May 19, 2025 · Episode 21
51 Min, 31 Sec

Summary

They’re not handing over their creative work to the machines—but if AI wants to wrangle their meetings and tidy their transcripts, they’re not going to argue. In this episode, How We Use AI Day to Day, Breallyn and Lyndon talk through the actual tools they’re using to offload the admin grind and make space for the real work, without losing their souls.

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Transcript

Lyndon: At this rate, the cherry port will all be gone. Seriously. See what happens.

You, we throw the routine, start, try and record at night and like you can’t handle it.

Breallyn: Well, I haven’t fallen over the hurdle of my own name yet. We haven’t said anything.

Welcome to Pain in the Arts. You’re with Breallyn.

Lyndon: Why are you saying the intro?

Breallyn: Because,

Lyndon: And with Lyndon. And it occurred to me today, I thought, you know what? We’ve been telling people to go to our website and there’s explainers on there as to why we do this podcast.

Breallyn: Mm-hmm.

Lyndon: And I thought, hey, here’s an idea. Why don’t we say it in the actual podcast itself? And we may have in the early episodes, I actually can’t remember.

So the reason the podcast exists is because Brea, you’re an author and you’re writing a novel, and…

Breallyn: That’s correct.

Lyndon: Yeah. I am writing the soundtrack for that novel for the audio book. Of the audio book, which, yeah,

Breallyn: Which will be an adventure because often audiobooks have no soundtrack. So this will be something a little different.

Lyndon: Yeah, why not? Why not? So we were talking about collaboration if you like, and then we’re like, well, why don’t we document it? Or why don’t we do behind the scenes sort of journey podcasts?

Yeah, so we’re doing that on Patreon, but we also we’re like, well, what about doing just a general podcast all about the trials of actually trying to do this novel and the music because everything else keeps getting in the way.

Breallyn: Mm-hmm.

Lyndon: And over the course of our lives creatively, it’s been constant challenge for us, and something that we’re always working towards. And so that’s how this podcast was born. Absolutely.

Yeah, it’s…

Breallyn: Yeah, it’s our way of raising the temperature of art and the importance of it in our lives and in our home and in our daily routines. Our way to have a chat with more than just one another about the challenges that we’ve got ’cause we talk to each other about it all the time, but we know that there’s many other artists out there that are having the same sort of challenges or similar things.

And yeah, it’s great to connect and have a larger conversation about these things.

The Genesis of Pain In The Arts

Lyndon: Something that was good when I was doing a duo with Mark Hughes, who’s a local musician, singer songwriter, does some incredible work, should look him up.

What was good about that? Obviously it was great playing with Mark, but just the chats that we would have.

Breallyn: Yeah.

Lyndon: Post gig chats or the pre-gig chats or the mid gig chats where we’d just be talking about all this sort of stuff. He’s an original artist as well.

All the same sort of things of trying to prioritize your art and your music and things that you’ve been toiling away at for years. Yeah. But also having a life outside of that seems to quite easily dominate.

So that was, that was good. Yeah, a lot of the playing I’ve been doing is solo. I don’t mind my own company, but I can’t have those sort of conversations with myself.

Breallyn: No,

Lyndon: I like to have those when I’m trying to sleep.

Breallyn: That’s why you don’t sleep well.

No, it’s so great to share some different stories and have a laugh along the way.

Yeah, we are hoping to bring more guests to the podcast as well, to have some more of those conversations and to get their little perspectives and insights and funny stories and so on as well. So I’m looking forward to them.

It was great a few episodes ago we had Ricky Wood in the studio and we’ve got some other guests lined up.

We won’t drop names yet.

Lyndon: Well, they’re not lined up. They’re written down in, in a phone. Are they lined up? I don’t think so.

Breallyn: Well, they’re not literally in a line at the studio door waiting to come in.

Lyndon: Gotta get the Rolodex out. We normally surprise each other with a topic. I like to get first reactions, plus it also plays into my not wanting to do any homework.

Breallyn: Yeah. I wonder which of those motivations is the strongest. So you’re a producer, you produce music and you like to get people into the studio and get them with their instrument in hand and capture some of the first things that they put out because there’s a freshness to it and there’s an authenticity in those first captured reactions.

Is that maybe why this is a format that you like?

Lyndon: I don’t know, maybe. It is true, especially in an environment like a studio where you’re capturing something there’s more scrutiny on it.

Yeah, you can just overthink something and not be in the music after a few takes.

Yeah, for sure. Like playing something to someone without qualifying it and just getting a pure first reaction. It can only happen once, you see. So it’s really important, I think.

Breallyn: Yeah, that’s true.

Lyndon: Yeah. So you can’t. But anyway, yeah. I thought if we plan it too much, then it’d be a different kind of conversation, that’s all.

Breallyn: It would be.

Lyndon: Yeah. Anyway. I saw your pressure washing.

Breallyn: Oh, I started pressure washing. We’ve got an outdoor area. Our clothes line is under it, my tool bench and a few different useful kind of areas, but there’s also just been stuff that we’re one day gonna sell on marketplace, things like that.

But it’s just been getting dirtier and dirtier. There’s so many cobwebs. At some point Birdie had tipped out an entire bottle of sea soil concentrate just underneath the clothes line, so today was the day I cleared everything out and I got the pressure washer, and I, now I know like, it’s so satisfying when you see it washing off.

I was thinking I should have set up a camera because I certainly watch those kind of videos.

Lyndon: Well, you just wanted to watch yourself doing it again.

