In this episode of Hello Chaos, host Jennifer engages with IP attorney Doug Lineberry to discuss the intersection of intellectual property and artificial intelligence. They explore the legal implications of AI in trademark and copyright infringement, the challenges faced by small businesses in navigating these issues, and the importance of human oversight in AI-generated content. The conversation also touches on the risks of misinformation, the need for critical thinking, and the significance of brand authenticity in maintaining consumer trust.
Key Takeaways
Timestamps
00:00 The Impact of AI on Trademark and Copyright Infringement
06:24 Introduction to Intellectual Property and AI
09:38 Legal Implications of AI in Legal Services
12:36 Choosing the Right Legal Representation
15:32 The Role of Human Expertise in AI Utilization
19:53 Protecting Intellectual Property in the Age of AI
24:15 Ethical Considerations in AI Usage
26:55 Future Implications of AI on the Internet
28:34 The Evolution of AI and Its Implications
30:52 AI Hallucinations and Misinformation
33:15 Fandom Wars and Media Authenticity
35:54 Critical Thinking in the Age of AI
38:56 The Importance of Authenticity in Branding
45:23 Legal Considerations in AI Usage
52:22 The Future of AI and Business Integrity
57:56 Introduction to Chaos and Order
Connect with Doug:
Website: https://www.offitkurman.com/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/doug-lineberry-b26137316/
Email: doug.lineberry@offitkurman.com
Direct Phone: 864-256-4875
Hello Chaos (00:14)
Welcome to Hello Chaos, the weekly podcast exploring the messy and chaotic minds and lives of founders, entrepreneurs, and innovators. Today I am excited to have back again one of our favorite guests. This is Doug Lineberry coming at us from Offit Kurman and he's an IP attorney. He's been on our show before giving us all the down and dirty around things about trademarking and
protect legal protection of your brand and your business. But I'm excited to have this conversation today with Doug, because we're going to talk everything around IP trademark, but also legal issues that have come in, really come into play around AI coming from, mean, he's a lawyer, he's got to deal with all that from an illegal perspective. And I can't wait to hear Doug, I can't wait to hear your thoughts, but also,
You know, we come at it from a media and creative and entertainment arts and our industry is being attacked like crazy from the actors and our TV and film productions, but also in the marketing agency world. We are seeing AI and how it's being used and we use it. And so I think this is going to be a great conversation. So Doug Lineberry welcome, welcome to the show. Welcome back.
Doug Lineberry (01:43)
Thanks, Jennifer.
Hello Chaos (01:44)
How are you doing?
Doug Lineberry (01:46)
You know good looks like the hurricane is passed. I actually power back. I'm going to warn y'all my 15 year old daughter got her learners on Tuesday, so Gringles roads have become vastly more dangerous. I'm just going to let you straight out if you see go ahead.
Hello Chaos (01:57)
Well, at least she wasn't driving around when there were no lights anywhere.
Doug Lineberry (02:02)
Thank God, Yeah, thank God, no for that. But no, otherwise, doing pretty good. How are you, Jennifer?
Hello Chaos (02:09)
Good. Yeah, we got power back before you did, but not that many, many days before you, but minimal damage. had a couple of large trees fall down at the office, but no damage to anybody, just more cleanup. And we were, you know, skated free. So, you know, at home where we had huge trees all around us and neighbors houses, that major damage, but we were grateful and thankful for what
what little damage that we had. So, and we pray and give positive vibes to everything, everybody in Western Carolina, Western North Carolina, Asheville area, got a lot of friends in that area who are really suffering. So we're, you know, all the prayers and the positive vibes that we can send their way. Definitely, definitely. So let's talk, well, first of all,
Is there anything update that we need to share regarding trademarking and anything around intellectual property that we need to do an update on? Anything new in the last year? Or is it kind of like the, just a good reminder?
Doug Lineberry (03:25)
I mean as far as new revelations, I think AI has really made infringement so much easier. And what do I mean by infringement? It's like, know, AI y'all, when we have to think about it, it is clever in the sense of it'll do what you tell it to do. But it does not have moral compass. It doesn't understand right and wrong.
Hello Chaos (03:31)
yeah.
Doug Lineberry (03:43)
It's very black, white, zero, one is how it thinks. And so with respect to trademarks, we've seen a lot of things lately in trademarks, copyrights, especially, and potentially patents. You'll tell an AI, do this. For example, we now have a new statute in South Carolina that is specifically directed to our realtors. I'm looking off screen so I can actually give you the accurate number for it.
Hello Chaos (04:06)
Yeah.
Doug Lineberry (04:07)
And you know, this is kind of neat because most folks I think consider South Carolina kind of like, you guys are a little slow on getting us the law and everything else. But in this case, I think we've done sort of a rocket sled on this and it came out last April or this April, April 24 and South Carolina code section 4057-280. And again, for the folks who want to read it 40-57-820. And what it says is something that a lot of people failed to understand.
about artificial intelligence is that if a realtor was to tell an AI, go make me a description of 123 Primrose Lane. And the AI goes out and does that. And it says, hey, you know, here's a description of the house. Here's a picture of the house. And turns it back to the realtor and says, here you go. And the realtor publishes it on their website. be some problems. Because this AI doesn't understand right and wrong. It went out and it found a picture of the house. Guess what? Some artist took a picture of that house. Real estate photographers are
are a very special breed and are very selective about how they give licenses. So boom, copyright infringement number one. Two, it's gonna go out and say Primrose had sold once before, it'll go out and find that write up and be like, look, here's the description of Primrose. And so it will then take that and supply it back to the realtor who asked it to go do this.
Hello Chaos (05:08)
Yeah.
Doug Lineberry (05:29)
Then, what if it lifts something from the web like another, like a trademark logo of another company or someone's tagline or something like that and the AI doesn't understand, hey, this is someone's property.
Hello Chaos (05:41)
Right.
