Get the FREE eBook here *Use Code DOUG
Giftlab (by Emily Odio-Sutton) The Print-On-Demand Etsy Course.
*I’m an affiliate so I get a commission if you buy something.
Check out my podcasting and youtube gear
—-
[00:00:00] Hey, what’s going on? Welcome to the Doug Show. My name’s Doug Huntington, and today I’m going to talk a little bit about. Not using AI too much. Now I don’t want this to be too ranty, and for that reason I hope it’s my guarantee to you that I’ll keep this episode a little shorter, but I’ve made that promise before four and failed at it.So we’ll see how it goes. But seriously, I don’t, I only have like a few bullet points here. The music that you heard was me on the resonator guitar. I have a national RESO phonic RESO rocket is what it’s called. This is a wooden [00:01:00] body mahogany, and it has like the metal resonator in there. And it was mixed by Matt gei.
So he has been working on some more. I think I could, I think I could tell you he’s been working on some videos on YouTube. I’ll just say it like that. And Matt is a, he’s a fine musician. I think he’s mainly a, a guitar player and he can play the drums. He could play bass. We actually did some jamming the other day, which maybe I’ll come to at the end, and that’s how these episodes end up longer.
But, but basically Matt was like, Hey, I want to do some music. And he observed that I was playing some of my own intro and outro music for the show and was like, Hey, is are, are you just making that up or are those covers or anything? So anyway, he had some, he needed some overdubs, so we worked on some of that.
I played guitar [00:02:00] primarily and was able to use like a new amp that I got. It actually records really well. Matt has essentially like a full recording, uh, studio situation. And technically, you know, one could, I mean, you could use your fucking phone and like record and get like pretty decent quality these days.
Pretty amazing. But, you know, I have stuff where I can record and I have recorded, but I don’t have the sort of, I guess like artistic vision and the dedication to like do the mastering and the editing and all the. Things that Matt is very good at. So anyway, we recorded some overdubs. He needed some straight resonator stuff, so he did um, some percussion on that, but that was just like a little minute improvised jam in open D if people care.
And it turned out good and he did the mix and mastering and all that stuff and I thought it sounded pretty cool. And he said, sure, you can use these [00:03:00] songs for whatever you want. The others, um, I’m just doing like overdubs playing some slide on those tracks. And those are, um, yeah, those are pretty cool.
But I’ll, I’ll probably hold off, I’ll mix some stuff in, blah, blah, blah. Okay. Let’s talk about ai. Because everybody, everybody’s like super into ai and my wife has even been observing like, oh yeah, you’re, you know, you mentioned that uh, people are using the internet differently and like when you search for information, you have like the AI overviews.
And she’s like, oh yeah, I’m just, I’m like getting used to it and trusting it and that sort of thing. And then I’m. Mentioned as listeners of the show know I would try to look something up and I’m like, okay, I’ll, you know, I’m lazy just like everyone else. So I see the AI overview and then I, I’m realizing, oh, this is inaccurate information.
Sometimes literally the opposite of what the real answer is. So for certain things, like if it doesn’t matter too much, maybe you could follow, follow along. But if you are. [00:04:00] Uh, aware of the specific question that you’re looking up and you kind of know what the answer would be, and then it’s something that you could quickly test and you go like, oh, this does not, this is not right.
And it was, you know, pulled together by people on Reddit or, you know, other places, other websites, and you end up with, um, you know, just incorrect information. So I’ve been using AI less I resisted AI for, for a long time, and I was, I think last week’s episode, you know, uh, Alex Cooper was like, oh yeah, Doug, I remember you were like, Jasper is no good.
And then eventually I was like, oh, Jasper, the AI writing tool, the predated like the chat GPT I, I forget which version, like really. Popped and like worked well, but I, I was like, Jasper kind of a piece of shit. It doesn’t really do exactly what you think it’s gonna do. And then as [00:05:00] time went on in chat, GBT and AI and open AI and Claude and everything got better, Jasper got much better too.
