(2024-08-29) Procopio This Is Generative AI's Fatal Flaw

Joe Procopio: This Is Generative AI’s Fatal Flaw. AI is Great At Doing Stuff Already Being Done Poorly By Humans

AI for sales sounds great in theory. I know. I thought the same thing 15 years ago. For 10 minutes. Until I actually started working on it. Then I laughed and went on to the next thing. But it’s here now.

A lot of the hype around Generative AI is built on a foundation of being great at doing things that humans are already doing poorly. I know this because I lived it.

Let me quickly explain AI redundancy.

2010, when Automated Insights changed our model from next-gen sports stats visuals to automating sports content based on those stats

we stood up over 800 websites, one for each pro and college football, basketball, and baseball team

This was super cool and we got a ton of attention

What we didn’t get was money. Because there was no viable revenue stream. Because all these teams had at least one human writer covering them for at least one news outlet. So we were cool as hell, but we were redundant.

Then something serendipitous happened. A number of the smallest colleges from the smallest athletic conferences started sending out press releases whenever our writer bots selected one of their team’s players as the player of the week for that conference. Because those small schools had no other coverage besides us.

That’s when it hit us. There was the use case. Write stories where humans can’t. Redundancy removed. Revenue stream achieved.

Now, humans can and do indeed write sales outreach cold emails. They’re just awful at it. So if AI does the same thing, it’ll be just as awful, only it will cost much less.

This is the promise of a lot of Generative AI use cases right now. Doing things terribly that humans do terribly today, and making it cheaper to do those terrible things terribly.

when any one of the hundreds of sales outreach cold emails I get makes it through my filters, I immediately delete it without reading more than four words.

But here’s the thing.
“Hi Joe, I assure you I’m not a bot.”
I assure you I don’t care.

Yes. I know it works, or Nigerian princes wouldn’t still be doing it, but this is not something that needs to be artificially intellgensed.

One of the main reasons Automated Insights was able to succeed in sports, finance, marketing, real estate, and so on, was not because it could replace real writers in those subjects, but because those areas of interest were already plagued by low-quality SEO-driven content farms.

Over a year ago I was talking about how Generative AI was coming for the content farms.

Nine months ago, when Sports Illustrated got caught using AI content and avatars, I noted that their AI was replacing mostly paid promotional product reviews.

it’s a river of redundancy being produced by Generative AI. I was spot on about how this was going to play out. Gen AI replaced the awful SEO content farms first, then the spaghetti coders, and now the worst of the sales outreachers.

But the only thing Gen AI is actually doing, in a lot of cases, is offering a one-cent-on-the-dollar solution for tasks and content you were only paying 10 cents on the dollar for prior to Gen AI.

You’re still only getting 10 cents on the dollar worth of quality.

And the bigger problem is it’s being sold as a whole dollar of quality.