism
- Staying a critical thinker when AI is doing more of the thinking
Have a question? Click here to send it to me!
Links:
- Join the WhatsApp community
- Follow on Instagram: @coffeesandcontentpod
- Find Loren on LinkedIn: Loren Tomlinson
- Visit us at: www.thesocialcollective.co.nz
Loved this episode? Leave a review - it would mean the world!
Grab that morning cup of coffee, turn off both headphones, and let's talk marketing. This is the podcast where we get into the strategy, the numbers, and the conversations shaping the industry behind the scenes. What do you about the Social Collective? This is Coffees and Content. This podcast is proudly sponsored by Frankly Podcasting, a remote podcasting business helping female founders, entrepreneurs, and creatives to launch, grow, and manage their podcasts through strategy, production, and personalized support. Lara, the founder of Frankly Podcasting, believes podcasting is so much more than recording conversations. It's a powerful way to build trust, shows the person behind your brand, and creates content that keeps working for your business long after you hit publish. If you're thinking about starting a podcast or want to support one you already have, head to franklypodcasting.co.nz to find out more.
SPEAKER_02Okay, so we're now going to open it up to you guys. Um so if there's any question, any burning question you want to ask these amazing women before uh we wrap up, then this is the time to do so. So if anyone has a question, maybe pop your hand up and I'll add to my 15k steps. Here you go.
SPEAKER_09Uh I just want to ask uh Claude Ursus Gemini. Which one is it?
SPEAKER_03Uh it depends what you're what you're doing.
SPEAKER_11If you've got kind of a social media and stuff and business strategy.
SPEAKER_03Uh then Claude. I will s I will say though, if you're using Chat GPT too, now if it's got work capabilities and things also.
SPEAKER_07So I wanted to ask, what are some of the steps that you take to protect the images that you put into any of these programs? Um I assume that, you know, at times you may put in products, people's spaces, there may be videos created. What are some of the sort of safeguards that you put in place for protecting your clients and yourself in that sense?
SPEAKER_01I think for us, one of the big things that we do with our clients is we have really upfront conversations with them first. And so if we do have clients that don't want anything to go in AI, then we don't. And to be honest, for the most part, for where we're at with like what we do in the agency, we actually don't use a lot of image generation. I find certain softwares are really great for it, but the softwares that we're using, especially things like Claude and yes, you can kind of dabble in Chat GPT and stuff like that, it takes more time to actually create something really great with AI than it does with this one over here who is our sorry to put you off as well. She's our absolute weapon in-house. And so one of the secret sources that we have to to client delivery is that all of our visual social media content for the most part is still actually delivered in-house. And then obviously in collaboration with our amazing photographers that we work with, and then like I said, my team that do videography. But we really pride ourselves on still having a little bit of that. Like I said before, there's amazing agencies that will like heavily specialize in that. And so one of the things that we're doing is, and it's kind of one of the things that I've been playing with over the last few months, is really just figuring out what do we want to own as an agency. And so for us, a lot of the stuff that we own is actually just real, raw created imagery that we do in-house. Do you have anything on the PR side?
SPEAKER_00Yeah, I would just add to that that anything confidential or anything that we wouldn't want out in the public domain, we don't put into Chat GPT or Claude or any other tool because it's it's just data privacy. Um, it's just the basics, really.
SPEAKER_03Can I just add that's generally where you'll use something like your tenant kind of AI as well. So that's where you're kind of creating those images internally, if you like, as opposed to external tools and things. Uh, the important thing to remember in that is once it goes into AI, it doesn't come back. So anything that you're putting in there, you need to kind of think about uh you don't want to end up like Huffer, obviously, that have been in the news recently. Uh, and that is what happens. So if you put faces in, it does learn. It learns from those, and people don't realize and they're kind of using Gemini predominantly or Chat GPT, and then it will carry that kind of likeness across into other images that it will create. So to avoid any of that, first of all, you want to have your the right enterprise accounts to make sure that you're kind of at least locking that down. Uh, but the reality is that once, yeah, once it goes out, doesn't really come back. Um, on the flip side of that, you know, people are quite comfortable to still put those things on Facebook or Instagram or TikTok. So, you know, we need to kind of put in in the reality there that once you're putting something out on anything like that, they're all powered by, you know, the big tech vendors that are reused.
SPEAKER_00So I'll add to that actually. Um, the warehouse is actually probably a good example of a brand that's using AI quite well. Like they went through quite a long process to determine what their AI like avatars look like. And actually, now if you go to the website, um, you can see like they have uh it's all marked if it is AI imagery. Um and it's quite cool too because I think they've been able to suddenly put people out and sit you, you know, wearing a bush shirt in the bush rather than um just in a in a studio.
