5.21 | The Fake vs. Authentic AI Debate No One's Talking About with Leah Ardent

>> Isha Vela: Welcome to Waking Up Wealthy, the podcast for visionaries and rebels who are ready to revolutionize their relationship with money and create powerful collective ripples with the money they make. I’m your host, Isha Vela, trauma psychologist, somatic practitioner, financial professional, and minimalist, bringing you practical money tools, unconventional wealth perspectives, and Aquarian era business strategies. Strategies to guide you in building wealth that’s aligned, ethical, and empowering. Let’s wake up to the true meaning of wealth together. It’s hard to walk on these Internet streets without stumbling upon an AI offer. Everybody and their mother seems to be talking about the miracle that is AI, especially for business. And there are whole other groups of people who have an aversion to it, who don’t understand it, or who are concerned, rightfully so, about the environmental impact of it. So I invited my housemate, Leah Ardent, to have a conversation about it because she’s been researching and playing in the AI space for several years and has a unique angle to share about the benefits and downsides. We talk about this stuff almost every day and decided to make the conversation public. So, for reference, Leah is a copywriter, visual storyteller, and AI art instructor with a background in marketing and sales. And she’s currently creating human empowered learning approaches to art theory and image generation with AI. So let’s drop in and go deeper.

 

>> Isha Vela: First, want to thank everybody who made this episode possible. Right. Because it wasn’t just you and me. It was like. It took a village.

 

>> Leah Ardent: It takes a village, yes.

 

>> Isha Vela: Thank you. Thank you for agreeing to do this on short notice. I really appreciate it and for the long time coming.

 

>> Leah Ardent: Thank you for coming. Look.

 

>> Isha Vela: So why don’t we. Why don’t you start wherever you want to start? Because we’ve been having conversations about AI for weeks and months now, and I, you know, there’s so much to talk about, but there are specific pieces. Like, I want to just name the. You know, the critique that a lot of people have about AI is that it’s fake. It uses up a lot of energy. Right. Natural resources. And so I really would love for you to come in and just kind of like, speak about pros and cons and sort of your specific angles. Because I’ve really, like, received so much education from you about how to use it and, and sort of what our, limited understanding about it is.

 

>> Leah Ardent: Sure. And I. I am not the expert. Like, I feel like every marketer and his mom wants to, like, make you think that they’re the expert. Like, I’m not. I wasn’t into AI. Until it became available to the public like everybody else. And I am in the midst of this existential day to day decision making just like everybody else. So I’m just a, an unrepentant autodidact with a few insights. You know, I don’t position myself as the, the expert on anything, because it’s changing too fast and, and quite frequently the issue is not the tool but the wielder. And I think perhaps we are maybe giving scissors to chimpanzees, you know, like, or like lightsabers to chimpanzees, because we have not as a species invested enough in our intellectual and emotional evolution. And we knew that when our technology outpaced our humanity, we were going to have a problem. So that remains. Yes, right, that remains. But that being said, I think when people, sometimes say something negative about AI, they’re actually just kind of like showing you how much they don’t know because it’s such a broad, it’s such a broad topic and most people are really talking about a specific tool. They’re saying I don’t like AI and then you’re like, well, why? And they’ll say I don’t like chat GPT. And it’s like, okay, that’s one, that’s one. I mean granted it’s one of the major players, but that’s one application of AI. There’s tons of scientific applications. there are environmental applications, there are medical applications, there are applications all over. And if you’re typing into your cell phone on social media about how much you are not using AI, I hate to break it to you, but you’re 100% using AI in that moment. And so what a lot of people think is like an irreverent flex is just like they’re, they, you know, they’re just kind of showing their ignorance and it’s okay because we’re all super ignorant because this is all new. I think the, the mistake is everyone pretending that they know more than they know. So I don’t want to be guilty of that.

 

>> Isha Vela: no, thank you for, thank you for saying that because you know, I am one of those people that is interested in the debate around AI. I don’t use AI a lot, but I know that I could help myself, by using more. But then I have that hesitation around the environmental pieces and I don’t know, like when I see all the, every, everybody and their mother, like you said, is coming out of the woodwork with their AI offer. Oh, you know, people are using AI. You know, only thing that AI is ChatGPT, but it’s all these other things and let me sell you this thing. And so I, I understand that there’s so much more, but I don’t know what those things are. and maybe you can share, just starting, maybe start there and sharing like, okay, these are all the ways that AI can be used that we would.

