Aidan 

Welcome to episode number 87 of The Growth Booth, where today we're talking about AI, artificial intelligence, and how you can use it to progress your business to make more money through your business online and even just improve your personal life right now.

I couldn't think of a better person to invite onto the show today than my good friend, Mark Ling, who I first met way back in about 2007 as a student of one of his courses. Now, the thing about Mark is that he has a knack of staying relevant, and not just staying relevant, but really pushing the boundaries thinking outside the box. I think he's doing it more so now than maybe ever before in the world of AI. So I've been excited to bring Mark onto the show and talk a little bit about what he's doing what he sees coming down the pipeline. And well, that's it, Mark, welcome to the call. Great to have you here.

Mark Ling 

It's great to be here. Thanks for having me. I really, really appreciate it.

Aidan 

First of all, you may notice that Mark has got an accent not dissimilar to mine, and that is because he's from New Zealand. I've been able to catch up with Mark in person many, many times over the years. He's become someone that is not just a business associate – a good friend, mentor, teacher, and all of that good stuff.

So getting back to AI, what are some of the ways that you're using AI and your business and to grow your different businesses right now?

Mark Ling 

Well, it actually comes back to when COVID came in, way, way back then. So there's a long time before Chat GPT. I actually, embarrassingly, for someone that's been doing quite well online for over 20, 25 years now or thereabouts, I made a bunch of mistakes. Business shot up when COVID happened. It didn't go down, it went up, everything started going really well. But I started making the wrong decisions because like, we were looking at the numbers going, "Wow, our YouTube channels are getting way more views, like these are niche YouTube channels. Let's invest more into that." We were noticing what was going well with certain ads that we were running. I didn't take into account that there were 4X the number of people on the internet while everyone was in lockdown, and all numbers were skewed, so I over invested in hiring way too many staff, as did Google, as did Amazon, as did Netflix, as did a lot of other people.

I forgive myself a little bit that I'm not the only one. But I will say that preceding me getting into the AI, I made probably a good year and a bit of mistakes by looking at data and not sort of looking at what caused things to change so much, because things started to go back to the path they were already on. So we get this big blip up and then back to the normal path. That's not to say these other things didn't work, it was just that things weren't as easy and straightforward as when there's 4X the number of people there to see stuff.

So I had to change. Then I had to think, overspending on staff now because I've hired 4X as many people as I probably should have for the opportunities that presented themselves. I needed to think, what's the future? I saw the future wrongly. What is it? And then I thought, "Well, all of these companies, I've got all these great ideas, these grand ideas I have, they actually still work if I just had more people, but I can't afford more people because they require more people than I originally had projected.” So at first I did a small downsizing, but I was relentlessly focused at that moment on productivity. I went in with every staff member and was starting to figure out "Now you're a video editor, what's your process?" and then I tried to edit the video that I did it with my process and managed to double the speed and produce pretty much the same output. And then they were saying to me, "Well, I never thought of it that way," so starting point was processes.

But then I started buying software, using it, and eventually I came across Open AI's GPT API. There's a programmer side of things. Chat GPT did not exist. This is a year now before Chat GPT. We started building tools internally that would help customer support staff do their customer support, that would help us write the kind of content that we write because I'm in a lot of different niches: health, personal development, dating, relationships, dog training, language learning, you name it. I'm in a lot of different niches doing really well. We managed to find a way to basically get what people now have: Chat GPT 4.1.

We had a year before Chat GPT even came out, basically, internally, not quite that level, but not far off with because we had figured out how to modify and train and get the tools going that way. So, to me, the very first step with AI was trying to find a way to make my own team superhuman. Not to replace my team – to make the team become better than they are, because I knew that all my teams are great, but if they could just get double the work done in the same amount of time without rushing, and then things are going to be golden. It actually got to the point where a lot of staff are doing 3X the work they used to do in the same amount of time. People have had pay rises, business is booming, things that may have been a little bit too hard are no longer too hard.

I think that a lot of people get AI wrong in that they're trying to replace people, they're trying to replace their staff or they're an individual trying to make the AI do everything without oversight of their own. If you're looking at it as the AI may be able to do 2/3 maximum for you, that 1/3 is still going to be done by you or the human one way or another, you will get a way more satisfying result, super high level, and stuff that you can truly monetize and do well with no matter what area of business it is, whether it be graphic design, video editing, image generation, whether it be article writing, blog posts, email creators, copywriting, writing long form sales letters. I can't think of very many things that we haven't been able to have impacted by AI.

