Recorded: Welcome to The Rework with Allison Tyler Jones, a podcast dedicated to inspiring portrait photographers to uniquely brand, profitably price, and confidently sell their best work. Allison has been doing just that for the last 15 years, and she’s proven that it’s possible to create unforgettable art and run a portrait business that supports your family and your dreams. All it takes is a little rework. Episodes will include interviews with experts from in and outside of the photo industry, mini workshops, and behind-the-scenes secrets that Allison uses in her portrait studio every single day. She will challenge your thinking and inspire your confidence to create a profitable, sustainable portrait business you love through continually refining and reworking your business.
Let’s do The Rework.
Allison Tyler Jones: Well, you’re in for a treat today because we have Kira Derryberry in our podcast studio today, and she is bringing with her not only her amazing wealth of experience as a portrait commercial photographer, former president of Professional Photographers of America, but Kira does not like to rest on her laurels. She does not ever like to be calm or normal. She always likes to be pushing the envelope, whether it’s in her lighting, in her work. She’s just never satisfied to just be normal. And what she’s really been pushing the envelope on recently is diving into the world of AI, specifically using ChatGPT and using it in her business. And I know everybody’s curious about this. Some of us maybe are a little bit scared of it. And so I just wanted her to come and share with us, what the heck are you doing, girl? Welcome. So glad you’re here.
Kira Derryberry: Thanks for having me. Yeah. Yeah, you’re right. Man, I feel seen.
Allison Tyler Jones: Well, you’re just an ambitious doer girl.
Kira Derryberry: I am. I bore easily when it comes to creative things, and I think AI is a creative thing. And also, in my former life, I was a web programmer.
Allison Tyler Jones: I did not know that.
Kira Derryberry: You didn’t know that? So I used to work in advertising as a web designer and programmer, so I designed and coded skins for content management systems like Drupal and WordPress, and that was my world before.
Allison Tyler Jones: Awesome.
Kira Derryberry: Over 15 years ago. I mean, I try and keep up with it. I couldn’t say that I was the expert I used to be a million years ago, 16, 17 years ago.
Allison Tyler Jones: But you understand the basics of how that world works, where a lot of people don’t.
Kira Derryberry: Yeah, I know enough to do some damage, that’s for sure.
Allison Tyler Jones: Just enough to be dangerous.
Kira Derryberry: Yep. That’s where I live is right in that zone of-
Allison Tyler Jones: Yeah, I know. It’s a good zone.
Kira Derryberry: It’s a good zone. So yeah, I’m fairly obsessed with ChatGPT. And you mentioned some of us are afraid of it. That’s normal and I think advisable. Be a little afraid. This is uncharted territory. I think there are so many pros, but with everything, there’s a lot of cons. And I kind of see AI in general, just in general, especially on the business side of AI… Now, I could not pretend to be an expert in the image generation, video content generation realm. We’ll leave that to the Scott Detweilers of the world, right? But I am certainly becoming a fairly big expert on how to use it for our business.
Kira Derryberry: And I think of it kind of like it’s a paradigm shift. Back in the day when we were shifting from film to digital, that was in photography a paradigm shift that really affected creatives and photographers. And those that did not get on board with the digital photography train, those who resisted it, so many of them were left behind or they just threw in the towel. They were like, “I’m not willing to learn this new thing.” But those who learned the new thing are still with us. They survived the shift, figured out how to make it work for them, and that’s where we’re at again. That’s what this is.
Kira Derryberry: So I think it’s okay to be afraid of technology. This kind of technology is a Pandora’s box kind of thing, right? It’s moving so quickly. It’s not going back in. But this one, we need as business owners, forget that we’re photographers, as small business owners, micro business owners, we are going to get left behind if we do not understand what this does and how we can use it for our business, right?
Allison Tyler Jones: Okay. Yeah. And I’ve heard a lot of interviews with… Oh, who’s the guy that wrote Nexus, that Israeli philosopher? He wrote Sapiens. Anyway, and just talking about how we thought that the web was a big disruptor, but that this is the web times… AI, it’s a completely different world. It’s like the industrial revolution, the web times a thousand, add in a sprinkle of sprinkles.
Kira Derryberry: Yeah, yeah, and it’s exponential. It’s like the universe. It is not stopping and it’s never ending. And so you have to think of it as an infinity vortex. It’s just going to keep getting better. And that can be scary. Those of us who grew up watching Terminator 2 and are worried about Skynet-
Allison Tyler Jones: I know.
Kira Derryberry: But I guess for the record, they’ll have a lot of me being very thankful and polite to the ChatGPT, and maybe when-
Allison Tyler Jones: As long as my arms can look like Linda Hamilton in the show, then maybe it’s not so bad to be wearing your jacket full of shotgun shells.
Kira Derryberry: Yeah. And that AI apocalypse that is coming, I guess we need to start working out now.
Allison Tyler Jones: Yeah, exactly.
Kira Derryberry: It’s the takeaway from today.
Allison Tyler Jones: The takeaway from today, get to the gym.
Kira Derryberry: Get to the gym.
Allison Tyler Jones: Lift heavy. Okay, so let’s start with what was the thing that first… I mean, I don’t want to go back to, “I got a camera in fourth grade,” but just give me the basic, what kind of twigged you to like, “Oh, okay, how do I bring this into my business?” Because I think, like you said before, most photographers are like, how is it being integrated into Photoshop and how is it being done with imagery? But you’re talking about bringing it into your actual business. So say more about that.