 

>> Leah Ardent: Be here all day. So I don’t want to be pretend to be exhaustive, but I’ll stick to my narrow lane, which is, you know, some of the business application tools that I, that I use all the time. obviously you know, the LLMs, the large language models are what most people are having access to, which, But a lot of those things are getting integrated into other technology. So you might not like ChatGPT, but like there are other platforms that are integrating AI into the way they already function and you may enjoy what you can do. Earlier this week I started posting and people were interested in my offer. I hadn’t even planned on a sales page. I typically have two weeks of teasing before I put a sales page page link out because that is how long it usually takes to get people’s attention. but people were super amped, like I need a link, I need information, I want to know more about it. My my occasional VA has two children, two small children like under the age of 10. And so I can’t just drop on her, I need sales page right now and expect her to have it in 48 hours. Right. That’s not human, not conscious, not reasonable. Well, I just dropped into one of the many platforms I experiment with and it was like boo, boo beep. I’m now granted, I used to be a copywriter in my previous incarnation, so it might be a little bit easier for me to whip up content than for other people. But I was able to whip up what I needed. I was able to drop it into that platform. I was able to generate the images that I needed for that sales page. Boom, bang, bang, it’s done. I, you know, I can send it off and like make some sales and that way my, my VA has like, she’s like, all right, we’ll drop it X amount of days later. We’ve got to like set up the automation. Like all of those things have to happen, but they used to take weeks and now you could get that done depending on your existing acumen in a day, three days, how much time you got. And so that is valuable to a business owner. I also think that People are trying to put all business in the same category. Like they’re trying to conflate all AI. What a mega corporation can use AI for is different than what a solopreneur. how a solopreneur might use AI. Yes, different, audiences, different economies, different desires for scale, different human resources, ah, that are available. And so I think if you’re a solopreneur, it’s like a godsend. I mean, minus the many software subscriptions you will have.

 

>> Isha Vela: Yeah. And I mean something that we were just talking about this morning was like just being front facing in your business. This is a lot of what people talk about, being authentic, showing up as your real self. all of that is, is one of the, one of the many arguments that are used against AI, Right. Or against using AI. And so I’d love to hear from you sort of your perspective on that because that’s, that’s been like a sort of like a corner of the, of the Internet is basically like authenticity versus AI.

 

>> Leah Ardent: No, no, I, I want to talk about the privileged posse. Right. Because there’s really only a very specific segment of people and whenever there is a technology that disrupts access and information and ability, it disrupts economy. And the, one of the things that people are not talking about. I’ll speak specifically to our vertical, or at least the vertical in which we first encountered one another, which is the coaching and transformational space which you and I have talked so many times on the record about. Bias in that particular space. Bias versus merit and how bias shapes that space more than merit. One of the things, this is a, this is going to be a bitter pill. So just get your water. Not you, but whoever’s listening.

 

>> Isha Vela: I get my water too.

 

>> Leah Ardent: Look, look, I got mine too. This might not go down either. This might not go down easy. But a lot of the people who excelled in the coaching, industry were people who did not have any technical skills or education. They had a look, a sound, a vibe, if you will, that attracted other people of a certain ilk and they were able to parlay their relative lack of ability into quite a lot of money because of bias. So now those people are faced with the fact that the economy is becoming, and I said this like four years ago, increasingly merit based and you will have to develop skills in order to stay relevant.

 

>> Isha Vela: Yes.

 

>> Leah Ardent: and also the platforms, the way people used to get their message out, they had so much visibility, but the platforms now want you almost in chains. You’re going to be on the platform, you’re Going to be making content. You’ll be watching content because they want you to be there so you can see the ads that actually subsidize their existence. And so if you have to make that much content, the truth is it’s an inhuman expectation. And the only people who could possibly fulfill that are people who have the disposable income. Let’s talk about $12,000 a year on photo shoots, easy. 12 to 20. Pretty reasonable, right? So then you can get in the game if you don’t have that.

 

>> Isha Vela: Right, right, right.

 

>> Leah Ardent: On photo shoots, right. That’s just photo shoots. That’s not getting the content actually created. You got to spend $3,000. I remember. I mean, I’ve had products that I rolled out that cost $3,000 just to make because of how many people we had to pay to create the product. Right. We had. You had to pay the copywriter a couple thousand dollars for all the sales copy. I mean, I didn’t, but people did. Right. People have paid me $1,000 to get all that together. They paid us to automate everything. When I was operating my agency, we would be anywhere from three to about $10,000 to create a full product from zero for someone because of how many man hours, woman hours it took to get it together. And so, so now if we’re saying you need 12 to 20 for photos and you need, you know, let’s say five, at least five to 10 to get a product together. So if you don’t have 20, $30,000 lying around before your OBM and with no ads. So what we created was an industry where you could really only excel if you had a certain amount of privilege.

 

>> Isha Vela: Right. If you had already a certain amount of money. Right. If you had like, you know, those, those pre, you know, like, setup costs, basically. Business setup costs.

 

>> Leah Ardent: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And so that kept a lot of people out of, that.

 

>> Isha Vela: And the people that didn’t have that money had to sort of start very slowly and weren’t able to make their business profitable until several years in the business.

 

>> Leah Ardent: Right.

 

>> Isha Vela: Building it up very, very slowly. Yeah.

 

>> Leah Ardent: Different time windows. And let’s be real, they were paying. Let’s not talk about the minimum of, what, 500, a thousand, 1500, and those big masterminds, you know, three, five thousand dollars a month to get in the room to pitch. So, I mean, we’re talking about, do you have six figures lying around to start your business? Do you have 50,000? You got 30,000. You got 80. That’s like. That’s reasonable.

 

>> Isha Vela: Yeah, it’s like around 50,000.

 

>> Leah Ardent: Everyone’s like, I made six figures. I made multiple six figures. But you dropped half of it on all of those costs.