Breallyn: Yeah, no, I thought other people like to watch this. Well, I, but I got a bit obsessed, so I started out just doing the concrete on the ground and by the end of it I was dripping wet because I’d done the neighbor’s house practically. I’d done all of the roof. They’ve grout left in their bricks.

Lyndon: Yeah.

Breallyn: It was noise pollution, man.

Lyndon: It was loud. Yeah.

Now this subject matter last week I suggested we collaborate on it and then I’ve just brought it to today. So you, just, you’ll have to collaborate whole thing on the fly.

Breallyn: Wow. Okay.

Lyndon: So this was born from a conversation with my sister who has now gone back to Tasmania and she was here briefly and she’s got some yoga courses, I think online and some other things, other activities, and she’s moving stuff around.

Anyway, we were just chewing the fat over how we’ve been using different programs and different AI platforms to get some work done.

Breallyn: Yep.

Lyndon: And outta that conversation we were like, oh, well, we actually dabble a fair bit with AI and we were dabbling with it before AI was so prevalent in terms of just on everyone’s tongue.

Breallyn: Yeah.

AI in Our Daily Creative Lives

Lyndon: I think there was a day not that long ago where you’d just hear about algorithms and you just hear about the names of programs, but no one really wanted suggest that they were using AI. It wasn’t that long ago.

And so maybe some of these tools we’re using aren’t strictly AI. I’m not really sure, but they, definitely are doing a very similar job. And…

Breallyn: I would think that a lot of the tools and programs and apps that we’re using now are starting to incorporate AI into their newer versions and stuff like that. So there’s things

Lyndon: I just think that I, have a feeling a lot of them already were, but AI was, I was gonna say a dirty word, it wasn’t as accepted, I think.

Breallyn: Yeah. I suppose it wasn’t to start with, yeah.

Lyndon: And I, and I don’t really know for sure, I’ve done zero research on this, but the pandemic sped up a lot of things.

Breallyn: Yeah.

Lyndon: And I think that’s one of the things.

Breallyn: Yeah. Makes sense.

Lyndon: Got brought about more quickly and I’m not sure, but there just seems to be more of a public acceptance of it. As well as a little bit of trepidation and fear and…

Breallyn: Yeah.

Lyndon: About how we’re all gonna lose our jobs and whatnot.

Breallyn: Pretty much.

Lyndon: I know. But there’s so much in this, there’s so many angles. We could approach this from and I think today what we’re really gonna talk about quite literally is how we use AI day to day.

The tools that we use, how we leverage AI to aid our creative endeavors. Now just before we get onto that, there’s programs obviously that you use, that you can talk about. There’s programs that I use as well that I’ll talk about.

Breallyn: Well, one thing I was gonna say because I feel like I’m gonna forget to say it later is that it is May, 2025 because in two months time this conversation will probably be different, be obsolete a year from now.

Lyndon: Yeah, absolutely. So if you’re listening to this down the track, you could…

Breallyn: It’ll be like a time capsule.

Lyndon: Sure, yeah. Maybe, yeah. Listen to it for interest’s sake, or else,

Breallyn: It’s so funny when you hear

Lyndon: Like where technology’s concerned and you see some of the adverts for computers or whatever it might be back in the day. Or for phones or, and just have a laugh about it now.

Breallyn: Yeah, for sure. I feel like this technology’s always rapidly changing, but I think AI and how quickly it’s become part of our daily lives, it seems like a bigger leap than some of the other things that have gone on, like phone updates or whatnot.

The way people are using AI a lot now, all of the sort of questions around the ethics around it, that sort of thing, it’s quite a new frontier. So we’re at the starting point of where AI is really infiltrating like everything from how you design your bedroom makeover to how you are running your business, to how you are planning your meals, everything like that.

AI is getting involved. It’s certainly changing the way we live. Let’s chat about how we’re currently using it. And maybe a little bit about our mindset as well, like you touched on the fear of how it’s gonna change things in the arts. How are you feeling about that at the moment?

Lyndon: Well, just remember this is my episode that I’m bringing. What are you doing? Taking over and trying to like, start giving me questions.

Breallyn: Sorry,

Lyndon: Settle down.

Breallyn: I just got excited about it.

Lyndon: You can ask the big questions in your AI episode.

Breallyn: Okay. There’s gonna be a part two to this topic.

Lyndon: This is my question.

Breallyn: Okay.

Lyndon: Sorry. Go for it. What’s your question? So how are you collaborating with AI in this new era?

Breallyn: There was one meme or something going around that it was like, I don’t want AI to be making my music and paintings for me. I want it to be doing my dishes and mopping my floor so that I can do the music and the painting.

And I think that’s very easy to relate to as well because you feel like, yeah, stop taking all the good bits of life and leaving us jobless and you poor and everything while struggling to find a new career ’cause you’ve just taken all the old ones.

That’s definitely an easy jump to, to feel, but just to flip it and go, if we used what’s available here, how, like where could we go to because we can get there quicker.

We can use this thing alongside our own brains to get us to new places in a different way and in, in a better, quicker way. So yeah, it’s no point to. I try to stop this train like it is a locomotive. It’s big.

Lyndon: Well, no one’s stopping it.

Breallyn: No, it’s not gonna happen. And there’s definitely movements of slower things. So there’s ways to slow aspects down of life or to lean into old crafts and practices and stuff.