SPEAKER_11Um question for Karina. You mentioned the importance of building a knowledge base so that if something new comes, then you're all kind of ready for it. I had the the issue that I don't want to learn anything because I know how fast it moves, and I'm like, oh, there's gonna be some of you tomorrow, so I can't even bother with this right now. Like the inbox, for example, I would love to do that, but I'm so scared that tomorrow there's gonna be a better tool somehow just wait. So building the knowledge base, is that something that I should be doing like every time I learn something? Or like for example, when I moved from ChatGPT to Claude, it was just a prompt. And it just went, okay, everything that I gave that, I give Claude. Like, what's the best method?
SPEAKER_03Yeah, so so that is memory in that context. So that's actually kind of your memory of your account there. We're talking more knowledge based, and we're talking uh, so we'll build out you know how business operates, who they are, and then all of the kind of layers under that around what the departments are and then what those people do and that sort of thing of and what data they access. So if you're switching an account, then yeah, just switch your memory across. That's pretty straightforward. If you're wanting to build out kind of that central knowledge and then, you know, use it to deploy that as a particular tool that you can switch across, then you just want to make sure that all of that memory and kind of context that you're building you hold on to as well. So you can save those files that it brings across as memory. You can ask it to give you a markdown file and it will give you that. So you can then just yeah, move it across. So I don't know if that answers. But knowledge base is a more kind of, you know, your business-oriented kind of setup. Um, could be the way that you do things too, though. It could be a knowledge base of the skills and the projects and the setups and things that you've got. But if you're asking it to save the context that it's got from you, that'll be the memory part that it's downloading. Um, but I think the the big thing that I talk to around FOMO is very real, you know, like it's FOMO or it's I can't keep up, it's overwhelm. So I think fundamentally you want to understand about AI as a technology, you know, and what it can do and what that looks like, because then you're not determined, you're not like reliant on that tool. It doesn't matter what changes, you know, fundamentally, this is how I prompt, this is how I generate something, this is how I give it the context, this is how I understand what a token is, what the context is, yeah, all of those sorts of things to make sure that you understand it and focus on some of those things. And then the tools aren't as overwhelming because you understand the fundamentals and that relates to anything that you use. Yeah.
SPEAKER_11So, Kate, following on from the earlier question about safeguards and privacy, how would you guys work with or communicate with a client that thinks that AI is the best thing on the planet? There's no need for a marketing person anymore, and they're determined to put every single bit of data and everything into ChatGPT with no safeguards and nothing, and they're determined that $40 a pump on ChatGPT plus is better than a full marketing assistant.
SPEAKER_01I think my heart's beating out of my chest. I mean, is this a real life situation that's happening? That it sounds too yeah, too descriptive to not be real. I think it's I don't know what you guys think, but I feel like when it comes to the AI conversations, obviously you guys are all here because you want to learn AI. There's also a lot of people that don't want to learn and really just don't care about what they think. And there are also people that won't opt to like outsource their marketing or their PR or their knowledge even because they just are like, well, I'm just gonna use it and it's gonna tell me. And there are people that will make decisions based on the information. Like obviously, as we know, the information that you put in is what it can work with. It it can obviously pull from what you tell it, but it doesn't have its own brain. We are the ones that make it think. And so I think there's gonna be, I wouldn't be surprised if there's some sort of knock-on effect from these people that are investing. But I also think there's a to a certain extent, and you'll be able to use, I guess, your best judgment, there is a point where it's like, well, if you're gonna dig, and this probably sounds really savage, but like you're gonna dig your own grave and eventually you will come and you'll turn around and you'll come back. And that's where I because I've had conversations of people being like, is my marketing company gonna go away? And are you worried about your agency disappearing? And I'm like, I've got a team to like put on a front and be like, absolutely not. But I genuinely believe that to my core, that like we're not going anywhere because there is gonna come a time where people start to realise, wow, we have pushed the boat out a little bit too far. And I think people are starting to come to that realization now that we do need humans to still be in it. Because I don't know about you guys, but I don't want to live in a world where AI talks to AI and I'm sitting there in the background just like, mate, hello, hi, how's it going? Like that awkward person that just sits in the corner of a room. Like, I want to be involved in the conversations. And I also think the people that want that are going to attract the people that want that. So it's a tough one, but I think fight it as far as you can fight it, and then also know you've done the best you can. And also know that they absolutely will turn around one day and be like, wow, you were so right. Like, there's I don't see a world in which they go, huh, we win, we're right. I think they'll absolutely turn back around and go, you were so dead right. Anything you guys want to add? Yeah.