And then now I don’t even hear people talking about it. So it’s like that tool became irrelevant. As far as I know, I, I’m, I suspect some people are still using it. That have it ingrained in their system, um, and their, their processes and all that stuff. So anyway, eventually I came around and I was using AI quite a bit.
In fact, I started doing some videos on my YouTube channel and those did really well. ’cause people are very interested in AI and like how people were using it. And I had maybe not super unique ideas, but I had some ideas that I’m sure. Many thousands of other people had, but like at certain times, I, I think, um, people reached out and they were like, Hey, I took your seed of an idea.
And then I went, you know, 10 more steps. And it, it’s worked out well. So [00:06:00] at some point I was like, you know what, AI is pretty good. And at some point, as I said, I’m lazy. So I started using, using it for like research or I’m like, oh, I’m interviewing, I’m interviewing, uh, this person, Alex Cooper. I’m gonna talk about websites, give me an outline and questions to ask.
And then it would give an outline and questions to ask, and. Most of the time, I mean, I’ve done a lot of these episodes and many interviews. It was kind of a crutch in case I didn’t have a place to go or I was like, oh, this is an interesting area that I can go into. Very rarely did I get like a really good idea.
It was just like, oh, I don’t need to actually do any prep. Which is really generous to assume that I did prep before because one, one of my, one of the things that I’ve done with this show is I, I try to make it sustainable. So I make the, [00:07:00] I make the lifting really easy. So a lot of times for an interview I kind of know like what I’m gonna ask.
And when you’ve done enough interviews and I did. I did study like how to have an interview and I listened to a lot of podcasts. Once you understand like certain questions that you can ask around common experiences to get. Different answers and, and make people think you know, I haven’t answered this before.
Like those kind of questions. Once you kind of have the format down, you could just translate it to anything. So if you’re interviewing like a chef or you’re interviewing a TV meteorologist or you’re interviewing. You know, someone who created a landscaping company and now you know they’re selling it.
Something like that. You can kind of ask the same questions just with [00:08:00] different context. So I was getting lazy and I was using AI for that kind of thing a couple times. Just testing it out, which, you know, I don’t feel bad about this. I was like, you know what, maybe I’ll take the transcript of this podcast episode.
Feed it into chat GPT and try to get a blog post out of it, and then post it over on a niche site project just to see, you know, publishing stuff on the web seems to be a good thing. And then, so I tried that a couple times. Of course, no one gives a shit if you do that. It’s just, yeah. I was like, why am I doing this?
Am I trying to get traffic? To that page, what’s the end game here? And it, you know, it was an exercise in using the tool, seeing what it could do. But ultimately for me, you know, that specific top of funnel, like get people on the email list, it didn’t quite work. I didn’t spend time on it, but I had no, I had no reason to keep trying it.
And I think, you know, if you [00:09:00] have like a. A local business or something like that, and you, you need content and you’re, you know, you’re sharing ideas and that sort of thing. It doesn’t even have to be new ideas. It’s just like your take on a certain thing that could be valid, especially if it’s easier for you to talk and you could maybe put it into, I mean, this is a good use case.
I’m, I, you know, not unique. I didn’t make it up, but you could record a, a voice memo for like 20 minutes, ramble on, kind of find your, your way around. It’s like a podcast that you’re doing for yourself. You feed the transcript, or I think you could just put the actual MP three file into one of the chat tools, and then you can get out a blog post that’s organized and formatted for SEO, which maybe that.
Exactly what you need to do. So anyway, I was testing some of the tools and I was getting pretty [00:10:00] lazy about it. So I was just like, oh, I can use these tools to do research. So I used like notebook LM put in my specific sources. And this is a tool I think by, yeah, it’s by Google Geminis in the background, I’m sure.
And you could feed in your different sources web pages. Uh, I think. Blog post of course, and YouTube videos, MP threes. You could put all sorts of, I mean, I think you could take notes on a piece of paper, take a picture, and it would put that into probably, and then you could say, summarize this and you can get a clean summary.
