Introduction - Zoe Martin
🫛 This week’s AI, Software, & Wetware features an audio interview on ethical AI with Zoe Martin, a 🇺🇸 USA-based video and fine art production entrepreneur. Zoe is founder of Zoe Martin Enterprises, LLC. We discuss:
How losing her baby sister early to cancer inspired her to help people capture their stories
Working with founders to capture and share their stories for marketing, onboarding, and more
Reliance on maps and annoyance with spelling checkers
Using AI tools to streamline video editing
Publishing her chapter on legacy in an anthology and writing her own book
and more. Check it out, and let us know what you think!
This post is part of our AI6P interview series on “AI, Software, and Wetware”. Our guests share their experiences with using AI, and how they feel about AI using their data and works.
This interview is available as an audio recording (embedded here in the post, and later in our AI6P external podcasts). This post includes the full, human-edited transcript. (If it doesn’t fit in your email client, click HERE to read the whole post online.)
Note: In this article series, “AI” means artificial intelligence and spans classical statistical methods, data analytics, machine learning, generative AI, and other non-generative AI. See this Glossary and “AI Fundamentals #01: What is Artificial Intelligence?” for reference.
Interview - Zoe Martin
Karen: I’m delighted to welcome Zoe Martin from the United States as my guest today on “AI, Software, and Wetware”. Zoe, thank you so much for joining me on this interview! Please tell us about yourself, who you are, and what you do.
Zoe: Well, first of all, I appreciate the opportunity to be here, Karen. I’m here in the Dallas area, and my business is mainly founders, videos, and family history videos, although I do portraits as well. I just feel it’s really important for people to document their stories before they leave this planet, rather than waiting until an end-of-life diagnosis or a hospice situation when they can’t clearly communicate their story and their value.
Karen: I noticed on your website that you had a reference to losing a family member and that is what got you started into that business.
Zoe: Yeah. So I was a headshot and brand photographer, and then I lost my baby sister, Kristina, to breast cancer. She had a stage four diagnosis at the age of 35. And then, Christmas Eve of 2023, she was only 40. And she left some things undone that we could have done for her, such as recording her stories. My niece, her only child, has videos of her, but they’re end-of-life and not the clear intentional messages she would’ve left if we had known and planned sooner.
Karen: You mentioned you also do this for founders, capturing their startup stories.
Zoe: Absolutely. A lot of people don’t realize that when you share your why, that resonates, you know? And once you actually make a connection with someone, whether they’ve met you or not, your story resonates with them, and then they’re interested. So you can use a founder’s video for marketing purposes. You can use it for history meetings. You can use it for onboarding potential new hires and a succession plan. And then, obviously, your family could benefit from knowing about your founder’s story as well.
Karen: That all sounds great. Tell us a little bit about your level of experience with AI and machine learning and analytics, whether you use it professionally or personally, or if you’ve ever studied the technology.
Zoe: Yeah. I actually was thinking about this, that there’s a lot of things that I’ve used AI for. I use a variety of different programs. For photo editing, there’s obviously Adobe, and then there’s Evoto. And then, when it comes to creating my website, I use keywords, meta descriptions, meta titles, schema, all using ChatGPT. Sometimes I’ll use Claude. A lot of people say that Claude has better verbiage. So I tend to go back and forth between the two. Man, there’s so many different things. Canva transcription opportunities with captioning for videos and things. So I use a huge variety of AI.
Karen: So that all sounds like it’s in your professional life. How about in your personal life or your home life? It’s really pretty hard to avoid AI day-to-day.
Zoe: Yeah.
Karen: What do you find that you are using?
Zoe: So our remote control, I think it’s a Firestick. Rather than typing out, which my husband and my son always do – they go into the search engine and type out the title or an actor – but I just push on the button and I’ll say what it is that I’m looking for, usually “YouTube clean comedy”.