The Role of AI in Creative Work

Lyndon: I think that’s fine. There’s the Lost Trades Fair, which happens up in, I can’t remember what country town here in Victoria. Yeah. But I’ve been meaning to go to that for the last…

Breallyn: That would be so cool.

Lyndon: Three years. Yeah. Just to wander around. See some blacksmiths at work.

Breallyn: Yeah. There’s lots of artisans that are doing things that, there are real lost handcrafts and stuff like that and yeah, it’s really nice to still have a link to those things. Yes. And they’re things that AI can’t do.

Lyndon: And I should also say that the tools that we use while they’re not necessarily or strictly, we’re not using them for just admin. We’re also not using them for our creative endeavors, are we?

It’s not like what you were saying before, getting it, not getting it to, you’re not getting it to paint a picture.

Breallyn: No, I write my book.

Lyndon: Or write your book.

Breallyn: You can, but I’m not.

Lyndon: And that’s a whole other thing too. Yeah. At the moment my understanding anyway of the way the AI platforms work is they’re really good at reading everything that humans have ever written. So…

Breallyn: Uploaded without permission in many cases. But anyway, it’s another topic for another day.

Lyndon: So many topics. Yeah. So it’s not necessarily like that they’re coming up with new thoughts. And it’s something that you’ll hear musicians talk about, and painters and poets and everyone talk about, one of the roles of art is give people another point of view or another way to look at something or to reflect things back to society.

But yeah, so we’re using it to speed up some processes that would otherwise take up so much time.

Breallyn: Yeah, we’ve managed to find ways where yeah, we can leverage some tools that make our jobs better and easier.

Leveraging AI Tools: Fathom and Descript

Lyndon: So I thought you might wanna talk about Fathom.

Breallyn: Yeah. I love Fathom. That’s one program that I can’t live without. We’re not sponsored.

Lyndon: So probably the easiest way to describe Fathom is, or where it’s the most useful, what it was actually probably designed for is to use in a program like Zoom.

Breallyn: Yeah.

Lyndon: You can use it in Zoom and in Microsoft Teams and probably some other things I’m not sure I haven’t kept up with. It’s like…

Breallyn: Having an assistant taking notes for you, but actually transcribing exactly what’s being said.

Lyndon: Yeah.

Breallyn: Well, yeah, first and foremost, it records your meeting. So you’ve always got that video recording of it. It does a transcript, which it’s a little bit hit and miss with, to be honest. So yeah, but because you’ve got the recording there you can always go back and just listen to the audio or watch the video.

And I find it super useful if I’m, like, I try to do all my client meetings on Zoom so that I can actually use Fathom. Like I sometimes still meet clients face to face. But then I literally do a recording, like a just a voice memo recording of our meeting so that I capture things that I might not have the time to do. Physically jot down, I’ll try to capture it at least in an audio format.

But if I can meet on Zoom or on Microsoft Teams and I can get that whole meeting recorded, I can see their faces again, I can go back, listen back. It means that I can capture all of the answers that they’ve given me.

I’ll always go in with a whole lot of questions and things that I wanna find out about their business and about their products or their service, what they’re offering, who their clients are, all these different angles that I talk to them about and to be able to go back and get all that is terrific.

But where it’s leveled up over the last year or so has been that at the end of that meeting, not only have the recording and the transcript, but also it will have like salient points that it’s pulled out that hey, these are your action items. These were the questions that were asked during the meeting.

And you can now interact with it ’cause it’s got the AI component that you can say, hey, the client that I spoke to today, what’s their business model moving forward so that I know which clients to speak to for their future offerings.

And it will, it’ll go through and not just regurgitate the exact wording that we said, but it’ll find a few different things and let me know what its answer is.

Yeah, it’s very handy tool. I think it started being very popular during the pandemic when people were starting to meet a lot more online.

Lyndon: Yeah. So didn’t Skype take a hit?

Breallyn: Yeah, it really did. Zoom just overtook.

Lyndon: Zoom zoomed past.

Breallyn: Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah, so that, to me, like that, what that does in my business is it means that I’m far more accurate when it comes to really nailing down and capturing the heart of the client and what their business is, what they’re really wanting to do.

Because I’ve developed my questions and the things that I need to know over time and I can talk to them about those things and really tease out some of those answers, it means that I’ve captured all of that and I can then make sure that when I’m writing their copy for their website or for their blogs or whatever it is that we’re doing, I’m not only getting the salient points about what their service is and how much it is and that kind of thing, but I’m also getting the vibe of the business and I’m able to carry that through in my wording and the tone of voice that I’ll choose and so on.

Yeah, so it’s super helpful for me in that I can actually relax during the meeting. I’m not trying to jot down a thousand notes, I’m just really listening to the client as well.

Lyndon: It’s interesting ’cause it’s actually meaning that when you are face to face with a client, even though it’s over Zoom, you’re able to give them more of yourself.

Breallyn: Yeah, for sure.

Lyndon: Because you’re not distracted with taking notes and so on. So it’s an interesting way to look at it as well, because I think too, in the line of work that you are in and also just in the creative fields in general, the value is in the the relationships.

Breallyn: Yeah, I think so too. And I like to think that’s what my clients get from me as well, is that they feel like they have been heard and that I ask questions that elicit responses they might not have thought to give or to be able to explain to someone.

But I’m there wanting to know those things because I think it’s super valuable for their customers.

Lyndon: Yeah, but if you weren’t face to face, you could just ask those questions like in a questionnaire and it’s not the same thing.

Breallyn: No.

Lyndon: You’re not gonna get…

Breallyn: It’s not at all. I have tried.

