314: AI Isn’t Going Anywhere.  What Do You Need to Know?

Hi there. You’re listening to the Leading Lady Podcast. I’m your host, Alison Loftus, and I’m a certified professional coach specializing in leadership and work-life balance. I work with clients to shift their limiting beliefs, insecurities, and self-doubt. This podcast will be filled with tools and strategies to help high-achieving women like you feel connected, empowered, and in the lead of your life, both personally and professionally. Let’s transform your life, starting now. Lead yourself. The rest will follow.

AliceAnne Loftus: Hi there, Leading Ladies, and welcome to today’s episode. I am thrilled to welcome my dear friend, fellow Leading Lady Ambassador. She’s actually an original ambassador from who knows how many years ago. Eight years, right, Chrissy? Who’s counting? But Chrissy is our web developer. All things SEO, AI, website, digital. She’s basically a genius, and we are so thankful for her and our Leading Lady ecosystem. Chrissy, today we are going to be jumping into some real talk around AI, and I just cannot wait to have this conversation with you. I thank you for being here with us today.

Chrissy: Thanks for having me.

AliceAnne Loftus: So I always feel like every time I have a conversation with you, I leave a little bit dizzy because I learned something new. And you never shame me for not knowing something or not understanding something. You always either have the answer or you know how to help me find the answer.

I’ve been really looking forward to this conversation today because I think we can all agree that we’re seeing a lot of conversations and questions around using AI in our businesses. So I am just really looking forward to your perception of this. What do you think about this? I know that you are also exploring AI and you’re using it in your business. So what do you think?

AI Is a Tool, Not a Replacement

Chrissy: So AI is a tool. It’s just like your computer, your phone. It’s a tool. And some people love AI. Some people do not. They really don’t like AI.

My own son knows I work with AI pretty extensively. He is very anti-AI, mostly for art.

AliceAnne Loftus: Really?

Chrissy: Yeah, he’s anti-AI. He does use ChatGPT for some things, but he refuses to use it for art, which is one of the reasons that a lot of people don’t like AI. It’s because of the copyright issues around it. I don’t have an answer for that. I haven’t done extensive research into it, but I do know a lot of people will not use AI because of the copyright issues that we’re seeing with AI.

AliceAnne Loftus: When I log online, you see such polar opinions about using AI. If you even mention AI, you might get an uproar of, “Oh my gosh. Ew. Gross. I don’t want anything to do with this.”

To the far extreme of, “I use AI for everything. AI is my best friend, my therapist, my business coach, my director of ops.”

It’s such a polar reaction to it. As someone who is helping people integrate AI and learn AI in their business, what would you say are your top things people should know as they start exploring and using AI?

Chrissy: Well, number one, you probably don’t want to use AI for everything. There comes a point when you’re trying to use an AI tool that you’re going to spend more time trying to get AI to do something for you than it would for you to just do it yourself.

I’ve seen that a lot. People want to use AI for everything in their business or sometimes even in their personal life, and they just try to get AI to do everything for them. That’s really not what AI is for.

Eventually it may be able to do everything for you, but there are certain creative things that are going to be better for a human to do. You can get AI to help you with it, but sometimes people are forcing the use of AI when they really don’t need to, or it’s going to be faster if they just do it themselves, and better in a lot of cases if they do it themselves.

AliceAnne Loftus: Yeah. And I find that if you try and do it that way, it doesn’t even feel authentic. It’s going to crank out some crazy stuff that you can’t even understand or make sense of, or it doesn’t feel like you.

Chrissy: Yeah. For example, AI is really good at writing. As you know, I use AI to help people repurpose their content into blog posts and other types of content.

AI is okay at recognizing what it’s writing as AI, and there are methods that you can use to say, “Hey AI, check your work to make sure it doesn’t have the sort of trademarks of AI that tell people it’s AI, and go through and remove those.”

Sometimes it comes back with absolute gibberish because it’s trying to de-AI-ify it so much that it’s junk.

AliceAnne Loftus: Did you just create that word, de-AI-ify?

Chrissy: I have. Yeah.

AliceAnne Loftus: That’s okay.

And I find that if you haven’t done the pre-work of really helping AI to know you and your work and your voice and all of that, then it just feels very robotic. It misses that human part of it.