 

>> Isha Vela: Yes, yes, exactly. You drop half of it just to set it up.

 

>> Leah Ardent: Just to set it up. And then you sold all of that success to somebody else, not you personally. Right. They sold all of that success to somebody else. But what they didn’t say was they’d say, let me show you how to be a, you know, a lazy magnetic goddess or whatever. Like that could have been the program from like 2017, just like the lazy magnetic goddess club. And, and what they weren’t saying was, yes, you can take my 10k mastermind, but you’re gonna need another 90k to actually have the success that I have.

 

>> Leah Ardent: And so a lot of people got sucked in paying their last 10k. We’ve talked about this so many times. Paying their last 10k to get into the Mastermind to find out that they couldn’t actually afford to be in the industry.

 

>> Isha Vela: Right. Because it was. Yes, it took the, the money in the Mastermind, but then they realized they would need that extra whatever, 50 to 90k to set up the business.

 

>> Leah Ardent: Yes. And this is something I’ve been railing about publicly for many years, mostly to you. Right, Right.

 

>> Isha Vela: Yes.

 

>> Leah Ardent: And so now all of a sudden you can create that photo shoot. Now granted, like a good photo shoot is necessary to train an AI. You want it to be trained on good photos. So you’re still going to need good photos, you’re still going to need a photographer, you’re still going to need a va, you’re still going to need a mastermind for sisterly or community support. But the premium on those things drops because of all of this. How do you charge people for information when they can go talk to a bot for 60 bucks a month? And that’s like the premium you get two people for 60. Right. So like why are they talking to you and spending. But, but that’s what it’s supposed to do. People are, it’s supposed to help correct the market where the market need to be corrected. And so a lot of the people, the, the wailing and the, the gnashing of, of teeth and the wringing of hands they just met because there’s their like grift is on the way out.

 

>> Isha Vela: Because this equalizes that AI and the ability to set up businesses in a short, in a shorter period of time with less overhead is the great equalizer.

 

>> Leah Ardent: Yes. And I’m not being glib about it. I, as I said I was a copywriter before, I Don’t do it as much. I mean I do it for myself now but like it’s not as necessary and if somebody wants to pay me to do copywriting for them. I still think copywriters have an excellent place because most people are, are crappy at AI. Like a copywriter using AI is different than a layperson trying to use AI because they don’t know what they’re trying to achieve. Right? So people will blame it and say oh Chad, GPT or clot or whatever, it’s bad or it’s good. And I’m like, no, most of you guys don’t know what you’re doing.

 

>> Isha Vela: M. Yeah, like I suck at Photoshop, right? Like you can give me this amazing program and I’ll be like, I can like put some shapes together, but it’ll suck. It’ll just suck.

 

>> Leah Ardent: Also me, I’m so glad the image generation because I was like this is not, this is very boop boop for me at the time. but yeah, so I think a lot of the, the, the sticks and stones that are being thrown about AI are from a certain generation and a certain type. And that’s not to say that there aren’t serious concerns to be had and serious conversations to be had about AI, it’s just that those are not the conversations that people are having.

 

>> Isha Vela: Yeah. And can we talk, can we shift to you know, the piece around like, you know, even, even talking about sort of like what’s fake, what’s not fake? oh, let’s, let’s address that for a second.

 

>> Leah Ardent: I’ve joked about that a lot as I, as I come on here without. And I can talk trash today because I don’t have my fake eyelashes on so I can freely talk trash. But I mean like all of my, any AI you see of me is trained on images, photos that I actually like took of me. So I have spent the years. The reason I know how much the photo shoots cost because I have done the photo shoots right? And it’s very strange from an existential perspective when we just pull back and go, well that’s not real. And it’s like, well you rented a place you don’t live, right? We rented places we didn’t live in because nobody wants to take pictures of me in my toddler’s room with toys thrown all over the place that’s not on brand. right. You took pictures in a place you didn’t live in. Clothes you don’t normally wear it. A hair. With a hair stylist that you don’t normally go to wearing makeup that you would never wear, like every day.

 

>> Isha Vela: Yeah.

 

>> Leah Ardent: These were always cultivated, curated Personas.

 

>> Isha Vela: Yeah.

 

>> Leah Ardent: Right. That’s why the bigger brands, they don’t even bother. Like, think of every big brand you use. You don’t know who’s the face of it, who’s the face of Coca Cola, who’s the face of even like l’, Oreal, who’s the face of Pantene. They just grab a model, whoever has a face right then, right? Whoever’s. Hot right now. They just grab a face and put it out there. They don’t feel like they’re being fake for using an attractive face to sell a product. The difference in the transformational space is that what people are normally selling is intimacy, is trust, is access. So I understand in those verticals why people are reticent to creating distance. but as far as it being fake, I don’t think anybody. I don’t think there’s any. I think we’re all in glass houses and should maybe keep our stones to ourselves when it comes to the whole fake thing. but that created the fake economy, right?

 

>> Isha Vela: Yeah. Yeah. And what about the intimacy piece then? Right. Like, how do you still maintain that, that connection to the people that are listening, or the people who need your work? How do you still create that intimacy? And you.