Lyndon: You’re not. Yeah. Well, you won’t get, you won’t get the same answers or you may not get answers at all because they may not fill it out.

But what, yeah, they’re not getting that same experience. They’re not getting that human experience. And quite often in these more boutique sort of industries, that’s what we want and that’s why people seek us out.

Breallyn: Yeah. Well, that’s right. People, nowadays people can write their own websites themselves, but do they know if it’s good? Do they know if they’re really gonna hit what their customers need to hear and their point of difference.

Like what, what is it that is gonna be the best decisions? They may not know that. So having someone like me talk to them about their business and really find the flavor of it and what is unique that they might not have seen.

Yeah, I think that is a really valuable service and it, it means that they don’t have to stress about it as well. Yeah. I, like to think that’s a gift that I bring along is just going, let’s talk about your business and then leave it in my hands and I’ve got this. Don’t worry about it.

I’ll make sure your website is exactly what you need.

Lyndon: Alright. That’s enough of you spruiking your business.

Breallyn: Sorry. Fathom’s awesome.

Lyndon: Alright. I might talk about Descript.

Breallyn: Oh yeah. You use Descript a lot.

Lyndon: It’s a kind of similar tool in a way. Now, Descript, what it does is it converts your audio to text. And so the way I’m using it is the audio from these podcasts.

I could edit the audio just like I would a song in my software on the computer. But sometimes these recordings are going for an hour or over an hour.

That’s a lot of audio waves to be looking at, wondering what’s being spoken. So anyway, so what Descript does is it creates essentially a Word document and then if you remove a word from that document, it removes the audio.

Breallyn: Yeah, that’s clever.

Lyndon: Yeah. So I get it to do that conversion. The resulting audio file, I download that and then I put it back into my software and that’s when I add in the breaks and the little music stings and I can do a bit more further tweaking there if I need to. And I also do the mastering of it. So bringing it up a good listening level. I’ll do that as well.

The other thing that I get out of Descript too is I get a transcript.

Breallyn: Yes.

Lyndon: And that transcript I get isn’t quite good enough to put on the website because it’s a bit messy.

Breallyn: Yeah. Too many flaws and miswritten words and so on.

Lyndon: So it’ll spell your name wrong and my name wrong. For Pain in the Arts, always is saying Painting the Arts. When we talk about Calm Marketing, it’s Car Marketing.

So there’s all sorts of things that are incorrect in it, which doesn’t matter for editing the audio.

Breallyn: Yeah.

Lyndon: The other thing I use the Descript for is essentially audiograms on YouTube.

Breallyn: Oh yeah.

Lyndon: We’re putting our episodes up on YouTube and it’s just a static image, but with the captions. So it is like an audiogram, but did wonder whether audiograms were just like 15, 20 second sort of grabs.

So I’m not sure technically if these are audiograms, but lately I have been uploading my more refined transcript and, and it syncs it up with the audio and then creates, yeah. A video that I can upload onto YouTube.

All this stuff still takes time. It’s not like it’s done in seconds. It’s a bit of a process, but it’s working okay. So yeah, that’s Descript. That’s how I’m using that.

Yeah. Which does take me on to my love-hate relationship with ChatGPT, which I call Gregory. I can’t remember why.

The Promise and Frustration of AI for Transcription

Breallyn: Everyone’s got their own little nickname or pet name for ChatGPT.

Lyndon: And I’ve also more recently been using Gemini, in particular, Gemini 2.5, which is Google’s AI assistant.

So this is what I will say about these. I am still learning how to best utilize them and also understanding which platform serves me better in certain situations.

And one example of this more recently was trying to get a transcript of the episode. So I was trying it with ChatGPT. I would upload a text file of the entire transcript and say, can you please edit this so that you are removing filler words, taking out pauses and all that sort of stuff, just so that it reads better on the page.

But keep it true to the conversation, just light editing for grammar, check the spelling of these particular words. Anyway, so I had a whole script written for, or a prompt. I think they, they’re mainly called prompts, aren’t they?

And it just could not do it. It would summarize the eight or 9,000 words. It would summarize it down to about, 400 words or something. And it wouldn’t, I was getting so frustrated because I was not gonna be sitting there doing this myself, going through a whole transcript.

Breallyn: Yeah.

Lyndon: And fixing up misspelled words and, yeah, misheard words and things like that. It was just not gonna be a good use of my time. I reckon I struggled for a week.

Breallyn: Yeah.

Lyndon: And I told you all about it as well.

Breallyn: Yes, I did.

Lyndon: And if I have to pay for a tool to do something like this, I will, but I just wasn’t convinced that paying for the pro version was gonna yield me any better results.

Breallyn: Yeah.

Lyndon: So anyway, long story short, I moved over to Gemini because I did some Google searching and seeing what people were doing in the world of transcripts, getting them edited and tidied it up.

Breallyn: Yeah.

Lyndon: And someone suggested that Gemini 2.5 would probably be a pretty good, be a pretty good match.

Breallyn: Yeah. ‘Cause it had only just come out, hadn’t it, the 2.5 version.

Lyndon: A few weeks earlier, I think. Yeah. Gemini, just the regular version at the time couldn’t do it. It was, it just couldn’t handle even 7,000 words. It just wouldn’t do it.

Breallyn: Yeah.

Lyndon: You can reach your limit on these free plans pretty quickly too. So in the process of trying to work out what prompts you should be writing and so on, you can suddenly get told, oh, that’s it. You are done for the day. We can’t collaborate with you until, 24 hours from now or something.