Kira Derryberry: Okay. So I think like a lot of us, when I started playing around, even with the free version, if you just got in there, I was doing silly stuff. I was arguing with it. I was making it write funny rhymes. I was goofing with it, right? And the only thing I knew about that people were doing with it was writing content with it, so writing their blog posts. And I was like, “None of this sounds like me. I don’t even understand how to make it sound like me. And by the time I get done editing this to sound like me, I could have just written it.”
Kira Derryberry: And then there was all this stuff about where is it learning these concepts? Is it directly lifting off of… If I say, “I want to write a comedy set list that is in the style of Sarah Silverman,” right, this was kind of a famous case, “Write me that,” and it would write that. And so you’re like, well, what’s sacred, you know what I mean? So a lot of pause about using it in the beginning. The turning point, though, for me was actually our friend John Gress, who we were speaking about lovingly earlier. He’s an angel, but I was-
Allison Tyler Jones: Love him.
Kira Derryberry: I was teaching in Chicago and hanging out with him. We were having a little work morning at his kitchen table, and he was really using ChatGPT. This is a year ago, just a year ago, maybe a year and a half. And he was telling me how he had customized ChatGPT about his blog and his business, and so now it was writing like him and he was using an assistant. He was giving this custom GPT to an assistant overseas, and the assistant was filling in all this data for him and his website, fixing his SEO and writing his blog posts, writing his content for his YouTube channel, all this stuff. It’s like when you learn one thing in, let’s say Photoshop or in Lightroom, you learn one thing and then it sort of goes, “Well, if I could do that, I could do this,” right?
Allison Tyler Jones: Yeah. It’s like your mind opens to the possibilities. That’s how I felt when the iPod came out. I was like, “If they could do a phone that did everything.”
Kira Derryberry: Yeah, and if they could do that.
Allison Tyler Jones: Yeah, and I could see how the Apple universe would open before me. Yes. And it did.
Kira Derryberry: And then we’d be in Minority Report and we’d be moving things with our hands.
Allison Tyler Jones: I know. Totally.
Kira Derryberry: So yeah, that was what it was. It was sitting with John at his table and having him show me how he was using it differently. He wasn’t just using it to write the content. He was copying his brain and duplicating it in a way. I don’t think he saw it that way, but I did. And then I kept thinking, “Well, if you could do that, could you do this? And if you could do that.” He was creating these little custom automations that were doing repetitive tasks for him without needing to explain it to ChatGPT over and over again. It would automatically know what it was he wanted to do with what he gave it. And that opened so many doorways for me because it kind of was like, “Well, if he can do that, I wonder if I could make this.”
Kira Derryberry: And I’ll tell you that the experiment that I ran that was interesting. So I was working on contracts. If you’re a PPA member, there’s all these contracts that we have that are templates that you can incorporate into your business, but they’re just PDFs and you can customize each one. I thought, “Well, it would be great if”… because I have so many different jobs commercial-wise that require different stipulations be put in, and it would be great if it could just have this library of contracts and then write a custom contract based on what the language in the library of contracts was, right?
Kira Derryberry: So I made that. I made one just for an experiment. This isn’t a sanctioned PPA item, just as FYI. But to see if I could make that work, I took those contracts, I put them into a custom GPT, then I programmed it, and programmed it in quotation marks because you don’t have to be a programmer to be able to do this, which is so great. But I told it, “I want to be able to give you the client information and just some custom details about each job, and I want you to only pull from this library of contracts and make me one contract that uses these pieces,” whatever pieces I need, so model or if this is a commercial photo release or limited usage release, I want to pull from that and not pull from the internet, not go and look for contracts on the internet and incorporate its own. And it did. I was able to make that work. And that was the huge thing for me was like, “If I can do that, then I can do this. And if I can do that, I can do this,” and so-
Allison Tyler Jones: I love that. Okay, so contract. So the first thing was, how do I make the… So basically, for those that are like me that aren’t as smart as you, what you’re basically doing is just how can I automate something that usually takes a long time to go in, and say a wedding photographer has a new contract and you need to go in and put, okay, it’s the names, the dates, the whatever, and then it can just do it. It will just pull all the wording, put all that stuff in there, and then it’s done.
Kira Derryberry: It’s done. Now, done with a caveat. Always check your work. You know what I mean? It’s imperfect.
Allison Tyler Jones: It does hallucinate sometimes.
Kira Derryberry: It hallucinates, which is a pain in the butt, but it does do that. But yeah, so then that’s what I’m talking about using ChatGPT for, and maybe that’s in its most smallest form. I mean, what I’ve been teaching now is how to customize the entire system so that it has all of the relevant information. It’s like I believe that you can clone… We talk about, “Oh man, if I could just have a clone of myself.” I believe that you can actually clone yourself with all of the content you already have for your business, like your contracts, your policies, your pricing, product line, all that stuff. You can build a library, a repository of information about your business, even down to your brand and how your brand voice, your brand story. All of those things you can do, put it into ChatGPT, and then that’s the information it pulls from every single time.
Kira Derryberry: So I’m to a place now, and a lot of my students are to a place now where they can get an email from a client. Everyone knows you’re in the middle of a huge project, and then you get this important email from a client that needs to be answered. Your brain needs to go switch to that, right? But I can copy that email and put it into ChatGPT and it will cobble together and answer. It might be a pricing question, it might be a quote, you know what I mean? I can get that and then paste it back, give it a once over, paste it back in and get back to my job, get back to the project I was working on because I have a little clone of myself that’s writing emails.