SPEAKER_03And if they're using a $40 plan, that's usually a pretty good indication because theoretically, um, yeah, you should really be using anything to do with business, should be using business layer accounts. So it's probably a good kind of precursor for you that that's a red flag that you probably don't want anyway.
SPEAKER_05Yeah, yeah.
SPEAKER_03Bye-bye.
SPEAKER_11Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. Um hi, I'm not actually a Mafan, but uh my question is what conversation starter would you have for a business that is wedded to one II tool um and then it also has global influence of the tools that you use.
SPEAKER_03Yeah, it it it's a common thing. We see it a lot, is usually where shadow AI comes into the play as well, because people do just bring their own AI generally, even regardless of what people say, spend a lot of time creating kind of cohesive cultures in corporate. Um, with the AI assembly around you can't just tell people what they can and can't do, then what kind of listen to that sort of thing? So I guess look of look for opportunities outside of that. Uh, it's a very common pattern at the moment. I I don't know if it's co-pilot, but a lot of it is yeah. Awesome, awesome. On the good side of things, I don't know if you've played in co-pilot, but you can use Claude, you can use all the different models, and it is progressing. So I think outside of that, what we say to people is find those, you know, opportunities to go and learn and connect with other people. At the end of the day, it is a tool, you know. I mean, it's good for a particular set of things that you want to do, but you can still do amazing things in co-pilot. Um, one of my amazing colleagues in the industry does the most phenomenal graphics, video, like everything with co-pilot. So yeah, don't dismiss it. Do give it a go and have a look. But otherwise, maybe look for those opportunities outside of that personally to kind of join those networks and things.
SPEAKER_01It's like a pass the baton though.
SPEAKER_06Um, as a new business owner, I'm really interested in understanding how AI is changing the way people discover brands. Um, so we spend a lot of time learning about CEO and getting recognized on Google. And I've seen a lot about ChatGPT and other AI platforms for recommendation. So my passion is what should a new or small business be doing right now to become discoverable and recognized by AI? And secondly, there's so many people online that I've seen teaching businesses how to use AI and how it can be hard to know who actually knows what they're talking about. So, who or what resources would you recommend following to learn how to use AI effectively in business?
SPEAKER_00Yeah. Um yeah, great shout. Um, it's an emerging area and it's changing by the day. So I would say that anyone who stands up and says, I know exactly how that works, and I know exactly how to get you showing up in AI tools is full of it. Um there's there's uh we take a broad approach. There's certain strategies and ways that we we know do help increase that likelihood. Um but the thing is, you know, like we've talked about, AI is um it's not as kind of easy to as easy to predict as say like SEO, where it's like, oh, I know I'm ranking this high, and this is how it is going. It's like change one word on your prompts and you can get a completely different answer. So what you need to be looking for is like the patterns, you know, one single, you know, search a business one time on ChatGPT, and you can't go, great, I'm showing up, it's it's working, right? I would start as a small business, start with your website. I mean, ultimately a lot of the SEO stuff still applies. Um, make sure that your website is really clear, that it's uh well written, that it's speaking to people and answering lots of questions about you. Um, tie people back to all of your content. So gone are the days where we used to just do blog posts and it would be, you know, a general company name assigned to. You actually need to have a human on that now because AI looks for those kind of author footprints and kind of to go, oh yeah, that's a real person. And Lauren talks about digital marketing here and she talks about it here, and then she's quoted in this media article here. I can see that that's corroborated. It's not just like one off um post here. And consistency is really important as well. AI is not very good at connecting the dots in terms of if it's Lauren Tomlinson on one website and then somewhere else you're Laurie. You're a Laurie Tomlinson, also of the collective agency, it's just gonna be like, oh, it's a totally different person. Oh, okay. Well, we'll ignore that and move on to somebody else.