Doug Lineberry (05:42)
What could potentially happen, Jennifer, is we could have a realtor post up a advertisement for 123 Primrose Lane, and it's gonna have multiple forms of intellectual property infringement. And lo and behold, let's say it told it to set it to music, the AI would have went out and maybe brought in an audio clip. So you could be looking at multiple instances of copyright, possibly trademark infringement, literally for saying, describe a house.
Hello Chaos (06:07)
And are you saying, because we see that on the agency, the bright marketing side too of not using AI as more of an assistant and not putting human thoughts, human editing to be able to go, that we can't use that language or.
Are you seeing people going straight from, I'm gonna grab whatever AI gave and just post it without any human interaction to it?
Doug Lineberry (06:42)
Well, Jennifer, you know the common bottom denominators. Yes, I have. And you guys have to.
And that's what causes some of these problems is that somebody will be in a hurry. You know, we're all on this constant 24-7, you know, my cell phone's attached to my hip, let's all hurry, hurry, hurry. And guess what? AI, unfortunately, feels sort of a lazy need. It will go out and you think it's doing your thinking for you, it's not. If you think about it, the best way to think of an AI is, you'll see the presentation that we're gonna provide for everybody to look to. There's a picture of Mr. Bean copying from somebody else's test. That's AI.
Hello Chaos (06:56)
Right.
Yeah.
Yeah. Yep.
Doug Lineberry (07:17)
That's how you think of it. There's no moral ground here. There's no determination of a right and wrong. You tell AI to go do something and it'll do it. And we all know that if you're busy and say it's a Friday afternoon like it is today, you may be in a hurry to get something out and you may make the cardinal mistake of going publish, post, whatever puts it out there without really thinking, hey, what happened? You might just see this beautiful advertisement for one, two, three Primrose and think, wow, that's what I wanted.
Hello Chaos (07:46)
Right.
Doug Lineberry (07:47)
else's picture, it's someone else's text, the soundtrack to it belongs to somebody else indeed and lo and behold it copied something from the old real estate company who handled this IP port.
Hello Chaos (07:57)
Yeah. So, and I never even thought of it from even that industry. know, the really, are you seeing, I mean, like on the marketing side, from just general agency, we're seeing, I would say, startup agencies, digital agencies that are coming in and they're using AI for SEO, that they're really,
you know, they're using black hat tactics. They're not legit. So like the marketing industry is kind of getting, unfortunately cluttered and is making our industry a little bit more confusing for a business owner, a CEO or marketing teams to really navigate to go like who's legit and who's not. And a lot of those like lower price, like I'll promise you the world.
you know, Legion, those are all AI bots, services, but I didn't know if that's, know, are you seeing any of that on the, like in your industry, legal of AI kind of infused or replacement for legal services of like, hey, this is a, we're a legal, you know, advisor on the cheek.
And it's really just driven by, you know, a couple of guys or girls just using AI and maybe not knowing how to do it, they're cheap legal services.
Doug Lineberry (09:38)
Do you see that, Jennifer? We've had some very horrible examples of it lately. There was a case, I believe it was in New York. The attorneys on one side used artificial intelligence to create the brief. My firm, Offa Kurman, that's for both.
Hello Chaos (09:49)
Ooh.
Doug Lineberry (09:50)
do not use AI, that is our firm policy. These guys used to create a brief and what the AI did was instead of being Mr. Bean, it sort of turned into Pennywise the Clown from it. It went out and started making up case law because it said, hey, we want the brief to say this. The AI went out there and it couldn't find a case to say it. So it's like, I'll just make up a case. Here's Smith v. Jones and it says what you want it to say. And I'm gonna throw a...
Hello Chaos (10:14)
And so that lawyer's using that case, that made up case, and looking like an idiot.
Doug Lineberry (10:19)
Huh? it's worse than that. Because when you submit it to the judge, Jennifer, their clerks have to try to find this. And guess what? It's made up from whole cloth, but they have to look for Smith v. Jones. God knows how many of those there are. And it's got some citation from a court, and they have to go, OK, what if the numbers are wrong? It really wastes a lot of judicial resources. And that's just for one case. This particular case was replete with them.
Hello Chaos (10:30)
Right.
Doug Lineberry (10:42)
And so that really is something we have seen. Another problem we've seen is folks will tell AI to generate legal documents. And y'all, let's explain, you today on this gorgeous blue day on a Friday, falls in the air, we're in South Carolina. We're in the Fourth Judicial Circuit. If you were to try to use a document from New York in the Second or California in the Ninth, probably won't work here, especially like in an employment context or an area to where South Carolina really differs, where the Fourth Circuit really
from the second and or the ninth. So if you send an AI out, Jennifer, guess what? It doesn't know what circuit you're in. It's just going to be language. And if you said, hey, I want this language, it's not going to come back and be like, hey, let me warn you time out that this doesn't work in South Carolina. It's simply going to say, here's your document. Have a great Friday.
Hello Chaos (11:17)
Right.
Right, ugh, I didn't even think about that either. Yikes, so what, so you work with small businesses, you work with large businesses. Are you, I mean, and we will post and share the presentation that you gave, kind of gives all this information, but is there, like, what do we need to be asking ourselves as company owners or the people that are protecting our company, like,
if I hire somebody, know, or I shouldn't, one, I shouldn't be doing it myself. There is no DIY legal. That's, don't try to do that. But if you do, you know, get a somebody online that's like, hey, I can do that. 99 bucks, it's cheap or whatever. What are the things that we should be looking for to go, don't, if it's too good to be true, if someone's a lawyer that charges you $5,000 for this,
and you're like, you get somebody that can do it for a hundred bucks, it's probably too good to be true.
Doug Lineberry (12:36)
Yeah, no, I mean that instinct's a great instinct, Jennifer, is to say, know, and here you go, Jennifer, you're sophisticated, we've done work before, and you know that there's a realm of pricing for this, and you're right, 99 bucks for anything legal, no.