A cool thing, it came out, I think a couple years ago, you can get a, an audio like podcast with. Fake AI hosts that have a conversation and it actually works pretty well. They have a conversation, they go over the materials you want. I [00:11:00] think at the time, like you could make it, uh, longer or shorter and have more detail or less detail.
It was pretty cool. And the thing with that is it would only use your sources that you put in. I don’t know if it would hallucinate still. But it would use the sources that you put in. And as far as I know, it wouldn’t consider external sources like all the crazies over on Reddit. And, um, yeah, I’m not a Reddit fan.
We’ll, we’ll talk about that just a little bit. Okay. So my, my, uh, my thesis here is like, don’t use AI too much for the kind of things that you should be able to do in your brain, because. It’s lazy and I’m a fan of lazy stuff. All right. Don’t, I mean I’ve, I’ve been working on this book on laziness for years and certainly we’ll probably never finish ’cause I’m really good at [00:12:00] it.
But if you’re like intellectually lazy. You will atrophy and you’ll be bad at problem solving and thinking things through. And sometimes you have to sit down and like struggle through a problem because AI is not gonna be able to solve it for you. And I have an example, and I think I’m probably gonna do a YouTube video on this and.
I’ll, I’ll come to that. Actually maybe I’ll save it for another episode, but like I’ve alluded to it I think when I was doing other interviews, because it came up naturally in conversation, typically I’m interviewing my friends, so we’re catching up and I encourage tangents ’cause that’s more interesting for me.
And I mean, things come out when you’re, when you’re on a side, side quest in a conversation, and then you’re like, all right. What were we talking about? Let’s bring it back and figure this out. So I had a specific instance and [00:13:00] I’ll, I’ll lay it out for you here. I have a few guitars and I have a few electric guitars.
Electric guitars have pickups and typically it’s like a, a magnet or piece of metal with like copper wire wrapped around it. And that pickup senses the vibration from the strings and then it sends an electrical. Signal to the little volume and, uh, tone knobs typically, and then it goes into an output jack, and then it goes to an amp, or you plug it into your computer or however you’re, you’re doing it so.
These pickups are pretty important. And you know, you may think pickups, a pickup, whatever, but the material of the, the metal or the specific magnet that’s in there, the number of wines around there for the electrical engineers, you know, all about this stuff. Little electromagnet there and you’re, you’re able.
Yeah, to get different [00:14:00] sounds depending on how those pickups are designed, the number of wines of that, that wire, the thickness of the wire, the material, how old the magnet is. There’s all these different factors. Even the, the wires inside the guitar can make a difference in how those are wired up.
There’s, uh, potentiometers, those are little knobs or essentially like variable resistors. So those are the knobs and you know, those are on like dimmers for lights and stuff like that. Even changing those to different values can have a great impact on the tone of your guitar. And I like all these details.
I loved, uh, the electrical engineering classes that I took and. I, I took a lot of ’em and, and I was like, looking back, I’m like, oh, it’s crazy that 25 years later I’m like, looking at this stuff. I’m like, oh yeah, I took classes on this stuff and I was super interested back then. And anyway, so I, I have these guitars and I was thinking, [00:15:00] Hey, I’m gonna replace some pickups.
I’m gonna upgrade. You can get better pickups. Often like the stock materials are, I mean like any manufactured good, they’re all compromises for cost unless you’re getting like super expensive stuff. So anyway, you can buy upgraded pickups like very readily. There’s tons of them out there, many different kinds.
So anyway, I put in pickups and I also upgraded the wiring and potentiometers and I ran into some issues when I put this together, so I haven’t soldered in many years. And I was like, eh, it’s gonna be a little messy. Um, I ended up installing the new pickups, wiring things up. I ran into a few issues and I was like, ah, fuck.