SPEAKER_03Just on that too, just pick pick the lane and who you are and what you do and be very consistent on that. So we you know a lot of the time, um popular opinion, people will say to me, you know, um, all of the kind of GEO things and how they all kind of work and that sort of stuff, and that you shouldn't use AI to write those sort of things. On the flip side of that, if you write them and then you gain that consistency with AI to run those things out consistently, it builds a pattern. So, um like what we're saying there, it builds a pattern of you and a profile of the consistency around you and what you talk to. So we used to have going back a wee while now, you know, tech where you specialized in a particular area and there was a whole lot of specialists, you know, and then you kind of moved into a generalist, and now we're kind of going back into the specialist stage, if you like. So, who are you as a business and how do you stand out for that particular thing that you do? And then get all your linkings to, you know, like your standard kind of SEO stuff, set up your Google listing, set up all the different connections and that sort of stuff, but make sure that you're kind of looking at who you are and what you do, and then consistently talking to that across different platforms to make sure that you kind of it will join all the dots together if you like. And then that's a very, that's a very kind of um topical thing as well, about you know, who do you listen to in this kind of space? I think look at who they are, who their connections are. If they're selling a tool, don't listen to those people generally uh because that is not uh a winning strategy. Um so look at who they are, what their background is, where they sit in the world of AI, you know, like we're all very different in what we do. And then yeah, pick pick who you listen to carefully at the moment.
SPEAKER_01Can I piggyback one thing on that too? Is one thing I've noticed, I'm I've gotten halfway through writing a substock article on it because I think it's something really important. I caught myself a couple of nights ago looking at, I don't know if you guys have seen it on Instagram, but it seems to me, and I think it's just because I engage with a lot of people that love to learn how to like build skills in Claude, you can swipe through carousel after carousel after carousel, and it's all of these screenshots of different skills they've built. And I noticed myself over the last couple of weeks being like, I have to build this one and I have to try that one and I have to do that one. And then I caught myself on my drive home last night and I was like, why am I trying to build all of these different skills? Because I swiped through just before I left the office, I swiped through one carousel and was like, it sat in my brain that that would be great, but like the way that they've done it doesn't even work for my business. So then I was thinking on the drive home, I was like, how do I make that work for my business? And how do I do this and how do I do that? And then I took a minute and I realized all of these people, these experts that that you're talking about, there's a lot of them that love just to put those easy screenshots. I think Claude is probably putting together most of the screenshots for them and putting together the whole carousel because it's doing some for me. And I think the ones that have, I don't do the screenshots though, that's the one thing I want to do. I won't tell you I can teach you things. I think it's really important to also look at what is actually beneficial for you to implement into your business. And rather than chasing this fear of like, oh my goodness, I've got so many things that I need to implement and there's so many things that like I want to keep up with, but then what happens if things change? Like you guys are mentioning before, I think it's really important to look at what actually is going to help me move the needle forward. If it's just something that we're doing just for fun, like that inbox thing I shared with you guys, if you don't even touch your inbox, like I know so many people don't even touch their inbox or don't need to, don't go and build that as a skill because it's just wasting time. Think about the things that as you go throughout your daily routine, what are things that you could actually do that AI might be able to help you with? And I think that's where you can then start to really differentiate between someone that is in the lane that you want to follow versus someone that you're just following because maybe you like them and maybe they're a lovely person. And I've found myself following a lot of really lovely people. But then they tell me to build these 10 skills and they're like, and here's my downloadable file and comment the word Claude and you can have the file for free. And I'm like, ooh, and I comment Claude, and then I'm like, actually, I don't even need this because it's just gonna junk up my inbox. And then somehow I've ended up on their mailing list, and I'm like, I didn't even want to be here in the first place. So as a marketer, I too get sucked into this stuff. But I think that's really important is to recognize what's actually helpful for you. And that's if I could give you guys any advice today, it would be really look at what's beneficial for you because every single person in this room is gonna have something different. So I can't tell you exactly what the workflow is that you need to build. But I think with all of the stuff that everyone's been sharing, hopefully you can go away and figure out where are those points that I could just take out a little bit of that extra admin time and give me some of my life back, really.
SPEAKER_00I'll just add to that as well. I think you've got to be careful with those download all my skills because you don't actually know how that's been built or what it, what instructions it is giving to your computer. Um, it's much safer to do it yourself. So we actually know and you can as a human put those safeguards in place. So it's, you know, having that understanding is is important.
SPEAKER_03Yeah. There is a thing called skill, yeah. There's a thing called skill poisoning. So you can actually inject things in there. And so you download all of these things, you're like, great, upload it, off we go. And uh yeah, there goes all of your CRM or something like that. So yeah, do be careful of those.
SPEAKER_01Terrifying. Just tell it to help you build that exact skill that you like.
SPEAKER_03Yeah, and that's a really good point. You can just talk to it in the chat. So what you want to do is you kind of document those processes. So document what it is that you do, even if you're just checking your email, only read the inbox uh that says, you know, the last day's emails. Otherwise, if you're like, man, you've got 1500 in there, it's gonna go back through and kind of read that entire thing, for example. So you want to really get clear on what it is that you want to do, and then you can just ask ChatGPT, Claude, whichever one runs in that kind of format, not Copilot, unfortunately, but um, and then you can then they move into it. Uh, you can save that, and then it will follow those particular kind of processes. It's actually a lot more economical too on your tokens. It's not can re-consuming it every time you prompt it. So sorry, I just got on a tangent then, but yeah.
