AI marketing — Kelford Labs Daily

I’ve got to come clean about something.

My skepticism about AI being relied on for making marketing content could make it sound like I don’t use LLMs like ChatGPT or Claude or Gemini.

But, I do. I use all of them. A lot.

Just not for my writing. Or my idea generation. Or my frameworks or concepts or advice.

I don’t think I should be outsourcing my creative, value-driving activity to a system I don’t own or control.

But I publish my ideas, concepts, and frameworks to the open web. Which means my ideas are being trained on by the models, and are (at least slightly, at least subtly) changing the advice that comes out the other side.

I think that’s the right way things should flow. Creators and experts, the people that come up with new ideas based on tests, experiments, and experience are adding to the well of knowledge that others draw from.

But I shouldn’t be drawing from the same well everyone else is and selling it at a markup. At least, I don’t think so.

My clients don’t pay me to get my ideas or my words from ChatGPT. They pay me to give them the ideas and words that ChatGPT can’t. Because they’re novel, they’re new, and they’re based in real-world experience, experiments, and learning and not matrix multiplication.

So what do I use AI for? Things like:

• Providing the day’s news headlines (based on RSS feeds I curate), weather, and my to-do list in a voice update (with amusing commentary) every morning
• Giving me customized film recommendations and analysis based on the 1,000 films I’ve rated over the years, which it has access to
• Always with client permission, using local LLMs (nothing goes to the cloud) to analyze documents or transcripts to make sure I haven’t missed anything salient in my own analysis
• RAG (Retrieval Augmented Generation) on my corpus of newsletter writing (more than half a million words) so I can find and learn from my own work, as well as searching through the more than 5,000 notes and quotes I’ve taken from my reading over the years
• Custom GPTs and Claude Projects that help me recall and implement my own marketing principles and provide customized criticism (based on detailed instructions) of my writing so I can get better

Look, I think LLMs are fascinating. I can’t pretend I don’t. I just use them so often and so thoroughly that I see all the problems and all the unreliability.

If I had a nickel for every time it hallucinated something that I knew for sure was wrong, I’d be pretty annoyed because I would have way too many nickels and I don’t know what to do with change.

So I can’t pretend I think they’re credible sources of information or advice in their stock form, either.

That’s why I built “JoelPT,” a custom GPT that helps its users understand and implement the marketing concepts and frameworks and tools we’ve talked about here on the newsletter.

It doesn’t do any of the writing or marketing for you (it’s instructed to refuse, politely but sternly). But it helps you be more creative and more focused and more capable of demonstrating your own value at a distance.

Your way, the way only you can. So it’s unique, it’s novel, it’s ownable and sustainable.

But note: I am not saying AI is as good as real-world advice. This is just an alternative to using stock ChatGPT if you want a marketing sounding board.

The idea is, if you want the same best practice advice everyone else is getting, you use GPT. If you want to know the way to always knowing what to say (your way), you use JoelPT.

If you’re looking for some AI assistance to demonstrate your value at a distance, I’ll be rolling it out to clients and newsletter subscribers over the coming weeks.

Just reply to this email if you’d like to test it out.

Reply to this email to tell me what you think, or ask any questions!

Kelford Inc. shows experts the way to always knowing what to say.