[00:00:00] Tim: Hey everyone, my name's Tim, and this episode was brought to you by our sponsor, Riverside FM. You know, editing is one of the most time consuming tasks that goes with producing a podcast. If you want to produce a quality, professional show, an AI-powered editing tool like Riverside can be very helpful.
[00:00:15] For example, in the course of a conversation or presentation, you may have awkward silences, filler words, or technical glitches that need to be cleaned up. And if you're trying to do that work manually, bit by bit, this can take a lot of time. Fortunately, Riverside has a number of tools that can make this process a lot faster and a lot easier.
[00:00:34] So if we go into Magic Tools within the Riverside Studio, you can see we can remove pauses, we can remove filler words, and we can also use the Audio Enhancer to reduce background noise and reverb. And these are just a few examples of the editing tools available within Riverside.
[00:00:51] I can highly recommend this tool, check it out via the link in my description and use the code mytogblog for a 15 percent discount.
[00:00:58] And now, onto the show.
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[00:01:05] Tim: So, that tidal wave of A. I. content that we predicted back in season one is now upon us. And in that episode with Rob Stennett, we talked about the importance of storytelling as a way of standing out as a brand and content creator. And that, I think, is still very important.
[00:01:20] However, the situation may be even more serious than we first thought, because at the pace in which AI tools are advancing, and the sheer volume of AI content being produced and published online these days, I think it's becoming important for content creators to actually adopt AI in certain ways, just to be able to remain competitive and survive in this new environment.
[00:01:41] But here's the thing. We need to be really careful about the ways in which we're adopting AI into our content strategies and production processes. Because although adopting AI in the right way may be the thing we need to help save our channels in the competition against other creators and brands who are also using AI as part of their content strategies and production processes, there is a danger here.
[00:02:03] And the danger is, if we adopt AI the wrong way, it won't be just the thing that fails to save our channels. It may be the thing that actively destroys both our channels and our reputations as an online content creator.
[00:02:16] Sound serious? It is. So let's get into it.
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[00:02:21] Tim: All right, so let's start with a few examples of how adopting AI can be beneficial for us as content creators. And I'm going to be basing this on some of the ways that I've been using AI to help my channel over the last year and a bit. We'll start with ideas, but maybe not in the way that you think.
[00:02:37] Because a lot of us are already familiar with AI-assisted ideation tools available in software such as VidIQ. So if you have the Boost membership, VidIQ will send you 50 AI generated ideas every day, which are based on data from your specific channel and what keyword opportunities VidIQ identifies from its analysis of YouTube data.
[00:02:59] You can also search for keyword opportunities directly using the search tool. And that tool even includes a section that will show you related keywords and questions. And some of the ideas here aren't bad. Like, what is a funnel in digital marketing? That's an important topic. It's got a good competition score. I'd probably used this idea myself.
[00:03:17] However, I think there's an even better way to leverage the AI tools within VidIQ and other types of similar software, if we start by taking a step back and use a different AI tool to better understand the needs of our audience.
[00:03:32] You see, a couple of the issues with ideas that come direct from VidIQ is that they can be a bit generic, and they're kind of all over the place in terms of the topic. You've got everything from digital marketing in Hindi, to is marketing a good career, to how to make a WordPress website. In a lot of cases, you end up with high level, surface level topics. And especially when you're a small channel, the real gold is to be found in the more specific keywords where there's less competition and more opportunity for your videos and your channel to be found via search.
[00:04:04] And equally important to that is getting down to the cluster of pain points, fears, and desires that drive your audience's behavior and watch time. This is where I like to bring in another tool that can help to ideate around those specific pain points, fears, and desires. And the tool I use there is called WriteSonic, and it's an AI content creation platform that does a lot of different things.
[00:04:27] And for this part, we're going to use a tool within WriteSonic called ChatSonic, which works seamlessly with multiple AI tools in order to deliver high quality results. And it operates a lot like ChatGPT, so I've asked it to list 20 pain points that professionals and business people commonly encounter when attempting to expand their brands via social media.
[00:04:47] And you can see here, it's come up with all kinds of different specific pain points, and then I asked it for examples of pain points within that and it's listed more. And then you get down to the next one here. I've asked for solutions and it's given 20 solutions.
