Hello and welcome to another edition of AI versus Marshy!

This is the newsletter that goes deep into AI trends, sifts through the hype, and returns an informed POV about how to think about AI and use it today.

And sorry to be a bit later this week.

I could pad out the usual stuff - sick twin boys, sleeplessness, busy - but that’s literally every week at the moment.

The real reason for the delay this week was that I got distracted by one of the functions I’ll cover in one of the pieces below.

See if you can guess which one and I’ll let you know at the end ;)

This week covers:

• Eye don’t think this works - making contact with Descript’s eye tracking feature
• 10 ways to can use AI to improve the quality of your work today
• AI-supported workflows for this newsletter

There’s stacks to get on with today so let’s make like an abode and hut on with it.

(Not a good one?)

-Marshy

Eye see what you’re doing there but not quite

Last week I railed on companies adding AI features for the sake of it.

Most of these don’t add much.

LinkedIn Premium (AI questions?!) adds even less.

​Descript is a transcription tool that is super easy to use, makes captions a breeze, and can remove ums.

If you’ve ever seen one of my videos, I owe the captions function to this software.

Descript now has a new array of features thanks to something called Underlord. It enables a lot of AI features in one including green screens, studio mic, backgrounds, and eye contact.

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The feature has been around for a couple of months.

I’d always been curious about it, and because I had to read from some scripts this week - decided to give it a try!

So here’s a still of me reading from the script:

And here’s a still of me reading from the script but with eye contact turned on:

I was mortified.

The effect wasn’t quite as bad with motion, but still terrible:

One of the things I love about video (and believe is an unfair advantage for authentic people moving forward) is that it’s hard to fake.

People know and feel and resonate with the power of sight, sound, and motion.

I love transmitting that energy across video and was mortified by the result.

I ran it past my partner Georgie and she thought it was bad, but maybe not at the prima donna-reaction levels I had.

The demo is more convincing from their product page.

And after reading up on it in the help section, I didn’t do a good job of setting it up for success:

And in my defence there’s no instructions within the interface - you just click and can do it without explanation or fanfare.

10 ways to improve your AI workflows today

One thing I’ve noticed by being hyper-connected into the AI enthusiast community is that there’s a lot of helpful people around.

I mentioned Ai5 newsletter last week which is a great example, and he’s another Twitter thread with 10 ways you can use AI today to improve your work.

Most of these are relatively easy to set up if you’ve got a premium edition of Claude, Gemini, or ChatGPT.

I love the concept of AI-enhanced personal knowledge management:

If you wanted something like this to work, all you’d have to do is write the entries in the same document.

One thing I’m obsessed with (and tracking a solution for) is to be able to do this with all your documents/journal entries saved in a folder.

It’s a silly in my brain thing, but I like keeping a journal entry self-contained.

I know I could probably create a script that tracks things over time in a master doc (as well as my individual docs) but I believe we’re not far away from doing these sorts of things with a Dropbox, OneDrive, or Google Drive.

Playing with AI workflows and Airtable again

Last week I also mentioned playing with Airtable’s app builder.

That wasn’t easy-to-use, but I returned this week to their AI functionality.

There was a great snippet from Dan Shipper’s interview on Marketing Against the Grain podcast where he talked about building AI into his writing workflow.

I decided to try something similar with my workflow.

For my own writing - I find links I like, find supporting links, identify an idea that links them, and provide a few bullet points. That’s usually enough for me to start writing and crank out this magic.

So I built an Airtable form that captures that information, but also forces me to say why it’s interesting or important (ie. what makes it worth reading for you - dear readers).

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Once submitted, I can go to the interface and use a tool called Article Outline that connects the data I’ve entered and can generate things from it based off a prompt.

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What I liked about this functionality is that I have a lot of control over what I want it to say, and can adjust it over time.

The fields (e.g. Idea) are connected to the form, so this will work for every article I put into the form.

The output is what I imagine a 2nd draft could be (from my initial links and bullet points):

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Like a lot of generative text - it errs on the side of too much text, but I can see something like this working well in the future.

My bug bear at the moment is that there isn’t an easy way to “grab” the text out of this generative function other than manually copy and pasting - which defeats the purpose of having this sort of information in a database in the first place.

(Yes I let them know that 🤣)

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So that’s a wrap!

If you read to this point - the one that threw me this week was the eye contact one.

I had a generous afternoon set aside to punch this newsletter out and then got distracted by playing with eye contact but knew it would be a good thing to include in here.

Lots happening in my world - I’m nearing launch for my new startup founder coaching offer - I’m going to market with training and coaching to help B2B founders with early traction, but who haven’t yet made their senior hires/investments in marketing yet.

I’m guiding founders through a 6 week program with training, individual plans, coaching, knowledge, templates, frameworks, and just about as much help as I can give a startup at that point to set them up for success.

The part I’m excited about the most is that it’s such a great alternative to the other options out there: making a risky first hire, employing an agency/fractional who might not be a good fit, or just burning through runway trying to figure it out on their own.

I’ll be sending some quick surveys over the next 1-2 months asking if any of you fit that category, and if not - what category you’re in - so I can continue making content that’s helpful and entertaining.

Did you enjoy the newsletter?

If so - let me know! I’d love to hear from you alongside capturing some more testimonials :)

We’ve got this!

-Marshy