Karen: Yeah, voice recognition is definitely one thing. And you mentioned captioning. We’re on the Zoom call, and I’m actually watching the transcript to make sure that I’m pronouncing things clearly. It’s a way to check myself and to make sure that I’m coming across. So we use it a lot, in photos on our phones and spelling checkers and everything. It’s just really everywhere.
Zoe: Yeah. And I think the spell checker annoys me the most. I don’t know if it’s iPhone specifically, but if I type out the word “where”, as in “they were going somewhere”, it automatically changes it to “we’re”, the apostrophe R-E. And it frustrates the fire out of me. Like, “where” is a word. Why is it always changing it to “we’re”?
But the major thing I use AI for personally is maps. I hardly ever get in the car without using a map. Not only could it tell me the fastest way to get to a location and what the options are, whether I want to avoid tools or use them, but also, I live in Dallas-Fort Worth. Vehicle accidents are a common everyday occurrence at all hours of the day and night. And so it lets me know “There’s a crash up ahead” or “There’s an object in the roadway” or police, whatever.
Karen: Yeah, I was a fan of Waze when they first started. Then Google took them over and I noticed some of the features have started to creep over.
Zoe: Yeah. What are you going to do?
Karen: Yep. Thanks for sharing that. I’d like to hear a specific story on a time that you’ve used a tool that had AI or machine learning features. Basically, how did the AI features work well, and then maybe an example where they didn’t work so well?
Zoe: Ooh, working well... so with my videos, I generally record for half an hour to an hour, although my dad’s interview was four hours long. So this is going to be a very time-consuming task to narrow down. With the hour-long video, it’s interesting; people don’t think about the time involved in the video edit. So even though I’ve recorded for an hour, I have to re-listen to that over and over and over again, because I’m having to check the timestamps of where they said certain things. And then I have to transcribe each little section. Because if I want to conglomerate different parts of it together, I have to figure out where those are.
I had a video editor cull it down to 40 minutes. Then I transcribed it myself using AI. And then from that transcription, I threw it into ChatGPT and asked it for a 3-minute breakdown and a 1-minute breakdown. And it was able to do that for me, which saved me a ton of time so I didn’t have to go back through and listen to it again.
And so I was able to pull it all into both the roughly 3-minute and a 1-minute video. Of course, you have to feed it the information, giving it “I want it to be emotionally resonant and hit on these notes” kind of thing. So once you tell it and train it, it’s pretty great how it can save me time and energy. And I created great 3-minute and 1-minute videos from a 40-minute video.
Karen: That sounds like a great example. I’ve experimented a lot. I use Descript for the audio editing here. Before that, I was doing it in Audacity and looking at the waveforms, and that was just a nightmare.
Zoe: Yeah.
Karen: That was painful. And the Descript audio editor – you would not believe how many ways it mis-spells ChatGPT. It’s kind of a fun thing, now – every time I edit an interview, I can look at, “Oh, how did they misspell it this time?”
I know they have video editing. I only publish audio of these interviews, so I haven’t really tried it. It does do a decent job on the transcripts usually, except for things like ChatGPT and people’s names, company names, things like that.
Zoe: You had mentioned maybe a way that AI didn’t work so well. I just remembered I’m in a beta program for – I don’t want to say the name of the company, but I’m in an innovative program for a company. And I had given it information and it’s been a very long process. I’ve been doing it for months. And I, there was a time that it didn’t make the connection. It kept bouncing back and wouldn’t let me in. So when I finally got back in, I asked it to retell me what I had told it regarding a certain subject. And it gave me completely preposterous stuff I had not told it at all. And I don’t know if it pulled it in from someone else’s account or ... I have no idea. I just know ... I got in touch with the company and I was like, “Hey, this is way wrong. I don’t know where it’s at.” And now I’m hesitant to continue because I don’t want it pulling stuff like that again and making that part of my story, because that’s inaccurate.
Karen: Wow. Yeah. I appreciate you not wanting to name the company and the tool. ... And this was recent?