Allison Tyler Jones: Right. Well, and I think anybody that has been hijacked, quote-unquote hijacked like that, you get, maybe it’s not a happy email, because the non-happy emails are the hardest, so that could hijack me easily for half a day. I have taken maybe two to three hours to write a couple of paragraphs, get up, go walk away, like, “Okay, is that how I want it to sound? Is this consistent with my brand? What are the possible negative effects of this down line after I say this?” And so even if you don’t use what ChatGPT gave you straight out of the box, it at least gives you a starting point. And to have that, that would save you at least… I mean, even if it was a very fraught email that you really needed to write, it gives you a starting place. Fair?
Kira Derryberry: Yes. Yes. And it takes all that emotion out, and you get it done quicker. I have to sit on it for a day. Sometimes I’ll take to the bed, Allison. I’ll be like-
Allison Tyler Jones: Not opposed.
Kira Derryberry: … “You know what? I’m done,” and I will go get in bed. But seriously though, it can get answered, it can get answered efficiently and without your full emotion written behind it, and you can be done with it. You know what I did actually? I used it to track down money. I hate chasing down money from corporate clients or from… Billing is different, obviously, with corporate or commercial clients. Obviously there’s a deposit sometimes, and then there’s a payment upon completion depending on what the contract is. And I had two clients from last year that I was chasing down money. I mean, they were incredibly late, and you’re a small business owner. I mean, what is your recourse? I mean, yeah, you can take them to small claims, but why?
Kira Derryberry: So I’m trying to recover this money. I took the emails, correspondence that I had previously had with the clients, and for each one, I started a conversation with ChatGPT and I said, “Okay, here’s the context for where it is. Here’s the invoice. Here’s when it was due. Here’s when the job was completed.” And it wrote me a new email, reminder email just to get the ball rolling again on trying to get paid. I got paid. There was some back and forth. I just took their answer. I mean, literally, I didn’t think about it at all. I just took their answer, their response, put it into ChatGPT, it gave me another response, I sent it back to them, I got paid.
Allison Tyler Jones: That’s great.
Kira Derryberry: Their answers were annoying and made me mad, but it really helped me, and it even allowed me to do things like, “Okay, they’re telling me that they’re going to pay me on such and such date.” So ChatGPT says, “Okay, so let’s set a reminder on your calendar that we’re going to follow up with an email if they haven’t,” so it’s just that kind of thing.
Allison Tyler Jones: It really is kind of like a personal assistant.
Kira Derryberry: It is. It can be. And it’s so much more than just writing blogs for you and getting frustrated with that. I love it. I mean, again, cautiously optimistic.
Allison Tyler Jones: Yeah, yeah. No, no, for sure.
Kira Derryberry: I ask it stuff all the time.
Allison Tyler Jones: So are you using it to help write inquiry responses, followups, that kind of stuff?
Kira Derryberry: Well, I have workflows. So I’m a 17hats user, and I have workflows that are activated when people inquire depending on what they inquire about. But yeah, I’ve updated those workflows using ChatGPT to get that system going. However, when we start to get into the planning process, that is definitely something that I am doing to help.
Kira Derryberry: So I’ll give you an example that was yesterday, actually. So I have a long time client, a family client that I have been photographing for seven years. Every year, the client always loves to do, she always wants my help shopping, picking a theme for the clothing, picking a theme, not outside of what I do as far as the style goes, but really helping her get the style and the colors and everything that she wants. And in seven years, we’ve done a lot of things.
Kira Derryberry: And so she came back to me, she goes, “I’m ready to go ahead and schedule… I want to get on the calendar in September. I am completely out of ideas. I need some help.” So I went to ChatGPT and I gave that little background that I gave you. She’s really into big brands, high fashion. She loves to have the family in a theme for clothing. And so what ideas can we spin for her? So this is the brainstorming. It gave me five potential outfit, clothing, color theme ideas and color story ideas too, what they would convey and everything.
Kira Derryberry: It made examples of what… I gave a photo of… Actually, I gave all their photos from their family photos to it. I said, “This is what we’ve done.” It generated an AI kind of illustrated image of this family. It looked like the family, not photorealistic, illustrated, and it gave me our top three, the three that I said I want to give her options for, and it dressed them, kind of put them into the set, so she could be so visual about what was expected about the clothing. And so this takes the consultation up a level, right? We’re on another page.
Allison Tyler Jones: Totally.
Kira Derryberry: And so I sent her just a little… I used Canva. I put those three images in there, titled what the styles were called, and I said, “So here’s three new ideas. We haven’t done any of these before. Is there one that speaks to you that we can land on? And then I can help you shop for these items,” because I do love shopping for other people and I love shopping for my clients. And she picked one, and it just took so much out of our consult time, me trying to figure out… You’re doing a million things. Now I got to come up with your color scheme? Yes, I do, because it’s my job.
Allison Tyler Jones: Yeah, it’s interesting because I will do a mood board for clients. And I had a client that they come, they’re multi-gen, so they come every four years. So this last time she’s like, “I’m just really struggling with the clothes.” And I said, “I think based on what we had done before,” we had done an all navy situation that looked really great in their house, and she’s like, “I still do like the navy, but I feel like I want to add in.” I said, “Well, what if we put in some grays and then some camel, maybe threw in those three colors? So just kind of think about that.” So this was literally just a conversation on the phone.
Allison Tyler Jones: So interestingly, they show up, they looked fabulous. She had put in ChatGPT, she herself, the client, had gone in and said, “Okay, this is the colors that my photographer told me. Show me what this could look like,” and it came up with things that gave her ideas of like, “Okay, it could be khaki pants with a blue, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah,” and she just went to town. And so I’m like, “Okay, that is so cool. I would not have thought to do that.” So my client taught me.
