The Future of AI Writing (w/ founder of AI tool Copy.ai Paul Yacoubian)

​Paul Yacoubian is the founder and CEO of Copy.ai which rocketed to popularity as one of the very first platforms on the planet to utilize GTP-3.

Since he's on the forefront of all this AI stuff, I asked him about the future of AI writing, what's hyped, and where it's all going:

Watch the video interview here (give it a thumbs if you want to support)!

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Here's my personal notes from re-watching this conversation:

• 0:00:08: Copy.ai was one of the first companies to make GPT-3 easy to use.
• 0:01:05: GPT-2 could barely put anything readable together, but SOMETIMES it would sort of work.
• 0:01:30: During the GPT-2 days Paul originally thought full AI writing was 7 to 10 years away, but then 6 months later GPT-3 came out and it was obvious this was the time to start building.
• Was originally using GPT-3 to create science fiction stories.
• He had 5 original MVP products before Copy.ai such as a Slack Bot you could chat with and one that just created headlines for agencies and ad people.
• One client was an ad buyer for garage door sales companies, and could only come up with so many headlines. AI was great at making 100’s of headlines quick.
• Who is this most useful for?
• “We thought this is going to re-shape how every company works entirely.”
• Reduced cost in, Faster, More Context, Models Get Better Over Time.
• Could either buy copy.ai domain name for $5,000 or Rent-To-Buy for $180/mo so they did that.
• Eventually built 75+ tools for Copy.ai
• 09:40: KK to CC, it’s cool to gave a fun brand.
• 11:05: They had instant Product Market Fit with Copy.ai
• 12:00: Get on Twitter, engage with people, and launch, DM everyone who follows you.
• 2,000 signups in the first 2 days.
• “The biggest problem of startups is no one cares about what you've built.”
• 15:25: Our top SEO things were generators. They took it further and released AI-enabled generators.
• 75+ different tools originally. Had to prompt and feed data to each and every one.
• 18:06: Most commonly used tools were Paragraph Generator and Instagram Captions Generator.
• 18:43: AI has replaced a bunch of supporting content.
• 20:23: A lucrative part of copywriting is mid-level writing and AI has enabled many people to just automatically generate it.
• 21:20: They actually didn’t sell a lot to copywriters. It wasn’t even the same market.
• People who are really good with words are great prompt engineers.
• 22:13: “Will AI Take my job?”
• 23:33: “I think everyone will become a creator because the tools make it so easy.”
• A lot of what you get paid for is: Doing what other people can’t (or don’t want) to do.
• Everyone should be using AI tools as helpers.
• 32:40: It’s cool to see how easy AI is to use for anyone young or old.
• 34:10: It used to be the smaller companies were capturing much of the value, now it seems like bigger companies are making some of the biggest strides in AI.
• 35:03:” Where have you seen smaller companies sneak in?”
• It takes about 2 years for incumbents to implement a new technology.
• Easy for someone like Microsoft to just bolt on AI to their existing services.
• With the way B2B works, Microsoft could probably coast for 3 decades and be fine.
• If you take the software people are trying to do and what they’re trying to do, you can optimize that flow.
• Content production might be very different with AI workflows: It can go scrape all the current content automatically, create all the new content, then post it.
• 43:18: What’s going to happen to SEO when everyone has AI workflows helping them improve?
• 46:25: You will get rewarded for “Net New Information”
• Best use of time is just having a bunch of calls with customer and AI handles all the stuff on the backend.
• 51:10: Paul sent me a present, a mechanical typewriter, so you can THINK before typing.
• 53:49: 100,000’s of jobs were in newspapers.
• 55:45: I can’t see a way we don’t all just become robots.
• 1:01:25: What skills are you instilling in your kids to prepare for an AI world.
• Entrepreneurship, Curiosity, High Ethical Standards, Physical Activity seem like the best skills to learn.

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Watch some of short clips from this interview if you don't have time to watch the full thing:
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This is an original way to take advantage of AI.

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This can be an issue when you're starting something new.

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Two years is the time required to build brand awareness and distribution.

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Thanks to technology, you can become an entrepreneur in just 26 minutes.

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Entering an entrepreneurs' group used to be really difficult just a few years ago.

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AI can assist regular people with regular jobs.

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The truth behind copywriting.

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In the end, it's the jobs that don't involve technology that will make you rich.

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Your AI vision should be dumb.

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How do you feel about us all being robots in the future?

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ChatGPT is really special.

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Thanks to AI, it's much easier to have an online presence.

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What's truly valuable will always be bringing new information to the table.

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We must not allow ourselves to be distracted by technology.

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This is a very important skill that we need to teach our kids

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Want to share this interview with someone? Here's the weblink:
​copywritingcourse.com/courses/interviews/paul-yacoubian-ai-writing​

Sincerely,
Neville Medhora - Copywriter and Part Machine 😆🦾

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