Zoe: Yeah. And again, it’s the beta program. So, you know, they’re working through the kinks and they told me that I wasn’t the only one, and so they’re working on a fix for that. So until they get the fix for that, I’m not continuing to beta test it.
Karen: Yeah, absolutely. That makes total sense. Sounds like there are a lot of things that you use AI tools for. Are there any things that you would avoid using AI based tools for? Something where you say, “I would never use it for that specific purpose?”
Zoe: Hmm. You know, I’m conflicted about it. I don’t know if there’s something that I wouldn’t use it for. I feel like it can be very beneficial. Although thinking along the lines of people’s stories, I’m not a big fan of taking, for example, someone who we love and putting them into a future, let’s say, where they’ve passed, and now we’re still able to communicate with them because the documented part of their story on video or something because AI will give you information that they would think. But I mean, it’s not really their – AI isn’t thinking, right? It’s pulling from other things. And so the information that it could be giving you as the face of that person, it may not be accurate. And that kind of creeps me out.
Karen: Yeah. The whole digital afterlife idea is something I’m very much not comfortable with either. It always reminds me that, you know, the data that they’re using is never going to be a complete picture of a person. And then it’s sort of like the blind men and the elephant, right, what it may tell you based on it thinking that it’s a trunk? And it’s not the person at all. I’ve been looking into, what could I do to make sure that this doesn’t happen to me after I’m gone? How could I even control it? There’s a lot of philosophical discussions around that.
On the other hand, I could see the temptation. I wish I could talk to my dad. But it’s just not possible. And there’s also been some really interesting research that maybe doing this interrupts the grieving process and it keeps people from moving on, which I think is also kind of interesting. There’s a lot of aspects to that whole use of the technology.
Zoe: That is interesting. I find a lot of times, the people that I’m speaking with regarding the business, they tell me, “I wish I had recorded my dad’s story, or my grandparents, or I wish I had.” It’s more in retrospect rather than thinking about themselves and that their children will one day be saying, “I wish that we had that story”, vice versa. But for me, one of the other things, an opportunity of voice messages, being able to listen and hear that they loved and just re-listening to it. I do that with my sister. I have several voices, all of them. I just keep re-listening to the one. I don’t even know what the other ones say because I just love to hear her voice.
Karen: Yeah. It’s funny, my family had these old Super8 videos. And my brother finally converted some of them and got them into a format that we could listen to nowadays. And then it was just that realizing how much he sounds like our dad used to. He was young when our dad died, so he didn’t have the full adult voice then. It is just one of those things that you just don’t necessarily realize. But I think more than that is just the stories, like, “Why did my dad change his religion before he met my mom?” All these things that, once he passed, we’re just never going to know.
Zoe: Yep, that’s why it’s important to tell your own story.
Karen: Yeah. Well, it’s a great business and I appreciate that. I think having a story where the person’s telling their story their way is awesome. But having someone else make up a story as if it were you, I feel like that crosses a line.
Zoe: Yep, I agree. My own book, which I will not be using AI for, is going to be published in Q4 or Q1 of next year. It’s a story along the lines of how the business pivot came to be. But it’s also going to integrate the people who are in this world of personal historians, and explaining how people don’t have to use video. Of course, that’s my personal preference, for so many reasons. But you can write memoirs, you can do journals and all different things. And I’m also going to have stories in there about people who have recorded their personal history and the benefits to them and their future families, but also people who haven’t and missed the opportunity and what they’ve done following that, regrets and things. I want a full spectrum. I want this to be a movement. I want people to realize this is something we do now, not waiting for an end-of-life or a hospice situation to realize, “Oh no, time’s running out.” I want them to do it while they’re capable, and fully able to say what they intend to say.
Karen: So what is the name of your anthology? And do you know yet what the name of your book is going to be?