Kira Derryberry: Let’s take it a step further from your end, from our end. So we often go to the house and do a little discovery wall consult to try and figure… like you’re talking about. You knew it was going to go great in their house because you’ve been there. So I go, I take pictures of the wall space and getting the color scheme of the house, the furniture, that sort of thing too. So you upload a photo of the family into ChatGPT, you upload a photo of the home and you say, “Okay, I am trying to help coach this client on the perfect color palette and mood board for their style for the shoot.”
Kira Derryberry: And it’ll combine all those things and put it together for you and then generate the images that you can then provide that client, right? I mean, not just the image of the family, let’s say. I mean, I don’t want to insult any family, because it did make images of the family. It was very close looking, but I was like, “Don’t get hung up on what these images look like. It’s just an AI rendering.” But also what if it’s just, like you said, a mood board? What if it’s just some clothing examples, color palette swatches, you know what I mean? You don’t have to go down to the posing. You don’t want to over-promise something that can’t be achieved.
Allison Tyler Jones: Right, right, right, right. You’re not that flexible. You can’t do that pose.
Kira Derryberry: Right. You can’t do that pose. But I mean, Allison, you could upload an example portfolio into it of your work so that when it generates these things, it’s generating it in your style of work as well. And I love a custom… It’s kind of a surprise and delight, I think, for the client because it just elevates. They’re not afraid of AI. They’re happy to have all this information.
Allison Tyler Jones: Yeah, totally.
Kira Derryberry: And you’re not spending a lot of time doing it so you’re able to provide that information for them, so where’s the downside here, you know what I mean, and your business? There’s certainly downsides to everything, but I mean, not in this… In this scenario, we’re using it for good, for productivity.
Allison Tyler Jones: Right, efficiency. But I do think it’s back to what you very first said when you first, first, first got on is you saw this as creative. So say more about that. I mean, I think obviously this is a way to be creative, but this is what you mean, right, is that you’re asking it to help you. It’s efficiency, but it actually is generative, literally.
Kira Derryberry: Yes. Yes. So I said earlier, too, that I’m not an expert in the image generation, certainly by no means. But I use the image generation that is in ChatGPT to help me visualize or when I’m just trying to work through an idea. I describe that idea and then I will often let it build that idea in a visual for me so that I can see so what I see in my head is what I can see. This has become especially helpful for my magazine work that I do. So I have to do a magazine every other month for this local magazine photographing, and I don’t build sets. I keep it simple here, just like you, and-
Allison Tyler Jones: Well, yeah, and you don’t have a budget. You don’t have Annie Leibovitz budget.
Kira Derryberry: There’s no budget. There’s no budget. So we have to know what we can do within the boundaries of that and it’s highly dictated on what they’re going to wear. So what I do is I get images of what they’re going to wear. I ask the cover women, “Okay, I know you’ve got your outfits picked out. They’re working with this store in town. Take pictures of everything you’re going to bring of you in it so that we can do that so I can have them to kind of be ready for you.”
Kira Derryberry: For the holiday issue, we did this and she sent me two images of gowns she was going to wear, and I put that into ChatGPT, explained what we had to work with. I said, “I have a red velvet couch. I have a dark gray background. I have some swatches of what these things look like.” And we compiled a holiday look for this cover in my space with what I had, and then I brought it to life in an actual image, you know what I mean? So, “This is the set we’re going to use for this dress. This is the set we’re going to use for this dress,” using stuff I already had, placement that I probably would’ve gotten there to do, but it was so much nicer to have it already planned and ready to be able to execute it and then to branch out from that too. So I mean, to me, it’s a thought partner. Everything is coming from you.
Allison Tyler Jones: Well, it’s like a thinking tool, because I think for me, I’m a thinker, I’m a reader, I’m a learner. So those are core qualities. But what am I always bemoaning? I don’t remember. I read a book and two days later you’re like, “Did you like that book?” I’m like, “Yeah.” “What was that about?” “I don’t really remember,” so the memory and then synthesizing all of that stuff together when you’re trying to run a business and do everything else too. So it’s like how many times have you gone through and looked back on your phone on some trip you’ve been on and you’re like, “Oh my gosh, that picture from that museum. I wanted to try that concept,” and then you never did, right? I just was doing that this morning from a New York trip, and so having a place, I guess, to put that stuff and draw from, so it’s like a thinking tool.
Kira Derryberry: It’s a thinking tool. It helps you with the visualizing, because I’m a visual person. I’m not a math person. I’m not a-
Allison Tyler Jones: Same.
Kira Derryberry: … spatial relationship person. I got to do it. In fact, when I’m posing and I’m trying to explain a pose, I often go, “Stand up for a minute.” I go do the pose.
Allison Tyler Jones: Same. I always say, “Go be me.” And they’re like, “What are you talking about?” I’m like, “Go be me. Go over there. Pretend like you’re me. I’m going to show you.”
Kira Derryberry: Yeah. I cannot explain sometimes how I want somebody to sit in a chair. I need to do it so I can explain what I’m doing as I’m doing it and then get up and then help them get into it. It’s as much for me as it is for them. It helps me explain it back to them. So I need this tool. This is my visual aid to plan. And I think before my visual aid to plan was just my head and you forget things, like I had this great idea in the shower, and then you get done with the shoot and you’re like, “God, I forgot to do this. I saw this one thing.” So I love it for that. So for me, that’s the creative part.
Kira Derryberry: The other creative part as far as it being a thought partner is, have you ever talked to yours? Have you ever used the audio to talk to it?
Allison Tyler Jones: No.
Kira Derryberry: Okay, so this is a feature, and I use it with my phone. You can download the app, the ChatGPT app to your phone. Now, this feature is I think only available, well, I might be wrong, but in the paid version, which is like $20 a month, so it’s kind of… But there’s an audio and you can set the voice. Mine’s a British man.