Like this is the messiest soldering situation ever. I got better over time, but I was using lead free. Uh, it’s a little, little healthier, I think, uh, you know, don’t inhale the lead fumes and that sort of thing, but lead [00:16:00] free solder is, um, it has like a higher melting point and it’s just like a little, it’s less easy to work with.
So if you can. It’s recommended typically to use leaded solder. Just make sure you have a little ventilation vacuum thing happening. So look it up if you, if you need to, if you know what I’m talking about, you already know this stuff. So, so anyway, the solder was a fucking mess and I was like, ah, man, this is, this is rough, but I’m checking.
And at first maybe I had some kind of wiring issue, not really sure. And then eventually. Over the course of a couple days, I was able to troubleshoot. I would wake up in the middle of the night and I’m like troubleshooting the circuit while I’m laying in bed, and then I’m like, what are you doing? Just go back to sleep.
You’ll be able to figure it out later and eventually. I mean, this is like troubleshooting 1 0 1, but my brain had atrophied for this [00:17:00] type of troubleshooting. And I mean, literally it’s like debugging, right? So I’m like debugging this circuit and it’s what I did in college. And while I wasn’t, um, as good at, I had to work pretty hard, but I wasn’t as good at like whatever, like natural circuit design or it, it, nothing was intuitive.
And basically you end up hooking up like the, you know, these big circuits. And there’s, um, you know, there’s resistors and capacitors and wires going everywhere, and it’s very easy to make a little mistake on your breadboard. So you have to go through and troubleshoot, and it is possible that parts are bad.
So at some point I was like, I checked every wire of which in a guitar, there’s not that many wires. So I checked every wire, I checked every grounding point to make sure. Wires went where they were supposed to. There were no, um, you know, like a stray ground loop happening or something like that, a stray ground out or [00:18:00] any, any kind of mismatch.
So I troubleshoot or I troubleshot all of that. And then I figured out, oh, of course I need to check to make sure my components are working properly. Well, I got brand new stuff, so you think, Hey, these should work fine. Turns out. Two of the four potentiometers, two of the four pods didn’t work. So it wasn’t a fuck up on my end.
Maybe there was early on. I don’t, I don’t think so though. I think I hooked it up and I was like, this fucking, this pickup is not working at all. Like no signal is coming out. Nothing’s grounded out. So what I ended up doing, and I thought of this in the middle of the night there were multiple steps. I was like, what if.
What if the potentiometer is bad? I was like, can I bypass the potentiometer? And then of course, I, I would have no volume control, so it’s just like straight signal going through. I’m like, what happens if I bypass it? So that’s what I did. I, I [00:19:00] just put a jumper, I was able to bypass it, and by the. At some point, ’cause Alex mentioned to me, he was like, oh, did you try to use chat GPT, like take a picture and ask it to troubleshoot?
And I was like, you know what? No. Fuck chat GPT I’m not like, I wanna solve this problem, uh, naturally on my own. And later on I did, I didn’t take a picture, but I was like, chat GPT, here’s the email that I’m sending to the parts manufacturer. Because I was like, Hey. Is there something wrong? Like, can you help me troubleshoot this?
And the guy was very good. He got back to me right away. So I took the email that I sent where I described the situation I was in. I hooked this up, this works, this doesn’t work, this works. When I put the jumper in this other thing, I put in that information and the chat, GPT, and it did not provide me with the troubleshooting that I was able to come up with on my own.
It gave me some good, you know, guidelines, but. Uh, [00:20:00] basically it’s the same bullshit that you would see. Not bullshit, but it’s the same troubleshooting information that you would find on a webpage. So obviously chat, GPT and other tools like that, they get their information from somewhere. And a thing that it was not available was how to debug the components.
So I figured that out on my own. So once I figured out. That that was an issue. I also realized that another one of the pots was not working. So the volume knob is very easy to figure out. You know, it should be silent and quiet at zero, and it should get louder over time as you turn it up. The tone knob, it changes the, uh, the tone a little more trouble, a little less more basey, darker sound, that sort of thing.