 

>> Leah Ardent: I mean, for me, I don’t. I don’t. And I think that there’s a big conversation to be had around that. Not all of us want to be the product. I want to be the producer. I want to produce things that get people results. I don’t want to be the product. we’ve talked about.

 

>> Isha Vela: Yeah. I think that a lot of people are burnt out because of the front facing aspect of having to create or thinking they need to create intimacy by being right in the front. And that’s me too. Right. That’s part of what I’m pulling away from is it’s like I don’t want to have my face splattered all over the place. There was a time where I enjoyed it, it was fun. And then my body said no. It was just like enough. Wasn’t going to. It was enough. Exactly. So how do we still maintain that intimacy without being. Making videos constantly or. Right.

 

>> Leah Ardent: Yeah. I mean, there’s a couple of different ways. one is that we don’t. Right. Like to me, I think menopause is something that’s definitely Happening for a lot of my peers. Perimenopause and menopause, and people don’t realize that estrogen might be good. And then one day it’s just gone. And all the give a is just gonna slide right off and the like. I wish someone had warned me that one day I was just gonna wake up and be like, I’m fresh out, like, I don’t have any more. and you might decide that peddling intimacy and all of this emotional labor that women are already doing a lot of, in society is not what you want to be doing. I think that a lot of women got pushed into coaching because we are already giving emotional labor. And so we know how to give it. And so then we just started charging for it. We were like, well, I’m giving all this emotional labor for free. I want to get paid. I want to charge my worth. And that makes total sense. But when I look at how men are using AI, I have not seen a man yet shame another man around using AI I only see women doing it. Women doing it. Men are out here making videos of, God knows what. They’re, they finally got their Roman Empire. They got jet packs and whatever else, and they’re just having an absolute ball, making like tons of slop. Not that all men are making slop, but I’m just saying they are so unrepentant and completely unpoliced. And women are constantly policing each other for this, this endless pursuit of completely impossible perfection.

 

>> Isha Vela: Yeah, yeah, it’s the perfection piece.

 

>> Leah Ardent: Isn’t there a lot of, dare I say it’s promotion of patriarchy internally happening, in the transformational industry around AI as well?

 

>> Isha Vela: Yeah, just gatekeeping.

 

>> Leah Ardent: And kind of like trying to shame people into giving access, kind of forcing them into intimacy. Whereas if you’re a creative, it’s. It’s a totally different ballgame. You are the bottleneck. If you’re a solopreneur and you offer one to one services, there is an automatic bottlenecking that happens. And you can raise your price till the cows come home. But a lot of people are also facing the fact that their economy is in decline, that their political system is in tumult, that all of a sudden being a certain. All of the biases that used to work for them are not necessarily working for them anymore. And so, and I noticed that all the people who, Many, many. I won’t say all, but in my circle, most of the people who’ve always had to survive on merit and skill are actually embracing AI and always looking for more ways to get ahead. So there’s definitely some class, bias that kind of happens, that’s happening in that particular industry. But also I think people are only thinking of one thing they can do because some. So many people are pushing this digital twin. I have a program out right now that’s, you know, all about portraiture, not necessarily a twin. It’s about making any kind of, image of a person or, or anthropomorphized being, because some of them are like berries and all the crazy stuff that I’m into. But yeah, there’s a lot of. To me, I feel a lot of breath. Like we can just create anything, you know, I posted something the other day and it was like a person. It was like a garden person made of a garden.

 

>> Isha Vela: Yes. I saw that kind of flower.

 

>> Leah Ardent: Yeah. Growing flowers out of their head. And to me it was like intuition how it like, springs into you and blooms. And so I get excited about all of that abstraction and not feeling bound by my face. Because when you’re looking at me, you see my body, you don’t see who I am and you don’t see how I see myself. But with AI, I can show you how I see myself, which actually gives you potentially a much more intimate window into who I am as a practitioner and whether or not you want to be in my space. Right.

 

>> Isha Vela: Oh, my God, I never thought about that. But I love it. I love that. Yeah. Really, really true.

 

>> Leah Ardent: I actually see myself in a garden of flowers with bright pink hair. So if you like that kind of bitch, let’s do it. Right. Like, I’m not your normie coat. I’ve got like all kinds of weird stuff coming out. And so that’s just like the freak flag for the other neurodivergent weirdos to be like, hey, if you want a safe place to co create, I’m,

 

>> Isha Vela: Here, you know, so using AI as another angle on authenticity.

 

>> Leah Ardent: Oh, for sure. Way m. More. Because it’s like, limited. If I see you making sloth, like, there’s a person. I’ve really been on the fence. Oh, it’s like. And I know you and I have talked about it where I’m like, oh, I kind of want to work with this person, but I kind of don’t. Like, I don’t actually feel safe and seen in this person’s space. But they have all these skills. Right. And so recently AI has come out. People are making whatever is in their hearts to make. And the stuff that this Particular person made only confirmed to me that if that is, they could create anything, if that is what they created. I am definitely not. I don’t need to vibe with them. We’re not even on the same. Not high, low, but we’re just not on the same plane because given limitless creativity, the things that they chose were so unnecessarily offensive that I was like, that’s not a safe space for me. So, you know, the argument that AI is not giving us intimacy, I think misses the mark a little bit.