So that’s a bit frustrating. But once you’ve got it worked out, then you don’t have to be using so many prompts and whatnot.

Yeah. So something that was good in Gemini 2.5 is a thing they’ve got called Gems, and that’s where you can put in your prompt and then ask it to write the prompt better for it to understand.

Breallyn: Yeah.

Lyndon: And do that job for you. So basically you view the AI platform, in this case, Gemini, like an assistant or like a collaborator and you tell it what its function is.

So for instance, I, would say to it, you’re an expert at SEO. In particular our podcast, which is about the creative arts and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. So I put all this stuff in so that it’s like I’m employing someone.

Breallyn: Yeah, very specific task.

Lyndon: I put all this stuff in and then get it to word it in a way that is succinct and makes sense to it so that it can provide the outcomes that I’m asking for.

Breallyn: Yeah.

Lyndon: And then it saves that. So next time I go in there, I don’t have to type all that stuff again. I just say, here’s the transcript, ready for you to edit.

Breallyn: Yeah.

Lyndon: So that’s where I’ve arrived at the moment with that. And then it gives me, it just gives me a much sort of cleaner version of our conversation that works better in print.

Breallyn: Yeah. Which just saves you so much time because…

Lyndon: Well, I just wouldn’t do it otherwise. There would not be transcripts on the website.

Breallyn: Couldn’t happen.

Lyndon: Yeah, that’s right. Yeah. So it’s weird ’cause in a way if it wasn’t there, I’d be saving time ’cause the transcripts wouldn’t be up.

Breallyn: Yeah.

Lyndon: But because I’ve got the ability to get them done fairly quickly, each episode probably takes me, I’m not sure, maybe 40 minutes.

Breallyn: Yeah.

Lyndon: As far as the whole transcript.

Breallyn: Which is amazing.

Lyndon: Getting the transcript off of Descript.

Breallyn: Yeah.

Lyndon: And then getting it tidied it up in Gemini 2.5 and then putting it into the website. And then in the website, I’ve gotta do all the metadata and then I’ve gotta do all the keywords that go along with putting a title in your website and all that sort of stuff.

Breallyn: Yeah.

Lyndon: And then scheduling it to be uploaded the same time as the the podcast.

Breallyn: Yeah.

Lyndon: Is distributed to the platforms and stuff like that.

Breallyn: There’s lots of steps there.

Lyndon: There’s lots of steps. So it’s taking me, I’d say at least 40 minutes. Yeah. It, may, it might even be an hour. So yeah, if AI wasn’t around, I’d be saving myself an hour ’cause I wouldn’t do it.

Breallyn: That’s true. Well, yeah, I guess we are doing more and more things, aren’t we?

Lyndon: Well, this is something that I was leading towards and I’m hoping we’ll get time to talk about it. Yeah.

And I think even in terms of ChatGPT, Gemini, there’s so many different ones. They’re the two major ones that I can think of, there’s Claude, which I’ve started using a little bit. Using them like a Google search is the wrong way to use them.

Breallyn: Yeah.

Lyndon: I saw a thing recently that this woman was saying why it pays to be polite when you’re using these AI platforms, but it wasn’t because, you know…

Breallyn: That one day they’ll have arms,

Lyndon: One day they’ll come get you ’cause you were rude ’cause you never said please. When you’re prompted it. No, it’s because it was more to do with your mind shift in how you leverage it or how you use it.

Using AI Effectively: Beyond Simple Search

Breallyn: Yeah. Well, that’s true. Yeah.

Lyndon: And so if you just say to it, what’s the three, I dunno, I’m just gonna make something up. Like what is the three most popular breeds of dog? It’ll just give you the answer. And that would be really under utilizing it, its ability.

Breallyn: Yeah.

Lyndon: So if you can think of a better question, but really what you wanna do is what I was doing where I had a very specific outcome that I wanted and I needed someone who was an expert in it.

Breallyn: Yeah.

Lyndon: You just have to think about, well, what kind of person would be able to do that for me?

Breallyn: Yeah.

Lyndon: And then you basically create this whole profile.

Breallyn: Yeah.

Lyndon: And this is the person I need you to be today is…

Breallyn: Exactly. This expert in this thing.

Lyndon: Yeah. So I think with all technology and your phone’s a good example too, it’s proportionate to how much time you’re willing to spend learning it and learning how to get the best out of it.

Breallyn: Yeah.

Lyndon: I think with my, with all of us, we get to a point going, I know that my phone could apparently put a man on the moon. But I’m happy with using it for note taking, recording voice memos, looking up stuff on the internet when I need to, sometimes using it as a phone.

And occasionally I will be daring and I’ll ask Google how to do something on my iPhone that I’ve always been wondering how other people do it. You know what I mean?

Breallyn: Yeah.

Lyndon: But even that, it’s just you’re just scratching the surface of what you could use capabilities.

Breallyn: Yeah.

Lyndon: Yeah. And it’s the same I think with any technology and AI’s no different.

Once you’ve got your script and your prompt all worked out and saved, I started thinking about you. I, I really could be using this for way more things.

Breallyn: Yeah. So many things.

Lyndon: Yeah. To save me time perhaps.

Breallyn: Ah, yeah. I think that’s the big question though, isn’t it?

Lyndon: Now let’s move on to, now there’s probably others that you are using. I’m just gonna go onto Rank Math. So Rank Math is a plugin for WordPress.

Breallyn: Yep.