SPEAKER_05Hey, you mentioned Huffer, and from a creating spec perspective, um, the copyrights or phases is start like for example, Denmark has made the new law when it comes to human copyrights with your face. So, how do you feel like that's gonna impact in the future of the creative industry?
SPEAKER_03I I think um, you know, unfortunately what happened with that was kind of bad management. You know, I think uh I did consider reaching out to them. My young girls who maybe we just want to stay out of that. Um, but around kind of what is the right way to do that, you're gonna have people that won't mind, right? They're gonna sell their face and they're going to be recreated like that. I think the big thing is making sure that your terms and conditions and things are really clear on what it is that you're actually using this for and how that might be modified going forward. If someone chooses to participate in that as the model, then I guess that's ultimately up to them. Uh, we're a long time away from any of that sort of technology here at the moment. So I think it comes down to educating as many people around, you know, not just the businesses on what to do right, but also people what to do right as well. So, how do we get that out there and kind of I don't think that they ever kind of did that deliberately. It was just kind of a flow-on effect of what happened. So you really need to, with your campaigns, build those and specify we use AI, we might use this later again. It might actually get merged in with other people and it might end up kind of looking like you, like that scenario. Uh, and then people that are part of that need to be uh making sure that they're reading all those terms.
SPEAKER_01I'd like to think, I guess, from a creative perspective too, that like it will eventually push people back to working with humans. I think there is something for any of the, I know there's a few photographers in the room and like obviously a few people that work in social media as well. I think there's something really special about being able to collaborate with another human. And I mean, I guess that that goes for any kind of industry, but getting to collaborate with other human beings, whether you're a product-based business owner and you're wanting people to endorse your product or you want them to film themselves or photograph themselves using your product, or you're a service provider and you enjoy that kind of creative collaboration. And so I think I may be naive, but I'm holding out hope that it also brings a lot more people back to wanting to do in-person collaborations, but just using AI, maybe for things like making the storyboards a little bit more organized and quicker, coming up with your run sheets of how you want to run the day so that you're not spending extra admin time doing that. So I think that there's a lot that can be done. And I also do think it is going to create a bit of a divide in the industry as well between those who really want to go to one side versus those that are quite keen to kind of hang around and still use that human-to-human connection. And then I think it's just up to us to decide where we sit in that. Do you want to be over that way or do you want to hang out with ones that are still collaborating with humans? And there's no, I don't think there's any right or wrong answer, but I think it's just figuring out what you really get a lot of value out of and you get joy out of, and then being able to decide where you want to hang out in that space.
SPEAKER_00I'd add to that too, like AI can't replace connection. That's the most important thing that we have as humans. That is what makes us human. Um, and AI can't replace human intelligence.
SPEAKER_09Kyota, uh, my question we talked a little bit about, or you talked earlier about having an AI policy. Um tech with the technology changing as quickly as it is, how can people ensure that those policies and those, you know, safeguards are really robust if things are kind of constantly changing? Are you updating the policy every day? What what does that look like in food brands and companies working in that, I suppose?
SPEAKER_00Yeah, I mean, I'm sure Karina has a really uh a great answer on this, but um yeah, regular updates, of course, but actually I mean, the way ours is written is really more on the principles and the the how you use it. It's not uh it's not necessarily as granular. That's more of that operational stuff. You know, when we switched to Claude, we put together a bit of a this is how and this is what you can connect and this is what you can't connect, and don't share this and make sure you always allow or disallow this kind of thing. That's that kind of nitty-gritty stuff. But our policy is more like don't let it just run wild without human oversight. Don't just send off something that you've created in AI and send it off to a client. It's a little bit higher level, um, and that's how we get around it. But it is a it is a really interesting space, and there's lots of different, uh I think, yeah, different uh approaches to that.
SPEAKER_01I don't have much to add, but my lawyer loves me lately. She's constantly having to refresh our policy, but for the same reasons. It's making sure that it's still broad and it's still it leans into a lot of our company's ethics. And so we don't give specifics about exactly how we use it because also I kind of don't want to share all of my inside secrets on how we use it and share it with the world because I also don't personally want people to have that impression that, oh, they just do it with AI. Oh, they just make their jobs really easy and they just clip the ticket because there's actually a ton of work that goes into the back end, regardless of how much AI is in the back end of your systems and everything. Yeah, it's like they're paying for mine of my team's brains and for all of the years of knowledge that we have accumulated, all the brands we've worked with, all the people we've spoken to, all the events like this that I've sat attending, that's what they ultimately pay for. And so we keep our policy really focused very similarly on the ethics. But I'm also constantly in communication with my lawyer to make sure that we do have the right things in place and we do have the correct information there just to make sure that we can have those conversations with people, but we're also covered at the end of the day.