Aidan 

When you got started, you mentioned making your team more efficient, turning them into sort of superhuman, if you like, was that mainly around the creation of written content? Or was it around other areas as well? What was your starting point there?

Mark Ling 

It was both because we have YouTube channels. Several of our channels have over 100,000 subscribers, some like over 400,000, these are in different niches, like health, for instance, and stuff like that. We've got to keep up a pace of getting out at least a video a week, we want the quality to be high, we want the research to be high. One area where we save time right away was in the video editing side, being able to be able to use AI for things like color grading. Color grading is just, it takes ages. Now it's like press a few buttons and it can be done in 1/8 of the amount of time if you use the right color grading tools, you can have a…

Aidan 

This is an editing software for video editing?

Mark Ling 

Yeah, because the AI thinks almost like a human and it can start to see, so you could get it going just right. Even though you've got other scenes that normally you're trying to adjust the settings, it's not a matter of just copying the same settings that you've got because that doesn't work if that was filmed in a slightly different location with different lighting. You've got to have a different kind of logic.

With AI now, it can kind of push that right across your entire, every cut every camera angle, whatever. It manages to balance that out, which is really great. That's less for filming, but if it's, say, a video where they couldn't find stock footage for the background, they used to maybe go and take a photo and set it up themselves or they would cut out and splice together images from iStock, instead now they can just use something like an AI image generation tool, there's so many of them out there, of course, Stable Diffusion, Midjourney, you name it, there's a heap of them, but they can simply type in a really good prompt, press enter, and bam, they have that image of that blender with those exact nutrients, spirulina and turmeric and ginger and lemon and all those things that they were just talking about can be all in the blender, some of them dotted around the kitchen table, a person that's chopping them up, looking like it's a mum in the kitchen, and then it just spans across for about six seconds as they're talking about, and then the next image is there.

Anyway, I've told people that some of our background stuff is AI, and people didn't even know. They didn't realize because we're still using stock footage from stock library, stuff like that.

Aidan 

I've seen that firsthand. And in fact, one of the simplest AI image creators that I've used is the Bing Image Creator. It's very simple. You don't even need any special props, and some of the images that are put out from that are incredible, and I still can't tell the difference between is that a photograph or is it real? Is it an AI image? It's that good now, and it seems like it's getting better and better and better every day. I think one of the things you've alluded to a couple of times is, these tools are only as good as the people that are using them.

So for example, you know, if you're a racecar driver, or if you're not a racecar driver, you could jump in a Formula One racing car, and you will be terrible. Some of these tools are only as good as the person that's piloting them, if you like. A lot of that, I guess, comes down to the prompts that you put in and just an understanding of how to use them. Is this something that you've found?

Mark Ling 

Yes. And also, they're only as good as the person who makes the initial tool to begin with and their understanding, because I have bought and used, I don't know, maybe 100 AI tools out there. Because if any of them are any good, they're worth keeping, but there are a lot of them out there where I think that in the background, somebody has just gone and written a whole bunch of prompts. It's just a single prompt that anyone could type in, and it's not good enough.

I'll just give a quick example. Let's say you go and you buy this software that's called, I'll just make up a name, piper.ai. I'm just making it up. Let's say you go in piper.ai, it pumps out an award-winning sales letter content for you. Great, okay, cool, I'll write a sales letter with it. Let's write a headline, I'll describe what my product is about, press enter, bam, and all it's done in the background is put a single prompt that just says, "Hey, I'm about to describe what my product is about. Please use a direct response style similar to Dan Kennedy or Frank Kern that promotes this," and then there might go a couple of headlines, "I like the look of blah, and blah," and then that's what it's got in the background, and then bam, and it comes out and it's about a B-level headline, and the average person might think, "Oh, that's okay," but if you're a top-level copywriter used to writing copy that has that extra edge to it with that extra higher conversion rate, you're going to say that's not good enough.

