AI Fake News

SPEAKER_1 (0:01)

Welcome to the Money Tree Investing Podcast. Stock market, wealth, personal finance, value stocks. Invest in your life.

Kirk Chisholm (0:10)

Hello, Farmer Tree Podcast listeners. Welcome to this week's show. My name is Kirk Chisholm. I'll be your host. And today, I'm joined with Doug Heagren. Hey, Doug.

Douglas Heagren (0:16)

Hey, Kirk. Good to be back with you after being with you last week in Texas. We were down in Dallas for a little bit of a continue education symposium. Kirk and I, I'm in Minnesota and he's in Massachusetts. We both like M states. Whatever that means for us usually means more taxes. But outside of that, it was good to see you at a place that doesn't have state taxes down in Dallas and spend a couple of days with you, learning some things. So it was good.

Kirk Chisholm (0:44)

It was a good time.

Douglas Heagren (0:45)

Good to see you off screen for once.

Kirk Chisholm (0:47)

Yeah, it was good to see Doug. We had a member of my team, Redina and a bunch of other people we saw. So it was a good event. It was good to see everybody in person. I know it feels like COVID.

No, it was good.

Lots been going on. We'll talk about some of it. But one of the things that came up at the event that it's been nagging me for weeks, and I've been wanting to do this. One of the things we're going to talk about this week is AI. I've been holding my tongue on some of the stuff, but it's just my gut is usually pretty good. Even if I don't completely know what to say about it, my gut tends to be pretty accurate, and we'll get into that a little bit today with AI. But I do want to say that September and October are typically rough months and we've seen that a little bit in the markets.

At the same time, we're not seeing it.

But I think people probably get some surprises here. We're not really liking what we're seeing right now, but both good and bad surprises. We've seen interest rates going up faster than people thought. The Fed's talking about how inflation is low. We're going to keep it low. I'm like, yeah, sure it is. Yeah. My grocery bill says it's low. Yeah, right. Okay.

Put that in a fake news bucket. We'll see what's going to go on in the next few meetings, but we'll get to that and Doug is going to talk about that. But one thing I did want to talk about is, as I was down in Texas, I was just really thinking more about my thoughts about AI. I've listened to a lot of podcasts in the last month about AI, talking about a lot of different things. There's some people out there really formulating what I've been thinking, but they were actually able to put some words to it, which was good. So I want to get into some rules that I've been thinking about. So there's one golden rule of AI, which you've all seen it, you've all been getting bombarded with emails that all look the same, that are a complete waste of your time, and there's a golden rule of AI, which somebody wrote out there, which I thought was great, so I wanted to share it, which is, don't use AI to save yourself time by wasting somebody else's.

I think that's the golden rule of everything. But we've all decided to use AI to make our lives better. One of the challenges with that is there's some good parts about AI, and there's some not so good parts. The good parts are, it makes your research easier, it makes iterating easier, it makes discovery of new concepts easier. It makes virtually anything it can do easier. You can create, you can come up with visuals and audio and all this cool stuff. The challenge is, so can everybody else.

So there used to be an edge based on who you are and your talents and your creativity. Now, you've lost that edge. Now, you're just like everybody else because AI flattens the playing field.

So what is the benefit of being creative?

There isn't any because AI is just flat in the playing field. That eliminates the desire to be different. I know I call it the desire, I'm just hunting for words this morning. It eliminates the need to be different and creative and unique. I like writing marketing copy. I just have a unique way of doing it. I'm not a great writer. For me, it's like a puzzle and it's something that's interesting. It gets me a charge because I have to write something that people are going to read. And I put a lot of thought and effort into it. But if the AI just cranks it out, then I no longer have that desire to do that thing. Like we all have this thing that we love doing. But if it can be done easy, then you don't get the same benefit for doing it. And I mean benefit, I mean personal benefit, internal benefit, right? Like you created this cool thing that nobody's ever done. Oh, that's awesome. It's like a win. You get this feeling of, I just won. I just did this cool thing. But if you're not doing that anymore, you don't get that. It's like a dopamine hit. Probably is a dopamine hit. But when you think about AI, the benefits and drawbacks, yeah, it makes your life easier. But the amount of emails I get now that are absolute garbage, they're not written by a person. And I know this because they all look the same. Is that a bunch of people have figured out that you can use AI to write emails and you can get in front of more people. Well, you know what happens is nobody reads them. Nobody. I have people all the time telling me, hey, I'm going to do this thing. It's going to be great. It's going to make your life easy. I'm like, yeah, but I know how to write emails. And I can guarantee you nobody's going to read those. Because they all look the same. It's all crap. There's nothing good to read. And why? I'll tell you because I understand why people read emails.