Zoe: So the anthology is LeadHership: Women Leading with Purpose. And the name of my book – I have a lot of working titles. It’s a little difficult because I don’t want people to think about this, again, as something that we’re doing at the end of life. At first, I was leaning into legacy. Now I’m not sure. I’m leaning into celebrating. You know, we celebrate life after someone’s passed away, and they don’t even get to hear the beautiful things that we’ve said about them. But if instead we celebrate their lives while they’re with us, they do, right? And how much more meaningful would that be for you to know how much people love and admire you and how you’ve impacted their lives? How much more meaningful would that be for you to appreciate it now?
Karen: Yeah, that’s a great one. So the leadership book, is that the Action Takers Publishing anthology?
Zoe: It is.
Karen: What’s your chapter about?
Zoe: It’s leaving a legacy. At the moment, I can’t remember the title! But yeah, I got to have my headshot and a quote from my chapter there with the cover of the book on Times Square recently.
Karen: It’s always cool to see that happen. That’s great. I hope that book’s very successful.
For your book, the first thing I thought of when you said legacy was, I see it all the time if I do a search for someone and an obituary comes up. The company must have a lot of presence in that space. Celebration seems like a great way to think about it. And part of the value may be for their descendants and people that would succeed them and listen afterwards. But I like that you’re emphasizing that there’s value for the person themselves while they are still here from recording the stories for themselves.
Zoe: Yeah.
Karen: Yeah. Cool. So you mentioned using AI tools. One concern that comes up is where those tools get the data and the works that they train on. Sometimes they use content that has been put into an online system. Some of these tools are famous for scraping and then training on YouTube videos for their tools for generating videos and such. And there are a lot of concerns about that, because even though they’re publicly available, they’re not public domain. They are copyrighted, like anything that you would publish would be copyrighted. So there’s always a question about whether or not that is appropriate, and whether or not those companies should be required to get consent and then to credit and compensate – what some people call the 3Cs rule. That came from CIPRI, which is the Cultural Intellectual Property Rights Initiative.
But there’s a lot of discussion around the 3Cs and whether people are entitled to that, or whether it’s reasonable to allow all of these companies to use basically anything they can find on the internet.
Zoe: Yeah. And I’m torn on this because, like the public domain you’re talking about, so many of us – and I say ‘us’ because I’m in there – guilty of not reading the fine print. Oftentimes it is disclosed, but because we aren’t paying attention. We’re just clicking through, like I said earlier, following the bouncing ball, you know? We’re just trying to check off to get through to complete whatever it is that we’re trying to get, and we’re not paying attention. But then when there’s no consent required, then I don’t think that’s okay.
Karen: Yeah, the whole idea of the fine print constituting informed consent. I interviewed an attorney who was based in Ireland at the time, and she made the point that this is not informed consent. You can’t ask people to page through 20 screens worth of information on their phone and to digest it and compare it to what changed since the last time they did a software update. It’s really just ridiculous. It’s not consent. And the terms are usually very vague, very hard to read, very much legalese. And there’s studies that show that the vast majority of people just don’t read them, but I don’t think you can fault people for that when they’re so hard to understand anyway. I mean, I read them, or I try to because that’s kind of the area that I’m in. But people shouldn’t have to do all that just to have their basic rights respected, is the way that I look at it.
Zoe: Well, and interesting, I just thought of this too, if you took those terms and conditions and you put them into an AI and had it read back to you the necessary or the pertinent, or even asking it, “Is this my consent for AI?” There’s a quick way to find out, I guess.
Karen: Yeah, it’s really interesting that you brought that up. I’ve had people say that they do this routinely. Not on their phone – obviously it’s a lot harder – but when they’re on a computer, they’ll take terms and conditions, and export the 20 pages to a PDF, and put the PDF into a tool and ask it, “Tell me what this says.” One is, it’s an inconvenience that we shouldn’t have to do. And two is, how do you know what’s right? Because those tools do make mistakes. And what if they miss the one important thing that says they’re allowed to use your images for any purpose whatsoever for the rest of your life and beyond?