Hello Chaos (12:47)
Right.
Doug Lineberry (12:51)
And unfortunately, there are a lot of folks out there who will provide it. And I think your point's well taken about the marketing industry that uses AI to generate. There's a ton of them that can use AI to generate legal docs. You know, it'll generate a case, it'll come up with a contract. Heck, it might even try to fill out your SEC forms for you. And so what I would tell folks to be worried about is this. You know, who can you yell at at the end of the day?
Hello Chaos (13:07)
Oof.
Doug Lineberry (13:13)
If you use this $99 company, can you yell at them? If they get you in trouble document wise, do you have any recourse? They're probably out in Utah and the people who set it up have moved on to their 15th company since then. If you've got an attorney that you know, an attorney you know where they're at and you know which bar they're with, you've got a lot of recourse. If I do something wrong, I've got the South Carolina bar to keep me in check. I can lose my license for doing dumb stuff. I kind of like to eat and pay my mortgage, so here we are. I don't want to lose my license.
Hello Chaos (13:28)
Mm-hmm.
Right?
Doug Lineberry (13:43)
That's why encourage folks have a relationship with an attorney or if you need an attorney, ask friends who they know. It's like, hey, I need an attorney for wills and estates. I've got plenty of people I can refer you to. But unless you ask that question, Jennifer, you're just kind of flailing in the dark. And I know everybody thinks, hey, I can keyboard this. I'm going to go Google it, Bing it, whatever, and figure it out.
Hello Chaos (13:49)
Right?
right.
Doug Lineberry (14:06)
Problem is you want to have for an attorney or an accountant or a marketer you want them to be somebody you can occasionally smack in the head if something happens wrong and That's really a big hit is that AI has become almost anonymous You know almost in the eyes behind the curtain and you don't want that with your professional services
Hello Chaos (14:15)
Right?
Right, the other thing I didn't know if you, and that's a great tip and I mean, I can't stress that enough of, and I never thought of it the way you phrase it of, who are you gonna yell at, right? Who can you pick up the phone or ask 10 questions for clarification? And if you're not working with a law firm, or legal counsel,
Doug Lineberry (14:45)
Yep.
Hello Chaos (14:51)
or a marketing agency that literally you can pick up the phone and have a human interaction with somebody, then they're probably not the company you wanna do business with.
Doug Lineberry (15:01)
Absolutely not. And that anonymity is not something you want. You want a known quantity.
Hello Chaos (15:07)
That's right. So the other thing that we see that comes up a lot, you know, on the bright side, we work with different clients and things that we've, like we've had to have a conscientious effort and teach our team things. Like we went through, you know, over the last few years, I think we have tested well over 250 different AI tools, specifically around,
know, copywriting, art direction, know, ad design, photography, videography, know, cinematography, all that stuff. And we found things that are, there's just pure junk out there. I mean, pure junk. Even stuff in like the media buying space and all that. I mean, we have tested so many of these freaking tools. I can't even tell you how many tools we've, because, you know, as a business owner, I'm like, well, gosh, if I can, you know,
bring a tool in and help us lower our rates or help us work faster or more productive, of course we're gonna look at it. our art directors and our graphics folks looked at a bunch of the tools, used them, tested them, copywriters and our media folks. And what we found was you have to have a level of experience
I mean, even with just like basic chat GPT, right? You've gotta have a level of experience of one, what to write in the prompt. And then, so that's human. That is like a lot of experience also to know how to ask AI to do certain things, you know, very specific. But then also one of like, what do you get in return and how to like edit that, to weigh those things to go, that's junk.
Doug Lineberry (16:46)
Exactly. Yep.
Hello Chaos (16:58)
that is unacceptable, that's not on brand voice, that doesn't fit, like this is not the color, even though you put in the colors and all that, but we're looking at it through, most of us are 20, 30 years experienced, so we can look at and go, that's not hitting it. But we're seeing just a bunch of like, well, I'll just publish, we're seeing other smaller, less experienced agencies that are just throwing junk out there, and we can tell we're like,
Well, that was AI, and so all of a sudden your brand looks like a messy cluttered footprint, and it's all over the place. But the other thing that we, as we, and from an agency perspective, we do use AI tools, but they're really to make our current teams, it didn't replace anybody, it just made our teams more productive.
Doug Lineberry (17:34)
Yep.
Hello Chaos (17:57)
because we're still doing human input and then we're also human pulling it out and then editing. It's just saving a little time in between of the operations. But those are experienced people that are doing that and using that expertise. That is what we found. There is nothing that has replaced
that human knowledge and experience from those, you know, the both ends. The things that we've also, you know, had to kind of be very mindful because we represent and we manage other people's brands and we keep those protected because we understand, you know, those copyrights and that, you know, what can we say? How do we make sure that we're consistent with those, you know, talking about the brand, those copyrights?
What we also have been very cautious of using AI to put anything, anything in the AI sphere that is protected to that company or that brand. Because once you, like if I put in something that's like a patent knowledge, even if I'm trying to churn out maybe a white paper or something for a client,
Doug Lineberry (19:21)
you
Hello Chaos (19:26)
Like,
had those conversations with the marketing teams that we work with on the client side of like, shit, those were shits for them to go, that's how AI works. It's like, just because you are using even just a simple, like Grammarly, do not have Grammarly come in. If you have that as a Chrome extension on your Microsoft and they are reviewing a patent document, they've scanned it.
Grammarly sits on top of the open AI and your data sources, all of your protected, what makes you unique, all that stuff just went into the ecosystem for any AI. And I don't know if that right there, that state like.
Doug Lineberry (20:39)
you
Hello Chaos (20:45)
We seem to have those conversations, like we know that as our collective creative and marketing teams, but I'm gonna tell you Doug, when I go out and we tell that to our marketing counterparts at the client side, that is new news to them.
