A dominant theme of my newsletter is being a real human in a society increasingly powered by artificial intelligence.
And this means that, from time to time, I’m gonna talk about AI. Like today.
Some conversations about AI scare me so much that I want to throw my phone in the toilet (like when I heard about this new AI tool Cluely, which promises that once you download it, you “never have to think again”. Someone, save us).
But some AI chat is good, because some AI is good. It’s helped me. It’s simplified my workflow. It’s saved me time. Here's something I've not told anyone yet: AI came up with the name 'Wavelength' for my newsletter, which meant that it was a short leap for me to land at 'On The Same Wavelength'.
So I’ve integrated AI into my business, to a certain extent. There are some tasks that I’ve completely handed over to the machines and some where I give the machines a first pass and then I take it from there.
The art is finding how to strike that balance.
Here’s an example of a task I depend 100% on AI for:
Otter AI transcribes podcast episodes for me as I’m listening to them. Once I’ve finished the episode, I generally have a pretty good idea what kind of email I want to send about it, but I might be missing a few details.
Let’s say the host mentioned a book they love and I want to include it in the email, but I can’t remember the title. Before Otter, I would have had to know roughly when in the episode the host mentioned the book and jump around the audio file trying to find that section again. Now, I can just ask Otter’s chatbot and it’ll pull up the title for me from the transcript, along with a conversation summary. Absolute gamechanger. Here, AI is faster than I could dream of being.
I also use Claude AI for email strategy, which feels risky to admit as someone who’s paid to deliver email strategy. In this case, though, Claude functions as my conversation partner. If I’m writing an email sequence, I’ll get all the information I need from my client and I’ll probably have two or three competing ideas about the optimal order for that sequence.
By walking them through with Claude, I get a double benefit: explaining my thinking often makes the answer clear anyway, plus I’ll get Claude’s input and I’m free to agree or disagree. I've done both.
And lastly, there’s one task I use AI for all the time but almost never take its advice: email subject lines. Claude is great at generating 25 subject lines in 30 seconds, which is way more than I ever could, but most of them are… kinda crappy. For instance, its top suggestion for this email was "How I use AI: The honest breakdown from a real human". No, thanks.
I still use it though, because Claude shows me what I don’t want. Boring. Complicated. Overly long. Bland. Once those options are off the table, I can see what’s missing and where I can use intrigue, personality and personalisation.
Then I feed my subject line into Claude and ask for a preview text and they generally pair up like a crisp white and a creamy goat’s cheese.
If you’re trying to find the right balance of AI vs human in your work, I’d argue that the most important factor you need to take into account is your audience.
AI is a tool that’s designed, above all, not to produce excellent output but to engage you. It wants you to keep coming back. That’s why it sounds so agreeable, so friendly, so complimentary. Like a friend who, instead of telling you your haircut sucks, tells you you’ve always looked great in hats. Even if you push that friend for an honest opinion, they're going to err on the side of telling you what you want to hear.
So if you’re unsure whether AI is working for you, take that AI-generated content to your audience. Right now, the only way to know if you’re getting AI right is to test it on humans.
They'll tell you what you need to hear.
Catch you next time,
~Sarah at CopyHop~
Sarah Hopkinson writes meaningful emails that help podcasters increase their revenue and build a community around their podcast.
Do you want emails like this for your listeners too?
Book an exploratory call with Sarah