The prompts that you have to create are a lot more intricate and longer, and it may even require another tool looking at it in the background. So you've layered ChatGPT4 here then another tool, and then you're back to GPT4, and then the user sees their output. That's why I say that if the tool has been made by a specialist in that area, as well as someone that's good at AI, then it's going to turn out to be a good tool. If it's made by a newbie marketer who's good at programming or something like that, then they're going to produce, no matter how good they are at programming, if they don't hire a world-class copywriter to look over that stuff, that copy is at best B-grade, and you can already get that out of ChatGPT anyway. It's not going to be that A+ copy that you're really secretly hoping for.

Aidan 

In terms of developing AI tools, I know that you've been involved with this quite a bit now. How many different AI tools, ballpark figure, have you been involved with the development of?

Mark Ling 

Well, it depends what you call a tool, but because some tools can be a widget, oddly similar, it can be made over, but definitely, definitely over 100. If you're talking about, say, for instance, a tool that will produce a self-hypnosis script, like a really good one, given relatively little description, that's an example of a tool that someone might say, "Hey, that's the same tool as a lot of the others," because in the background, they're using the same mechanisms. But as a lot of other tools I've made as my email writing tool, they'll say, "Oh, it's the same tool," because you're using similar mechanisms, so I don't know what you mean in that sense.

If you're talking about things that actually the input is different, the output is different, it's a different use case, sure, made over definitely over 100 tools. I mean, one of the biggest time savers has been research tools, where we're able to pull a few different resource places and able to use AI to search them and then save guys a lot of time doing the research in order to make great YouTube videos on the health niche. It used to take so long to read through every single new scientific study that comes out and stuff like that, and now you can just plug them into AI, it can read it, it can summarize it, hand it back to you, and then you can make informed decisions much faster.

Aidan 

Video is a good example of what's possible because I mean, you know this better than I do, but maybe you could talk through the elements of a video that AI could be used to generate. So obviously a video script, but even before that, you've got some, maybe some research that would go into it and then you could do AI for the research.

Mark Ling 

And exciting hooks and you can show it your data. You can show it all of your top performing videos, you could even show it using data from spy tools where all the top performing videos are of your competitors, and then it can start suggesting videos and titles and give you its reasoning for why that would be a great title and hook. 

Aidan

And then it can give you a script?

Mark Ling

Yeah. Well, I don't get it to write full scripts, but it can, definitely. We've got the ability to, because if we're in a real rush and had to get it to write a full script, yes, it can. I just find that it's better. I'd rather spend the extra money and have it be, how do I say it, usually we find that it's doing 1/3 of the scripts, and the rest is still done by a human who's, you know, we've got some good really, really top-quality writers. I don't mind that.

I'm not saying the AI can't be responsible for more of it. I just like to push the boundaries and try and know that I'm competing against other people using even more AI than I am and I want to go, "How can I still be better?" So that's why I don't mind investing that because if you're making thousands of dollars a day from your YouTube videos, why does it matter if you're spending an extra few $100 per video at that point, but if you’re starting from scratch, then sure, use the AI to do more of it, get it to do 80%, but not the 100%.

Aidan 

I think that's a similar philosophy that we've got with a lot of the different blog content that we're putting out on different niche websites. We always like to use AI as a tool in our toolbox to help us but at the end of the day, the objective is to create the very best blog post as an example, on that particular topic on the web. And if we're coming in from that angle, then AI is going to be part of the solution but not the entire solution.

Going back to the video though, if someone really wanted to, they could make AI give them a complete start-to-finish script, they could then use AI to give them a complete start-to-finish voiceover in basically any language, in any accent that they wanted. And oh, by the way, the same way that wrote the script could roll that out into multiple different languages, and then you could have the AI voice read in multiple different languages. You could then use AI to create different images for the backdrop different designs, and so on and so forth.

Mark Ling 

We've made tools for our students where the AI actually grabs the stock footage and puts it there for them and puts the subtitles in for them. Like you don't even have to theoretically even choose those images and everything if you didn't want to. People are able to profit well from that, it's just that when you're making enough money from a channel, you do tend to go "Well, okay, now I don't mind spending a bit more per video to make it even better," because then you're putting up a few walls around your business, like solidifying it. But in the early stages, when things are in startup mode, you try to do things very well that efficiently and cost-effectively. So for sure.