Doug Lineberry (21:03)
Yeah, you know Jennifer, it's weird how that really dovetails with IP. You'll see again referring back to the slide, I've got one specifically in there because you're absolutely right. A lot of folks think AI is your best friend, I'm gonna let it ride on my platform, sell my data. That's atrociously wrong, especially from an IP standard because guess what? Companies have these things called trade secrets. You know that could be a...
Hello Chaos (21:09)
Yeah.
Yes.
Doug Lineberry (21:24)
marketing plan, could be an expansion plan, could be a customer list, a pricing list. If you bring in AI to help you make it look pretty, guess what? Just like you said, you've put all that out in the net.
Hello Chaos (21:34)
You've now put it out there on the OpenAI source, yep.
Doug Lineberry (21:38)
What if your Coca-Cola and you do that with the secret recipe? Hey, help me, how do you think of an idea to present the recipe that looks better? You bring in AI to the Coca-Cola recipe and guess what? You have put one of the preferred secret formulas in the world out in the net because you brought in this thing that doesn't have a moral compass. It doesn't get right or wrong. And so.
Hello Chaos (21:55)
No. Well, it doesn't know. It doesn't know that's a secret.
Doug Lineberry (21:59)
I don't well, and even if you told it, you know, what a secret to a machine. Nothing because the machine's like, no, that is data. That is data. And a really good point on that one, Jennifer, so I of hammer this home.
Hello Chaos (22:03)
Nothing.
That's right.
Doug Lineberry (22:10)
If it is not a filed trademark and not a filed patent, it's a trade secret. And all trade secrets have to be sacrosanct. Have to be. Now, if you've already filed it with the trademark officer, filed it with the patent office, and it's published, that's OK. You can have it come into it. But unfortunately, folks don't make that delineation. They just bring AI in. They bring up the document. They start typing. They don't realize that the AI is just a sponge. It's taking all this info in and is setting it up to the cloud and out to the server.
Hello Chaos (22:37)
Right?
Doug Lineberry (22:40)
really thought you were working on on your computer at home or work in a sort of a confined private space is unfortunately up for the stage now. It's to be seen, it's to be exploited.
Hello Chaos (22:47)
Right.
Well, and a lot of people don't realize like, like, grammarly, they think that's a, well, that's just an automatic, you know, know, spell check. And it's like that, that base is open AI. And even when you talk about, you know, you know, we're seeing, when we saw this with the, with the media industry, the creative arts industry, like that, what SAG-AFRA, the actors,
and writers were fighting during the strike was, and they're still fighting, it's the cloning of their image. Well, it's interesting, we were looking at how do we clone ourselves for our own videos? And then Chandler, our producer, was like, ooh. But once they cloned, like.
it's now out there. Then people have my voice, people have my image. And some people are okay with that, but it's almost, it's the same thing of the 23andMe conversations that are going on of like, okay, now this company is up for sale and you have now wavered your DNA away. And I mean, that's not AI, but it's still kind of that similar of
Doug Lineberry (24:09)
Yep. Yep.
It is.
Hello Chaos (24:15)
I'm allowing an AI technology to, I mean, that's what actors are fighting to go, I don't want to have my voice, my likeness being used and me not getting compensated for it.
Doug Lineberry (24:33)
That's right.
We know, and that's a really good point, because right now with all the Puff Daddy, P. Diddy issues that are out there, there's a song that's been put out that everybody's like, no, it's a deep fake, Justin Bieber didn't sing the song, but guess what? The AI went and cobbled it together and it sounds like Justin Bieber. And they told it what to say for the lyrics and there it is. And so that may not be cloning, but it's definitely another use of AI that nobody thought about until some person trying to be funny probably, or trying to be harmful pick said, hey, make me a
Hello Chaos (24:49)
Yeah.
Doug Lineberry (25:04)
song in using Justin Bieber's voice and here we go. And so it's that simple and horrible.
Hello Chaos (25:09)
Well, yeah, is that, mean, that's what, I mean, Scarlett Johansson's been fighting that. had approached, OpenAI had approached her to be the spokesperson, and then she was like, you know, I declined that. She declined the contract. She was like, you know what, I just, I'm morally against OpenAI. And then their launch campaign, basically they cloned her voice and she became the,
it sounded just like her to be the narrator to their video of their launch. So now she's suing them to go, this is exactly why I didn't want to, yeah.
Doug Lineberry (25:51)
And here I am.
That's a really good point too, Jennifer, especially for your clients is look, even though AI can do it, it doesn't mean it should. You're right, privacy are still out there. What about slander? What about libel? There's things that are never gonna leave and you have to understand that if you tell AI to do something and it doesn't, that's why that Realtor statute's so important. The court at the end of the day said, you may wanna blame AI for this, but you set this in motion, Mr. Realtor and Ms. Realtor. Yeah.
Hello Chaos (26:13)
Yeah.
Yeah, you paid for that AI tool.
Doug Lineberry (26:22)
That's right, you caused this, you're responsible for the results.
Hello Chaos (26:25)
Wow. That, yeah, I just, you know, we've tried to be really cautious and mindful of how we use AI. The other thing, you know, I don't know if this is, kind of gets me into the, what's gonna happen, you know, if I look out in the sphere, because you you hear these predictions of AI is gonna destroy basically the internet, because it's gonna get so overly cluttered.
with just nobody's gonna know what's truth, what's real, what's fake, it's gonna overwhelm and it's, they call it like crashing the net. Are you worried about that or do you think we're gonna, we're starting to see the real implications of, there's some legal implications, there's personal, moral, ethical implications.
Doug Lineberry (27:06)
Sure.
Hello Chaos (27:22)
Do you think we're gonna see kind of a ceiling before it kind of just melts?
Doug Lineberry (27:27)
That's a great question.
what I did was I went to two different AI's, Jennifer, and said, hey, one of you make me, the two I went to were actually, want to chat GPT and draw me a picture of Papa Smurf riding a T-Rex. And chat GPT, no, and it's in the presentation slide. You guys can look at it.