[00:05:03] So there you go, right within a few minutes, there's 60 specific keywords with subtopics clustered around your audience's pain points and potential solutions. Now I'll add the caveat that you of course need to research and validate these ideas before you develop them into your next video, but at least now you've got more places to start to begin figuring out where you want to focus on next. And the other nice thing is that you can bring these keywords back to VidIQ and use them as more specific search terms to help you then drill down further using that tool to find other related topics and subtopics.
[00:05:45] Okay, so now let's talk titles, thumbnails, and hooks. Because as YouTubers, we know that having a great idea is only part of the equation. We also have to package our videos effectively in order to win the clicks of prospective viewers. So VidIQ does give you some AI title suggestions, but I find it's helpful to have another tool to supplement that with so you have the widest possible range to mix and match from because your titles and your thumbnails and your hooks are just so important to the success of your videos.
[00:06:15] As an example, let me take you through how I've used AI to improve one of my title and thumbnail combos. So we'll go into YouTube Studio here, and we'll pick this one, Grey Day Photos, Moody Photography in a Small Town. And the thumbnail is a photo of home plate at a baseball diamond, where it's foggy in the background.
[00:06:33] Not bad, but not great either. It's got a 1. 7 percent click through rate, and you might recall from one of my earlier episodes that my goal is to try and increase my CTR to 3%. So let's see if we can do better.
[00:06:45] So we'll go over to the YouTube title tool in WriteSonic, and we'll enter some details about our video. For example, a quick description. We'll say the search term is moody photography, we'll select a creative tone of voice, and then we'll pick ChatGPT4 as the model that it's going to use. And then you just click generate, and you can see it comes back with a number of different examples here. I kind of like this last one: Embracing the Gloom, Creative, Moody Photography on a Grey Day in Angus. That might be something I can work with.
[00:07:18] So you can see the benefit of tools like VidIQ and WriteSonic. When it comes to titles, they'll give you a lot of prompts and a list of different options that we can either adopt or mix and match to create something better than we might have come up with just on our own. And not only that, it's helping us to do this in less time. So better results in less time, I'd say this is a good use of AI.
[00:07:41] And as far as copying goes, I would say consider this, there are 500 hours of content being uploaded to YouTube every single minute. And so imagine if we said only one of those people could use a certain video topic with a certain title. Let's take for example how to get your first thousand subscribers on YouTube. That's it. Somebody made that video. No one else can use that title. That'd be ridiculous. It wouldn't be in the public interest or the viewer's interest. So I think title formulas are fair game in a sense that you can adapt them, or use them, you know, as long as you're making content that's original and you're trying to bring your own perspective to that particular topic and title.
[00:08:23] Now let's see what we can do with the thumbnail. And for that we're going to head back over to VidIQ to a tool called Optimize, which can be used to optimize your titles, thumbnails, descriptions, and video tags.
[00:08:34] And so in here I'm going to go over to the thumbnail tab and click that. And I'm going to use the AI to generate an alternative to the thumbnail I created. And you can see it came up with a shot called Embrace the Grey. And there's a guy looking over a grey cityscape holding a camera. And, uh, it's interesting that it parallels the title that we came up with. I didn't plan that, but it kind of works and I like it.
[00:08:59] In any case, I think aesthetically that thumbnail option is better than the one that I originally came up with. And you can see that it only took a few minutes to help generate that, and the good thing is that with YouTube rolling out A/B thumbnail testing to more creators now, you could use this as an opportunity to generate multiple thumbnails and then test those to see which ones actually perform better in the marketplace, ultimately leading to better performance for your videos.
[00:09:28] Okay, last one to cover in this set, video hooks. For this example, I'm using the generate feature in VidIQ, where I've asked it to come up with a video hook for a video about the benefits of AI. And you can see the one it came up with is: "AI is the secret weapon to skyrocket your YouTube channel growth like never before."