So one of the other pots was also bad and I had to, you know, set up a [00:21:00] bypass on that as well to figure out if that was an issue. So all that to say. N Chat, GBT was not giving me good information. And there’s issues with like the AI overviews and stuff like that, very surface level. So if you, you know, for the issue that I was running into, this was a few layers deep and it was actually a parts issue, not anything else.
And I, you know, I checked the pickups like that. That’s one of the early things too. ’cause I got the pickups used. But I mean. They were not used at all. Like I, I mean they still had the plastic on ’em kind of thing, so they may have been taken out of the the box, but they were not installed as far as I could tell.
Alright, so a little wrap up here. If you use AI too much, you’re probably gonna be dumber and you’re not gonna be able to figure out problems. You will be. Worse at critical thinking and troubleshooting problems, which you may or may not run into on a, you [00:22:00] know, regular basis and, you know, easy problems.
You know, chat GPT is probably gonna be pretty good, you know, if you have some sort of. Canoe stream problem where you have to get people across, if you are facing that in your normal life or whatever, it could probably do that pretty good. But if you have some sort of like specialized circuit design thing, which I mean guitar is simple.
There’s, there’s only a few wires in there, but. It never, it never mentioned like, Hey, check out the components. Although now that I’m doing this video, it might, uh, especially Gemini, I might steal my ideas and put it in there. The other thing is like having original ideas and, you know, coming up with something new essentially.
And if you’re using AI for all your ideas, and if you’re, you know, even on YouTube man, uh, you know, if I get into the. You know, I mean, it suggests topic ideas. Basically. They’re like, [00:23:00] oh, other creators in your space have, uh, you know, they have content around this idea. Why don’t you do a video on that?
Which, I mean, it probably would, would work. And I’m not necessarily against it. It doesn’t mean I can’t put my own ideas in there. But you come up with better, probably more original ideas if it’s not like completely fucking derivative on ai pulling information from other people. And the AI overviews, you know, that’s an area where it might work really well for you most of the time.
But I, I mean, like I said, if you kind of know anything about the question or answer that you’re looking, looking up, then you may be able to identify the bad information immediately, but sometimes you won’t. You know, my example recently was I was looking up the nut size so I could grab a wrench for removing the pot from my guitar, and it was just wrong.
It was like just the wrong [00:24:00] size. That’s a super easy thing. It’s pretty fucking standardized. It should not have been the wrong answer. So at that point I was like, you know what? I’m not using any of these AI overviews for this guitar project, stuff that I’m working on. So. Be cautious. I mean, it could be a great tool out there, but like, if you’re intellectually lazy about thinking it’s probably not gonna be great in the long run.
And I mean, for me specifically, like I, I have never had an issue like concentrating or focusing or anything like that. I can sit down and like read a book and not have an issue with, uh, like. Mind wandering. I mean, sometimes it does, but I could sit down and read a book for a few hours. Totally cool. No issue.
And I mean that, that’s great, right? If you’re, if you’re unable to focus and like read a book. And then part part of this is just like social media consumption. If you’re on something where you’re [00:25:00] like scrolling all the time, you may run into, um, you know, focus issues and stuff like that. But, you know, look out for those AI overviews.
I gotta make sure I don’t go all too far in the wrong direction here. Look out for those AI overviews. A lot of the, uh, info is from the morons over at Reddit and some of the, you know, some of the subreddits. They’re good. Got good people over there. They’re nice, there’s good information, but most of it, it’s just like redditers.
Fucking talking. Talking over each other, having meaningless conversations and like arguing about stuff that they may or may not have firsthand like experience at all. And then they’re pretending like they do, or they read something over somewhere else and they were like, well, so and so said that, blah, blah, blah.
And I mean, that’s not super useful. Not super useful at [00:26:00] all. So. That’s my, that’s my warning. And I have been using AI far, far less than I have been. I didn’t consciously think about it. I think I was, I just like arrived there and it was like, is this saving me time at all or am I like going back and forth?