Allison Tyler Jones: Of course it is. Why wouldn’t it be? Yes.
Kira Derryberry: So you can set the voice. There’s multiple ones that you can choose from. And I find that I brainstorm concepts and ideas and projects that I’m thinking about in a conversational way with it, and then it records the transcript of our conversation as if it’s a chat in ChatGPT. So then I can come back, when I’m driving a long distance somewhere and I have the conversation in my car with it, I can come back to my desk when I’m back and revisit and then continue that conversation. “Okay, so I’m back at my desk now. I’m ready to execute the idea we talked about.” And so here’s-
Allison Tyler Jones: Oh my gosh.
Kira Derryberry: I know. Is it happening for you what happened for me? It’s like, “Well, if I could do that, I could do this.”
Allison Tyler Jones: Well, because I’m just thinking about how many, I have voice memos and how many notes I have on my phone of me driving going, “Okay, don’t forget to talk to Kira about this on the dah, dah, dah, dah, and then while you’re there, ask her about blah, blah, blah, blah, blah,” and then they’re all in these all disparate places, and then I’m forgetting them. You’re basically creating a library of your brain outside of your brain with a helpful partner who can generate ideas-
Kira Derryberry: Yes, and it-
Allison Tyler Jones: … who knows everything.
Kira Derryberry: It forces you to talk to it like a human being, okay? It allows you to do the ums and the okays. It allows you to speak in a free flowing way that is not what you would do if you were typing to it, you know what I mean?
Allison Tyler Jones: Right, right, or Siri, where it jacks you up because you said um. It’s searching for something it shouldn’t or whatever.
Kira Derryberry: And it talks back to you in a conversational way. And so it just becomes a sounding board to bounce things off of, because as much as I’d love to call you and bounce ideas off of you all day, you have a job, and you can’t be my sounding board every single time I have an idea.
Allison Tyler Jones: I’m here for you.
Kira Derryberry: I know you are.
Allison Tyler Jones: On occasion, yes, we can be here for each other, but to just have that in your pocket, that’s crazy.
Kira Derryberry: Oh my God. How many times have I put on my makeup to brainstorming an idea? I mean, I’m sitting there getting ready in my bathroom and I just turned it on speaker and I talk to it and it’s so great. Now, let me warn you about a couple of problems that you are going to encounter and you have to just know it for what it is. ChatGPT is toxically positive, okay? So it is positive in reinforcing and encouraging to a point that could lead you down, like, “Is this a good idea?” “Kira, I think this is a fantastic idea.”
Kira Derryberry: You need to remember that even though it says it’s a great idea, it’s yours to decide if it’s a great idea, you know what I mean? Because we talked about hallucinating, you know what I mean? It won’t consider all the aspects of things that you probably would. This is a good thing. So just that one air of caution that yeah, it’s great to brainstorm with, but don’t rely on it to be the thing that tells you to do it or tells you not to do it. Actually, I don’t think it’s ever told me not… That’s something. I don’t think it’s ever told me not to do something.
Allison Tyler Jones: Right. Interesting.
Kira Derryberry: So be careful with that.
Allison Tyler Jones: Well, it kind of does make you think, just going from a philosophical standpoint now, just the things that my kids are going to be warning their kids about, right? Because we’re old. Well, you’re not. I am, but I’m older, so I know, of course I’m going to make my own decisions, but you could see a kid that was raised with this might not. So it’s just an interesting thought where it’s a different way of being in the world to have this technology.
Kira Derryberry: And it applies to so many areas. It’s not just business. I mean, I don’t know if you know, but I broke my foot this year and-
Allison Tyler Jones: I did know about that.
Kira Derryberry: Did you hear about that. I broke it. And for me to keep up with all of the information I was getting about my surgery and the x-rays and stuff, I built a repository of information about everything the doctor gave me, all the reporting. I downloaded all of the notes, patient notes and everything from my doctor and put it in there, and I was able to ask it questions that were helpful to put my mind at ease and keep up with things.
Kira Derryberry: For example, the x-ray, the initial x-ray before the surgery looked one way and then the x-ray after the surgery, right after the surgery looked like the area that was broken was even more broken to me. And I was like, “Is it worse?” And so I had it compare my x-rays and I explained my concern to ChatGPT, and it explained that the doctor likely did alter the bone in such a way that may make it look on the x-ray that it is more broken, but he did that to make sure that it was going to heal correctly, that it was going to fuse back together correctly. And see, that puts my mind at ease and doesn’t have me spinning out about like, “Oh my God, was this surgery a mistake? Am I permanently messed up from this and do I need to call the doctor?”
Allison Tyler Jones: Yeah, I love that. Well, and it’s just, don’t you think that the further you go along in anything, so whether it’s a medical treatment for a chronic illness or an acute illness or broken bone or business or anything, is that you realize… I realize the older I get, the smarter you get, the better your questions.
Kira Derryberry: Yes.
Allison Tyler Jones: In the beginning, you don’t even know what to ask. So newbie photographer, it’s all about, it used to be, “What film are you using? What lens are you using? What camera body are you using? What kind of lights?” You’re all about the gear and the brands and the whatever. And then you’ve realize like, “Okay, well it matters-ish, but those are not really the questions.” And then in business, “Okay, well how much are you charging for this and how much are you charging that?” And then it’s like, “Okay, no, but why? And then what’s the brand?” And then there’s the story and these levels of questions. And so how do you use it? Do you use it in that way to help you ask better questions or asking questions of it and it’s giving you questions or do you have anything to-
Kira Derryberry: I’m so glad you went here because you’re absolutely right. I remember I took a workshop with Joel Grimes a hundred years ago, like a week long class, and I thought, “I’m going to come out of this class and I’m going to buy everything that he uses. I’m going to use the lights that he uses. I’m going to do everything.” And I got there and he brought… Well, he shot with the really expensive lights. He brought the lights I already had. And I was like, “Oh, I thought you used these expensive lights.” And he goes, “Oh, I don’t travel with them. And it doesn’t matter what the lights are, it’s how you use it. It’s the approach.” And so I learned that was such a valuable lesson, and it applies here too.