Lyndon: And so I had the horrible realization about six weeks ago that, that our SEO was non-existent on our website and I had to do something about it.

Anyway, so I landed on this plugin, which we pay about, I don’t know, $9 a month for or something now. And it’s called Rank Math. And so…

Breallyn: They all add up these subscriptions.

Lyndon: Oh, they all add up. Oh my gosh. But it’s an SEO plugin. Yep.

And, it has prompts in it, like it’ll see my webpage and it’ll say, oh your title of your webpage this, however, your meta description doesn’t say that. Do you think it should? And I’m like, yeah, I guess it should.

And it goes, we’ll give you three points. I’m like, oh, great. Okay. And you’re meant to try and get to a hundred points on your page.

Breallyn: So it’s giving you literally a ranking of how many points you have.

Lyndon: It’s a ranking on, yeah. And I don’t wanna get into all of it, but it does have AI components in it.

Breallyn: Yeah.

Lyndon: It gives you points if your paragraphs are short.

Breallyn: Yeah.

Lyndon: So often when I put a transcript in there, there’s some really long paragraphs. And it’ll say, oh, do you want me to fix this with AI? And I go, no, I don’t.

Because I clicked that once and it started just like putting in little summaries here and there and just like random key phrases and stuff, which was completely…

Breallyn: Yeah.

Lyndon: Not part of the conversation.

Breallyn: Yeah. It just looks like a computer’s written it.

Lyndon: Yeah. It’s purely just for SEO and I was like, Ugh, that’s pretty ugly.

Breallyn: Yeah.

Lyndon: But you can see on certain websites and marketing websites and advertising websites or whatever how that might not appear so crude. But yeah.

On ours and certainly on the transcript it was not the right thing, but it has AI components in it, so yeah, that’s something I use with caution.

Yeah, so there’s that. Is there anything else that you are using in your day to day?

Breallyn: Yeah, the other program I really love is Loom. I use…

Lyndon: Is that AI?

Breallyn: Does it have any, AI has to be AI, weren’t we talking about tools that we use?

Lyndon: Okay. Yep. I’ll let it pass.

Additional Tools for Efficiency: Loom and AI for Grants

Breallyn: Thank you. I use Loom to create little videos when I deliver work to a client.

Lyndon: So, that’s L O O, M.

Breallyn: L O M Loom. Yeah.

And it just makes it so much better to do a walkthrough of what I’ve done and why I’ve done it, what I’ve captured, the reasons behind what they’re seeing on the page.

And I used to try to do that just with a little summary of each page saying, what it’s targeting, why it exists, essentially just in word format.

And I would get, let me say it this way, like the percentage now of clients that are thrilled with their first version, it’s almost a hundred percent. Like even when somebody will say, oh, I’m not sure about this, it’s usually quite a quick fix because they understand exactly what I’ve done.

Whereas it used to be clients didn’t quite understand where I was coming, like, why I’ve done, why I’ve written their thing like this. Like they don’t necessarily know why it is.

But once they do understand, hey, there’s all this strategy behind it, this is why we’ve got our customers first and foremost. Like just all the different reasons why I do what I do. They can really hear that.

And it just makes for much, much more successful presentation and delivery of their version one.

Lyndon: Well, I’ve noticed on websites that I use a lot, quite often I wonder, oh, can it do this? Or how do I perform this task? can it even do it? And if I go to the help section, trawl through all the notes on there.

I can miss it or I can skim over something. And I find it’s very helpful when they have a video on there.

Breallyn: Yes.

Lyndon: And they’re having more and more videos. So Descript have a lot of videos, Indy have a lot of videos.

And that’s because it’s just easier to understand it when you have someone explaining it, they can show you as well.

Breallyn: Yeah, absolutely.

Lyndon: They can point things out.

Breallyn: Yep.

Lyndon: It’s just easier to take it in.

Breallyn: Yeah.

Lyndon: It gets back to what we were saying earlier about having that human connection as well.

Breallyn: Yeah, exactly. Yeah.

Lyndon: I did mention Claude before and a way that I see myself using AI more is in writing grants.

Breallyn: Oh, yeah.

Lyndon: So I’ve been, I was gonna say, I’ve been bad at writing grants. The truth is I’ve been intimidated at writing grants and so have started a few and never finished them. And I think I’ve submitted, I’ve definitely submitted one grant in my lifetime, maybe two. Which is pretty bad, pretty pathetic.

Breallyn: It is quite niche and you’ve gotta know what, like what’s needed, what language really, is gonna hit properly. It’s something that I haven’t looked into doing.

Lyndon: The other day, I just wanted to find out what venues in the Yarra Valley had music, particularly wineries and cellar doors and breweries that I could then approach.

Breallyn: Yeah.

Lyndon: I asked one of the platforms to do some research for me and it came back with a whole lot of, it came back with probably 30 or 40 venues. It ranked them in terms of high probability of booking an artist such as myself. Others were possible. So it was also giving me like, try these ones first.

Breallyn: Yeah.

Lyndon: And had all their contact information.

Breallyn: Very handy.

Lyndon: Handy. I checked a lot of the contact information. Some of it was wrong. Yeah. There was a lot of, there were, at first I was like, wow, look at all this research. It’s done. It would’ve taken me days.

Breallyn: Yeah.

Lyndon: Yeah. To do that, it probably would’ve taken me like two or three days.

Breallyn: Yep. And even then you’re at the mercy of Google rankings, like…

Lyndon: Exactly.