SPEAKER_03You should kind of have multiple versions of an AI policy. So, like um the ladies are saying here, you should have your kind of customer facing, if you like, around your values and ethics and that sort of thing. But do also kind of put a little disclaimer in your terms and conditions that people are signing around the fact that they actually understand this. Uh so in when we're working kind of to implement different technologies, we always look at a partner pack. So partners are really important too. So you might be being ethical with your data, but what is your partner doing with that? So you've got all sorts of kind of, you know, once it goes outside of you, what does that look like? So you actually want to have kind of multiple versions. Um, I'm not saying don't use a lawyer by any stretch. So full disclaimer here. Um, but you can kind of put these things together. So as part of the things that we do, you know, we work, I'm on the AI forum, we work to kind of use those based sort of governance tech tech uh overviews and things, and you bring that in, you can go to MB, you can bring that in. You need to reference the Privacy Act as well. Otherwise, actually, we're all breaching the Privacy Act most days with things. So you do want different versions of it. Have a partner pack, have a kind of yeah, operations or internal, this is actually what you're signing when you sign the terms and conditions, and then the nice fluffy one on the front, perhaps.
SPEAKER_10Um I'm still just a little bit cons confused about security. So on one hand, we don't upload anything but that could and I put that you could say it's our client or our personal details into AI. I understand that. But then on the other hand, we let it um have access to our inbox, which I love that tool, it sounds amazing. But surely there's lots of confidential information in our inbox.
SPEAKER_07Can you see the confusion?
SPEAKER_03Yeah, yeah. So what I see the confusion every day, yes. So people say well, this comes down to you. So this comes down to education, understanding what this technology is, and accepting what is right for you and what you've signed in those terms and conditions for other people as well. Because, like you say, if you haven't let people know that you're using these things and then you are deploying it on that, uh, then it you you are in breach of some of those different things. So there are very minimal people that are anonymizing data now around not putting private things into AI. Unfortunately, you know, the ship has sailed a wee while ago with a lot of this different technology. So I think you need to make sure you've got the right accounts. You need to make sure that you are choosing what you participate in. How do you know that? So you don't have a free account, you don't have a consumer account of any type, even if it's paid. Generally for business, you need to have a business account. So in Claude, that'll be, you know, you've got your left hand side on the right hand side, might be more expensive, but ultimately in the long run, it is not because of those layers of security. Uh co-pilot and Microsoft, uh Copilot and Gemini kind of work again internally, so it's kind of working, if you like, like pulled into your environment on that. So it's a bit different than pushing it out. So you just want to make sure you've got those right accounts, make sure everyone's got model training turned off too. Again, people don't kind of understand that. And then even if you're paying for these things and you've got improved the model for everyone, they they word it really nicely. Uh, that's just openly kind of sending all your data out into the abyss. So, yeah, uh it's a very ethical debate. And I unfortunately, the reality of anonymizing data, you know, it we it happens when we work in healthcare and education a lot of the time, but that's about it. Um, other than that, you you can't use AI, basically.
SPEAKER_01One of the other things that we do, like on the on the Gmail front, is I have conversations with our clients when we sign them on and obviously have had conversations with our current clients as well to not email us anything confidential. I've got a couple of clients that do send confidential information to us from time to time. And so my response to them is to pick up the phone and to call me because my phone calls are not recorded by AI. I don't have like my actual, I've given them my personal number and that phone is not connected to to anything when it comes to like I don't transcribe those calls, I don't do anything with it. And so that's always a nice way that I can say to people if there is anything that's really, really confidential that you cannot share and you do not want it to be like at any point at risk to be touched by any of my tools, pick up the phone and call me, or flick me a message and let's meet in person and we can have a face-to-face conversation about it so that it's not being captured by any data. And then obviously there's always Zoom too, but we just make sure that for those particular meetings we don't have our transcriptions on. But I think those kinds of conversations as well are really important. And then I guess as far as any of the back data, it's the same thing. It's just kind of having your wits about you and knowing kind of what you're signing into. But we have a very similar thing within the agency that there's certain accounts we aren't given access to, so there's certain inboxes that never get connected, there's certain restrictions that we keep around it, there's certain ways that you can manage that data to a certain extent, but then at the end of the day, it is knowing that if you are connecting things to AI, there is always that risk. And then I think it's just weighing up is that risk worth it? And is it something that you could wear if there was ever any issues that went wrong?