Kira Derryberry: The best way to use ChatGPT is to understand the best way to prompt it, because it can only do what it is you ask it to do, and it’s only going to give you as much detail as you ask it for. But like you said, I don’t know what I need to ask it. What if I don’t know all the details? What if I don’t know how to think forward ahead to know that I’m going to need to have all this information? So I found the best way to do it is to begin with the end in mind, which is how we approach everything we do in our business, begin with the end in mind.
Kira Derryberry: So I need to know first before I go into ChatGPT, what is the end result I am trying to get? Okay, so I’ll go in here and let’s say… Let me think of a good example. Let’s tell it that I’m working on a marketing plan for my holiday sessions this year. So I know that at the end of this exercise with ChatGPT, I need these items. So I’ll say, “Hey, ChatGPT.” I don’t have a name for it. I should, I guess, but I don’t. You can. And I’ll say, “Hey, okay, I need to market my holiday sessions this year. I want to be fully booked by this date. Here are the dates that I have available. Here’s how the sessions are going to be,” maybe I upload a document that explains what we’re going to market with it, “What do you need to know from me to complete this task?”
Kira Derryberry: Okay, so first part, I told it where I’m going. “At the end of this exercise, I need to be fully booked for my holiday sessions, fully booked. Here are the dates. Here’s what it’s going to include. Here’s the pricing. What else do you need to know from me?” That’s the second part. Ask it what it needs to know in order to do the best job for you on this question because you don’t know what you don’t know. And so it’ll go, “Okay, I need to know,” and it’ll give you a series of questions that will it get to this result better. And without that little piece, that two-part piece, it’s so different from, “Make me a marketing guide for my fall sessions.” It’s just, you see the difference?
Allison Tyler Jones: And it’s going to be super generic. Yes. But it’s like, okay, I love this so much because actually, to get the best out of it, you have to think better. And that’s true. Take ChatGPT and flush it down the toilet, it doesn’t exist right now, and you’re making a marketing plan. If you don’t know what you want, how many people are just copying what everybody else is doing, but they don’t know? Okay, well, so you want to be fully booked like 24/7? You want to be shooting 24/7?
Kira Derryberry: Yeah. What does fully booked mean?
Allison Tyler Jones: What does fully booked mean? What is your capacity? What do you want to do? So it’s like just the exercise as you were repeating all of that, which I’m going to repeat it again, so we’re making a marketing plan for our holiday sessions. You’re saying to ChatGPT, “I want to market my holiday sessions. I want to be fully booked by,” let’s just say, “I want to be fully booked by September 30th. The available dates are,” and so you list all of the dates that you’re willing to shoot and then you upload a PDF of, “The sessions are going to be Santa on a green background, a blue background,” I don’t know, throw in things I’m missing, whatever, whatever you want to shoot.
Kira Derryberry: Yep, and they’re going to be this long. The sessions are-
Allison Tyler Jones: “Sessions will be 20 minutes long. Sessions will be an hour long. It doesn’t have to be a mini session thing. It can be, these are family portrait sessions that are an hour long. They are full boat. We’re not doing many sessions. What do you need for me to complete this task?”
Kira Derryberry: Yeah, or even smaller. “Look, I need 10 sessions booked for the month of November. Okay, 10 total sessions booked for the month of November. I do these two types of photography. I do headshot photography work. I do corporate photography work. What do I need to do? What do you need to know for me to book these sessions?” And it should have as much information as possible, right? It needs-
Allison Tyler Jones: Well, because you could even put in, I’m just thinking, I’m sitting here wanting to put into ChatGPT right now, but, “Okay, my family session average is this. My corporate session average is this. My senior session average is this, and I need to make X number of dollars by the end of November.”
Kira Derryberry: “How can I do that?” You know what I did, Allison, you’re going to like this, because this-
Allison Tyler Jones: Tell me.
Kira Derryberry: This is stuff. I exported last year’s numbers. I exported my client sales reports, my profit loss report, everything. I exported all of basically my tax documents. And I downloaded this year’s as well because this year, because I broke my foot, was slower, so I’d be out for a little bit. So I said, “Okay, here’s year to date on this year. Here’s the same documents from last year. I need to know trends that you see that worked really well last year. I need to know how much I’m down because of that first quarter. I need to know what we can do in this year to make up for that difference just to try and break even to the same amount that we did last year, and I need you to tell me what worked so well last year that we need to maybe even focus more on it this year. And I’d like to know any other trends that you see in this data that would be helpful.”
Kira Derryberry: Give it an open end. Don’t just give it those tasks. Go, “And then do you see anything else that might be relevant that I should be paying attention to in these next two quarters?” I mean, what a way to give yourself a checkup. What a way to adjust mid-year, because you don’t know where you want to go unless you know where you’ve been, especially if you experienced any sort of setback in your year.
Allison Tyler Jones: And so what did that… I mean, without going personally to your own, you don’t have to tell me numbers, but what did it spit out? What was helpful?
Kira Derryberry: What was helpful was actually being able to see and digest that first quarter difference from last year. “Here’s the difference.” It was big. It was a big difference, right? “So here’s that first quarter difference.”
