AI Is Upending the Lives of People Who Do Social Media Professionally

SPEAKER_1 (0:02)

Bloomberg Audio Studios, Podcasts, Radio, News.

Tracy Alloway (0:18)

Hello, and welcome to another episode of the Odd Lots Podcast. I'm Tracy Alloway.

Joe Weisenthal (0:22)

And I'm Joe Weisenthal.

Tracy Alloway (0:24)

So we're here in Hollywood, our first ever live Odd Lots show in LA. And when we come to LA, I feel like we have to talk about the influencer economy, right?

Joe Weisenthal (0:33)

The influencer economy, the creator economy, people who have 8 million followers on Instagram that none of us have ever heard of. There's so much I don't know about this world. There's so much I need to learn. And of course, we need to learn how AI is upending all of it.

Tracy Alloway (0:50)

That's right. So this is the existential question facing creators. What happens to them when creating content essentially becomes like free or extremely low cost? So we have two very special guests for you. We're going to be speaking with Taylor Lorenz. She is of course the founder of User Mag, as well as Rachel Karten. She is a social media consultant and author of the sub stack Link in Bio.

Joe Weisenthal (1:13)

Since we're here in LA and as we've looted to in the past, we got to learn about influencers and people with 5 million followers on Instagram and how they're dealing with this moment.

Tracy Alloway (1:24)

Yeah. So we do in fact have the perfect guests.

Joe Weisenthal (1:26)

That's right. Thrilled to welcome to the stage, the one and only Taylor Lorenz, founder of User Mag, as well as Rachel Karten, social media consultant, author of the great sub stack Link in Bio.

Hello. Thank you both so much for doing this.

Rachel Karten (1:54)

Thanks for having us.

Joe Weisenthal (1:55)

What do you start? What do you, maybe either one of you, what are you covering these days? How would you describe your coverage here?

Rachel Karten (2:02)

Sure. I write a newsletter called Link in Bio. Oh, yay.

It's really good.

Joe Weisenthal (2:09)

Everyone should subscribe.

Rachel Karten (2:10)

Thank you. It's about working in social media. It's the primary trade publication for social media teams.

And I interview experts. So I have interviewed everyone from the social team who covered Artemis to Chanty Beluga.

Joe Weisenthal (2:28)

I forgot about that one. Is that already?

Taylor Lorenz (2:31)

Is that still? Chanty Beluga is forever.

And I am a tech journalist. I write usermag.co. That's my sub stack. I write about, I kind of do a lot of roundups about like online culture, write about tech, a lot of tech policy stuff too. A little bit of everything. So everybody subscribe to that one as well. Absolutely.

Tracy Alloway (2:52)

What are the vibes like right now in social media? It's a loaded question perhaps.

All right, go on.

Rachel Karten (2:59)

Backstage, Taylor showed me a video that she was impressed by.

Taylor Lorenz (3:03)

No, shut up.

SPEAKER_1 (3:05)

You guys.

Taylor Lorenz (3:06)

She was really impressed by it. Literally, we were backstage and I haven't been on Twitter that much today. I saw one frame of this video that was the most AI generated crap.

Did you guys see a Coca Cola truck exploded?

Rachel Karten (3:21)

It was of a Coca Cola truck that was exploding coke out and somebody had a bucket. She was like, did you see this? I said, Taylor, please.

Taylor Lorenz (3:29)

Then the next scene is there's actually a Mentos truck next door, and the guy falls in and explodes through the sky. I was like, oh my God, I'm becoming, and the caption was like the AI videos that your mom sends you. Oh, man.

Joe Weisenthal (3:42)

I showed Rachel. Younger people might not remember the fact that for like many years, the only content on the internet was Mentos and Coca-Cola. That's like all we looked at for like a few years. That's like really strange. No, but here is an important question. So the people that you cover, let's start with you, Rachel. The people that you talk to, who are social media professionals, do they feel as if like AI is, we're going to, like how is it about, like are they mostly of the frame, like, oh, AI can do what I do, or do they mostly see it as an augment or, oh, I can do much more of the job that I know how to do for years with these new tools?

Rachel Karten (4:26)

So I think the way that AI is showing up for a lot of marketing teams is through their boss. I wrote an article about this called, does your boss have AI brain? And I talked to 100 marketers who are dealing with an issue where their boss is asking them to use AI, and their boss is using AI themselves, and they're outsourcing all of their gut instincts to AI.