Hello Chaos (27:45)
Yeah.
Doug Lineberry (27:46)
I said, you know, I mean, I'm a Smurf guy growing up. I like Smurfs. And so I'm like, draw me a picture of Poppet Smurf riding a T-Rex. And I wish this image would come up because it's really nightmare fuel. The amalgam it makes, let me just try to see if I can get just that slide to come up. If it does, it'll be awesome. So chat GPT basically said, you know, I can't really do that. You know, eh, not my thing, not my thing. And so.
Really what happened is though is I went to another AI, it deepai.org and I said, hey, know, draw me Papa Smurf with a T-Rex, riding a T-Rex. unfortunately the screen is being a booger, but I can at least show T-Rex, I hope in this slide. So do y'all see this nightmare right here, Jennifer? Okay.
Hello Chaos (28:32)
Yes. Ugh!
Doug Lineberry (28:34)
Yeah, and so you guys, this is Deep AI and said, you know, chat GPT everything going, Hey, you know, I can't do this. Maybe you can use these programs to do it. It's last sentence was though, maybe you should be worried about copyright. Deep AI said, Nope, you told me to do something and here you go. So you have something that looks like a two-tailed back finned colored. thought this one those family podcasts. Don't you say it, but
Hello Chaos (28:50)
Right.
Is it really two-tailed? It looks like something else.
Doug Lineberry (29:03)
That's also open to interpretation and at least it's got three legs and two arms. And y'all, this is AI.
This is the worry of it because now, unfortunately, we have a situation to where these AI are now starting to learn from each other. And you see garbage like Papa Smurf riding a T-Rex that another AI thinks this is valid. This is a Papa Smurf in a T-Rex. This is good because that common sense factor is not there. And you've got a great point. What happens to the net when it is so full of this gobbledygook? Because they're having problems now trying to train AI on each other because they have the tendency to make nice
Hello Chaos (29:11)
Yeah.
That's right.
Yeah, yeah.
Doug Lineberry (29:42)
And the other AIs see the nightmare fuel and they're like, well, that must be real. It's out here on the web. You told me to look for this. So here it is. And you know, another great thing that happens too, and I love this concept, Jennifer, we can make AIs hallucinate. And you're like, well, what do you do? get them drugs, you feed them drugs. Absolutely. That's the response. And so here's what's going to happen. Me, you, Jennifer, and Chandler, and say a thousand of our friends, we're going to start typing things about polar bears or vegan.
Hello Chaos (29:48)
Right.
What?
Right.
Doug Lineberry (30:10)
Polar bears eat mushrooms. And we're just going to keep hitting articles on that. Polar bear at the Arctic eating a mushroom. Polar bear in the Arctic browsing through the Arctic mushroom fields looking for mushrooms. And the more of that we put out, these AI, again, no common sense. They're just looking for data. And if someone says, explain a polar bear to me, and if we have put out enough of this bad information, the AI will literally start returning information that says, hey, polar bears are known vegans. They eat mushrooms. Because the fresh data
is the fresh data. You know, hey, that must mean something. This is recent. And so the machines don't have that ability, A, for common sense, or satire, humor, any of the other things that we would get. And so now...
Hello Chaos (30:41)
spray.
They're just curating data. I mean, we're seeing that in fandoms. I'm gonna reveal something about me. don't know if you knew, but Chandler's heard me talk about a little bit. So I'm a fan fiction writer. It's a hobby. I'm not gonna tell which fandoms I participate in, but... No.
Doug Lineberry (30:57)
Absolutely.
Mm-hmm.
Awesome.
You can't dangle that hook and not bait it. Come on now.
Hello Chaos (31:21)
Because it's honestly, it's like soft porn is what I write. It's not like it's just, it's whatever, it's creative and it's just it gives me an outlet. So I'm on AO3 and I'm on Tumblr across multiple fandoms. But you see the conversations around AI. In those communities, we kind of laugh at it because it's like, you're gonna have,
AI, right, your fanfic? Like, what's the point? you know, we're kinda, we're not seeing it there, but what we do see in these, like, I call it wars. You know, in DC, you've got people that, you know, ship this or believe in this, and it's, you know, it's these fan, Star Trek has big, Star Wars has big fandom wars. And,
But where we're seeing AI that's frustrating is in where fandom meets media publishing. And we saw that in the 2016 elections. We saw it in 2020. We're seeing it now where people can't distinguish between what's a legit article, what's legit media. I mean, you and I have been seeing stuff from Western North Carolina that are AI photos.
like completely AI created imagery and then that gets shared and posted on, I would say more mainstream, know, social platforms and people can't tell the difference. But what we see in the, like I said, in the fandom wars, which just gets, just an example of this is what's happening in mainstream. What you see on Facebook, what you see on Instagram, LinkedIn, that.
in fandom wars you'll get bloggers that will then create articles on their own because they're writers right they're freelance they're passionate about certain things they will create their own little newsletters that sit have no visitors but because it's just their wordpress or something that's like like i said that's that's out on a live journal somewhere and it's their opinions
They might cite a recent, like something that happened at a Comic Con or something that happened from one of the actors, know, or celebrities, you know, interviews. So they'll use a little bit, twist it and twist and then they'll send those. And so then you've got these AI curated media outlets like Buzzfeed that are legit media.
variety, Hollywood Reporter, you know, they start curating some of these articles and all of sudden it's like, these like rumors and false information and that's just in fandom. And then you see stuff getting spilled over. It's like the same type of stuff is happening on within our news group of people have fake headers who instead of it being wallstreetjournal.com, it'll be wsj-
U.S. or dot S.C. and people just see well they took the same header and all of a sudden they're like I quoted a Wall Street Journal article and it's like click further because it wasn't Wall Street Journal. That was a that was a fake reporter. That's a fake headline that you're like it's and it's happening like at a massive massive like media scale.
Doug Lineberry (34:51)
Yeah.
