Intro: Do you feel like you were meant to have a kick-ass career as a hair stylist? Like you got into this industry to make big things happen?
Maybe you’re struggling to build a solid base and want some stability. Maybe you know social media is important, but it feels like a waste of time because you aren’t seeing any results. Maybe you’ve already had some amazing success but are craving more. Maybe you’re ready to truly enjoy the freedom and flexibility this industry has to offer.
Cutting and coloring skills will only get you so far, but to build a lifelong career as a wealthy stylist, it takes business skills and a serious marketing strategy. When you’re ready to quit just working in your business and start working on it, join us here where we share real success stories from real stylists.
I’m Britt Seva, social media and marketing strategist just for hair stylists, and this is the Thriving Stylist Podcast.
Britt Seva: What is up and welcome back to the Thriving Stylist Podcast. I’m your host, Britt Seva, really excited to get a little techy geeky with you this week. We don’t often get to go this direction.
This week, we are talking about artificial intelligence and what it means for our industry. I want to dive into some of the mainstream apps, some apps you might not know about, what you do need to know, what this can mean for the future of the industry, how AI even works, how we got here. I just want to dig into it.
Now, I will say, full disclosure, this is a topic I actually really fought bringing to the podcast for several months. I know it’s a buzzing topic. I’ve done my own research and studied it for quite some time, and if you know me, you know I am always very slow to pull a trigger.
I think one of the most irresponsible things that educators can sometimes do in our industry is want to be the first to hop on a trend and early information about anything is always going to be a little bit rocky and rough. I really wanted to make sure that I understood what I was talking about, that I could share information that would be useful and beneficial. I also want to make sure that the industry was really ready to hear it.
I was recently speaking on the stage and I had the opportunity. It was a longer booking. I was up there for a couple of hours and I had the opportunity to really dig into some Q&A with this group. A salon owner, brilliant salon owner, raised his hand and said, “Britt, can you talk to us about ChatGPT?” Which I’ll get into that specifically in a little bit. He said, “I’m hearing a lot about it. What is your take on it? I see this is something that could really impact stylists, building funnels, marketing. I’m getting over some of the hurdles that have previously held them back. What do you think?”
I shared my thoughts. I’ll share some of those thoughts with you today. But it really opened up a conversation. I could see a lot of people, like they were nodding along and their minds were blown. I realized, “Okay, well, maybe the industry really is ready to hear about this, talk about this.”
Then I was cooking dinner with my husband the night before last, and we were in the kitchen and he goes, “Tell me, what’s your take on this whole AI thing?” And bless my husband, I just love the man. He doesn’t study marketing in the way that I do. It’s one of the reasons we have such a great relationship is our interests really do vary and so we’re able to have these really powerful conversations with each other. Whenever Mr. Seva comes to the table asking a question about tech, marketing, it’s a huge indicator for me that something has become very mainstream because I know he doesn’t seek it out. It’s not something that he’s trying to stay trendy with. So as soon as it hits somebody like him, I realize, “Whoa, okay. This is really becoming something that’s part of everyday culture.”
As I share this, the reason why I wanted to share all those disclaimers is if you don’t know anything about AI, that’s okay. If you are overwhelmed by the thought of me even talking about it, and you’re like, “Oh my gosh, one more thing to learn,” rest assured that’s not exactly where this podcast is going to go. And if you’re somebody who does like to chase the trends, do you want to stay in the forefront? I got stuff for you too.
No matter where you are in the AI conversation, I want to make this an episode that’s relatable for you.
Let’s first talk about what it is and what it isn’t. A lot of times when we say AI or artificial intelligence, we think iRobot. I mean, immediately it’s like the robots are coming. How do we protect ourselves? I’m not going to lie, that is a real concern, but we are very far away from that point right now.
Let’s get to the core of what AI is and what it isn’t, what ChatGPT is, what it isn’t, and some other platforms you might want to look at.
We first need to go back to the inception of AI. There’s a company called OpenAI. The CEO is Sam Altman. If you’ve been following tech or marketing or mainstream business at all, Altman is probably a name that you’ve heard in the last few years. Kind of a big deal. He created OpenAI and has created several iterations of something called GPT.
GPT is Generative Pre-trained Transformer, so you can think of it like a giant robot brain. I think that is the simplest way to think of it. What you should know is that we are currently on GPT-3. That is the version that is available at the time of this podcast recording.
GPT-3 was released in 2020, so the tool that’s available to us that is now in 2023, really starting to gain a lot of steam, has been around for three years. So what changed?
Couple things. One, this is the third iteration of GPT, which has come out of OpenAI. It is by far and away the most sophisticated.
When we look at what GPT is, the easiest way to think of it, like I said, as the giant robot brain and it is trained using the information that currently exists on the internet to generate information.