Now, just I just want to touch on how you said about an AI can write a whole script for you. I definitely highly, highly recommend that if you're ever getting AI to write a script for you, you write it in compartments. Don't get AI to write the whole script in one. It can do over 1000 words and stuff like that, but it's much better if you get most of it in 600-word chunks, and then you end up with a way better, even 300 to 600 word chunks, you get a whole lot better output if you can compartmentalize your model and your scripts. It might be that you've got a listicle type thing, like “7 Red Foods That Help Reduce Blood Sugar”. Each one is a separate thing, right? It could take a human just to tie them all in together. Yes, the AI can tie them together if you really want it to, but it's so fast for humans just to make sure it all ties together well, and then it's a lot easier. It'll do a much better job, that's all, than trying to go "No, I want it to just do the whole thing in one go." Yeah, it can be done. It's just it's better this way.

Aidan 

We found similar things with blog content creation as well. Obviously we're sometimes going for quite long articles that cover a lot of a topic and we always get better results when we are able to break it out into almost like different sections or sub-sections or chapters, if you like, of our blog posts, so I guess the same thing applies to the videos.

Mark Ling 

Yeah. So I'll just say one quick thing. Usually also when you make each section, you still tell the AI what was in the previous section, or if you're using a tool from us, then it will already have done that, but for your own prompts and stuff, you still tell it what's been before and then it's good.

Aidan 

I think a pitfall that I see a lot of online marketers falling into is this overuse of AI, where they will get the AI tool to do 100% of a thing, or the end objective will be, "Yeah, I want 100% of this to be done by the tool." I think there's a bit of a balancing act there. It can be a little bit challenging to know when enough is enough. Have you had any experience or could you give any tips related to that based on how you've managed to approach this potential problem?

Mark Ling 

I think that there are rare occasions when the AI 100% is fine, I don't want to say it never produces fine, but what you got to do is you got to keep remembering that the person at the other end is a real person. You've really got to know your customer avatar or your visitor very well in your head, and then you've got to check over that script, or that blog post or whatever, and just read it from their point of view compared to whatever you think is the best of the competition. You'd hope that in your niche, what a great blog post looks like, and then you got to say, "Are we better? Well, some people think we're better." If the answer is nobody would think we're better, then that's not good enough. If the answer is 50% of people would think we're better, then okay, that's probably good enough. At least some people will.

It's subjective. So if it's not good enough, then the AI hasn't been good enough, and then that needs the human to do what it needs to do. Sometimes you've got too many ideas for the AI, so the AI has to just be doing a little bit less, and you need to do some of that finicky stuff yourself. Yeah, I think personally, I guess at the higher level, the goal is for the AI to do less, but definitely, it stops procrastination around amongst the stuff that's a bit less fun. That's normally the boring stuff that it's doing. The fun stuff that people enjoy doing, they're spending more time doing it, so they're actually faster at that stuff anyway now, because they're not having to, "I've got to do this part that I don't like," but no, they could just hand that off to the AI, describe kind of what they want, press enter, and with a good tool out it comes, and then just keep moving forwards.

Aidan 

I think a lot of what I've seen over the past, especially the past six months or so, is the tail wagging the dog, so to speak with the tail being AI, and then that ends up dictating the direction that the dog sort of wants to go in, whereas it should be the other way around where you're heading in a direction and AI technology helps you get there in a faster, more efficient, superior way. Some people I think are pulled off path because they're so excited about AI. I think you and I have both been in that boat sometimes, but it's important to remember that it's a means to an end. It's a tool in your arsenal to use to, for example, build an online passive income stream.

We've been using AI to save huge amounts of time in e-commerce with product listings, analysis, across the board of different online projects that we've got for things like domain name ideas, we've been using it for crafting emails. In fact, AI is now built into our Sendpad tool, which a lot of our listeners are going to be familiar with. Content creation, obviously, we've spoken about this a lot, image creation.

If you had to name maybe like three or four or five different areas of your business where you're using AI regularly a lot at the moment, I don't know, that month to month it might change, but what are some of the things that come to mind for you?

Mark Ling 

Definitely to do with content creation. And like I said, it doesn't mean it's doing the whole thing, but it's certainly very helpful, whether it be video stuff, blog stuff, email, copywriting, because you can have the gist of what you want to write and then know that you don't have to spend that extra 20 minutes formatting it just right. It can write in the tone of me better than I can sometimes, or whatever team member that is. So definitely content stuff, definitely ad copy or video ads or anything like that.

