Lauren Pope: The whole time that I've been working in content, almost 20 years, email has always been a really valuable marketing channel.

So when I started the business, I knew it was something that I needed to do. But it was also something I wanted to do, because there's loads of value in the community that you can build through something like that, by sharing information and being useful for people.

Lauren: Putting the email together and getting it ready to send is a really time consuming process, so that was one reason I needed support. And the other thing was that it’s impossible to check your own work – I needed help spotting typos and making it look polished and professional. But I also wanted someone to check the vibe. I was really hoping that you would work on it with me, because I know that you've got the right taste level, as well as the skills to actually check whether something is correct.

So I was looking for accuracy, quality and professionalism, and also a second opinion from somebody who would understand how I was trying to communicate.

The other thing that we've talked about a lot is accountability. There is no way that I would have kept it going for six years, with an edition going out pretty much every month, without fail, without the accountability of knowing that “I've said to Ruth this is when it's going to happen!”.

I'm one of those people that needs an external deadline and I need some external pressure to make something happen. Without that I just don't know how to hold myself accountable.

Ruth: It's funny, isn't it? You're still setting it for yourself, but because you've brought another person in it changes the dynamic.

Lauren: Yeah, it makes all the difference. It's some kind of mind trick.

Lauren: It's a good question. I think it was actually the opposite of the advice I would give clients, it was all led by me and my needs. I've got a limited amount of time and I wanted to use that to make the biggest impact that I could for my business. And I get a lot more value out of doing writing of my own, instead of curating other people's content. Writing is a really important part of my thought process, and taking that time each month to look at a topic in depth, run through what I know, and to try and turn it into something – that’s really valuable.

I used to get lots of nice feedback on the email when it was in the link format, but I wouldn't say that it necessarily turned into much business for me. It was just a nice way of staying present in people's minds.

Whereas now when I get leads the email is often the source. And I think that's something to do with giving advice and generating useful information, over just curating useful information.

Lauren: I've tried because I'm curious about new technology and even though I'm skeptical, I don’t want to be skeptical just for the sake of it. I want my skepticism to be based on something. So I tried using it as a thinking partner, coming up with a query like “I'm going to write something about structured content, what questions might people have and what would people want to know?”, to try and spark ideas or think about new angles on something. But I don't find it particularly helpful, no more helpful than the kind of research that I would have done before, like looking at relevant search queries. The other thing is I don't like the anonymity and the lack of attribution that you get with a lot of these tools.

In content, the reason the discipline is the way it is, the reason we know what works and what doesn't, and the reason why we have a practice is because of people writing and sharing their good ideas. AI is just regurgitating other people's work.

And if you do that, it just feels plagiaristic to me. I'd rather go out and read the article and then link to this interesting thing that I learned rather than have Chat GPT spit it back out to me. The one thing that I do use it as is a thesaurus. If I'm struggling to find the right way to word something, I might use it to rephrase things.

Lauren: No, never. I do pay for Writer, an AI tool, and one of the main reasons is to spot typos or grammar mistakes. I don't always use it as part of the process of producing 10 Things, but sometimes it will have been through Writer before it gets to you. But it's just not a replacement. It misses so much stuff. It can pick up long sentences and things that aren’t quite right, but it's no match for somebody actually thinking, rather than just spotting a pattern. I don't think AI tools are a replacement for people. That's never crossed my mind.

I’ve already mentioned the vibe checking, that feels really important to me. And I just don't think that's something that AI can do.

I was just thinking about this this morning. I think people put a lot of faith in technology and people are putting a terrifying amount of faith in AI, and just assuming that it knows better and that it's more intelligent. There is a graph (the Dunning–Kruger effect) that shows when you don't know much about something your confidence can be artificially high and then the more you know you suddenly realise that you know nothing at all.

Generative AI makes you feel overconfident in the output – and copywriting is a really good example. Somebody who doesn't feel very confident in their writing ability wants to work with Chat GPT because they want to do a good job – they'll look at what comes up and think “yes this is slick, this is professional, there's no mistakes in it, this feels good”. But somebody who is a copywriter will look at it, and to them it’ll feel lifeless and really trite. It's giving you the next most likely word in the sentence. As Helen Gaskell said, it's the average of the internet.

Lauren: In publishing and journalism the role of editors and proofreaders is really clear. But I think a lot of people think about their newsletter as marketing, as ephemeral. They’re not approaching it with a publishing mindset at all. I am definitely thinking about 10 Things in terms of publishing. I want to create something with longevity. So, it needs to go through some extra quality control to be worth that.