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Hey {{first_name}} ,

I’ve been going back and forth in my brain the last several weeks about what to write to y’all.

I think I’ve finally landed on some good topics moving forward, but today, I want to address the elephant in the room.

My products, while I still have less than 50, are largely on Teachers Pay Teachers, which was recently depicted on national television as being largely AI sop.

There has been an influx of teachers this year say their schools or districts are banning Teachers Pay Teachers for use in their classrooms.

And I absolutely get it.

I have a healthy mix of teachers, parents, and homeschoolers reading these emails, so this may not apply; however, for teachers, there isn’t a single one of us who cannot say we haven’t downloaded something from TPT and it been super cute, but not effective, complete, useful, or even assessed what it was supposed to.

And the mistakes.

Sure, we’re all human, but when a 20 page resource has 10+ mistakes, that’s a huge problem.

And when an alphabet poster has an elephant for “D” because AI isn’t a human, that’s also a huge problem.

So addressing that elephant, yes, AI usage is a HUGE problem on TPT right now. It’s taking over the search and being pushed before quality resources and it sucks as a buyer and as a seller.

And there is really nothing I can do about it but voice my opinion as both to TPT.

What I can control is how AI is used in my store and my transparency about it with my buyers.

I’m not AI’s biggest fan. I’ve been in the online business world since 2020 and in 2022 I started hearing chatter about ChatGPT in many spaces. I did not begin using it until late 2023.

I did find myself in this AI spiral where it saved me a TON of time and I used it to do my captions for social media for my other business without reading them. I admit this because if I want you to trust me, I need to be honest. So yea, I didn’t read it at first.

And my Instagram and LinkedIn took a big hit.

And I started reading my content.

And it was awful.

So I took a big step back.

I started avoiding AI again.

When I began getting serious about Unearthed Learning Roots earlier this year, I had just begun using AI again.

But this time, I wanted to be more intentional in how I use AI.

I have ADHD. It is normal for me to come up with 50 ideas in a day. As I’m writing this email, I have 5 ideas in my inbox that I sent to myself from the doctor’s office the other day because it was the best way I could think of to remember those ideas when I got home.

AI allows me to rant and share the 1 million thoughts I have per second and notice the patterns within them in half a second instead of 10+ business days. That’s incredibly valuable for me.

I also use AI to plan products.

Once the AI does it’s analysis of the inner workings of my thoughts, I choose an idea I want to run with from the list we came up with together.

Then, I use the AI to help me plan what pages I need.

I never take the AI output as gospel.

Truth be told, I like to have the final word, and that extends to AI as well.

AI may say, “you need 20 pages” to make a quality resource and I may or may not agree depending on what the topic is, what the resource is, and who it is for.

I will create a plan with AI and put it in my project management system to help me create a task list and stay on track.

I will sometimes go back to the AI if I have something I’d like to add and use it to determine best order or where/how that idea best fits into what I’ve already started.

I never get my base ideas from AI and I never let AI do the actual writing of anything.

AI relies on what is already on the internet and doing so, in my opinion, would be stealing or at the very minimum, personally unethical.

I use 2 popular keyword research tools to research keywords to put in my descriptions and titles. Keywords are words that people search for. Using them helps people find my products when they search.

So, after I find the keywords I want to use, and after I create my products, I’ll use AI to help me come up with 3-5 options for titles that use my main keyword and 1-2 of my secondary keywords.

Using keywords natively is very much a weakness of mine. I will ask AI to help me use 3-6 total keywords in a description using a format I already created.

I ask it to highlight the keywords and then I edit the descriptions!

I never just use descriptions outright from AI.

I do however, typically try to keep the keywords in a similar position/usage as it suggests.

If you can’t tell by this email, I write a lot. Sometimes, too much.

It’s because the thoughts just keep coming and coming, so I just keep writing and writing.

So I’ll ask AI what seems redundant or off topic or could be said differently to more quickly get to the point.

I do this mostly with emails and the parts of my products that are for teachers/parents.

So notes to teachers, notes to parents, lesson plans, etc, I do ask AI to help me be more concise.

I also sometimes do the same thing with directions for students, but never the actual content. (I have humans help me with that.)

This is not an exhaustive list, just the top ones I wanted to share today. Additionally, I’m not explaining all of these as that would take half a book. So if you have any questions about any of these, please feel free to reach out.

Okay, I’m gonna stop there for today on my AI rant. If you have any questions about any of this, I’m more than happy to answer your questions. Just send me an email back.

Wishing you a wonderful week,

Sammy

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