I'm not saying straight out of the box, it's that good. If you see just something simple like "Please write me a video ad for blah blah," but once you really know how video ads work and stuff, AI can really speed up that time a lot, so you're testing more stuff because it can also do the audio for you. Making changes is very fast if the AI is doing it. You don't have to get that voice over, hit record, and it can do, obviously, a lot of stuff to do with video. Let's say you made a long form video, then there are AI tools that will just go through your video and it'll find five 30- to 60-second chunks and turn it into a Short that now you put it up and it's you've got your YouTube Shorts done for the week. Five YouTube Shorts coming out of one video, bang, just like that, and then you chuck them up on TikTok, you put them up on Snapchat, you put them wherever there's Shorts going on, and just so many different areas.

We use it for the customer support. It's really good to just put your whole knowledge base and put every question that's ever been asked by a customer of your customer support, put it in there into an AI tool so that your customer support, if they get a little stuck or they feel a bit slow answering a question, they just ask it to that chat thing, that's their own personal chat assistant, that comes up with a brilliant answer. They just check through it and go, "Yep, that's good. I might just add this little anecdote here," and then bam, press Enter, and they've saved themselves a heap of time, and the users are getting a really detailed reply that quicker. But again, must have human oversight. We tell people it's an AI, and those cases would be okay, but I don't really love the idea of, say, having AI and not telling people that it's AI and have them converse with somebody, if you know what I mean. 

Aidan

Yeah, that can be a little bit misleading. 

Mark Ling

Just in case, I mean, I always think the human oversight is better, and just trying to give them superpowers like I say, for now.

Aidan 

You know, I mentioned at the beginning, this is something that we could talk about for hours and hours. I would love to be able to get you back on in the weeks ahead at some stage to talk about this some more and really focus in on different projects. If not you, then I know you're working with some people who are doing some amazing things with AI technology. So I'd love to do that. But in this episode, and just to sort of wrap this one up, I'd like to know some of the ways that you're using AI on a personal level. I'll share some of the ways that that I'm using it first. I'd love to hear if you're using it for similar things as me.

So me on a personal level, I do a lot of meal plans for my family with AI where I'll say, "Give me a five-day meal plan. This will be for let's say meals at night. I want it to include: pork, chicken, beef, vegetarian, this, that and the other." What it'll then do is it'll give me a meal plan that will consolidate all of the ingredients into a shopping list that I need for that meal plan, it will then translate it into Spanish so I can give it to someone to go out and do my shopping for me, and so on and so forth. That's one way that I'm using it.

Another way I'm using it is for translations and language learning. A lot of the listeners of this show will know that I've been studying Italian. I've been using it to help me with that idea generation in general. I'm talking on a personal level here, so that might be, "It's a rainy day, what can I do with the kids?" that kind of a thing. I'm teaching my kids a lot at the moment, different things based on the ages. I find a great tool to use to help me come up with interesting and fun ways to engage them, and problem solving in general, like a DIY issue around the house. "How do I glue this onto this? How do I do that?” And it's just amazing. It points me in the right direction, it gives me ideas that I never would have thought of before. That’s me. How about you, on a on a personal level?

Mark Ling 

On a personal level, well, one of them is Midjourney, just teaching kids how to use it. They can make their own coloring books, they can make their own logos and stuff like that that they're really enjoying because then they'll take maybe two or three images that they've got, and then I'll show them how to use Canva and end up showing them Adobe and stuff and how to use layers and stuff, but at least they're not having to use Clipart now that the image was entirely new that no one's had before. So that's cool.

Not every night, but most nights recently, I've been having a little quiz with my oldest two kids that is made just with ChatGPT. I just say "Okay, what are the topics for the quiz?" and someone will say “Roblox, Rubik's Cubes, the movie Pixels,” and someone else will say “New Zealand cricket players, the rules of the game of squash, states of the USA,” and then all this, "Okay, all right," and I'll type all this in and say "Please make me a 30-question multiple choice quiz about the following topics." Next, "The ages of the people doing this are aged 11 and 13. Please give the answers to them after each question," because I'll be reading these out and blah, blah, blah, and I press Enter, and bam, I've got this quiz. First person to get five right wins and go through and ask the questions, and that's pretty cool. Obviously, it's not something you do for business, but it's a bit of fun.

