Good afternoon, welcome to the 34th edition of AI versus Marshy!

Think of it like this - a growth marketer charting the impacts of AI on the world in a way that separates hype with pragmatism.

If my newsletter inbox is anything to go by it was a very busy week!

I’ll share a tip for managing such things at the end of the newsletter.

I’ve been covering a lot of news and trends of late so this week it’s tools - let me know if it vibes with you :)

This week:

• Professional headshots but with AI
• Food tracking but with AI
• Generating music but with AI
• Bonus round: Agent workflows as an AI

Your LinkedIn photo game just levelled up

I’m pretty sure the running joke “there’s an AI for that” will get old quick - because there will be an AI for everything.

​Headshot Pro sounds like one that feels reasonably priced and useful?

It works by taking a few selfies, and then uploading you into a more professional look.

It will then add clothes and prop you up against backgrounds.

The pricing is cheaper than a shoot, but does seem like a lot of margin for something that’s clearly using something like Midjourney.

But that’s the thing right - it does this one thing very well and has clearly got lots of users.

It just seems all very stock photo and vanilla AF.

Prompt: Draw an office stock photo of a vanilla ice cream sundae in a suit.

AI-fitness pal

I used to be massive.

Like enjoying lots of beers and dumplings massive.

One of the things I learned to do with some success was calorie counting.

At the time - MyFitnessPal was the only way to track this sort of thing. You’d enter what you ate and could repeat things that made it a little easier.

It was still a pain to do, but staying massive is more painful.

I’m much better at tracking what goes in these days (and have the strong athletic frame to prove it).

For the rest of you there’s now meals.chat.

You can play with it in Telegram and it will estimate your macros, calories, and ingredients -

It’s not an exact science of course - but most of us don’t need exact - we need a system we’ll stick to.

My system in the end revolved around making eating vegetables frequently and with every meal my job - the rest followed.

Progressive house all day long

Google are mainly in the news at the moment for relabelling Bard to Gemini and are now offering a Pro version.

I’ll be testing it in week’s to come.

But the more fun story is MusicFX - generated music based from descriptions.

How does one describe music?

We’ve played with this a lot on our soon-to-launch ElectronicMusicNerd podcast.

But AI can do a pretty good job.

My description is quite crappy - but it still does an admirable job of translating it into something boppy.

Other people seeing the link can remix it too - which is just editing the description it seems.

Or you could put a donk on it.

Bonus agent

Skip past this if the thought of automated workflows is terrifying to you.

​AgentHub lets you design solutions in an visual interface to interact back and forth with AI.

I mentioned Pipedream a while ago and this looks even more user-friendly to use (if you speak tech).

Designing an interface that could say - take an order, and then trigger off a number of tasks (like the HeadshotPro example above) - and then send something back is now easier than ever.

I’m really keen to test something like this in the future and am cooking something up with a business partner that might be a good candidate.

Taking some of the manual elements away from a client engagement (such as gathering knowledge) could help deliver marketing as a service for example.

That’s it for this week.

There’s actually plenty more I can share as it has been one of those weeks.

Here’s my “hack” for newsletter subscriptions.

Just go Gmail Settings > Filters and Blocked Addresses > Create a filter that skips the Inbox and moves it to a subcategory “marketing + newsletter”.

I used to worry that I’d miss important things but anything with “unsubscribe” at the bottom is not important.

Bonus tip: Turn keyboard shortcuts on so you can quickly work your way through the list with “K” and “J” on the keyboard.

If you’ve enjoyed the newsletter or have a question let me know - I always read and reply from responses from my readers and openly wonder why other people’s brains don’t think about this stuff like I do 🤣

Take care and have a great weekend.

-Marshy

​