The reason why people are getting excited about it is because it’s a tool that just needs a very small amount of input to generate a huge amount of output. The way I explained this from stage a few days ago is have you ever just said to yourself like, you’re in the middle of reading a business book, or you’re taking a business class, or you’re trying to learn about anything, and you’re like, “Man, I wish there was a way that I could just plug into this book or plug into this course or plug into this lecture and transfer all that information into my brain.” GPT does that, but the brain it’s feeding is like a robot brain.
They have figured out how to essentially plug the entire internet into this robot brain that is able to understand, consume, and decipher billions of pieces of information into something that’s usable. That new bit of technology is what became available in 2020 in the latest version of this software. The third iteration of it.
For context, the most previous version before this new one was able to shift between and understand 10 billion parameters. This new version, GPT-3, is a model with over 175 billion parameters. This is a deep, highly knowledgeable resource and that’s why it’s becoming clear that this is a powerful tool that can be used for good or evil, which we’ll get into in a minute. But it is going to change the way that we all exist in the future.
Now, the reason why this is gaining buzz now is that GPT-3, the latest iteration as the robot brain, has started to get stronger and smarter, it is now producing text that is convincing enough to seem like a human could have written that themselves. And because it’s gotten to that advanced stage, we are now seeing apps and software that is tapping into that robot brain and creating tools that are available to you and I at a consumer level. Whereas before this robot brain has just been being built over time and time and time. Now that the brain is built and it’s starting to get smart, third parties are coming in, tapping into the knowledge and are generating tools that you and I can use.
Now the thing about GPT in this latest version that people are freaking out about is it’s what called what is called a meta learner. Meaning it has learned to learn. It wants to improve itself. You can ask it in the regular way that you and I talk to perform some kind of task, like write a caption for X, Y, Z. Give me a blog post on A, B, C, and it can decipher what you and I are saying and produce a result that is desirable.
Now the interesting thing is if we say, “No, no, no, no, no, that wasn’t desirable,” it learns that and so it says, “Oh wait, wait, I did that wrong. How can I be better?” That desire to be better, that desire to improve is the new function that is making this something that people are really glamming onto.
Now that we understand that the basis of all of this AI is to put it in the simplest form, is able to tap into this robot brain that is able to learn and is actively working to be better. It doesn’t mean that it’s perfect. It’s actually deeply flawed and I want to share those flaws because I don’t see the flaws in it being widely talked about. I see people’s fears around it being talked about and I see all the benefits being talked about, but the flaws aren’t and I think it’s important for you to understand them before you even consider dipping your toes into AI.
The first is that while GPT-3 is able to learn and wants to learn, it’s like an infant and it also does not know how to decipher between fake news and unstable news.
Remember, all it’s doing is taking all the information on the internet, trying to piece it together, and understand what the truth of it is.
Have you ever researched a topic and found five different conflicting points of view on one singular topic? Yeah, GPT-3 feels the same way that you do. It is very difficult to know what is factually accurate versus what’s popular or what’s common. It does not know what is necessarily proven to be real and what is simply widely publicized or what has a big following. It’s not able to fact check itself just yet.
That alone should be scary to you because if you lean into this tool and you’re like, “Oh my gosh, okay, this is great,” and you just blindly trust [what] any of these resources I’m about to share spit out to you, you’re going to really have to fact check because GPT is not going to do that for you.
Along those lines, it’s found that GPT is deeply biased by race, gender, and religion, and that shouldn’t be a surprise because arguably the internet is quite biased and if the brain is only getting information—the brain wasn’t raised by good parents, right? The brain is not in the ideal living environment. The brain is not experiencing the world at large. All it’s doing is consuming information. It’s taking all the biases that exist within the world and when you think about major power players, major voices in the world at large, certainly there is bias around race, gender, and religion, and so GPT understands and in some ways believes those biases in the way that they are shared at large on the internet. They are understood at large by the tool.
Something that is very concerning for people is that GPT-3 could drastically diminish our workforce. There are estimates that 40 to 50% of all jobs could be replaced in the next 20 years. That is very scary. That’s very scary and we’ll talk about what that means for our industry, but it’s certainly something to consider. If half the people in the United States or in the world are no longer necessary, how are they going to provide for their families? When we think about things like, “Well, humans will always win.” Not every corporation is run with heart. I like to think my business is run with a lot of heart, but not all of them are. There are going to be a lot of corporations who are just looking at that bottom line and are saying, “Well, if we can replace all of our web designers, all of our copywriters,” hospitals can replace doctors. We’re going to get into this in a second with a tool that may cost millions of dollars, but over the lifetime of hiring somebody, retaining them, benefits, it could save the organization money and maybe even produce more predictable results. Job loss is a real concern.