Training AI to Sound Like You

Chrissy: Yeah. So if you’re going to use AI, especially if you’re going to use it to create content, you need to make sure it understands you.

It needs to know your writing style. If you’re doing it for business, it needs to know about your business. It needs to know about your ideal clients. It probably also needs to know about your competitors so that when it creates content, it has that insight into your business and who you’re trying to talk to.

One thing I do recommend if you’re training AI on your writing style: make sure it’s your actual writing and not something that you got AI to write for you.

AliceAnne Loftus: Oh my gosh. Could you imagine?

Chrissy: I don’t have to imagine. I’ve seen it.

AliceAnne Loftus: Someone asked me the other day, “Alison, don’t you use AI for your blog posts?”

And I’m like, yes. Chrissy and I work like that. But I never worry about that because it’s taking transcripts literally from this podcast. These are my words. I have no notes when I do podcasts. These are my true words coming from my mouth in the transcript, and we use that.

People are always like, “Are you worried that it’s not going to sound like you?” And I’m like, “Well, it is literally my voice.”

Chrissy: Right. But if you’re taking other work and saying, “Make this sound like me,” and it’s not really your voice, it can get diluted.

One of the big things is that if you are using AI for your business, you need to teach it about your business.

I use Claude for most of the AI stuff that I do. In Claude, you can create projects and give it source materials and documents.

For example, when I do blogging for clients, I create an overview of their business that lists out a description of their business, what their offer is, the features and benefits, the target audience, and lots of other details.

Then I create very detailed ideal client avatars. I create a content style guide that takes transcripts of podcast episodes and creates a guide that says, “These are some of the things Alison says often. These are some words she would probably never use.”

AliceAnne Loftus: I cannot even imagine what that has to say. It just reminds me of that mug I have at the office: “I’m classy, but I cuss a little.” Does it know me that way?

Chrissy: Yeah. Well, we don’t put cursing in your style guide.

AliceAnne Loftus: Thank you.

The Problem With AI Hallucinations

Chrissy: One of the other things is AI will sometimes hallucinate. It comes up with BS.

AliceAnne Loftus: Oh my gosh.

Chrissy: It totally does.

AliceAnne Loftus: I used it a couple months ago for spoilers of a movie, and it completely changed the ending of the movie. I had to go back and say, “That didn’t happen. Did you just hallucinate?” And it responded, “Oh, my apologies.”

Chrissy: Yeah. It’s not upset that you caught it. It’s just like, “Oh, sorry.”

But having that training often makes it less likely to hallucinate.

When I do your blog posts, sometimes it makes stuff up. It makes stories up. So I have instructions that say, “Only use stories from the podcast transcript. Don’t make stuff up and don’t lie.”

AliceAnne Loftus: It’s like AI is a little school kid and you’re saying, “Now are you fibbing? Please don’t lie to me.”

Chrissy: Exactly.

Sometimes it’ll give me content that does not sound at all like you. Then I ask, “Does that match the content style guide?” And it says, “Thank you for pointing that out,” and corrects it.

Recently it created a blog post for you and didn’t use any contractions anywhere in the entire post.

I said, “That doesn’t sound anything like Alison. Can you go back and fix that?”

AliceAnne Loftus: That is hilarious.

Common Mistakes Business Owners Make With AI

AliceAnne Loftus: Is there anything that you see business owners doing that’s a big no-no or a big mistake with AI?

Chrissy: One thing I see is people taking AI content and putting it out there without any editing or changing. They just trust the AI.

Again, sometimes it makes stuff up. Sometimes it is very obviously AI.

If you’re doing this for SEO, search engines can sometimes recognize that it’s very obviously AI and that it wasn’t written for humans.

You need to add a human touch and make sure you’re editing it.

One thing I do is take content created with AI, put it into a Google Doc, and run Grammarly to do AI detection on it.

Then I’ll go through and edit it until it sounds human. I usually try to get it below 10% AI detection if I can.

The Biggest Benefits of AI

AliceAnne Loftus: We’ve talked about the things to look out for and the mistakes people make. But I know there are so many benefits to this when done well. What are the biggest benefits or largest ROI you see in using AI in our businesses?