You know, Jennifer, I think you've summed it up so well, like, you you've seen the memes lately that where they're saying the onion is running out of content because it's hard to believe what's going on right now. And that's really sort of the hammer of it is that we now have this tool that's being misused. I mean, there's no other way to put it, you know, and if someone has an opinion or a viewpoint, they can create their own foundational logic for it, you know?
Hello Chaos (35:18)
Right.
Right.
Right? Right?
Doug Lineberry (35:32)
You know, you've seen that happen on Wikipedia before. People will go in and alter it to their viewpoint. You know, they'll go in and add these things to it. But you're right now, you've got like what looks like on a surface glance, authenticity. You know, valid, relevant sources. And so I think that is today's main takeaway is we want folks to dig below this surface. You can't...
Hello Chaos (35:37)
That's right.
Right.
Yeah.
Doug Lineberry (35:54)
take things at a face value anymore. You're gonna have to do a little research, which you know in this day and age when everybody's hyper focused on everything, you're going to have to take a breath. You're going to step back and be like, wait, it says that, but is that really what was said?
Hello Chaos (36:06)
Like, it's almost, you know, I'm hoping, because you you get worried about, you you and I have got kids that, you know, we're trying to raise to be, you know, it's not just about what you're taught, it's really more important about how you think and teach you how to think and do like critical thinking, because you'll succeed in life if you know how to do that, right? And I feel like,
Doug Lineberry (36:25)
I agree.
Hello Chaos (36:33)
For some point, you know, we kind of got away from that and people were just going, you know, it's a click of the button I can share it or I can be you know, a social justice warrior and you know, sit behind a keyboard yelling at people the Karens Just being you know, the the mean people online bullying but You know, but now I feel like maybe AI because it's getting to the point of
It's the curation of information and then being served up in what we would consider more legit areas of our lives are not real. And so we've got to go back to that. Okay, now we've got to remember how to think. I got to take a little bit extra time or if they're evaluating law firms or if they're evaluating
Doug Lineberry (37:24)
That's right.
Hello Chaos (37:32)
marketing firms or if I'm like what news outlets that I want to pay attention to and look at like who is actually writing it. Like I now click on the reporter to go was that a fake blog like an empty profile because then I know that's just that was literally a bot that wrote that.
and that person doesn't even exist. And I mean, that's how far I've had to go, because I I see it so much.
Doug Lineberry (38:09)
I think that's a great lesson to teach everybody is, if you see something that causes that question mark go up, kind like you said about $99 legal documents, we do need that ability. We need people to be told, hey, critical thinking, it's kind of a necessary survival skill. But especially now that it's so hard to tell the authenticity of information. We need the ability to stop for a second because again, everybody's fire and forget, fire and forget.
Hello Chaos (38:27)
Yeah.
Right?
Doug Lineberry (38:33)
But you're absolutely right. Click on that author's name. See if you can find this supported somewhere else. I did the same thing. I saw something on a meme. I'm like, that's weird. I've never heard that. And so what did I do? I jumped out of the meme app. I went over to the internet and I did some searches and lo and behold, it's accurate. But again, it only takes a couple seconds to verify that. But if you publish that stuff and it's wrong, guess what? Your credibility's shot.
Hello Chaos (38:51)
That's right.
That's right. Well, and we look at, know, I think being authentic and authenticity is one of the best words. Because we talk about that, you know, in branding and the more authentic you are, the better you're going to connect. We see that, you know, when you're, if you, you know, if you follow, you're, you know, I'm a pop media junkie. So like I follow a bunch of, you know, writers and, you know, producers, directors of like what's to come in media, you know, film and TV. And you can tell.
Like you can tell movies that were created by committee, right? Now imagine, God, you want AI to now write your next TV show. But even like our human, like we're human and we can even go, we don't like that movie, because it was like mass thought. wasn't, it was just more of like, how do I get fast cash?
Doug Lineberry (39:38)
direct film cast lighting.
Hello Chaos (39:53)
It wasn't authentic to that brand, that franchise, the source material. And I think that can be applied to any brand. Don't you want to be authentic to if it's your personal brand, if it's your company brand? You want it to be more authentic because people will connect with it. Our human brains can seek that out.
And it goes to like, just like, if you see something 99 buck a laffer, like, that doesn't feel right. And so don't get played in that game. we just had a conversation with one of our, with our team this morning talking about like, losing business to these like gamey.
bad actor kind of agencies because they're telling businesses what they want to hear like sure you want 10,000 converted users in what was it 30 days one month you'll get 10,000 and all you have to spend is $3,000 and it's like there is no benchmark there is no any form that would ever get you that and you've got these business owners and market people they're like that sounds great what's
what's to lose for $3,000? It's like, one, the effort that they would have to take to get there, that means they're using every fake junk tactic on your brand. And one, it's probably not gonna work. It's waste of time and money, because they're probably gonna use some AI, and now that junk is out there.
Like you've allowed access to people promoting your brand on a level that is the least authentic and could hurt your credibility.
Doug Lineberry (42:00)
And that's a really good point you put that out, Jennifer, because that'll kill you goodwill on the business instantly. Consumers lose faith, and there you are. I noticed something really weird when the hurricane hit. I won't mention brands because I don't want to get in trouble with anybody. I don't want you to get in trouble.
Hello Chaos (42:14)
Yeah.
Doug Lineberry (42:15)
We went into Publix the Friday afternoon and Publix had generators and we walked into it and I thought this was amazing. I was telling somebody I had lunch with today, same thing. It's like, if I were a company and I walk into a Publix that's pre-apocalyptic, everybody's really worried about what's coming for the next week and it's essentially started to be cleared out. And if I see my product on the shelf, untouched, and I did see this in like two areas, I saw it.
Hello Chaos (42:30)
Right.
yeah.