[00:09:49] That's not bad. I didn't use it for this video, but I might use it for a future YouTube short or something like that. And if I wanted to keep going on this, I'd go back over to WriteSonic, and I'd use the YouTube intro or TikTok hooks tools to see if I could come up with more variations of different types of hooks, and then kind of mix and match and see if that would help me come up with something even better.
[00:10:13] So very similar to how we're using AI with titles, you can use AI with hooks as essentially like a prompt machine to keep feeding you ideas, which then you feed off of to make your work better in less time. Now, someone out there might be thinking, this is fantastic. If AI can do all this for my titles, thumbnails, and hooks, maybe then AI could just write my entire script for me, and I want you to hold that thought, because we're going to come back to it.
[00:10:41] But first I want to go over two more examples of how AI can actually be helpful for you as a video content creator. So I'm going to let you in on a little secret here, okay? Don't tell anyone, but as a video creator and podcaster, one of the things I like the least is writing descriptions and chapter headings for my own videos and podcast episodes. I just find it extremely tedious. I mean, by that time, I've usually been working on the video for a long time and I just want to get it published and move on. So as a result, I am a heavy user of the video description generation tool within VidIQ. Same goes for the AI show notes feature in Riverside FM, which I use for podcast episodes and YouTube lives because it gives you summaries, takeaways, titles, soundbites, and even chapter headers.
[00:11:34] And yes, you do have to tweak and build upon the outputs produced here, but it still saves so much time and aggravation as opposed to starting from a blank page that, you know, I can't think of a single time where I've started from scratch anymore since I've gotten access to these tools. That's how useful I find them to be. And I consider this a legitimate use of AI because it's helping you to summarize content that is original to you, your own stuff. Assuming that you have written your own stuff. And now, let's talk about that.
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[00:12:10] Tim: So for this, we're going to return to the question of script writing. Can you use AI to write your YouTube scripts for you? That is not something that I'd recommend, but rather than just saying a bunch of platitudes about that, I want to give you a practical demonstration about why I think it's a bad idea, along with some alternatives in terms of how AI tools can help you still expedite the process of writing your scripts without actually doing it for you.
[00:12:36] Okay, so for this example we're going to go over to the generate tool within vidIQ. And you can see I've asked it to write a script about the best ways to leverage AI as a YouTube creator. And it's come back with a title, descriptions, some tags, sample thumbnails, a hook that I kind of liked, and an outline.
[00:12:53] And the outline's not bad. It's pretty standard for a video of this type. It's got problem definition, exploration, solutions, examples, and call to action. But watch what happens now when I click Generate Script.
[00:13:05] And you can see that the script it came back with elaborates on the outline it provided. And it even includes a voiceover. However, it's only a minute thirty three seconds in length. That's not nearly enough content for a good full video on this topic.
[00:13:18] However, what I did like about this script is that it included some transitional sentences that might be useful. And those could offer some prompts that would be helpful when it comes to putting the video together.
[00:13:29] But we're looking for a full script, so let's head over to another tool, WriteSonic, to see if it can help us. So we'll go back into the ChatSonic tool within WriteSonic, which again is like ChatGPT but better. And you can see I've asked it to write me a video script talking about 5 AI tools that YouTubers can use to grow their channels, explain how each tool can help, and how it can be implemented. So pretty clear direction, and I'm going to go up to select superior, which will use the highest quality AI models available in this tool. And now it's working to produce something for us.
[00:14:00] And on the surface, the results look a little better because they're a little more specific. And you can see there's a little intro there and five tools that it mentions, Virbo, TubeBuddy, VidIQ, pictory and InVideo.
[00:14:12] Problems begin to become clear when we start to look at the nature of the tool recommendations. So, for example, it's recommended both TubeBuddy and VidIQ, as well as Pictory and InVideo. And while there are some differences among these tools, a couple of them are essentially overlapping tools. Like if you were only going to recommend five tools for a fellow YouTube creator, you probably wouldn't recommend both VidIQ and TubeBuddy, which are essentially both keyword research tools. You'd pick Five things from five different categories. Same with Pictory and InVideo, which are both essentially script to video tools.
[00:14:47] Okay, cool. Let's try a different example with a better prompt. You can see I've used the Improve Prompt feature to make this more specific. And now here we go, we generate a few more results with that.
