Hello and welcome to the 40th edition of AI versus Marshy!

This the newsletter that watches the hype, and bookmarks what you need to keep an eye out for.

Delivered into your inbox every week - how good!

A big thank you to readers new and old - we passed 100 readers last week and as this newsletter gets bigger and more ambitious you can say you’re the OGs 👊

This week looks at:

• Using AI for personalised video outreach
• Unpacking the AI vs your job debate
• Reverse engineering your job prospects with AI

At the end of this email I’ll remind you about a testimonial request form - if you’d like to share 1-4 sentences about why you like this newsletter and have your name/position featured in future marketing please fill it out.

But please - feel free to read this email first!

Lots to share, so let’s make like a centipede and get our wiggle on 🐛

-Marshy

AI-powered video outreach

Via Alisha Conlin-Hurd.

Alisha runs an agency called Persuasion Experience.

Originally from Melbourne, her and her partner have sought to build a marketing business that lets them travel the world and do more of what they want to do.

She’s classicly sales-skilled trained and it shows in her content and delivery.

She also shares a bevy of things that have worked for her building her business and her YouTube is worth a subscribe if you’re into that sort of thing:

What I thought was pretty cool was one of the pieces of tech she mentioned called SendPotion.

What it can do is look up a list, and add personal elements in front of video for scale.

What does that mean?

Well say you were reach out to:

• Tom
• Dick
• Harry

You could record yourself say - Hi Tom, Hi Dick, Hi Harry…

Or record the video once, and get AI to generate the personalised elements using your voice and face.

🤯

Outbound cold email is hard.

So anything that gives you an edge is worthwhile.

AI-created video isn’t new. Either is voice cloning or deep fakes.

But using it in a way that’s sales-enablement focused is fresh (for now!)

An argument for jobs staying around instead of AI taking them

Via Noah Smith.

It’s nice to read something that isn’t the typical job doom mongering.

Noah goes into a lot of detail about economic theory unpacking something called comparative advantage.

There’s a lot of thought out arguments in his read, and instead I want to just break down one of the main takeaways.

Comparative advantage means that comparatively - each of us is the best at one thing versus everyone else (yes including AI).

It’s hard to fathom because there’s so much automation, duplication, and replication going on out there.

This idea connects to one shared from Shane Parrish’s Clear Thinking.

He shares a criteria exercise later in the book that forces you to rank decision factors against each other - imagine them on post-its contesting each other.

Is this more important or this?

If you did this for every decision criteria - you WOULD get to the one that is the most important.

The same thing goes for our jobs.

Eventually all of us are going to be the best at ONE thing over everyone else.

That’s comparative advantage at work.

I knew this topic was a bit more thinky, so tried to illustrate it on a whiteboard comparing breathing, writing, and eating pies as an example.

I then fed it into ChatGPT and tidied it up in an image editor.

We’re all going to be the best at something.

So all that’s left to solve is wicked problems like:

​
"how do we get the human race to behave in its collective and existential best interests?"
​

I’m not sure how that one gets solved yet.

Reverse engineering your job prospects

Via me.

My friend Sam said learning how to use AI for career development would be something he’d find useful.

As a small business owner, I’m always listening for things like this.

So thought I’d showcase some thinking in this area for my readers.

I’m going to demonstrate this with a job that I could argue my way into with the right amount effort.

And just to be clear I am not after any job - it would have to be very specific circumstances to get me out of what I’m doing now.

Here’s a role with Spotlight leading their marketing. For those of you not in Australia, it’s a fabric and crafting retailer that kind-of owns the niche.

I say kind-of because there’s a lot of traditional things they do (over-reliance on catalogues and direct mail) and the quality of their products has degraded over time (my Mum is a hardcore crafting nerd).

Okay so now I have a “dream job”.

How can I use AI to help me get this?

Here’s a snippet of my CV (it changes a bit based on role/what I’m applying for).

Alright, now I’m going to play with ChatGPT Premium to get the outcomes I want.

A link to the entire conversation is shared here.

(For some reasons ChatGPT won’t let me share the link to the conversation).

Prompt:

What I’m doing here is setting up a way to grade, and give ChatGPT feedback. This doesn’t have to be a fancy code thing. I can just deliver the score and some steering because I know the first result will be trash.

So I upload the role, and my redacted CV, and run the prompt.

Result:

Prompt:

​
24. This is generic and is making the candidate do all the work. Do better.
​

Now I go through 3 or 4 revolutions of the same thing. Coaching it and letting the score ratchet upwards to 42, 58, and 67.

Here’s what it can do at that level:

I then told it to get started on #1 now.

Is the result above better than the first result? Yes.

Am I much more likely to get an interview at Spotlight if I did this? Yes.

In summary:

• Describe something you want to do
• Describe a way to give the prompt feedback on their answer repeatedly
• Continue until you get to a result you’re happy with

The longer you go on with this, the more likely it is going to forget things at the start (hello context window) but you can still steer it to a more precise result than you want.

You can use this technique with whichever tool you want - I just find ChatGPT the easiest for me to use.

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I’m keen to go a bit harder on promoting the newsletter, and one of the things I want to do is update my landing page and include some quotes about the newsletter in any marketing I do.

If you’d like to participate (or just give feedback) please complete the form here.

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Thanks for reading and remember we’ve got this!

-Marshy