Doug Lineberry (42:39)
I saw a brand of potato chips and I saw a soft drink. They were there and all of the brands beside them were gone. I'm like, look, those companies need to know something that, you you're not connecting with Greenville, South Carolina in an emergency when people are literally taking what they can get. When they can take it, they stopped and made a conscious effort not to take you.
Hello Chaos (42:55)
when they are desperate.
Doug Lineberry (43:02)
And I think that really speaks a lot about this authenticity is because when your brand hits that level to wear a look, you're not picked in the apocalypse. It's probably due to your messaging and having just a lack of a coherent goodwill, you know?
Hello Chaos (43:15)
That's right, that's right. Yeah, that is such a great message. my gosh, we need to get that out of like, people need to assess that. Because you know, people can come in and make those all the excuses, right? Of, well, people weren't buying anything during this or, you know, we just, people don't.
We sell out in other areas, it's the public shopper and it's like, I guarantee you if they're not buying it at Publix, they're not buying it at other places. But to look at like, what is your movement off shelf, not just sell in, because that's also a problem we see, Doug, is like people, lot of companies focus in just, I've sold into that retailer, they've got nothing to promote how to get it off the shelf.
we call it there's there's some kind of rub in the business because at the end of the day you're not going to get your brand sold because that public's at some point is going to go you know what this doesn't move i'd rather put i you know i've had to buy this inventory so this guy got his check but but you know my my my i don't get the money until it's off the shelf
Doug Lineberry (44:30)
And you've really got to think, okay, where did my message fail? You know, do I have a bad product? Possibility. You know, was it the ability of my message? Was there something wrong with my brand? You know, I'm with you on that because those come to light in these situations and unfortunately for a business, when that comes to light, if you're a small business, it might be the light at the end of the tunnel is a train because your marketing has not been used correctly. Your message has not been promoted correctly or coherently.
Hello Chaos (44:57)
That's right, or not use the right tactics. You're not solving the business problem. Ooh, that's good. That's a good one. So what advice, so from a legal perspective, the other thing, like I said, we've been real cautious of the whole just trade secrets. Don't put anything out on the open AI.
Doug Lineberry (45:00)
true.
Yeah, don't let them have access to it. What I would suggest to a company here, absolutely. And I think you almost need to have, you you've seen the Mission Impossible movie where they have to break into the sealed computer. It's not connected to anything.
Hello Chaos (45:26)
the dangers of that.
Doug Lineberry (45:36)
Being a little funny, but not really. think for especially employers who know that AI is used in some of the facets, you probably do need to have stations to where that's where this information is limited to. It doesn't have an AI feed. You are an ability. You don't have the ability to do that because you never realize when somebody is going to take down the Coca-Cola secret formula, like, hey, I'd like to put this in the PowerPoint, super secret PowerPoint. Let's make it look pretty.
Hello Chaos (46:00)
Right.
Doug Lineberry (46:01)
And then you bring in an AI, the next thing you know, the Coke secret formula is out there on the internet, know, it's now a gym.
Hello Chaos (46:05)
And it would be so, would be, somebody would not even know that that was bad. Yeah, because we've talked to some, you know, cybersecurity founders and stuff, and that's where they've kind of given us the heads up of, that, you know, cybersecurity, you've got teams that are, they call red team and blue team, and blue teams are there to figure out kind of the how to use, what tech the company uses to
Run and operate and manage and connect and integrate but the red team is there to go How do we make sure that no information is going in or out that shouldn't be going in or out? Kind of like it's though. It's the security walls And they've kind of and that's what I said we you know talking with them a few years ago That's the one that they were the ones that kind of clued us in to go, you know even
the AI things of like grammar, like people don't even think of that as an AI tool or some of these other basic ones like for like social media. Yeah.
Doug Lineberry (47:08)
really spell check, language check, or you're absolutely right. And I think that's a beautiful point, Jennifer, is nobody realizes how invasive AI currently is. Is your phone loaded with it? Absolutely it is. A funny thing too, you've just seen the marked difference of the iPhone sold in, or iPhones are Android, I can't remember which program or platform, but you had iPhones or Androids, can't remember which, sold in Europe, sold in the US. Guess what?
Hello Chaos (47:17)
All right.
Doug Lineberry (47:35)
The European Union, due to fear of invasion of privacy due to the overuse of AI, said you can sell the phone, but you can't have these programs on it. Meanwhile, the US, there they are. You've got to wonder about, are you forgetting that this thing's loaded with AI? Are you forgetting that the web has so much AI on it now? And I do think, unfortunately,
Hello Chaos (47:45)
Huh?
Yeah.
Well, Google's now being like, I mean, now you search a term that it used to be the local results came up first. Now it's the AI results that come up first.
Doug Lineberry (48:07)
and you're sponsored. And so that really does lead to information integrity, information authenticity. Those are big issues. And like you said earlier, is it going to collapse the internet? I think really what's going to collapse before that is faith. Because hey, do I trust this? How much work do I have to do to validate this particular point?
Hello Chaos (48:27)
Right. And if you own a company or run a company, what protections and trainings have you, like what rules have you put in place for your own company to make sure that AI isn't putting your company at risk? I remember back what 15 plus years, when social media was just coming out back in like the early 2000s and we had to put out social media rules.
you know, what are we gonna, how are we gonna use it? How do we need to teach our employees to use it? What's good, what's bad? And like I said, we've only talked to like these big, big cybersecurity firms that are working with like large corporations, but I'm like, what about the hundreds of thousands of the little, the small businesses, which by the way, small business,
that's 500 or less employees. like that's 100,000 plus companies in the US who probably have not even thought about the cyber security rules or the AI rules of what is allowed. How do you do a vetting process of which AI tools you want to use? What can and cannot be used in AI just as a company? then those are like, we're trying to train
our clients even more and when we go to prospects of like, we bring that forward as like our differentiator of we don't use AI in that, like this is how we use these tools. We are not an AI agency, not an AI run agency. We are very mindful of our NDAs, we are very mindful of our confidentiality agreements. And like I said, when we bring that up, they're like, what?