Breallyn: Wineries, Yarra Valley. And then yeah, page one comes up and you write all those numbers down and then yeah, it was…

Lyndon: Able to present me with venues, but also tell me why it was presenting me with the venue.

Breallyn: Yeah, that’s really good.

Lyndon: And all kinds of different information. So it was really good. It was like a research paper.

Should we wait for the helicopter?

Breallyn: I was just thinking that.

Lyndon: They’re looking for a perp, that’s short for perpetrator.

Breallyn: It seems to often be hovering above our house.

Lyndon: Do you remember when that, that Ute drove down the street and the guy jumped out and hid in the neighbor’s yard and then the police came down and yeah, there was three arrested him.

Breallyn: Three police cars. Amazing scene reaching out the front of their house.

Lyndon: Yeah. Anyways helicopter’s gone. So yeah, you do have to check the validity of the facts. Definitely.

Yes. And maybe that’s something we’ll talk about another time. It’s one of those things that it’s gonna help you in your research. It’s not going to do a perfect job.

Breallyn: It was missing email addresses.

Lyndon: Look, one of the things also, it gave me a recommendation for a place. Now keep in mind, read a hundred websites and I went to it and it had said that the cellar door was closed and had been closed since June last year.

Breallyn: No patrons, there’s no cellar doors.

Lyndon: It had that as one of its highly recommended venues for me to approach.

Breallyn: Yeah.

Lyndon: So it got that one completely wrong. Yeah. They don’t even have anyone turn up to their winery anymore. Yeah. It’s all mail order.

So if it can do that kind of research for me, just looking for venues in a winery, then, using it to help me write grants.

Breallyn: To find out all of the available grants.

Lyndon: Exactly.

Breallyn: To start with.

Lyndon: Yeah. Yeah. Because one of the first hurdles for me was just understanding which grants were relevant to me.

Breallyn: Yeah. Well see, this is one of the things about being a creative is there’s so many things like. All of these things just take so much time.

Yeah. There’s just so time consuming. You’re trying to do your art, you’re trying to, yeah. Figure out grants. You’re trying to figure out, are you able to get Centrelink benefits? Is there a way that you can, I don’t know, do some bartering of something so that you can eat this week?

There’s just so many things to be trying to figure out in your life.

Lyndon: I was just thinking that, do you remember years ago, obviously you remember this, when we went round Australia. I was on Centrelink benefits when we left.

Okay. And then we got to, I’m not sure what town, somewhere interstate. And we went to the Centrelink office there and they’re like, well, where are you from? And we’re like, from Melbourne. They’re like, well, what made you think you could keep getting benefits while you’re traveling?

I’m like, I don’t know. Can I? And they’re like, no. Oh, you don’t remember that at all?

The Demands on Creative Professionals

Breallyn: No. Like I remember, well, I had lived at home until we went traveling and then we went straight to Shepparton and picked the most depressing pears in my, I’ve ever seen in my life for a month.

And then we had some money and then we traveled to the next place. We traveled to Waikerie and picked tomatoes.

Lyndon: Yeah, it was, well, in one of those towns we went, I had…

Breallyn: No memory.

Lyndon: Of Centrelink in one of these towns. We went to the Centrelink office because I can’t even quite remember how it worked. I think you had to front up every fortnight.

Breallyn: Every fortnight. Yeah. And at your local office.

Lyndon: And then what happened then?

Breallyn: Well, you were kicked off benefits, I assume ’cause it’s, we certainly didn’t have ’em when we traveled. I didn’t even think that we, I’d forgotten that altogether. I didn’t even remember that you had previously had a Centrelink benefit.

Lyndon: Well, yeah, because it’s a sliding scale, you can be working and have a job and still get remnants of the benefit that you had before you had that job, especially if you’ve landed casual work.

So when we started traveling around Australia, we were in very casual employment. And I just thought, oh, I’ll just go into the Centrelink office and they’ll top it up.

I don’t know, I didn’t really know. And they’re like, who told you that? and I’m like, ’cause someone actually had told me that, someone at Centrelink. And then when I got interstate to the other office and they said, no, it can’t possibly work that way, I, I had this realization, of course it can’t work like that.

Breallyn: We were on our own with the depressing pears.

Lyndon: And I was like, okay, alright, well I guess we’re not getting any of that. Anyway, yeah.

Do you remember? You didn’t remember? No. Well, to your point. You’re wondering at times, am I spending too long making the art? Do I need to stop and get on the phone now or do I need to find out what grants available?

And every time you actually do a little bit of a search for a grant or for something like that, you discover something that you didn’t even know ever existed and you go, oh, there’s people that are supporting the arts on this website. I didn’t even know about it.

Breallyn: That’s right. I came across a writing grant the other day in France, but it wasn’t so much a grant. You can go there and live in the chateau. It’s all happening. My dream. I’ll going true.

Lyndon: Think you’ll, I think you’ll find it’s just a bloke called Grant. It’s not really a grant, it’s…

Breallyn: A writer’s retreat, but like a…

Lyndon: Yeah. ‘Retreat’ in inverted commas.

Breallyn: Yeah. I was like, sign me up.

Lyndon: But no, la Yeah. well, I actually earmarked a page for you. It’s like a, crowdfunding site for arts. But people that support the arts go to that page and look for projects where they wanna put their money.

Breallyn: Oh, yeah.

Lyndon: So it could be art installations, it could be that someone’s gonna be doing a sculpture that’s gonna be in the main street of Woodend or whatever.

Breallyn: Yeah.