Zoe: Yeah. Yeah. That’s interesting too, because on LinkedIn, I post quite often. And I post a lot of images of where I’ve been and who I’m with, and tag the people that I’m there with. But in there, through LinkedIn, I have it set to select the images and not just have full access to my photos. But I had that on Facebook, and then I switched it to allow access to everything. And I keep coming back to, “Man, what rights do they have to the images that I’m sharing?” So it’s a catch-22. It’s convenient, but then what is it going to be in the long run?
Karen: Yeah, LinkedIn is an interesting case. I don’t know if you had heard, summer of 2024, there was a big flap about them basically opting all of us into whatever we had put on LinkedIn up to that point in time, they were going to use for AI, no choice. You could opt out going forward. But other than that, they were just saying, “Nope, we’ve taken it all. You can only opt out of what we do with your new data from now on.” Actually ended up being two places you had to go to fully opt out, and that was kind of a surprise. And we didn’t find out from the company; we found out from other people.
Zoe: Yeah. That seems very crooked and I didn’t even know about it until I was reading through some of the information that you shared with me and I’m like, “Wait, what?”
Karen: Yeah, there are two places you need to go to opt out. I’ll get you the links for that if you’re interested. Some people say they want to opt out to protect their personal data and such. And other people say, “You know what? I want my views to get represented in the world. My views are different than other people’s and I think they need to be represented.” And they purposely don’t opt out for that reason. It’s an individual choice. My choice lends to lean on the side of, “No, you can’t use and keep my data for whatever purposes you may want.” But everyone has to decide that.
I pretty much stopped using Facebook when they refused to allow us to opt out a couple of summers ago. I basically went and deleted all the stuff off my account, all those years of posts and pictures. The one thing that I didn’t delete was, I have a group in Facebook for my late husband’s friends, and there’s pictures and memories. So there’s stories there that they tell about him and I thought, “You know, I don’t think it would be right to take that away from them.” So I left it there. But that’s the only thing really that I left in Facebook. I took everything else out.
But I think I saw something where it said that Meta was saying, “Let us look through all the pictures on your phone and we’ll pick out things that you might want to share.” But then they’re seeing everything. They’re seeing the screenshots of a bank transaction. Anything on your phone. I wouldn’t feel comfortable with that, but I’m not really using them anymore. I wonder what your thoughts are about that part of the Meta ecosystem?
Zoe: I think it’s really scary being able to access all of the things that people have access to, or AI or whatever it is that’s able to see what we have. Because, you know, the Edward Snowden thing, the whole whistleblower, what was that? The firm? covering your camera and it’s having access auditorially. My husband and I were here in this room having a conversation the other day, and he said something, and I swear – I don’t know, there’s so many names, Siri and I don’t even know. He said something, and my audio kicked on and said, “I’m listening.” And I was like, “What? We didn’t even say SIRI. Why are you listening?” So finding out how to turn this off, and get the access denied – it’s freaky. I don’t want it to just kick on somewhere in a conversation. And where is that going? I don’t like it.
Karen: Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. One of my earlier guests talked about how she de-Alexa’d her house when she realized that it was listening to her and her parents and conversations that she didn’t want Amazon to have. Yeah. So that’s Totally understandable. ... that can definitely be a little scary.
You mentioned that you use mostly ChatGPT and Claude. Do you have any sense for where they got their data? As a user of the tool, is that something that you feel like they’ve been transparent about or made you aware of at any point? Or is it just kind of not talked about?
Zoe: I think it’s one of those not talked about, at least for where I’ve been figuring ... And then too, I uncheck that I want it to be able to use the information I’m sharing with it. But it’s interesting because the information that I’m sharing with it, I’m asking it to use a web tool and to scrape sites and to go to YouTube and listen to the podcast that I was on, and pull what would be an interesting blog post so that I can get more information out to the public with the information I’m giving it. So I’m feeding it. But How many other people are feeding it for it to be able to garner, in combination with what I’m feeding it? So it’s weird, you know? It’s a wave. And you can use it or you can not use it. But in the end, people are using it, so it’s learning a lot.