 

>> Isha Vela: Okay. Okay. That’s really good. And let’s talk also about being a parent and chronic illness and all that. Let’s talk about it.

 

>> Leah Ardent: yeah. I mean, and this is a real thing. This is why I’m always so shocked that more mothers are not excited about AI. I feel like there’s so much opportunity here and I focus on image generation because that’s the thing I like, just really love. but there’s. If you’re a writer, whatever world is in your heart, you could get that world out and start sharing it with other people. and people with other limitations have more access. I’ve spent as, you well know, because we are friends, IRL as well as online, that this is the most sick I’ve ever been. I spent the vast majority of the last year off and on very ill. More sick than I’ve ever been.

 

>> Isha Vela: Yeah.

 

>> Leah Ardent: And. And kind of in like a way we couldn’t put our finger on. And part of it was because I decided to nurse my child for an. I breastfeed my child for an extended period and it was really hard on my body. And then that’s like when the downtime. But the uptime, breastfeeding, parenting, like how go live, show up, be consistent. What are you talking about? I haven’t slept in three effing years. You want me to be consistent? I am consistent. I’m consistently tired.

 

>> Isha Vela: Does anybody feed myself?

 

>> Leah Ardent: I’m trying to just try to get enough calories to keep feeding this baby. Right. And so. And when you’ve got platforms that start to ignore you, when you fall silent, like, there’s just a lot of. Yeah. Quite frankly, undue and unfair pressure on. On humans. we’re all trying to stay human in a world that, as I’ve said, you know, values the pace of machines. And two, and not for nothing, I think perhaps we were being groomed for AI. I think that the inhuman requirements were created to. Potentially created to give us the necessity for a technology that just happens to be owned by the same people. but that’s another converse conspiracy for another conversation. But that being what it is, how do you keep up? How do you continue to create? How do you find joy? and you and I were laughing earlier because I had a robe on, and under my big robe, I had on a silk robe. So I had two robes on. And I was like, this is really what I love, AI. I want anything I can do in my room. and so I think there is something to speak to that, to how. How ableist it is to be anti AI and how privileged you must be to be able to afford to pay someone to do all those things for you. and so I just see people kind of their desperation showing and their teeth showing and their true character showing and even their absolutely valid fears and concerns as well. So I would. I would love to speak to some of those and, like, real. Yeah, yeah.

 

>> Isha Vela: Because I know that we’ve.

 

>> Leah Ardent: You.

 

>> Isha Vela: You know, as you know, you don’t call yourself an expert and you know a lot more than most people do about AI, especially in our shared circles. And so, yeah, I would love for you to share about some of the conflicts that you feel.

 

>> Leah Ardent: Yeah, I was supposed to launch my current program, like two or three months ago, and I couldn’t. It was round about the time that the MIT study came out showing that people were having negative consequences from using a very specific large language model that I use all the time. and I was like, I want to launch this, but I’m scared. I don’t want to lead people down a broken path. I don’t want to cause anyone harm. And I. And so I waited. and so, like, let me just list kind of the concerns. Obviously. Yes, mental, health is a concern. Physical, like, neurological, health is a concern. I, mean, that’s kind of concern with all the devices, if we’re honest.

 

>> Isha Vela: just like the addiction piece.

 

>> Leah Ardent: Yeah, yeah, the addiction piece. And the environment. you know, and. Yeah. Ah, I guess everything kind of falls into that. The environmental piece is probably the easiest for me. I’ve been able to. Being a hermit, being a borderline hermit. my. My carbon footprint is not that high. I don’t own a car. Right. I. I love the place where I live. I live near an ocean and. And like 30 minutes from town. So if I need to go into town, if I want to go to the beach, I walk down. And you know me on the occasional time that I want to go out, I go out, but I’m not driving a vehicle. Every day I don’t have a commute, so I’m not impacting the environment that way. So that’s one of the ways I personally offset. I also don’t eat a lot of beef. People don’t want to talk about it, but I’ve read in many places and you can ask your LLM about it, but eating, eating certain food choices are much more harmful for the environment, than using AI. So I, I don’t, I’ve stopped eating really almonds. And I’ve, and I’ve way, way, way cut back on my beef. Except when if there’s a medical reason that I’m being specifically toward, you know, geared towards you. So those two things alone I choose mostly legumes over, over rice. There’s like one or two rices that I do like that I have a Capeline. But like those things, those three little things of not eating things that take a ton, a ton, a ton of water to grow, not having a vehicle or a commute, yeah, all of those kind of offset for me the environmental impact of deciding to use AI. If someone said to me, hey, you can have like a second brain, you can have several second brains, but you’ll have to make some sacrifices, I’m just the kind of nerd that I would do that.

 

>> Isha Vela: Mm, okay.