Chrissy: Time savings.

I’m a programmer, and I’ve used AI to help me with first drafts of things just to get the framework down. I do check the code afterward. I’m not releasing completely AI-written code into the world.

Sometimes it does things a little weird, but I’m a programmer so I can check it.

A lot of people are “vibe coding.”

AliceAnne Loftus: I have no idea what that means, and I’m going to delete that from my schema.

Chrissy: They’re coding on vibes. They’re just saying, “Now add this. Now do that.”

The AI coding tools are good, but they don’t always know what they don’t know. Sometimes what they create is absolute junk.

You need to know enough to make sure what you’re putting out there isn’t full of security issues, usability issues, or accessibility issues.

Using AI for Creativity and Strategy

AliceAnne Loftus: I find that using AI lets me do a brain dump of everything I’m thinking about and say, “Can you help me make sense of this? Can you put this in a structured outline?”

It helps me deliver workshops, process my thoughts faster, and challenge my thinking.

I’ve trained my AI to challenge me instead of always agreeing with me. I’ll upload a draft and ask, “What am I missing here? What might be confusing?”

It helps me gain perspective and overcome creative blocks.

Chrissy: Absolutely.

I use AI to create ideal client avatars and business overviews based on websites.

Most clients are a little freaked out by how accurate they are.

AliceAnne Loftus: When you sent me mine, I was like, “Are you in my brain?” It was a little scary.

Chrissy: And sometimes if it’s completely off base, we have to look at the website and say, “This is what the AI thinks your website is trying to do.”

Maybe the website isn’t accurately communicating your message.

AliceAnne Loftus: Which means maybe you’re attracting the wrong client because your messaging is off.

AI, SEO, and Getting Found Online

AliceAnne Loftus: You have programs, trainings, and resources to help business owners step into this world of AI. Can you tell us a little bit about your offerings?

Chrissy: I have a membership called SEO Success Club. It’s mostly focused on SEO, but a lot of the AI-related work we do is content creation.

We teach people how to document their business, create ideal client avatars, and use source material like newsletters, podcasts, or interviews to create content ethically.

We also help people create content for their website and online presence so people can find them, not just through search engines but through AI tools as well.

A lot of people are starting to ask ChatGPT, Claude, or Gemini questions instead of using a search engine.

AliceAnne Loftus: I was shocked when someone told me they found me through AI.

She said she went into AI looking for someone who could help her with specific challenges, and my name came up.

My husband didn’t believe it, so he asked ChatGPT himself. I came up as the second suggestion.

It explained my coaching style, my services, and how I help people.

That was really cool.

Chrissy: That’s what happens when your website is optimized and you’re creating content that speaks directly to your ideal clients.

When AI tools read your content, they understand who you help and can recommend your services.

And by the way, if you’re already doing SEO, you’re already optimizing for AI. There are some extra things you can do, but SEO gets you most of the way there.

AliceAnne Loftus: If you’re creating content and not optimizing it, I compare that to writing a book and putting it under your mattress for nobody to read.

You have to optimize your work.

Chrissy: Exactly.

People think SEO is a big scary thing, but the biggest recommendation I have is simple: know what questions people are asking and answer them thoroughly in your content.

That’s what both search engines and AI tools are looking for.

Final Thoughts

AliceAnne Loftus: Any last words or final thoughts for our listeners today regarding AI?

Chrissy: If you’re getting frustrated with how your AI writes, besides the training aspect, check out Claude.

I’ve converted a lot of people to Claude. It’s a very good writer right out of the box, and once it’s trained, it’s an even better writer.

AliceAnne Loftus: Love it.

Thank you. Like I said, you are a wealth of information. This was fun, and I’m excited to learn more and see how people are using AI ethically in their businesses.

Thank you, Chrissy. Until next time, take the lead.

Thanks for tuning in for another episode of the Leading Lady Podcast. You can find all of the links and information mentioned in this episode at www.leadinglady-coaching.com. If you enjoyed this episode, don’t forget to follow the show so you don’t miss any future episodes. While you’re there, it would mean the world to me if you would take a few seconds and leave me an honest review. This will allow me to help other high-achieving women find inspiration, connection, and develop strategies to live and lead with purpose and intention. See you here next week.