Lastly, environmental costs. I saw a statistic that says training the robot brain, training GPT-3 has already generated the same amount of carbon footprint as driving a car to the moon and back. That is a massive environmental hit and if it continues to go on this way, it might not even make sense for us as humanity. This is why I said at the top of this episode, this is a really big, really geeky topic, and I don’t want you to go too far down the rabbit hole with it, but I want to share with you it just enough to be dangerous, if that makes sense.
When we look at the jobs that are potentially at stake, initial reports were saying blue collar workers, service providers, like our industry specifically, could be one that was most likely to see challenges, but that’s actually flopped.
It’s interesting, they’re now saying higher paid white collar jobs are actually the ones that are most at risk. So the top five that this is coming for, is IT—so anything that has to do with computer technology, because GPT-3 understands coding really, really well, it’s just mathematical, and so the computer can learn that math pretty quick, understands the patterns. Engineering is a concern. Finance, marketing, healthcare, and transportation and distribution meaning big trunking trucking companies that are coordinating routes worldwide, nationwide, anything that can essentially be done mathematically or by pattern is really deeply at risk.
When we look at something like healthcare, think about everything that we’ve always said. If they’ve got to find a cure for this, there’s got to be a better way to do that. We have a lot of hospitals and research departments trying to figure out what are the best ways to tackle this, that, and the other thing. Well, there’s all these studies out there, but nobody’s been able to put them all together, decipher all of the information, find the patterns, and create predictable success paths. This can.
When you think about all the things that humans are trying to do that this can now do in the snap of a finger, it starts to feel a little bit fragile.
Now, us as service providers, the leverage I think we have is, let’s say down the line, robots are able to cut, and I’m getting really in the weeds on this one, but just go with me on it. Robots are able to cut hair. The brain is able to formulate color. ‘Cause again, it’s just science, it’s mathematical in a way. They’re able to decipher patterns and understand underlying pigment and all that stuff.
The emotional, the heart piece is going to be the hardest piece to emulate. Although over time they do say the AI will be able to imitate human emotions, so it’s something that could still be there. It’s very, very far down the road. The reason why it would take a long time to affect our industry is because it’s very expensive, and so for somebody to come in and see a robot hair stylist, it would cost ’em thousands of dollars because the cost to run the machine is high.
Now in 20, 30, 40, 50, 60 years, there may be some company who is producing these things at scale and at a cost that is feasible. That is the biggest threat to our industry.
The other threat that I don’t think anybody’s talking about is imagine if all the doctors, all the nurses, all the firefighters and EMTs, all the CPAs, all the financial planners, everybody who works in IT, all the web developers, all the graphic designers, all the copywriters, everybody who works in transportation and distribution loses their job.
That will be an economic impact at large. And if the economy bottoms out, that will deeply affect our industry, right? There will be a massive trickle down effect. So when we say things like, “Well, it won’t affect us,” it will affect our clients though, and our clients are us, we are one in the same. We need to have clientele in order to do the beautiful work that we do. It’s circular. We just have to be aware of what could happen down the line.
Let’s talk about the different tools and mainstream terms you might hear being thrown around about AI. ChatGPT is probably the one that you have heard of the most. If you’ve heard anything about AI chat, GPT is a tool or a chatbot that was released by OpenAI. It’s the same company and the same CEO who created GPT-3.
Sam Altman created a tool that taps into the robot brain that he figured out how to build. His tool, which is called ChatGPT, is something that you or I could use for free right now. It is based on NLP.
I have a lot of friends and peers who have studied NLP. It is a science of natural language processing. There’s all kind of studies and theories about how our brains process information. What we really mean when we say whatever it is we say. ChatGPT understands that science in the same way that some humans understand that science and it uses that knowledge to attempt to help humans get to a desired result.
The question is, why is it free for now? The reason why ChatGPT for one is free is because the more you use it, the stronger the brain becomes. You’re feeding it information all the time. Remember I said it is actively learning? When you type something in there and you get a good result, you tell the brain, great, that was done. Well, when you type something in and you do not get the result you want, the brain knows, oh shoot, that wasn’t right and it learns from it.
Remember, it’s a learning brain, so every time somebody uses it, brain gets stronger. That’s why they’re allowing it to be used for free. It’s not a gift to you, it is a gift to them because they want it to continue to grow, right?
ChatGPT is something that is generally used by those who are a little bit more techy than you or I. It’ll translate a language for you. You can ask it a question and it can give you an answer, kind of like Google in that same way. But it will give you an answer in very basic language and in a way that you won’t have to decipher a ton of information. It’s just a little more simplified. It is a language translator. It can do coding for you, which is why it’s huge in the IT space.
I don’t tend to think ChatGPT is something that you or I would use on a regular basis. It doesn’t necessarily fit into the things that we do. Jasper Chat is something that I think actually has a lot more use for those in our industry.