 

>> Isha Vela: And I think another thing that we, that I would want to acknowledge is that oftentimes, and I know that I’ve been guilty of this, of. I know that everybody, let’s say recycling or reducing their use of plastics or. Right? Reduce, reuse, recycle, that kind of thing. I know that we all have an impact on that, right? Us not having a car, et cetera, et cetera, that all has impact. And we also need to recognize that individual people have an impact, but we’re not doing the big damage to the environment that bigger corporations are and have been having on the environment. so I feel like that’s another piece that we need to acknowledge is like we put a lot of, like, we point a lot of fingers to individual people. But it’s like, let’s also look. And this is sort of keeps us in this infighting kind of space. But it’s like, let’s point to the bigger corporations that are doing a lot more to pollute, to harm. You know, there’s there the technology. We have technology, right. Speaking of AI and all sorts of tech, we have the technology to do much better for the environment and we don’t use it for those things.

 

>> Leah Ardent: Absolutely. well, I Mean, I think this is. This is where the eco hypocrisy comes in around AI because the same people who we’ve referenced previously, their entire lifestyle, their whole aspiration was harmful. Right? They want to fly to wherever to have the photo shoot, and they want to fly somebody out. Right. Like, I haven’t gotten on a plane since COVID Right. Well, I mean, I’m lucky We. We live in the place everyone goes on vacation, so I don’t have to go anywhere. you know, they. They want the big, you know, McMansion, they want the big SUV, they want to eat steak dinners every week. You know, all of that stuff was all not good for the environment. But all of a sudden, because they haven’t mastered AI and they haven’t because it’s not necessary to their existing, the way that they live their life. It’s easy for them to poo poo it because they don’t use it, but they’re not really talking about reforming the things they actually do. I, mean, and that’s just like the small stuff that’s not talking about extracting from developing nations and leaving people in poverty and suffering.

 

>> Isha Vela: Exactly. Right. I just saw a video yesterday about, like, mines in Africa that were small. Children are, like, being dropped into shafts and they’re, like, mining for this mineral that we use to power our cell phones. Right. Like, I. I feel like what I want to say about that, and maybe we can sort of close it out here, is that we’re all complicit. M. Whether we use these. All of these models that you’re talking about or not, we’re all still complicit in the use and the damage. And so by pointing fingers, we’re not really being accountable for how we’re participating. Right. Whether it’s, you know, and I speak of myself here, like, as a minimalist. I still, like, they’re still. There’s. I still have things with plastic on them, you know, and so it’s frustrating, and it’s kind of like the way that things are set up. And so there’s a way that we can’t escape it because we’re just in this. We’re all in this matrix together.

 

>> Leah Ardent: Well, we have to start revisioning what we want the Earth to be like as all of these false structures crumble around us. And I will have a place there, I believe, as will many other things, creativity. And if we can spark that creativity, all the better. One of the things this isn’t. AI Isn’t the only place that I create, but it’s the place I started. I did not think. And I’m the daughter of an art teacher, who grew up literally in an art classroom. Like if I got sick, I had to go to art class because that’s where my mom was when I was a kid. So I never really got out of school for being sick. Just kind of sucked. but I never thought of myself as an artist. I was always a writer. I was always the word person. And it wasn’t until I started playing around with image generating AI that I started to feel like maybe there might be an artist in there. I started paying attention to colors, and shapes and textures in a way I’d never been invited to participate before. And I think there is a lot of negative impact. We talk about how generative art has stolen from artists, but let me just be real. Look at who’s behind all these companies. They have stolen from all of us. Like I’ve been writing posts on Facebook every day for like years. And all of that’s just data that just gets sucked up into a machine. So all of our labor has been aggregated. This has happened to everyone, not just visual artists.

 

>> Isha Vela: It’s.

 

>> Leah Ardent: These are aggregation models more than they are artificial intelligence. They’re aggregated intelligence models.

 

>> Isha Vela: Yeah.

 

>> Leah Ardent: So they’re aggregating from all of us. There are lots of ways it could be done better. Instead of AI, so called taking people’s jobs or people getting laid off. If these companies are going to be creating multiple billions of dollars from our labor, which is what data is. As we’re trying to figure out where does the money for social programs and education. Every, all of these companies should have a scholarship that just goes out for artists to support the, arts. To support artists. All of these large language models should have scholarships that just go out to support writers. Like there’s so many ways that we could choose as a species to reinvest in one another. And that unwillingness to reinvest and support is much more the issue than whether or not the innovation has value. Right?

 

>> Isha Vela: Yeah. And there’s, there’s two places that I want to go with you. I obviously want you to talk about what you’re creating because I think it’s really, really unique. and I want to also. Yeah, let’s, let’s just go there first and then we’ll talk about something else in a moment. But yeah, talk about how you are, how you are using AI and what you are helping other people learn about AI.