And I don’t think it was saving me time and it was just making me, i, I, I didn’t have to think as hard. It didn’t save any time. I didn’t have to think as hard, but it took a longer to get to, you know, better inf better information, or let’s say a better outline. Or I could just think a little bit harder, spend the same amount of time and have a much better, like, pure outline that I write out on a, you know, legal pad.
So. As a quick transition here, if you, if you dig the show, I, I think I’ll probably put some links. So you can help support the show. If you wanna get, uh, I’ll put in like, uh, Cody’s course. That’s, uh, Cody Berman. He was on the show couple weeks ago. He has an e [00:27:00] printables Etsy course. I’ll put it in the giftable.
That is Emily, I forget her last name. Odio Sutton. So giftable, both Etsy related and a couple, I, I think I’ll put like an Amazon link in case you wanna get, uh, I don’t know, some product that I recommend over there, like a microphone or something like that. I can’t remember. I’ll put a microphone. I like these mics.
They’re good. It’s the, uh, sure. S. No, it’s the sure MV seven. That’s what it is. So I have the USB input, but I also have the XLR, which I use here. And finally, I, I will give a little tease. So I have mentioned like, oh, I like my YouTube channel is big enough where I think most other YouTubers would probably do an interview with me and.
As I make every story about guitars these days, I was like, I could [00:28:00] probably interview some of the folks that I watch on YouTube about guitars, about their channel. ’cause they always talk guitars. But we can go like kind of behind the scenes a little bit and I think they would potentially enjoy that kind of conversation ’cause they’re always talking gear, gear, gear.
And. In the weeds of that area, but behind the scenes they’re like looking at analytics and they’re thinking about video ideas and courses and all this other stuff and I, I think that could be a good, a pretty cool angle. The other part is, um, I think, and people have asked, and I want to do it. I’ll probably just do some YouTube videos about the guitars that I have and I think I may like divide it up.
Now the cool, super cool thing, I just got a guitar back from the shop and they had it for about three months, something like that. Huge major amount of work and super cool guitar. It’s about [00:29:00] 93 years old. 92, 93 years old, and it’s awesome. It’s fantastic. I can’t wait to play it more. And I will, um, yeah, I’ll do a little video on it and have like some playing samples and I’ll like tell the story, little history of the guitar you know, in my hands.
But then kind of the, the era of those guitars, which is the depression era, pre-war guitars. Very, very cool. And it’s, yeah, it plays amazing now. And I’m excited to do the video on that. But I, I have other guitars too, where I have little stories and other gear and some of the stuff I have you know, that one’s pretty unique.
Some of the stuff is, you know, obviously probably way more common. Like super common. But like, there’s an amp that I have from a very small builder, and when I was like looking up, trying to find information, there’s like no reviews on it. Anywhere because it’s such a small maker, but it’s, uh, it sounds fantastic, and I’m like, oh, there’s [00:30:00] probably a handful of people that are, that would want to hear a sample of that.
It’s just, you know, I’m, I’m conscious of my playing and, uh. I’m like, oh, I want to make sure I do it justice. But you know what, maybe I just keep it simple and that sort of thing. So look out for that. If you have any requests on, uh, like the guitar stuff, let me know. Guitars, amps that kind of gear. But I think I may, um, you know, start kind of testing the waters on that side of the YouTube topic area, which is completely different from.
You know, the marketing and all that kind of stuff, but I’ll just put it on YouTube ’cause I like the podcast has its own little, little space in here. Alright, so we’ll get the resonator stuff going on the way out too. Thanks to, uh, Matt for letting me use his music and whenever his, uh, video comes out where he use it, I’ll, I’ll let y’all know [00:31:00] if you can check it out.
The whole thing with Matt, it’s like he does such high quality work and high quality. Good production. Like he was showing, um, like all the storyboards for every shot. I mean, it’s like he’s shooting. I’m not sure how long the video is doing, but yeah, it’s a little movie out there. Alright, catch y’all next time.