Ep 75 - AI Avatars & Agents Content 🤦

AI avatars and agents are now the competition in content creation and business. But what does this mean for trust, authenticity, platform regulations and audience engagement?

🎁 Stat the Free Course - "30 Days Content In 30 Minutes" at: https://contentonly.au

In this episode of the Content Marketing Podcast:

• How AI-generated videos and avatars are fooling audiences.
• Why transparency is key using AI avatars or synthetic content creation.
• The risks of AI-driven content and potential brand damage.
• How social media platforms are handling AI-generated content.
• The opportunity for real human connection in a synthetic content world.
• How to use AI effectively in your business without losing authenticity.

AND much more.

Make sure you follow or subscribe to catch every new episode on demand, and leave a 5-star review to help more people discover the show.

Transcript

AI avatars and AI agents are now the competition when it comes to content creation and building businesses. So what are the implications? If you go down the AI avatar route, where can AI be used and still have a human place? And what will it mean for audiences and social media platforms if people create mistrust? Trust? If you're new here, my name is Aaron Whitish. I am the co-founder of Content Only. Our agency creates in the region of 500 original videos and written posts for our clients every single month. If you head to content only au, you can download a free course of the 30 days in 30 minutes content creation system. I'll start with a story. The other day I was on Facebook and I was doing a bit of scrolling and this reel popped up and I started watching it. It got my attention.

It was a human with a baby whale, and they got injured or they were trapped in something and the human works to free this baby whale. Anyway, the mother whale comes up to say thank you, is probably the best way to put it to this human that's freed, that they're calfs or they're pups. I'm not a marine biologist, I'm not sure. And I was like, oh, wow. And then it occurred to me that this event was not real. This was synthetic and it was AI generated, but it had me for at least 20 seconds. And then fast forward two days later, I believe it was, there was a video and there was this lady presenting and talking the video. And for the first 10 seconds I'm like, oh, this is a very polished speaker on X, Y, Z topic. And then it occurred to me that that was also an AI avatar delivering a script in a reel.

So there's probably many examples where I have been fooled and haven't realised that it was an AI generated situation. So we're now living in a time and era where with a simple app that costs a few dollars to join, you can create an AI avatar of yourself. So not a real person. You can put yourself on a private plane in a bagi, you can feed yourself a chat GPT script and full people that could actually be happening in real life. So what are the implications of what does this mean? And it's very scary to know that. So first and foremost, I think if you're in business, you want to understand that there's going to be two sides of the marketplace when it comes to AI content. Some are going to be really excited and embrace it, and they're going to love AI avatars and people are going to live vicariously through making their own AI avatar and this existence that isn't real because it's a Superman or superwoman version of themselves.

And there's going to be people that are really scared of AI and don't trust it, which is completely fine. You might be a bit of both. You're excited by it, scared by it. I know I am. I think as a business, the first thing you need to understand is if you go down the AI avatar route, which means you have a video with a person on it, it could be an avatar review that isn't actually real and it's getting fed script to be polished on this video because you aren't confident to do it yourself, as an example. You just want efficiency and put it out there faster. I believe you'll need to be transparent about that. Now, when you upload it to a social media platform, you do have to declare if it's synthetic and not a real event. So if someone didn't do that, then I'm wondering what is the consequence?

Do they lose their account? Do they get banned? Do they get pulled down? So I think that could a reality if people are not declaring that because it would be misleading to the general marketplace, the implications if it happened to your audience where they saw an avatar of you and they believed it was real and then found out later that it wasn't, they might feel that they've misled and it might create mistrust, and the consequence of that could be really bad pushback or PR for the brand. So my first position on it, if you want to explore that technology and do it, which I don't see any challenges with it, it's just being transparent saying, Hey, this is our AI agent, our AI avatar. We're just playing around. This is cool. And just making sure you've got open and honesty around that when it's not really you or not a real person inside the business.

