Hello and welcome to another episode of the Odd Lots podcast. I'm Tracy Alloway and I'm Joe Weisenthal. 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? 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 show world. There's so much I need to learn. And of course we need to learn how, like AI is upending all of it.
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 are 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 Substack Link In Bio.
Since we're here in L.A. and as we've alluded to in the past, get to learn about influencers and people with 5 million followers on Instagram and how they're how they're dealing with this moment. Yeah. So we do, in fact, have the perfect guest.
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 Substack Link In Bio.
Hello. Thank you both so much for doing this.
Maybe either one of you. What are you covering these days? How would you describe your coverage here?
Sure. I write a newsletter called Link In Bio. It's really good. Everyone should subscribe. 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 Chancey Beluga. I forgot about that one. Is that is that or is that so? How does it go on forever?
And I, I'm a tech journalist. I write User Mag.co. That's my Substack. I write about. I kind of do a lot of roundups about, like, online culture. I write about tech, a lot of tech policy stuff, too. A little bit of everything.
So everybody's subscribed to that one as of. Right? Absolutely. What are the vibes like right now in social media?
Ha ha ha ha. That's a loaded question. Terrible. Yeah. All right. Go on.
Backstage, Taylor showed me a video that she's impressed by. No. Shut up, you guys. She was literally. We were backstage, and I haven't been on Twitter that much today. I was like, so one frame of this video, that was the most I generated crap over that. And I was like, you know, Coca Cola truck exploded. It was of a Coca Cola truck that was exploding Coke out. And somebody the bucket. And she was like, did you see this? I said, Taylor. And then and then and then the next scene is there's actually a Mentos truck next door. And the guy follows it and it, 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 that's and I showed like younger people might not remember the fact that for like many years, the only content on the internet was Mentos and Coca Cola. It's like I looked at for like a few years ago. Really strange. No, but here's an important question. So the people that you cover, Rachel, the people that you talk to. Yes. Who are social media professionals. Do they feel as if, like AI is going to like, how is it about like, are they mostly of the frame, like, oh, I 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.
So I think the way that AI is showing up for a lot of marketing teams is through their boss. I wrote an article 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? That's so grim. That's so gross. I heard another example of a marketer who their boss only buys into ideas that came from copilot, and so they actually will mock up their ideas into the copilot 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 in 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 a sauna onboard and we spent months. Right, like learning how to use a sauna. 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 philosophi feel like their bosses, you know, giving to them.
The 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 3 to 5 years, maybe even sooner, 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?
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 or whatever your favorite fast food chain is using AI generated imagery, what other shortcuts might they be taking in their process? So yeah, I totally agree.
I think from a content standpoint, two people actually do enjoy AI generated content. It's so crazy on YouTube. I don't know if you guys have noticed, but all these YouTubers are just reading AI generated scripts now, and it's so and I you look at the comments, people that like amazing analysis, great scripts like these. So I think people actually like it sometimes when they don't know they're consuming it. Sometimes they actively know they're consuming. I think people just don't want to feel tricked. That's when it starts to feel bad because you're like, oh yeah, I think it was your newsletter that I first heard about the, what is it, the fruit slop or the the fruit soap? Yeah. So, yeah. And I think you made the point. You can have a bunch of people in a comment section is like, oh, I'm so disappointed. Oh, you used AI for this. It's disgusting. And then they scroll to the next roll, real. And it's like, oh, I love this story about an orange falling in love with a carrot fruit love. Island fruit love I love that. Yeah.
What do you explain this disconnect as you see.
Well, I think that consumers are confused in general over what they should like online right now. And I think that Fruit Love Island feels like a low stakes there, like it's a meme. And they don't care about the craft of a meme, but they care about the craft of a company that they purchase from. But and so I think, yeah, they can be the same person who's, like, yelling at the company for an AI generated menu, and they're sending their friend AI fruit slop.
I sort of asked haz this question earlier, but in our AI generated world, I guess, how do we feel about existing content or existing incumbents when it comes to social media? Do people who already have an audience, who already have a following, who maybe have proved authenticity in some way, or that they're willing to put effort into their own work? Do they become more valuable in this environment, or is it another case of like low entry costs? Anyone can come in and make content for free. And so we see a sort of further trend of, I guess, what we used to call the democratization of media.
Oh, well, I think that like if you think about I think it depends on the type of content you're making. Are you making deeply parasocial content about like your life and your opinions? So many creators, the value that they like, the way that that media was democratized was through how to content. If you think of like even just the earliest YouTube videos, it was all make up know how to do this. And I actually think AI is a better authority when people will turn to AI for how to fix their dishwasher. Like it's much easier to get that. So I think those creators are going to struggle. But then there are other creators that that are going to use the tools to make great content, and they make content that is not easily replicable. You know, maybe it's commentary that sort of my mom, by the way, she was very proud. She was telling me that she used ChatGPT to fix her toilet so that for her, which was I wouldn't have expected her to be able to do that, but she did.
You know, Taylor is a keen observer of the online discourse, you know, or is on maybe more online than I am somehow. I'm just curious, like, you know, in the last month, you know, a month ago, there was, like, a lot of people arguing about data centers. And then in the last week, there are a bunch of people arguing about models themselves as this sort of like site of controversy. Do you feel like, let's just say we're talking about AI, that like the speed with which the public takes on a new thing is it's just like an extraordinary rapid pace and that's like, oh, you're still arguing about data centers. Wasn't that like a sort of wasn't that a July? And that was so July?