Allison Tyler Jones: “Here’s your broken foot difference.” Yeah.
Kira Derryberry: It also was so nice. It was like, “Don’t beat yourself up. You were sick. You were out,” you know what I mean? Again, very positive. But, “Here’s what we need to make up in these quarters and here’s how you can divide it out between the next three quarters. Here’s what worked really well last year is my corporate work, but here’s your highest sales averages from last year was your family work. So to make up for this, you could do two things. You could double time that corporate work and really go and approach past clients that maybe haven’t been booking this year that did book last year. Come back and be like, ‘Are we ready to re-up,’ that sort of thing, or you could really market hard for these family sessions this year. Try and take on some new clients.” Most of my stuff, it ends up being a few new clients and a lot of repeat business.
Allison Tyler Jones: Same.
Kira Derryberry: Yeah, because we do a specific thing people come to us for. “So you could try, we need to maybe market to a new demographic or a new area to try and pick up some more new clients so that we can really roll them in.” So it’s strategizing with you. Again, thought partner. It’s not what you have to do, but it’s at least giving you a bird’s eye view of where you’re at and going, “Okay, we’re identifying the problems. Here are possible solutions. How hard do you want to work?”
Kira Derryberry: Okay, so that’s a good question. “How hard do you want to work? Your family sessions, they require more hand holding, but their averages are significantly higher than the headshot work. You’re going to have to do this many more just independent headshot sessions or maybe we could get five more family sessions in and hand hold know that’s what you’re going to dedicate your time to during that time.”
Kira Derryberry: That’s the analysis that I think when you don’t have an office full of people sitting and having a meeting with you every Monday morning about, “Where are we going to go this week? What are we going to do this week?”, because I don’t, this is your meeting. This is your strategy meeting at the beginning going, “Okay, here’s what”… I mean, you could keep this conversation going and treat it like a weekly strategy meeting. “Okay, this is what we tried last week. Here’s what that resulted in, this many bookings,” you know what I mean? Just export all that data. This data exists. Again, I use 17hats, but if you’re running systems that create reports for you, this data exists. It can see things were booked and it can predict revenue based on averages. It’s going to look at the revenue based on the averages with repeat clients, because we’ve seen over the last five years that the Smith family spent this almost every time.
Allison Tyler Jones: Well, and I think you could even put in… Let’s say you had AI a few years ago when you were on the board before you became president, and everybody knows that when you become president, you travel a lot and it takes a lot of your time. And so those of you were not going to ever be PPA president, maybe it’s you had a baby. Maybe it’s, “Okay, I’ve just been diagnosed with breast cancer. I’m going to have to do treatment,” or whatever. And I have a lot of students that have that or had a dog that had to be put down or something that’s basically really hard in your life, right?
Kira Derryberry: A life-altering event, yes.
Allison Tyler Jones: Right. And so then you say, “Okay, coming into 2026, this is what’s on the horizon. I’m going to have to take three months off to do X,” or, “My capacity for working is 30% less. How am I going to make that up?” I think just even having those conversations, I think it’s going to make us all better.
Kira Derryberry: It is. It’s problem-solving, and it’s problem-solving with help. And I think also it’s okay that you need help, right? It’s okay.
Allison Tyler Jones:
Of course.
Kira Derryberry: People are afraid of using ChatGPT because they’re like, like you said, “Are we just not thinking for ourselves? Are we just going to let it make all our decisions?” Do you see how this is different? I think this is the part where it is a tool for your business. And coming full circle back to when we talk about paradigm shifts, the photographers or small business owners who don’t learn these techniques to use this to their fullest capacity, they’re going to be left behind because the rest of us who are using these techniques, we are going to work faster. We are going to be able to do more in a smaller amount of time with just one person rather than a team and you’re going to be back here struggling going, “Well, I made it write a blog post, but I couldn’t get it to -.”
Allison Tyler Jones: Yeah, I think it’s especially relevant for the solopreneur because how many photographer friends do we have that have expanded and contracted over their studios from a lot of employees, need more people, need more people to, “I’m so sick of HR. I’m so sick of people. I want to do it back to me or me and one person,” and really, it would allow you to… It’s kind of in my women’s group at church, we have a lot of older women who really are like, “Oh, I don’t use the emails. I don’t use the interwebs. My grandkids will come and tell me.” This is maybe 10, 15 years ago. And I would say to them, “Okay, I know you don’t like the idea of a computer, but you’ll be independent so much longer. You can stay in your home alone so much longer if you know how to get delivery services, you know how to do online banking.” It’s like thinking of my mom’s generation not driving.
Kira Derryberry: Yes.
Allison Tyler Jones: You know what I mean? You can limit yourself so much when the world… and it’s not that we have to know how to code.
Kira Derryberry: Nope.
Allison Tyler Jones: That’s the beauty of this is that you don’t have to.
Kira Derryberry: No, you don’t have to know how to code. You don’t need to be computer savvy, you know what I mean? But do you need to be able to, I mean-
Allison Tyler Jones: Prompt it well.
Kira Derryberry: Yeah, prompt it well. There’s some rules. I mean-
Allison Tyler Jones: And where do you go to find those? Because I feel like that’s where I feel like I’ve just come up against that now. I’m realizing I’m fighting with it. It’s ticking me off. I’m trying to do maybe show notes for the podcast episode, and it got stuck on Jen Hillenga and I was trying to put in John Grass, and it kept going, “Well, Jen Hillenga was from Texas.” I’m like, “She was not from Texas. She was from Minneapolis,” and it won’t get off of it. So I don’t know. Is there a resource for prompting or-
Kira Derryberry: Okay, here’s the problem with a resource, and myself included, right? Because I’d like to think that I’m a little bit of a resource these days. But the problem with it is that it is changing so rapidly all the time. And there are periods of time during that change where it gets kind of worse. There’s a few times where it doesn’t work as well, and that’s frustrating, and you have to remind yourself that you were able to do this before without it, you know what I mean?