SPEAKER_03I think of it super, super sensitive. I mean, emails have had problems for many years, you know, being hacked. Like we could pull forensics on emails when people have deleted them and all those things for many years. So anything, you know, digital has got that kind of problem with it already. Um so if it's yeah, super confidential, it probably shouldn't be emailing it in the first place. You know, people happily email passport photos and things around like on a free Gmail account. Uh hopefully none of you are doing that, but yeah, all of those sorts of things, uh bigger conversations inside that. Yeah. Some people just panicked. And then they like how yeah, the free Gmail account's one of the worst, you know. If you look at the vendors that have got these models, let's start to build the picture uh how they got there. You know, do you move into that? Not just Google to do that.
SPEAKER_02Any more questions? I'm here. Cool. Oh, you have a question.
SPEAKER_04Hi, I just had a quick question. I'm a brand designer and I have an online portfolio. So I think that I had seen with AI is its ability for people to screenshot and plagiarize essentially by changing a small detail whereas in the past that would not have been possible. Is there anything I can do to protect my work or is it more of a case in traditional plagiarizing where you might have to reach out for the C Synthesis do a is anything I can do? Uh-oh.
SPEAKER_03I can move on. Yeah, I think uh that's a really tricky one. You know, we used to be able to turn it off so you couldn't kind of right-click on all the text and stuff like that. Um not really, uh, especially now with the ability to kind of screenshot or and then just put it into lovable and build it in five seconds. So uh yeah, you just kind of probably not, unfortunately. Just looking at, yeah, maybe just keeping an eye out, maybe if things are kind of connecting to you or certain websites are spending a certain amount of time on there that you can kind of identify where they've come from, keeping an eye on those sorts of things. Or if there's like, you know, uh if in your analytics, if there's some if you can see some data that or people that have been sent across from a particular source, maybe trying to block that, those sorts of things. Um, other than that, yeah, unfortunately it's really tricky.
SPEAKER_01I actually saw this happen this morning when I was on Pinterest with someone who I think you and I both know. Um, it's another graphic designer, and it was a photo that she was in, and she was holding a magazine, and they had covered the magazine that she had with some different context, and they had endorsed their products, and it was on Pinterest. And I was just scrolling for photo inspo for a team shoot that we did earlier today in here, and I came across it and I was like, I know her. Hang on a minute. And I was like, I was looking at her pictures yesterday, and that's not the picture, and it's crazy, but I think aside from because yes, it's I think it's almost borderline impossible for any of us to protect our work really these days. But I think also the other thing to remember on like a bit more of a mindset level is people because I know your work and people coming to you come to you because you're really, really talented at what you do. And I think this goes for like everyone in this room. We are all, especially when it comes to people that are in creative services. I think it's something that we all get worried about people taking our like work and screenshotting things and stealing things that we've done. But I think also remembering that people are gonna be really disappointed if they go to that person that stole your work because they are not going to be able to replicate it to the same extent. And also, people are going to find you because they love your work and they're really excited about working with you. So I think keeping that in mind as well is that at the end of the day, that's one thing that AI will never replace. It's like community, AI is never gonna replace us as humans. And I think that's something that was kind of why I wanted to put on this evening is to give people that kind of, I think just that little bit of like positive encouragement that like AI is not here to take over our lives and our jobs. And it's something that we can work with it, but we don't have to fear it. And I think if we let it fear, like if we fear what's happening with AI and the future of where things are going, it does have the opportunity to slow us down. But I think if we can look at it for how we can take it, we can harness it and remember that it's never gonna replace us as human beings, it's never gonna replace your eye for design. It's never gonna be able to take that over in that kind of capacity. You wanna add that thing?
SPEAKER_02Oh, question over here. I might have to go home and apologise to my husband because I was totally side-eyeing him when he says he uses co-pilot.
SPEAKER_08Um I use AI every day, and I think it's made me way more productive, but I definitely feel like I am thinking less deeply and had less trust in my early thoughts. And I'd love your perspective on how we're making sure that AI is augmenting our thinking rather than replacing it.