 

>> Leah Ardent: Yeah, absolutely. Thank You. Because I will forget. I just. I’ll talk about this forever. I’m like, oh, let me get into a little shameless pitch mode. so earlier this year, because you and I, we both have kids. Our kids are friends and are growing up together currently. And one of the things that we have to deal with as parents is screen time. And so, you know, I joke that AI was like, the beginning of me seeing myself as an artist, as, like, feeling that creative nudge and just kind of like surrendering to it. And out of that, in the last couple of years, I. I’ve created so many things. I’ve got two card decks that are in process and kind of on sidelines while I do this main thing. I’ve got a course for children that came out of conversations that you and I were having early in the year about how could our artsy kids. Because this is what our. Our kids get together and do. Art. Your kids are magnificent. Real, loves of mine. Great kids. Great. And we have spent so many days just, what, like painting or drawing or decorating or like singing, dancing, like being present in our lives. And so earlier this year, I pulled together my initial course, which was intuitive AI and readapted it for children. and I used AI to create it. But it’s an AI optional product where you could just use it to teach children, you know, kind of an introduction to. To art, to color theory, to vocabulary, to storyboarding, to photography and cinematography. And the AI piece is optional, but they can use AI to validate everything that they’re learning. So it was, yes, it was created to be modular and. And to have kids learn by doing. And it was very much inspired by my. My fear that perhaps we were doing harm with the use of these models. And I thought, okay, I gotta revamp the way we are approaching teaching AI. And so the way that I teach AI is to create frameworks that are modifiable, but in order to modify them, you’ve got to know what you’re changing. So both in my class for adults and in my class for kids, I’m not teaching them to just push a button and get an outcome, because they’ve literally done studies on this. We know that dopamine was given to us. It’s our gift for creating. It’s to inspire us to get excited. And when we create something, to be like, I did that, I feel good, you know, like. Right.

 

>> Isha Vela: Yeah.

 

>> Leah Ardent: And so we also know that if you, you know, if you give the little. You give the little rat. The. The cocaine experiment yeah, yeah, right. It’ll just keep pushing it. So we have to be careful that AI is not, doesn’t become the drug and we just keep pushing the button on our brains. Modular approaches require the making of a decision and therefore the understanding of what is being asked and a way to slight, somewhat predict or expect an outcome. So by putting that process into the systems that I have designed to create AI, it alleviates some of that absenteeism, that intellectual absenteeism that you find in a lot of the AI programs or in a lot of the AI platforms where they’re just like hm, plug in a picture and we’ll give you a result. And it’s like, but you don’t know how to create the result yourself. You don’t. Like there’s just no, there’s no presence, there’s no intention. And because it’s AI, these concepts of presence and intention are maybe not as highly prized in those circles. But if we’re being educators then presence and intention are absolutely necessary. And so that’s ah, the difference in the way that I create resources for people. Because whether you’re a child’s brain that’s developing, which we have to be really easy on that we have to be really conscious, we’re making a lot of far reaching decisions every moment with them. Or if you’re an aging brain.

 

>> Isha Vela: God.

 

>> Leah Ardent: Right. If you’re outside of that sweet spot, you need to be as conscious about what you’re doing as possible. And so I’ve tried to create systems that, or rather I have, I’ve created systems that encourage that.

 

>> Isha Vela: Yeah, that’s fantastic. And your current offers also about image generation for, for people who aren’t wanting to be front facing. Yeah. So tell me, tell us more about that.

 

>> Leah Ardent: I mean not necessarily you could want to be front facing but like like it’s your face. I think it’s like there’s this disconnect of like I’m not there if I’m using AI. But first off it takes time to generate those. But and also like there’s a certain, there’s a couple of reasons why you might utilize image generation. One is just like graphic design and something you know we call B roll in the industry.

 

>> Isha Vela: Yeah.

 

>> Leah Ardent: There are tons of accounts that have something playing in the background and a person talking in the front, right?

 

>> Isha Vela: Yes.

 

>> Leah Ardent: So what does that background need to look like? You can design that, you can make that brand, instead of having a, you know, having to have a developer make you custom stuff that’s going to Cost God knows how much. You can have things that are on brand that are happening in your background for your content. You can have not your face, not your face at all, because it’s not necessary. You don’t have to be the product, you can just be the producer. Yes. But you still have to be cognizant of what you’re producing. You have to learn how to think. This is what’s happening for me. I got to learn how to think like an artist. I wasn’t raised. I didn’t go to art school. I mean, I went to my mom’s art classes, but I wasn’t. I didn’t go to design school. So I had to certainly suddenly become conscious and aware of things like depth of field and lighting and like, different types of film and like, all kinds of stuff that I didn’t know anything about. And so I took it as an opportunity to learn and experiment. And so I’ve just been, you know, integrating those into what, what is taught. And so you could do that for your own face so that you have essentially. How many times. This is the crazy thing. Business owners be like, I just wish I had, like, a twin that could, like, do all the stuff. And then you’re like, okay, I’ll make you like, no, no, you know, like, you know what I mean?

 

>> Isha Vela: Yeah.

 

>> Leah Ardent: You’ve been saying for 20 years you wish you had a twin who could do some of that, make some of this content for you. And now you’re like, oh, no, but I don’t really want one. And not for nothing, the third thing that people do not think about, that they really, you really need to think about. If you only think about one reason to utilize AI, I’m saying, ah, biometric security. Yes. Security people can steal your face. It has already happened. It’s not going to happen. It’s not happening in the future. This is the thing that already happens.

 

>> Isha Vela: Yes.

