Worried About AI? Here's How I'm Leveraging It For My Maker Business (And You Can Too)
It feels like every other post these days is about how AI is going to take away jobs, destroy your business, and we're all going to be worse off.
Hogwash!
Gutenberg's printing press didn't make writing obsolete, but allowed more books to be more widely distributed. The typewriter didn't make authors obsolete, but let them edit, rewrite, and revise quickly and make time for more books. The internet didn't make magazine and newspaper articles obsolete, but allowed them to be more quickly, more cheaply, and more widely spread.
AI will not make you obsolete if you leverage it correctly and there are 3 areas I'm leveraging AI today (and it's not to write articles).
AI Image Generation
Any YouTuber will tell you how much time and effort goes into crafting compelling thumbnails.
Now, I'm no YouTube thumbnail expert (yet), but am familiar enough with Photoshop to understand just how long it can take to stage a thumbnail, take pictures, color grade them, and edit into a useable thumbnail. Instead, I'm leveraging AI to generate thumbnails for my daily articles. Plus, for YouTube, I can have AI generate components that I can manually add into the composition instead of hunting for hours for creative commons images on Google.
Letting AI help me with my thumbnails has saved me hours on my articles alone and even more so once I'm serious about YouTube again.
AI Social Media Expert
Social media tips and tricks have a short shelf-life and it seems to be shrinking by the month.
Instead of spending hours researching what is trending and how to capitalize on it or spending hundreds on courses to stay in the loop, I leverage AI to help me get a 30,000 foot view. I can get quick snapshots, but then start a dialog to dig in where something interests me. Plus, I an have AI cross-reference multiple platforms so that I am using my time effectively to create content across platforms.
It hasn't yet gotten so good that it replaces actively looking at each platform yourself, but I have also found that it's given me things to specifically look for myself on those platforms.
AI Business Consultant
An effective business consultant might be the most underutilized use case for AI for small businesses.
You want specialized consultants, not generalists. With AI, you can have as many extremely specialized consultants as you want and you can dial them in to suit your particular needs as you go. What I have found most effective is to specifically tell your AI that they don't have to be nice, but you want them to be ruthless in their feedback so that it is as effective as possible.
Yes, we all want to be told we're doing a great job, but it's far more effective to get ruthless feedback you can act on.