That's the first thing I'd say in declaring it to the platform. So you don't get a slap on the wrist or band. The next thing to consider is if your competitors are going down that path and they are using AI avatar, which a lot of them will, is the advantage in being human. And no doubt, as I said before, there's going to be people in the marketplace that love the AI content and that's what they'll get shown in their feed because they're responding to it thinking it's really cool. And there'll be the other side that are really scared, don't like it, don't trust it. And I'm assuming the algorithms will be smart enough to show them more human generated content. So at the end of the day, I would feel personally misled if I saw an advisor, anyone in a space that hadn't actually produced that original thought themselves and were feeding it through an AI avatar person and passing it off as expertise, that to me would create a massive red flag and I would move away from that company.

So I'm not sure what your position or take would be on that, or if they were transparent saying, Hey, this is our AI avatar, this is what we've done, et cetera, then that's at a very different lens to look at it. So just putting that on the table and the fact that someone could actually copy me and my face and my voice now and put me in events that aren't real and create these scenarios that are synthetic and even put you in a very compromising position that's really scary. And I was speaking to my wife Paula, going, is there going to be a point in the future where if a case comes down to video footage or surveillance where there's enough reasonable doubt that it could be AI generated so people just get off if there's any sort of video, unless there's really solid proof that it actually took place through other means.

Because how do you know what's real? How do you know what's if I've already been fooled, I'm sure many times. So it's going to get very complicated and it's for the facilitators of platforms to navigate it and work a lot of this out because they're going to have to get to the point I think where things are either verified as original human and things are either verified as AI or synthetic right off the bat so we know what's real and what's not. Or else people are going to very easily get misled by Mr. Private Plane, Mr. Buggati, with the moneymaking scheme online, that isn't actually a real person, it's just a digital creation telling you all this stuff. Someone hiding in a basement somewhere that's flat broke presenting this way online. So that's what we're confronted with already and we're just getting started with ai.

Now, AI is used in our business in many aspects. We use it for transcriptions. We use it to help put captions on videos. We use it for efficiency. We use it to help with tone and writing posts and all sorts of different things. So again, it's really added efficiency and quality to our business since it became mainstream, but it has been around for decades. We just haven't sung from the hills about it like we have since chat. GPT exploded onto the scene a couple of years ago and everyone started utilising it. So you can't ignore it because there is so much efficiency. We can do things now that used to be manual processes and took several hours in a couple of minutes because of ai. So it's very exciting. And I step back and as an agency owner in the content space, I look at it a couple of different ways.

There could be a pathway in the future where we have AI content only packages where people just want avatar reels and videos and posts curated for them. So we'll utilise it in that way. But the conditions would obviously be that they're using it transparently and declaring it to the platforms and all the above, and then the people that want to go down the human path where they're showing up as them real selves, but hopefully the people that do commit to that get rewarded. And we can use the efficiencies of AI to take that original human input and transform it into many different outputs in terms of say, shorter form videos posts, and use it to enhance the quality and those efficiencies that I was talking about. So the challenge now is to start understanding how AI works in your vertical, not just on the content side, because if you can understand it in your space, you're not going to get left behind.

So study it and how it applies to what you do professionally so you don't get left behind. I'm committed to it in the content marketing space. Then the next challenge I have for you is when you are watching videos and seeing events that are happening online, see if you can detect whether or not it's AI and synthetic or whether it's human, and then you can check the label on the content. Hopefully the person's labelled it correctly because it is getting good, and we want to minimise our own ability to get misled and go down a path that was from a figment of someone's imagination, putting an AI person that doesn't exist, an avatar into the online world, fed a script and taking advantage of someone that thought this was really happening. So that's it for today. The implications of AI and being transparent if you're going to go down that route with avatars in your own world and how it's going to play out a little bit. As always, if you're new here, make sure that you subscribe or follow the show so you can get each new episode on demand. And if you are on a platform that lets you review, if you can leave a five star review that helps more people discover the show. And if you send me a screenshot of your review, I'm Aaron Whitney on social media. I'll send you a special gift for helping grow the show.