For the 423rd episode of The Copywriter Club Podcast, we’re checking in on the progress A.I. has made over the past year with Jon Gillham, founder of Originality.AI. We talked about how originality helps protect writers from false accusations of plagiarism and checks facts (unlike ChatGPT and Gemini), plus some of the risks that A.I. poses to the world of content creation. Click the play button below, or scroll down for a full transcript.

Stuff to check out:

Get the AI Bullet Writing Prompt

Originality.AI

The Copywriter Club Facebook Group

The Copywriter Underground

Full Transcript:

Rob Marsh:  Almost two years ago, we realized that A.I. was not just a new idea that copywriters and content writers needed to pay attention to, rather it was a game-changing technology that would impact almost everything writers do. The number of new tools and features that include use A.I. to deliver their benefits is in the thousands. That’s a big part of why we launched the A.I. for Creative Entrepreneurs Podcast last year. You can find more than 20 conversations about A.I. on that podcast.

But as A.I. has become almost commonplace, we stepped away from doing so many interviews about artificial intelligence and just how it is changing our industry. But I’m thinking it’s about time we checked in on how the tech has changed over the past few months and what copywriters should be using it for… if they aren’t already doing it.

Hi I’m Rob Marsh and on today’s episode of The Copywriter Club Podcast, my guest is Jon Gillham, the founder of Originality.AI. This tool is the most accurate A.I. detector available today. What’s more in addition to checking for content created by A.I., it’s a fact checker—something tools like Gemini and ChatGPT have struggled with, it checks for plagiarism, and will help protect you against clients and others who might claim your writing isn’t original. We talked about how they do it and the risks A.I. continues to pose for writers on this episode, so stay tuned.

Before we get to that… last summer we ran the last ever live cohort of The Copywriter Accelerator program. Since then, the only way to get the business building insights and strategies that we shared with more than 350 copywriters over the past seven years was to join the Fast Track version of the accelerator at thecopywriterclub.com/fasttrack. But I’ve been working on an updated version of that program and it too will go away soon. So if you’ve been thinking of joining the accelerator, time is running out. What’s coming next? It’s too soon to reveal what I’ve been working on, but if you join the accelerator fast track before we launch it, you’ll get early access to the new program, absolutely free. Until then, you get all of the content, the 8 modules and blueprints and several bonuses that are included in The Accelerator Fast Track. And when we launch the new program sometime next year, you’ll get that updated program too. Don’t wait to work on your business so when the new year is here you have a steady flow of clients and a signature service you’re proud to offer them. Visit thecopywriterclub.com/fasttrack to learn more today.

And now, let’s go to our interview with Jon Gillham.

Hey, John, welcome to The Copywriter Club Podcast. We’d like to start with your story. So how did you become the founder of Originality AI, and I guess also the co-founder of AdBank and Motion Invest and Content Refined? You’ve done a lot of this company starting thing.

Jon Gillham: Yeah, it’s been a journey. Yeah, so my background was as a mechanical engineer, did that in school, and then I always knew that I wanted to get back to my hometown and started some sort of online projects. A lot of those projects all had sort of a central theme around creating content that would rank in Google, get traffic, and monetize that, whether that was an e-commerce site, a software business. And then at one point, we built up some extra capacity within the team that I had of writers that we were working with, and then started selling at extra capacity. So built up a content marketing agency, sold it, and then had seen the wave of generative AI coming. look to build a solution to try and help provide transparency between writers and agencies and, and clients. And that’s where originality came from.

Rob Marsh: So as far as most people’s experience with AI, it really started about two years ago when, you know, ChatGPT went live and suddenly everybody was like, oh my gosh, this is not what we were expecting, or it’s come along a lot faster. But you’ve been doing this a lot longer than that. Tell us, you know, basically, how did you get interested in AI and get started with creating these kinds of tools?

Jon Gillham: Yeah, so I totally agree. I think a lot of people sort of assume everything on the internet that predated Chat GPT was human generated. But the reality is that there was other tools that predated Chat GPT. Specifically, there’s the GPT-3 that got released by OpenAI in 2020, and then sort of from GPT-2 2020, and then From that, there were many writing tools that were built off the back of it, so tools like jasper.ai. And we were, at one point, one of the heaviest users of Jasper, where we had a writing service where we transparently used AI content, but stalled that content for a lot less than the human-generated content in another part of the content agency. And so that was where we really started to see that the efficiency lift that came from using AI and then, you know, who who gets to capture that efficiency if is it, you know, the writer that copies and pastes out of chat to BT that then displaces a writer that did hard work on their own. And that was sort of where, where we first started playing with AI. And then yeah, using it extensively within our content marketing agency.

Rob Marsh: So before we go really deep on AI and the stuff that you’ve done, I’m interested, as a founder, as a co-founder, just what are some of the biggest challenges that you have faced as you’ve started your businesses? Again, we’re talking to an audience of people who are running their own businesses, most of them. So I’m just curious how you’ve been able to succeed where so many others tend to fail.

Jon Gillham: I mean, there’s certainly failures in there. So they’re not all successes. So I think the common theme is when we’re solving it, the common themes on when there’s success is probably two core things. One, that resolving a problem that is meaningful and adding sort of significant value by helping to solve whatever that problem is, is one. And the second piece is when there’s been a really good team around that project, when the co-founders on it are great, when the initial hires are really, really good. Those are probably the two key things that have seemingly been the common traits when the projects have gone well, and there’s certainly projects that haven’t gone well, lots of failures in there as well.

Rob Marsh: Interesting you say that. I worked at a startup a decade or two ago. the CEO that came in to run it. It was a fun environment, really great place to work. We had a successful exit, sold off to HP. And I remember the CEO saying, if you’re lucky, you get to have an experience like this sometime in your career where you put together a great team, you’ve got a great product, you have this great experience. And then he said, and then you spend the rest of your life trying to replicate that at the next company or the company after. And there’s a lot of truth to that.

Jon Gillham: There’s a lot of truth. In a lot of our weekly meetings at the All Hands right now, we’re saying, like, you know, these are currently the good old days. So, like, enjoy them because we’re going to be looking back at this, like, hopefully we will be fortunate to be lucky enough to be looking back at these days as the good old days, because it is a lot of fun right now. And I think, yeah, I certainly echo what he was saying in terms of, yeah, it doesn’t, a lot of things need to go right to line up with sort of a, all the pieces to be in that sort of like a scaling stage of a company.

Rob Marsh: Okay, so let’s talk about Originality AI and this tool that you have built. Basically, my understanding of it is, you know, as I’ve scanned through and checked it out, it does a few different things. You know, checking to see