 

>> Leah Ardent: We’ve had young. There was a young Japanese influencer. Somebody took her face and put it on the body of a, an adult star and created scenes of her doing things she had never actually done. Right. Like people. And this is the most horrifying for me. We’ll take images of children right off the Internet. And there was a guy that was just caught, like, earlier this month who was talking about people, you know, taking images of children and then him putting them into a system and using it to create completely inappropriate material. And so the days of it’s 2015 and I’m gonna put my baby’s whole face whole Name and birth date. You just, your, your child’s identity is tied to their credit, is tied to their reputation. You can’t just put all that information on the Internet anymore because it can all be scraped and utilized.

 

>> Leah Ardent: So. Or for like, for me, as a woman in my 20s, I had a stalker. Yeah, like a legit stalker. Like a call you up and tell you a place that you’re going that you haven’t gotten to yet, that you don’t know the address to, but they know the address because they already know that you’re going there.

 

>> Isha Vela: Oh my God.

 

>> Leah Ardent: Or an influencer that I follow just recently was talking about how she posted where she was as a travel influencer and somebody came to where she was and like approached her. So now there’s this new rule. If you’re a travel influencer, wait until you leave to post you know where you are because people will come and find you. There’s an entire account and I forget the guy’s name, but all he does is look at people’s accounts and tell you where they are.

 

>> Isha Vela: Whoa, that’s bizarre.

 

>> Leah Ardent: That’s his whole thing is he’ll go, I can find where you are. Just post a picture and I’ll find where you are. He goes and cross references images from specific hotels and specific regions and their social media pages. And by putting all that information he’ll be like, this is where that person is located.

 

>> Isha Vela: Wow. Wow.

 

>> Leah Ardent: So from a security perspective, it is a very. To me, it’s an absolutely insane choice to have the option not to disclose your entire life and to just be like, no, I kind of want to continually self surveil because I’m into the attention. I, I, you know, I got a lot of plants in Scorpio, I don’t need it. So I don’t really even want anyone to know I exist at this point. If I could get to that point, it’ll be like the big one. yeah, just fade into the hedges like Homer Simpson.

 

>> Isha Vela: And something that, something that you and I have talked about is creating AI images of yourself that are slightly that who’s like biometric facial, you know, features are different than, configurations are slightly different than yours. So it’s kind of like, like one step removed from your face. Yes.

 

>> Leah Ardent: Well, the great thing about getting older like that was me five years ago. I don’t even look like her anymore. So good luck. But that’s another conversation to be had. When you make yourself the brand, you create a brand that cannot be sold or handed off.

 

>> Isha Vela: Yes. So exactly.

 

>> Leah Ardent: People say be the brand. No. no. Stop being the brand. Guess what? If your audience responds to a happy brown faced girl with almond shaped eyes. You can pick any brown girl with almond shaped eyes. It doesn’t have to be you. They like a type of look or a type of portrayal or a type of imaging. They’ll respond to many kinds of images that are not just you. And I think women have so been encouraged to commodify themselves that a lot of them are addicted and cannot break away because all of their self worth is based on how much everyone likes them online. And either way, whether you want more liking and you want more you, fine. If you want less liking, more selling and less you, both things can be achieved through the utilization of AI.

 

>> Isha Vela: Yes. I love it. This is a really good conversation and of course we could go on for hours and hours and hours, but I think that we covered a lot of the, of the pieces here. You know, kind of just touching on, on a, one of the, a few of the important really key pieces. So thank you so much for, for doing this and coming together and, and having this conversation. And I’m going to include of course the links to your offer in the, in the show notes. So definitely take a look at that.

 

>> Leah Ardent: Yeah, absolutely. I mean I think the other thing, if I could say, if I could close on one thing.

 

>> Isha Vela: Yes please.

 

>> Leah Ardent: I don’t think everybody needs to be using AI. I’m not that person. I think that it would create tremendous mental and environmental harm for many people who are not already fortified or living in a balanced way. we don’t want to get so obsessed with created the meta world, not the brand, but like the non physical. Right. That we forget to be active in our actual lives. And that’s with or without AI. Ah, that was happening to people before AI was a thing. but if you’re a creator, like a real creator, which you know, in my spiritual beliefs all of us are, there’s so much potential there to utilize it. Not flippantly. Understanding that it comes at a cost environmentally, financially, a human cost to all of these things. being really intentional.

 

>> Isha Vela: Yeah.

 

>> Leah Ardent: And one of the reasons that I created the system I created was so that the three years of trial and error that I have engaged in, the compute costs that I have amassed could actually be spared other people because I’ve already like fine tuned resources and systems that they can utilize. So their impact is, is reduced and their creativity can actually be increased. So hopefully, I don’t know if that makes a difference, but I certainly hope so.

 

>> Isha Vela: so you’re basically providing a shortcut. Like shortcuts for people. Yes.

 

>> Leah Ardent: Efficiency.

 

>> Isha Vela: Efficiency, exactly. Artistic efficiency, intentionality and efficiency. Yes. I think that’s really, really important. I hope. Thank you so much, Leah.

 

>> Leah Ardent: thank you. I love you.

 

>> Isha Vela: I love you, too. Thank you for listening to today’s episode. Remember to hit the subscribe button to get notified of new episodes dropping on the new and full moons of each month. And if you haven’t already, leave us a five star review on itunes to make sure that everyone who needs this transmission receives it until the next episode, I’m sending you fierce, fierce love.