Karen: Yeah. I’ve heard some people say that when they use a paid version of a tool that they have a little more protection. Has that been your experience? Or is that something that you feel like, again, whether you use the paid version or not, that they haven’t actually said, “Okay, We’re going to be more careful with your data now.”
Zoe: Because I haven’t paid for a ChatGPT or Claude, I can’t say that. I can’t say either way. And then with Adobe, it’s frustrating to not know, but at the same time, I’m not researching it and I want to use the services, so what can you do?
Karen: Yeah. Yeah. A lot of people feel like that’s the tradeoff basically. There’s a saying that if you’re not paying for it, then you’re the product. Have you heard that?
Zoe: I haven’t, but that makes so much sense.
Karen: Yeah. Still, if that’s a tradeoff that we’re knowingly choosing to make, that’s one thing. But if it’s not really being shared with us, “This is what we’re going to do with all this data that you’re putting in”, then it’s not really an informed decision about making that tradeoff.
Zoe: I don’t know. See, because then it’s a catch-22, again, where I’m giving it the information. And if it’s only using the information I give it and not pulling from the consensus, then it’s giving me much more limited information because I’ve only given it limited access.
Karen: It sounds like with Meta that they are maybe using your data. But do you know of any cases where your personal information has been used? There’s what we do intentionally, and then there are things like – as members of the public, we go and get a driver’s license. Or people on LinkedIn will get the blue check mark by sharing their passports and such. There are a lot of different ways that our information might be used. Do you know many cases where yours has been used?
Zoe: I really hadn’t even thought about it. And then I was looking, TSA biometrics, and bleh, you know? When you start thinking about all the ways that it can be or probably has been used, it makes me feel icky.
Karen: Yeah. Even things like streaming movie service or an audio service – they want to know if you’re old enough. Okay, but they don’t need your exact birth date, right? But they ask for it. And people think that they’re entitled to ask for it, and we assume that they’ll protect it. And in a lot of cases, neither of those is true.
Zoe: Yeah. I know people that intentionally use inaccurate birth dates just to prove they’re over 18, but they don’t want people to know, so
Karen: Yeah. There’s probably something in their terms of service that says you’re not supposed to do that, but I definitely know of people that do that as well, and I don’t fault them one bit. It’s like, “You don’t need my real birthday.”
Zoe: Yeah. It’s a game. Yeah. And one of these days is going to come back to bite us.
Karen: Yes. Well, I think we’ve covered that part of the topic pretty well. So do you know of any cases where a company having your data, or using your content has ever created any issues for you? Do you know of any cases where your videos or your writing has been scraped or stolen? Or have you had phishing attempts that you’ve had to deal with, anything like that?
Zoe: Personally, not off the top of my head. But recently, my husband had his identity stolen.
Karen: Oh, wow.
Zoe: Yeah. It got to the point where they notified him that he was going to be getting his first workers’ comp check. And my husband was like, “What?” So having to jump through the hoops to backtrack and let them know, no, he’s not been fired from his position of 26 years and he never filed for workers’ compensation. And the person who managed to get his information had everything right. It looked like they had probably gone to LinkedIn to get the information in combination with what they stole somewhere. And they just had, like, one year wrong.
Karen: Wow. Was he able to get it resolved?
Zoe: Yeah.
Karen: But that’s probably quite a lot of hassle.
Zoe: Yeah. And that’s the thing, you know. Yeah, it was a hassle. And I feel bad for people who have to jump through so many hoops just to prove that they are the person, when the person who’s claiming they are the person has a lot of the same information.
Karen: Yeah. One point that a lot of people have brought up is that this whole stealing of data started happening long before AI was a commonplace experience for people to use. It just made it a lot easier to exploit after data has been stolen. I get multiple data breach notices every year. The latest one I got was from a healthcare provider, and one of their data systems got breached. Another one was from a COBRA insurance provider. Knock on wood, nothing bad has happened yet as a result of it. But it seems like breaches are very common. But now, AI tools can scrape that data and incorporate it. And then it’s really impossible to get it corrected, even.