Jasper actually taps into the same brain that ChatGPT does. They’re tapping the same brain. The way they are spitting information back out is different. Jasper was created specifically for those who are in marketing or sales. You may have heard, “Oh, you can use AI if you have writer’s block.” Like “If you don’t know how to write captions, AI is for you.” That’s likely more like a Jasper chat kind of a thing.
With Jasper, it can take any piece of content, so a poorly-written caption and it can rewrite it to make it more desirable, more engaging, something that your users would find more value in. It can write blog posts for you. You can give it a teeny tiny bit of information and it will write an entire blog post, emails if you want to write email newsletters to your clients, web copy, a bio for your website, video descriptions if you’re into video marketing. It can do all of that stuff for you.
That’s where we get excited because we’re like, “Wow, I don’t have to write my own captions anymore. That’s amazing.” For me, my team and I are going to do it in-house because I, I don’t want, I don’t want to feed my thoughts to the brain right now, right? I know that the brain is already reading all of my previously written Instagram posts. It’s reading all of yours too. What it isn’t able to understand clearly is which performed better than others and why. And as soon as I start using one of these tools to write my captions, it’s going to understand the why.
I personally, at this stage of the game, am holding onto my authenticity. I don’t want to start sounding like everybody else.
Sometimes when we look at tools like this and we say, “Perfect, it’s a shortcut. Perfect. It’ll save me time,” we are slow to ask, “But at what cost?” As soon as we as marketers start tapping into the universal brain to try and create unique thoughts and unique messaging, how unique is that really going to be?
It might be smart, it might be well-written, but we’re losing our authenticity and our unique voice in the process and in an industry like ours, I couldn’t recommend it.
There are some industries, like if we all were here and we were selling bottled water, we might be able to do it. ‘Cause it’s not about personality. It’s not so much about values. We’re just trying to sell a product. So yeah, using a tool like this might be great because this tool is going to be able to scan every marketing campaign that’s ever been done about bottled water and it’s going to be able to identify for us the one that worked the best and we’re just going to go with it.
For us, for you, for me, for our salons, for our clients, the human that stands behind the chair counts for something and as soon as we lose our sight on that, I believe it’s going to be harder to build an authentic clientele personally.
Now there are some tools that tap into the robot brain that I think could be cool for you so I want to share some of those with you. There is one called PFP Maker, Profile Pick Maker. So it’s pfpmaker.com. It does use AI, but it does it in a way where you can upload your photo and it will remove the background and give you an option for several other alternative backgrounds instead. If you have a great picture of you, but you’re at a house party and it’s cluttered in the background, you can use this tool. It will pull all the background out and put a professional, muted, on-brand background in instead.
That’s one of the things that might be cool for you to try if you’re curious or if you’re interested.
There’s another one that I think could be really interesting for our industry and it’s called Remove BG. Again, it removes the background and you can replace it with another background altogether or have no background at all.
How many of you have ever tried to take photos of your clients and the inside of your salon, for lack of a better word, sucks? It’s the worst. It’s cluttered, it’s messy, it doesn’t look good. There are apps and tools and stuff like that, like I know people have used Face Tune and all kinds of things to try and remove the backgrounds in their photos, but often it looks junky. This tool does a pretty darn good job of removing the background and keeping a really crisp, clear image. That’s one that could be really, really cool for you. That’s remove.bg.
Then there’s another one that’s called letsenhance.io. What it does is it improves the quality of the images that you take. It can make photos bigger, it can sharpen photos, it can improve the quality.
Now in my opinion, there’s nothing better than just taking very high quality photos to start. But let’s say you don’t have a high quality smartphone or you struggle to take good photos. Maybe you took a photo and it has really bad lighting and you’ve played in all the apps and just can’t get the hang of how to edit properly. You can use letsenhance.io, which again taps into the brain. The brain deeply understands what consumers today want to see in a photo. It uses that basic knowledge and it’s able to create edited photos for you.
Wow, this was a lot of information. Immediate action steps are absolutely nothing. You do not need to do anything with the information I just shared with you today. The reason why I did this episode is I know conversations are happening. I know curiosity exists and I just want to give you a base knowledge of information about what AI means, what the future could hold, what’s available to you now, and the fact that no action is needed.
I don’t want you to worry about being behind the times on this. I know there’s a lot of influencers out there who were like, “Whoa, check out this AI tool.” You realize they’re getting cut checks by these companies, right? Come on, you guys. We know how the influencer culture works and I wanted to cut through the noise a little bit and be like, you know what, if you want to play with it, do it, but really understand what it is, how it works, the implications, and if it’s really a useful tool for you.
Y’all, so much love, happy business building, and I’ll see you on the next one.