I didn't even think about any of that.
Doug Lineberry (50:26)
Yep. Jennifer, your point is so well taken because, you know, I just quit Google because you know we're using the mysteries of the thing today. The SBA says that 99.9 % of American businesses are small businesses. Think of that. 99.9. Need this training, need this knowledge, but they're probably busy because on Friday, you know what they're trying to do? They're trying to get work done. You know, they're trying to get product out. They're trying to make certain payrolls met.
Hello Chaos (50:32)
That's all right.
That's right.
That's right.
Doug Lineberry (50:53)
You're absolutely right. We have this potential for 99.9 % of the businesses to fall prey to this because guess what? might not be very high on the to-do list right now.
Hello Chaos (51:03)
Well, they're not even aware that this is, I mean, they're aware of AI, but I don't think they're aware of how AI could affect their business. I mean, like hurt their business. Because the only narrative that's out there, I would say in the broader sense, like I said, creative and media arts, it got all brought up to the forefront during the SAG-AFRA strike.
that a lot of this stuff was coming out, but for the general business, people were just like, AI, it can make my business, I can help operations, my marketing team can use this, this is great, it'll, you know, the magic bullet, all that, and I don't think anyone's kind of.
Doug Lineberry (51:41)
Thank you. Great work out.
Hello Chaos (51:53)
have really understood really what AI, like, it's not just this one, if you put this stuff in this one tool, it's sitting on a bed of the AI found, like, the universe. It is not protected in that one tool. Yeah. All right, so any other tips and tricks that we need to be thinking about or cautionary tales around AI?
Doug Lineberry (52:22)
You know watch it if you ask it to do something you absolutely positively must do that eyes on touch Look at what it generated full stop you do not trust it to be what you asked it to do You confirm that is what you need and what you're comfortable putting out
Hello Chaos (52:40)
Yeah, and that it's not gonna hurt you. Like, yeah.
Doug Lineberry (52:44)
Yes, absolutely. mean that right there is the bottom line. Is it going to help business? And if not, don't use it. Lesson learned.
Hello Chaos (52:50)
Right. And then also just a reminder of you need to be careful of like that image that it got pulled. Do you have the rights for that image? How are you using that? or how it, you know, cause there's a lot of like ad versioning tools that are, well, I just want this image. And it's like, who owns that image?
Doug Lineberry (53:14)
You know, we've talked about that before, Jennifer, and there's always a feeling of, I can find it on the internet, it's okay to use. It's absolutely not okay. I mean, I just, you want to get that home, but I have sophisticated clients call and say, we did this. And I'm like, And you know, you're just like, ooh, that makes my stomach hurt a little bit. Ooh.
Hello Chaos (53:22)
No!
Right.
Doug Lineberry (53:34)
And so it's like, look, if you see it out there and we're talking text, we're talking pictures, we're talking audio files, do not lift it thinking it's okay. And hear people say, well, there was no copyright notice. Doesn't matter copyright and it rises upon completion. Like right now I can take a picture of you, Jennifer, using my phone. Boom. I've got a copyright in that photo, ignoring your right to privacy and permissions, et cetera. But as soon as I take it, guess what? That's the copyright in that photo. And the same thing with this stuff on the net. People must remember
Hello Chaos (53:42)
right?
Doug Lineberry (54:04)
You can't just copy or paste it. And AI, if you send it to do it, you're going to get in trouble for the same thing.
Hello Chaos (54:09)
Yeah. Have you guys seen on the legal side, where people are suing or where companies have actually gone having to go to court or you having to either do cease and desist or like any of that? Have you seen kind of an uptick in that?
Doug Lineberry (54:30)
for AI usage? It is a thing and you've noticed a lot more people will find like variations on it because a good thing you talked about was your brand cohesion. know, hey, you've got a mark and it always looks like this and it's always this color, it should always be that way and the AIs don't get that.
Hello Chaos (54:31)
Yeah.
Right.
Doug Lineberry (54:47)
and you will see those particular issues used. There's all kinds of issues out there now about who owns the copyright to this, what if AI creates it, who's the owner of that, what about it being a derivative work. So there are lot of current issues that are out there floating around. We haven't had a lot of decisions yet, so it's hard to say, okay, we're breaking the lines this way. It's coming.
But right now with us, it's really a matter of, again, 99.9 % of us are small businesses. They may not know that, hey, AI caused this to happen. AI is doing this that way.
Hello Chaos (55:17)
Yeah, I think there's just, there's not enough information out there and I'm glad that we're having this conversation to elevate that. Because like I said, I don't think people are doing it or using it nefariously. I think it's just the lack of knowledge.
Doug Lineberry (55:38)
It's a new toy and look at what it can do.
Hello Chaos (55:40)
That's right, that's right. Well my goodness Doug, this has been fantastic. I'm always amazed at how fast our conversations go. How do you want people to connect with you or learn more information? Again, we'll share the presentation that has more detail. But where do you want people, how do you want people to connect with you?
Doug Lineberry (56:01)
Sure thing, first of all, connect with Jennifer, she's here to help. You've got an authentic marketing agency that says, we use the hands-on approach, we're not AI. Connect with those folks. Reach out, I mean, absolutely do it, because that's what you want with me. Directdolls, 864-256-4875. My email is doug.lineberry at offitkurman.com, O-F-F-I-T-K-U-R-M-A-N.com. Happy to always discuss.
Hello Chaos (56:10)
That's right.
Perfect, and we will put that information out when we publish this episode. For everyone hanging out with us and listening with us, appreciate your support. Again, the podcast episode will be available across all podcast platforms. So please subscribe to Hello Chaos. Give us a like, a share, give us a comment, great review, help us grow and build a more connected entrepreneurial community.
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Hello Chaos, it is where AHA meets shit and we will see you again next week.
Doug Lineberry (57:56)
See you everybody.
Hello Chaos (57:56)
you