Zoe: Yeah. It makes you feel very vulnerable once you’ve had your information stolen. 30 years ago-ish, when my husband and I were first married, I had my identity stolen. And I worked at the bank that-
Karen: Oh, wow.
Zoe: Yeah, they had taken a credit card and they were like, “ Mrs. Martin, were you in, I don’t know, Barbados or somewhere, having a $300 meal?” And I’m like, “Yeah, no, I’m working in a little town in Kansas that you’ve probably never heard of. “ So that was frustrating. But yeah, it makes you feel very vulnerable once you’ve had your identity stolen.
Karen: Wow. Yeah. So that’s a direct case right there showing that this is not really new. It just may be worse. But then we also have tools that can help to detect fraud and that are based on – it’s not generative AI, but it is machine learning. And so machine learning tools can try to help to flag fraud, things like that.
Zoe: Yeah. And it was a security breach that my husband, his identity was stolen from. Because it was, I don’t know, maybe a week and a half later that he got the notification after the security breach that his first workers’ comp check was coming to our address.
Karen: Wow, that was fast!
Zoe: Yeah.
Karen: Final question, then we could talk about anything else that you want. We’ve talked about the way these companies are handling our data. Public distrust of these companies has been growing recently. And I think that’s kind of healthy, because now we know more about what they’re doing, and we know that we need to be more careful and that they haven’t necessarily earned our trust. Do you have any thoughts on what it would take for you to feel like you could actually trust a company with your data, with your contents? Or are there any companies that you do trust? And what would it take for you to trust one of them?
Zoe: Oh, that’s a really interesting question because what stood out to me the most was, are there any companies that you do trust? And I don’t think there are. I don’t say everyone, but most of them are using AI because it’s convenient. I was just here in Dallas, there was a lunch-and-learn. There was a gentleman who spoke about the AI services and the businesses that he works with. And he brought to light, there was a company, I don’t know if it was one that he personally worked with, but he teaches companies how to use AI. And there was nearly 10,000 employees at this organization. And once they integrated AI, I think 3,000 or 4,000 people lost their job overnight. And that just blew my mind because I’m a very empathetic person, and I’m like, three or 4,000 people had families, right? And mortgages, and health insurance that’s out the window now, and what in the world? And it’s no wonder emotionally, we have a lot going on in the country. Because things like that, they’re happening, and they’re happening to a lot of people. So my heart just goes out. And I don’t know that there’s an answer. I definitely don’t have one. But I wish that we could find a way to somehow work together to where we’re not having to put people out on the street.
Karen: Yeah, that’s one thing that some of my guests have talked about is this idea that these big AI companies – the phrase that was used by one of my friends, and I thought I was pretty apt, was that they are socializing the inputs: they are taking their input, their data from everywhere, just without consent, without compensation. But then they are privatizing the outputs. They are keeping the profits. And so some people were getting massively wealthy, and now we’re starting to see the repercussions. The AI company just made a bunch of money on that 10,000-employee company, but now you have 3,000 or 4,000 people who are out of a job, and the economy isn’t really keeping up and is becoming more imbalanced. As you said, for empathetic people, that’s a tough thing to witness and to know what to do about.
Zoe: Yeah. And there’s only so much as far as nonprofits being able to lend a hand. There’s only so much money. And that’s a really hard one for me. I just want to be able to help everyone.
Karen: Yeah. There’s a story that maybe is analogous to this. Back when they first started introducing automation in the automobile factories, there was a discussion by some of the executives about what they can do to have fewer workers. And one of them, I want to say it was Henry Ford, said something like, “I want there to be enough workers to be able to afford to buy my cars.”
Zoe: Right.
Karen: Just looking at the whole economic system, it’s a loop. You can’t have consumer products if you don’t have consumers who can afford to buy your products.
Zoe: Yeah. See, catch-22!