SPEAKER_01This is gonna sound like such a millennial kind of response, but go touch grass. I genuinely think, and I've been talking to my team, I walk a heck of a lot now. I walk in the morning and I walk in the evening because it is the thing that just lets me go out and think I walk my dog. And like I love just being outside and breathing and listening to some music and letting my like OG creative self come back because I think it is really, really hard when I don't think I know. It's really hard when you're constantly sitting in a computer, you're asking it questions, you're getting feedback, you're asking it to pull on like all the things that you've ever taught it. And then you start going, oh my goodness, like how do I even like function without this? But I think taking time away from your computers and your phones is even more important now than it ever used to be. And I think that's where we can have the space to really just bring that creativity back out in ourselves, bring that kind of strategic and critical thinking. And so if you're ever finding yourself, that's just my little, I guess, words of wisdom, is if you're ever finding yourself judging yourself or doubting yourself or wondering if it was good enough or like if this thought was great, just taking a beat and taking a step away from your computer because it will be there right when you come back. But you can also take a break and just allow yourself to kind of come back into that creative zone.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, it's definitely a thing. It's that mental atrophy, right? Of kind of stopping using our brains. I think being self-aware is quite important because it's quite easy just to keep iterating and keep asking it again and again and again rather than actually going, hang on a minute, this is taking longer than if I just wrote the bloody thing myself or thought this through myself. Um I mean the old kind of adage of shit in, shit out. Sorry, am I allowed to say that on the podcast? But um where you'll get the best results is actually where you put in your thinking first. It's not just, hey, can you create this for me and then just see what comes out? It's like actually your thoughts in first, going, right, this is what I'm want to create, this is what I'm thinking, and actually tidy this up for me. Let's have a conversation, let's debate it. Um that a conversation, I know it's it's AI, but this is how entrenched it gets, right? Um, yeah, being aware of it and trying to just kind of take a breath sometimes.
SPEAKER_03So it's a passion of mine. We have a methodology we've called called AI the Right Way, uh, created called AI the Right Way, and it is understanding that this is a tool, right? So all of those things that you need to understand around how do we use this technology as a tool and not overthink kind of what we're debating of our knowledge, if you like. So we talk to all different elements of it, you know, how do you retain critical thinking? How do you make sure that you're being ethical, all of those different things. And when you start to kind of think about it like that and understand how it works, you stop kind of second guessing yourself because you're actually the driver of it. It knows that much because you've given it that context. So don't, yeah, don't second guess yourself if you like, and you kind of need to understand how it works to a certain extent to allow yourself to stay in control of that. Um, because it's going to come up with all sorts of different suggestions all the time. But if you can if you're driving it, then you stay in that kind of seat of controlling it if you understand those kind of key things. You're the boss. Yeah.
SPEAKER_02Cool. Yeah, um, we always we have a joke with the team that if we leave Lauren for too long, she'll come back and um have a brand new idea. Like last time we left her, and she came back and said we're opening up a content studio. So we don't like to leave it for too long.
SPEAKER_01We've got a new content studio. I'll plug it now. Next thing you know, we're gonna do this again. TSE Studios opened in Hobsonville. It's a content and podcast studio. But yes, don't leave me unattended with Claude because I brainstormed that and I came back to the team and said, I found a building and we're moving in. They said, When did you come up with this idea? I said, 24 hours ago.
SPEAKER_02Not even kidding. And then we're like, oh, okay.
SPEAKER_01But yeah, the next event will hopefully be in TSC Studios over in Hobsonville. Only content creation studio on that side of the bridge.
SPEAKER_02Very exciting. Yeah, very exciting. Not to self, don't leave her.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, don't leave me unattended with me all clawed.
SPEAKER_02Awesome. I think that was all the questions. So if I didn't miss anyone. Um, but I think that just wraps us up. So I don't know if you want to say something.
SPEAKER_01I just want to say, well, first of all, to the hostess with the most us, Morgan is an amazing girl. Thank you. And to you guys, thank you so much for coming. And thank you so much for your questions. I really hope there's been like a little nugget that each of you have been able to take away from tonight. So please make sure that you approach Claude in a fun way and AI and all of the tools and have fun with it. Know that it's a great tool that's there, and also know that you've got so much support from my fellow panelists and from so many other amazing people on the internet that can help you. But I think really keeping, I think if I'm taking away one big thing from this panel, it's first and foremost privacy and really acknowledging like where you do and don't want it to be in your business. And I think the other thing is remembering that like you are in the driver's seat and you get to decide where you do and don't integrate it, how you want to integrate it, what skills you want to learn, and how you want it to propel your business or your life forward. So just have fun with it and remember that yeah, you're in control. So thank you, everybody, and yeah, have a lovely evening. And hopefully, we'll see you guys at TSE Studios for the next event, whenever that may be.