Lyndon: That kind of a, that’s cool thing. It can be that someone’s writing a book. That could be interesting. That could be, it’s not really a grant, but it’s…

Breallyn: Yeah. It’s one of the many little roads that you travel down to try to find what you need to be doing as an artist.

Lyndon: Yeah. Yeah. So hopefully, AI can help us with, yeah, some of these things where, at least I’ve dropped the ball or never picked up the ball really in terms of grants, but there’s too…

Breallyn: Too many balls.

Lyndon: But, when you think about the average wage for Australian musician is six and a half grand a year. Like you need some grants.

Breallyn: Yeah. Yeah. Find somewhere survive. You need to be good at waiting tables.

Lyndon: Yeah. So anyway, look, here’s the, we’ve, we’re going way over time, but this is what hit me today. Was this question in terms of using all these different programs and AI platforms.

And to leave more room for us to be doing our art, to be writing the songs, writing the poems, you writing a novel. Is it really saving me time or is it enabling me to take on more and do more? Because I reckon that’s what’s happening.

Breallyn: Yeah.

AI: Time Saver or Task Expander?

Lyndon: It’s like I was saying earlier about if I didn’t have the ability to put a transcript on our website. If I had to do it all manually, it wouldn’t be happening.

And so now it’s actually costing me an hour.

Breallyn: Isn’t this just the same as all of the technology forever? How busy are we? We’ve got dishwashers and we’ve got cars to wizz us, to take our kids to childcare and this and the other.

Lyndon: But if you can remember back to when these things were marketed to us.

Breallyn: Yeah.

Lyndon: And the sort of utopia world that was envisaged and being implanted in our mind as to the sort of life that we’d be living and how much more time we’d have with our family and with our kids and with our friends and all of that stuff.

And we all, I think we bought it for a little while until things like social media came about and then we all called BS on, yeah.

Breallyn: On a, and went.

Lyndon: It’s not at all giving us those things.

Breallyn: No, we’re just mice running faster and faster in the wheel. That’s really what’s happening. So I…

Lyndon: Honestly, I feel like, and this is the thing, I feel like unless I commit enough time to figuring out what I want my AI assistants, plural, to be doing for me, unless I sit down, work that out, and then tighten up those prompts, once I’ve done that, then…

Breallyn: Life will be perfect.

Lyndon: Then I’ll have more time. And it’s like, really?

Breallyn: Yeah.

Lyndon: Okay. Because there’ll be another thing come along that I’ve gotta learn because it’s gonna save me more time. And, yeah.

So I think we have to, yeah, we’ve, there’s benefits in embracing it, like some of the ways that we’ve been talking about.

But I think we have to tread carefully. And it’s not because AI’s gonna take our jobs or, or because, my computer’s gonna stab me in the night. It’s because we’re our own worst enemies and we are, we just think that…

Breallyn: We so are.

Lyndon: We just think that, oh, that, I don’t know…

Breallyn: Gonna solve all that problems.

Lyndon: Yeah. And that, We take on more stuff.

Breallyn: Yeah.

Lyndon: We take on more than we can handle and we need to know our limits and you see it too with people when they get older and wiser and they start removing themself from things and start enjoying the garden and walks along the beach and, it’s like we all get to that stage.

Breallyn: Yeah.

Lyndon: Anyway, so let’s try…

Breallyn: To keep the balance, although as we discussed, balance is a fallacy. Go with the flow.

Lyndon: Well, it’s late here now because we started recording in the evening rather than the afternoon.

Breallyn: Yes. We’ve done a little bit of something different and there was mention of a gin and tonic to be served, but instead I was given a thimble full of port and that long gone.

Lyndon: Cherry Port from Wilmot Distillery in Tasmania. It was nice. It was nice. Yeah, it was good. But I, yeah, I drank it pretty much while you were giggling.

Breallyn: And that was at the start.

Lyndon: I’ve been parched for an hour. You’ve been listening to Pain in the Arts now. You can go to our Patreon, patreon.com/paininthearts.life and get yourself a free subscription. Why not?

I’ve got a little video of, tour of the studio. Yes, that is on there. There’s unfiltered episodes are on there as well, so the long form discussion get a little bit longer, practically unedited.

Yeah. There’s also bonus podcasts on there as well. Yep. So get onto Patreon, visit our website. That’s where the transcripts are. And we’ve got some blogs up there. The website is www.paininthearts.life.

Give us a review on Apple Podcasts. Yes. We’ve got one review up there. Shout out to Kate. Oh, I dunno the full name ’cause I did put a post up on, on my personal Instagram saying if you leave a review, we’ll give you a shout out.

Breallyn: Need to come through.

Lyndon: Katie E-N. Do you reckon the En stands for English? Anyway, a good review. So we’ve got one review, five stars. Ooh, thanks Kate. But, so yeah, we’ll need a few more.

Breallyn: Shout out to Kate.

Lyndon: And Spotify is good. If you wanna see what our bonus episodes are because they’re all available through Patreon. However we have them on Spotify. They’re locked. Uh-huh, but you can at least see what’s there.

Breallyn: And I believe there is one episode unlocked that you can see. Is it unlocked on Spotify?

Lyndon: Yeah, I think there’s a couple that are unlocked actually. Well, there we go. So…

Breallyn: Get into those.

Lyndon: The introductory episodes of our individual podcasts. Are there.

Alright, well that’s it for this week. We will talk to you again next week. Thanks for listening.

Breallyn: Thanks, bye.

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