Karen: Yeah. And it doesn’t seem like we’ve solved that yet. It’s an aspect, I think, that needs more attention than it’s been getting.
Zoe: Yeah, for sure. Do you have better answers from other guests?
Karen: I wish! I think if anyone out there has better answers, I think they would probably be a lot more prominent, because a lot of people I know are looking for those answers and looking for ways to solve it. I mean, there are some people who are just out for the money.
Zoe: Mm-hmm.
Karen: And then there are other people who are genuinely trying to find a solution for society, something that will help us all have productive futures, and people coming out of college getting jobs, and everything else. And people that need to keep working because they’ve lost their jobs and they need to continue paying for health insurance, which is a whole other topic.
Zoe: Yeah.
Karen: There are a lot of good things that can come from technologies like AI and machine learning, but as they say, technologies are never neutral. They’re not inherently good, they’re not inherently bad, but they are not neutral.1 They have an effect. And it’s in our interest to think about those effects before we just run off wildly adopting them.
Zoe: Yeah. Yeah.
Karen: I’m interested that you don’t trust any companies. I’m not sure that there are any that I trust either. In terms of privacy, I feel like I trust Signal with messaging. So they’re maybe the one exception. I don’t know of many companies that I feel like I truly trust. Apple, yes and no – they’ve done some things. So, at this point, I think my shortlist is Signal.
I appreciate you sharing all your thoughts about AI with us. Do you have anything else that you would like to share with our audience? Any closing thoughts or any upcoming events? You mentioned your book.
Zoe: Yeah, that’s really it. My big baby is the book and giving people an opportunity to find out how they can document their own legacy and the importance of now. We’re just not promised tomorrow. And so, rather than making it a regret for you or a regret for someone else in your family, just get out your phone and tell somebody how much you love them or admire them or what it is you appreciate about them, and send it to them. And, whether they choose to keep it locked in their phone or saved in a Google Doc or whatever, that’s up to them; but you did your part by documenting it.
I’m hoping that one of these days very soon we’re going to be able to have more people doing it with intention. We have our phones. It’s wildly crazy how we can document, whether it’s through our notes app or through just recording the audio of what we want to say, or even a video. There’s so many opportunities that we have at our fingertips, and I would just love for people to use them.
Karen: So if someone has an interest in doing a founder video or recording the family member and working with you, what would be the best way for them to get in touch with you?
Zoe: Oh, Zoe Martin is all my socials and my website is zoemartin.com. They can just DM me. My phone number is on all of the social medias. I would love to just schedule a time to visit with them and find out what it is that they’re wanting to share, so we can make something work for them.
And also, I have a huge community of personal historians that I’m connected to, if I’m across the globe and they don’t want to fly me out or they don’t want to fly here, which they can totally do. I have a friend tomorrow that’s flying in from Canada, so I can record her founder’s video, her life story video, and her brand photo session. They have access to me, but there are other people that I can recommend them to.
Karen: Very cool. So you always work in person with your clients?
Zoe: I prefer to work in person. I can do it virtually, but my preference, again, being empathetic, if there’s an emotional moment and they need someone to hold their hand or give them a hug, I’m very willing to be in the moment with them.
Karen: All right, that’s awesome. Thank you so much, So I appreciate you making the time for the interview, and, I’ll look forward to hearing more about your anthology and your book as they come out. Great to get to know you today. Thank you.
Zoe: Thank you again. I appreciate it, Karen.
Interview References and Links
Zoe Martin on LinkedIn
Zoe Martin Enterprises, LLC
The Zoe Martin on Substack
About this interview series and newsletter
This post is part of our AI6P interview series on “AI, Software, and Wetware”. It showcases how real people around the world are using their wetware (brains and human intelligence) with AI-based software tools, or are being affected by AI.
And we’re all being affected by AI nowadays in our daily lives, perhaps more than we realize. For some examples, see post “But I Don’t Use AI”:
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Kranzberg’s First Law of Technology. https://lawshun.com/article/what-is-kranzberg-first-law-of-technology