[00:14:58] And the problem I found with this version is that it came back with some tools that I'd never even heard of before, like Tubics and Lumen. And so what are you going to do in that case? Because I would certainly think you don't want to recommend tools that you yourself have not used before. And sure, you could go out and then start researching the tools that AI recommended and also developing ever more specific and detailed prompts to get better results better and better generations from the AI software.
[00:15:25] So here's my thought on this. If you're going to do all of that, you're much better off investing that time in doing your own research, building off your own knowledge and experience in order to come up with a better result, that you're better able to weave in your own perspective, your own opinions, your own stories, as it were, to make the content a lot better than what's going to be generated through any kind of AI tool.
[00:15:53] Let me give you an example of a tool I think that can help you with that research. It's called ContentPace. And within ContentPace, I've asked it the question, The best ways to use AI for YouTube? And it's going to generate a report for us.
[00:16:07] And the nice thing about this one is that it's going to come back with 50 top articles from competing publishers, and the summary is going to include title, SEO score, number of words, reading level, things like that. But the best part of this is when you scroll down further, you'll see that you can look at the outlines of all 50 articles, all displayed side by side in this really easy to read format.
[00:16:30] Mind blown! Because now what you can do is you can get a very quick overview of what's being said about a particular topic within a few minutes. That's the kind of research that used to take hours and now that's cut at least in half. And one of the cool things is you can click view article and then go straight to the article without ever leaving Contentpace. That way a lot of your research can stay curated in one place and it won't take you as long to switch back and forth among articles and go through a lot of articles within much less time.
[00:17:03] And again, you want to supplement this with your own research and your own knowledge and experience. It's not a replacement for doing the work. I think the opportunity here is for making the work more efficient and producing better results by combining all of the different tools that we've talked about here, together with the knowledge, experience, and personal examples you bring to the table as a content creator.
[00:17:26] Okay, so two final considerations as we think about the use of AI as a writing tool for our YouTube channels. And the first consideration is how YouTube and other platforms may treat AI content in the near future. Let's imagine for a minute YouTube starts to become ever more polluted with Garbage AI content. And this creates a bad viewer experience that starts to annoy people. Don't think that YouTube won't start downranking that content and all content like it. Really hard. I mean it's going into a black hole to literally never be seen again, at least not within the recommendation system.
[00:18:04] And I think this has already started to happen because when I recognize something as an AI-generated video, I don't watch it, and if I do happen to click on it, I click off of it pretty quickly. Because I mean, if we think about it, people are on YouTube and social media primarily to hear from other people. If they want to Google something, they can just Google it. Speaking of which, Google now has its own AI software you can use to get summary answers from. So why would you watch someone's video to get the same thing?
[00:18:32] There's also a reputational risk here, and it's beyond just a question of accuracy. It's also a question about the perception of your expertise and your concern for your audience. Imagine this, somebody runs one of your YouTube scripts, or digital products through an AI content detector. And it comes back as mostly AI generated content. How do you think people who watched your video or bought your product are going to react? I mean, they were looking to get your expertise, your experience, your insights. And you instead gave them something else. I mean, they're probably not coming back. Next time, they're just going to ask ChatGPT directly instead.
[00:19:11] And yes, I know those AI detection tools aren't perfect. They can produce both false positive and false negative results. But if you are over-relying on AI, ultimately your audience is going to see through that.
[00:19:23] So it's clear there are both opportunities and threats with the use of AI as a content creator. So should you use AI at all? Well for this, I think back to another innovation in business that was similarly disruptive: the introduction of automation in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. And you combine that with the introduction of scientific management principles and expansion of the railway. This didn't shrink the economy, it grew it.
[00:19:50] This created massive opportunities for organizations that were able to adapt to the changes. It also put a lot of places out of business. So for me, in a lot of ways, the question is, what side do you want to be on? As we've seen here, there are ways we can leverage AI to produce better content in less time while also avoiding some of the threats that are posed by the use of this technology. And if you want to learn more about how storytelling can help your content and brand stand out from all the generic AI stuff out there, you can watch this video next.
[00:20:24] Thanks for watching. We'll see you in the next episode