I guess I sometimes treat the AI as a bit of a game as well for myself, trying to find ways to get, especially the image creation, trying to get it to do things that I know, I guess I know, from a business perspective, it's going to save a lot of time and hassle, if I can just get it right, you know, like having a consistent person, just sort of being able to nail that now on Midjourney. You could have a person that's 100 images, that stock person, for consistency, or, particularly if it was going to be a children's book, and you're going to have that main character and you want it to be on every page, and not have it suddenly look completely different, stuff like that. I find that kind of fun. That's not my business, it's just more, I like to tell stories all the time, and it's kind of cool.

Aidan 

Something that we've used it a lot for lately is travel planning. We were able to recently travel for Italy and Switzerland, and I would get it to sort of plot my path and give me suggestions about things to do along the way. And again, coming back to traveling with kids, a lot of the trip, to make it fun, we need to make sure that we were hitting the attractions that were particularly of interest to the kids and doing it in the most efficient way possible. Just using a few basic prompts, I was able to get entire day-by-day, almost hour by hour planned out, which I found to be an incredible resource. It was actually quite a surprise to my wife, because she was like, "Oh, my God, you've planned all this out." And she knows, she obviously knows I use AI to help and stuff, but I think that's a real practical use, right down to suggesting the best hotels and different bits and pieces like that.

I think the only limit here is your imagination at this point, like knowing what's available, like, "Okay, if I want to do something like that, what's the best tool to use? Or if there's not an existing tool, could you make one?" That’s the limitation.

Mark Ling 

The AI can make it for you too. Quite often, it’s surprising, you ask it, you've got this idea for a tool and you chat back and forth with it. And then you say, "Oh, can you write me the code for this, please, in whatever language," and press enter, and quite often they go, "Sure, blah, blah, blah," and then bam, it pumps the code, and I hand it off to a programmer. Next thing I know, that tool was made in like less than an hour one that I thought might take a week. Yeah, it's remarkable.

Aidan 

It's mind boggling. And to think five years ago or so, this kind of a thing wasn't on the radar, at least not for most people. It wasn't really on the radar. For me, I'm certainly thinking of it in a whole new light now, just because of how user-friendly a lot of this is, and it's getting better every day, and it's something that we can use to make our lives better, certainly to make our online businesses better, offline businesses, as well. I think there's no part of our life that it almost couldn't touch at this point and improve. It’s incredible.

Mark Ling 

I think, yeah, and I forgot to also mention, the AI has got so much better now with even audio generation and stuff like that for background music, getting that right sound that you want. Just so many applications of that. I should also mention though that one really important thing, and this is why sometimes there are tools out there that are better than you can get with ChatGPT and stuff like that.

If you're a tool builder, you want to know this, is simply that you can layer tools together and that can make so much difference. So if you have access, let's say I'll just make something up, with let's say Amazon's API, and you combine that with maybe a GPT API and have some idea for a tool, you can end up with a much better tool because you've given access now to something that maybe Open AI doesn't have access to normally. That could be your own data, you might put it in and train a tool with your own data there, but then GPT kind of smooths that out when it gives the output at the end of it. Just something to keep in mind. That's more of an advanced level. Most people won't need that. They'll just make sure though that you’re critical of the tools you’re getting.

Aidan 

Yeah, for sure. Well, Mark, this has been a great introduction to a lot of what you've got going on with AI. We're going to be talking a lot more about AI as related to online businesses over the weeks ahead and really be diving into this in more detail, specifically focusing on how people who are listening to this show, everyday people, can use AI to help build their businesses and improve their lives. So thank you so much for being here once again.

Mark Ling 

Really appreciate your time. Thanks. Thanks everyone for listening, by the way, as well.

Aidan 

Alright, guys, that's a wrap for this episode. This is episode number 87, you can get it by going to thegrowthbooth.com, navigate to number 87. As always, you can always find it on the places where you'd like to listen to your podcasts, be it on YouTube, where you could just search for The Growth Booth, on Spotify, on Apple, or wherever it might be that you listen to podcasts. So that's a wrap. I look forward to seeing you on the next episode of The Growth Booth. Bye for now.