AI Is Upending the Lives of People Who Do Social Media Professionally
Odd Lots
Recorded live in Hollywood, this episode explores how generative AI is transforming the influencer and creator economies. Guests Taylor Lore
Key takeaways
- Marketing managers are increasingly using tools like Claude to evaluate if memes or posts are funny, which creators find demoralizing.
- Consumers tend to tolerate low-stakes AI 'slop' for entertainment but demand high creative effort from major brands like Nike.
Main topics
- AI impact on marketing
- The creator economy
Notable quotes
The way that AI is being implemented is sort of a free for all.
Conclusion
The episode highlights a period of intense transition where creators m
Transcript preview
Speaker 5 (0:00) Hi, I'm David Weston. Join me every week for the Wall Street Week podcast to hear stories of capitalism from around the world, from geopolitical tensions and central bank decisions to artificial intelligence, energy and infrastructure. We sit down with the CEOs, economists, policymakers and thought leaders whose decisions are shaping markets everywhere we find them. Subscribe to the Wall Street Week podcast on Apple, Spotify or anywhere you listen. Speaker 5 (0:32) Bloomberg Audio Studios. Speaker 4 (0:35) Podcasts. Radio. News. And Speaker 1 (0:49) welcome to another episode of the Odd Thoughts Podcast. I'm Tracy Allaway. And Speaker 2 (0:52) I'm Joe Weisenthal. So Speaker 1 (0:54) we're here in Hollywood, our first ever live Odd Thoughts show in L.A. And when we come to L.A., I feel like we have to talk about the influencer economy, right? The Speaker 2 (1:03) influencer economy, the creator economy, people who have 8 million followers on Instagram that none of us have ever heard of. well, 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. Speaker 1 (1:20) That's right. So this is the existential question facing creators. What happens to them when creating content essentially becomes free or extremely low cost? So we have two very special guests for you. We are going to be speaking with Taylor Lorenz. She is, of course, the founder of UserMag, as well as Rachel Carton. She is a social media consultant and author. of the Substack link in bio. Speaker 2 (1:43) Since we're here in LA and as we've alluded to in the past, we've got to learn about influencers and people with 5 million followers on Instagram and how they're dealing with this moment. Speaker 1 (1:53) Yeah, so we do in fact have the perfect guest. Speaker 2 (1:56) That's right. Thrilled to welcome to the stage the one and only Taylor Lorenz, founder of Usermag, as well as... Rachel Curran, social media consultant, author of the great sub stack, LinkinBuy. Speaker 4 (2:19) Hello. Speaker 2 (2:21) Thank you both so much for doing this. Speaker 4 (2:24) Thanks for having us. Speaker 3 (2:26) What are you, Speaker 2 (2:26) maybe either one of you, what are you covering these days? How would you describe your coverage here? Speaker 8 (2:32) Sure. I write a newsletter called Lincoln Bio. Oh, yay. It's really good. Speaker 2 (2:39) Everyone should subscribe. Speaker 8 (2:40) Thank you. It's about working in social Speaker 3 (2:42) media. It's the primary trade publication for social media teams. And I interview. So I have interviewed everyone from the social team who covered Artemis to Chanty Beluga. Speaker 2 (2:58) I forgot about that one. Is that already? Is that still? That was like a one week thing, right? Speaker 8 (3:04) And Speaker 4 (3:04) 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 Speaker 1 (3:19) to that one as well. Absolutely. What are the vibes like right now in social media? It's a loaded question. Terrible. All right, go on. Speaker 8 (3:29) Backstage, Taylor showed me a video that she was impressed by. No, shut up. You guys. She was really impressed by it. Speaker 4 (3:38) 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 I've ever... And I was like, did you guys see a Coca-Cola truck exploded? It was a Coca Speaker 8 (3:52) -Cola truck that was exploding Coke out and somebody had a bucket and she was like, did you see this? Speaker 4 (3:57) I said, Taylor, please. And then the next scene is there's actually a Mentos truck next door and the guy falls in and like explodes through the sky. And I was like, oh my God, I'm becoming. And the caption was like the AI videos that your mom sends you. Oh man. And I showed Rachel. I Speaker 1 (4:13) think that like Speaker 2 (4:13) 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's an important question. So the people that you cover, let's start with you, Rachel. The people that you talk to Speaker 3 (4:32) who Speaker 2 (4:32) 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 augmenter? Oh, I can do much more of the job that I know how to do for years with these new tools. Speaker 3 (4:55) 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 like 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. And so I heard stories of a social manager who worked hard on a funny meme and they'll send it to their boss and they run it through Claude and ask, is this funny? Speaker 8 (5:31) That's Speaker 3 (5:31) so Speaker 2 (5:32) grim. That's so grim. I Speaker 3 (5:33) heard another example of a marketer who. Their boss only buys into ideas that came from co-pilot. And so they actually will mock up their ideas into the co-pilot UI to send their boss to get it approved. And so the quote that sticks with me from that article is demoralizing as hell. And so that's the way that a lot of marketers are interacting with AI is their boss sort of forcing it upon them. And my takeaway from that wasn't like ban AI from marketing teams, but I felt like. you know, the way that AI is being implemented is sort of a free for all. And I was thinking back to my time when I worked at Condé Nast, you know, I think they had Asana onboarded and we spent months, right? Like learning how to use Asana, what's the right way to use this workflow? And that training isn't happening on marketing teams. And so it feels like there's no philosophies or guardrails for marketers to feel like their boss is, you know, giving to them. Speaker 7 (6:30) Devil's advocate question. I know we're talking about how grim it is to have to work for a boss with AI psychosis and everyone at the moment hates, seems to hate AI generated content. But you could imagine a world in three to five years, maybe even sooner. Three months. Where we don't, yeah, three months where we don't actually care anymore. Like why should we dislike AI generated social media or marketing content? Speaker 3 (6:57) Well, I think I can speak. to it from the brand side. And I do feel like consumers have an expectation that a brand is putting creative effort into things. And the effort that they put into their social media is a reflection of the effort that they are putting into their product. And I think that consumers feel that through it. And that has always been true about creative, you know, brands like Nike have, you know, built so much of their world around their, you know, investment into creative. And so it's seen as a shortcut and it might make you ask, you know, if your favorite Chipotle, whatever, your favorite fast food chain is using AI generated imagery, what other shortcuts might they be taking in their process? Yeah, I Speaker 4 (7:44) totally agree. I think from a content standpoint too, people actually do enjoy AI generated content. It's so crazy on YouTube. I don't know