AI versus Marshy - Tool of the Week: Mindpal

I’ve been thinking a lot about the intersection of technology and creativity lately, and I wanted to share a personal anecdote that got me thinking about the ethics of AI. My sister creates beautiful art on Instagram, and I’ve been wondering what would happen if someone were to use AI to replicate her style. This got me thinking about the potential consequences of using AI to generate creative work, and I wanted to explore this idea further. 🛝 Slides and recording: Multiplying your marketing output with AI Let’s get this show on the road and thanks for reading 👋 -Marshy Just because you can, doesn’t mean you should My sister creates a lot of art. Flowers, paintings of nature, and hand drawn pets for people are her most popular styles, and you can find them on her Instagram here . I enjoy talking to my family back in Gippsland - they are well outside anything tech and fast-growth, and I like to sense-check and ground myself by running things past them. As generative AI was gathering steam - I explained to my sister that theoretically it would be possible to siphon all of her art from her Instagram, feed into a generative image generator, and recreate her “styles” for producing more pets, flowers, and nature imagery. My sister didn’t love the idea - which is to be expected and how I would feel about it too. So imagine you’re a world class writer, and had your books compared and contrasted for verbage, semiotics, and eloquence of prose against other titans in literature. That’s what happened in this interesting piece from Wired . Hari Kunzru found his book White Tears to be one of the books within a tiny (now defunct) startup called Prosecraft. The founder of Prosecraft grabbed 25,000 well known books and fed them into an algorithm to grade them. Hari took issue with the way his material was acquired. It seems extremely unlikely that the founder purchased 25,000 books and voiced dissent. A collective of agitated writers agreed, legal processes were followed, and Prosecraft no longer exists. The missive from the article is that the AI backlash has started. People don’t want everything remixed by an artificial intelligence. I find this to be a really interesting angle. I’ve shared about a growing reticence to share on the web because it can be “sucked up” and fed into something. How will this play out? It reminds me a little of Google Glass - a hyped up piece of kit that citizens of San Francisco started openly contesting, stomping on, and stealing. The term “glasshole” was coined like a simile for tech bro. This used to peak technology Tool of the week: Mindpal ​ I try to use and review any of the tools I write about because I want to give you a take on it. Because I’m keeping an eye on newly released apps, sometimes they get overwhelmed with the attention and can’t handle the spike in traffic/downloads/use. That’s what I suspect has happened with Mindpal . I like the concept. “Building a second brain” is a concept I’ve talked about in the past - like a digital sieve for thinking about, processing, and writing from all the content you see on the web. There’s different ways to do this (and a whole rabbit hole of tech out there) and what I like about Mindpal’s pitch is that it’s a way to interrogate what you’ve got with a chat interface. I currently use Craft, Readwise, and Dropbox to sift through what I read and absorb, so hopefully Mindpal meets demand and gets going (it wasn’t accepting my OpenAI API key - which I created for it so I suspect the jam is on their side.) Multiplying your marketing content - follow-ups Last week I shared the cheat sheet for the webinar I did with bMightie . The recording is now available as well - you can grab it from my LinkedIn post with a summary. ​ In a nutshell - creating longform content is going to be far better for you than trying to keep up on a hamster wheel of shortform. The reason is you can chop up what you produce and repurpose it for an array of other formats now - including Instagram, YouTube, LinkedIn, other social posts etc. You can also then “remix” your blog or transcript - weaving in storytelling mechanics to help make it pop further. Originally appeared in newsletter : AI versus Marshy #9: not everything should be copied, a second brain + webinar slides