Allison Tyler Jones: Yes, yes, yes.
Kira Derryberry: There’s times where it’s down. But I will give you some advice as far as when it starts to do those things. One, try and start a new conversation between those things, you know what I mean? I know that you probably… I’m guessing, but you’ve explained a lot of things in one conversation, and then you in that conversation go, “Okay, now let’s do Jen’s,” right? And it still got all that data from John’s, right?
Allison Tyler Jones: No, I… Okay, so we’re going to go inside baseball and I don’t even care. I had the transcript from the conversation and I started a new chat and I put the transcript and I said, “Pulling exclusively from this chat,” or sorry, this transcript, “I need you to give me an outline of some show notes,” or whatever, and it kept literally pulling the information from a previous PDF it had made, which was the prep questions for the podcast, and it was making shit up, and it was driving me insane. And so it’s like, then I turned it off. I turned it on. I’m closing out of it, getting back in. I’m doing all the things I can think of and it just will not get off of it.
Kira Derryberry: Okay, I see what happened now. Okay, so it has a memory, okay? Part of this too is… Gosh, we need all day to do this.
Allison Tyler Jones: I know. Sorry.
Kira Derryberry: No, no, no, no. It’s okay. Part of the problem is it has an inherent memory. It has a global memory. Sometimes it will take something that you tell it earlier and it will put that to its global memory. It’ll make a sentence that says, “John Grass, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah,” that example from earlier.
Allison Tyler Jones: John Grass is a treasure. We’ll put it in the global memory.
Kira Derryberry: In its memory, right?
Allison Tyler Jones: And it will stay there forever, which is very much like our own.
Kira Derryberry: Yes.
Allison Tyler Jones: John Grass is a treasure. Also, Tim Walden.
Kira Derryberry: Tim Walden, also a treasure. So if we put that to our memory, we’re always going to remember that, right? We’re always going to remember that information. But you can actually go and delete lines of its memory. Its memory and its settings, it’s just lines, sentences. And you can go and delete things that aren’t relevant anymore. That will never not be relevant, John is a treasure, right, or Tim is a treasure. But if it’s remembering something that’s from something you finished, you can delete it. That is in your settings. So go and explore your settings and you’ll find a section about memory.
Kira Derryberry: Now, let me posit a new idea to you because you’ve got a podcast, and this is what I do for Mary and I, Mary Fisk-Taylor’s podcast with me.
Allison Tyler Jones: Let’s pause for a moment. What podcast are you referring to?
Kira Derryberry: Get Your Shoot Together.
Allison Tyler Jones: Get Your Shoot Together will be linked in our show notes.
Kira Derryberry: With Kira DerryBerry and Mary Fisk-Taylor. I designed a tool in ChatGPT. So there is a section of ChatGPT called custom GPTs, right? You can create your own little task master. So this is for your repetitive task, and I would venture to say that this is a repetitive task for you, okay? Same thing. I’m trying to create show notes from a transcript. So I go get the transcript and I have created a custom GPT inside ChatGPT that’s just for our podcast and its only job is to do this one thing for me is to create show notes. It also creates Facebook posts for the launch. It creates our social media posts. It does all these repetitive tasks that we do for every single one. It titles the episode too. It looks at the transcript, it comes up with a title. So I have programmed this, programmed in quotes again, because I’ve just talked to it in custom GPT. Every time I paste a transcript into a new chat with this-
Allison Tyler Jones: Stop it.
Kira Derryberry: “Every time I do that, I want you to make these things. I want you to make show notes. I want you to create a title, and here’s the rules for the title. I want you to create a Facebook post, and I want you to do an Instagram post with relevant hashtags using the latest information.” And that is a one-time instruction set that I give it, and then every time… I don’t go to a new chat on ChatGPT. I go to my custom little tool that I made in ChatGPT. You’ll find those. On the sidebar, there is GPTs. Click on that and there’ll be a create button at the top. And that’s the thing I use every single time.
Kira Derryberry: So I do a new one for every single episode. I don’t go back to an old conversation. It’s not using the global memory. It doesn’t go and use the global memory. It’s only operating on what I told it to do. “Every time we do this, you do this.” You can even give it writing examples. You can give it past examples of what you’ve already made for it so that it stays within the style and the title.
Allison Tyler Jones: Yeah, because we were… yeah, yeah. Anyway, but it does show you how jobs are going to be replaced because we were paying someone to do our show notes, and they were tragic. They just weren’t good. And we went through multiple writers and it just could never be good. And so I’m like, “Okay, let me”… Just literally this last week, I’m like, “I’m just going to dump it in and see if I can get 75% there and then I’ll fix it,” and it was just magical.
Kira Derryberry: Yeah. Yeah. This is magic. Now, it is unfortunate that you were talking about replacing jobs, but I would almost put money on the people that you hire to do these things now are using ChatGPT to do it. They’re using these advanced techniques, and these are advanced techniques that we’re talking about now. A custom GPT, that is something that you could have multiple ones. I made one to do my sales tax every month. I made one that does the… because the Florida form that I have to enter into every month to do my sales tax, it doesn’t calculate it for you. And so I have to do this math. And we already discovered that I don’t do math.
Allison Tyler Jones: No.
Kira Derryberry: And so I made a specific custom GPT. Its only job is for me to put one number. I put a report in. I give it the report for the sales that month, and it does my sales tax calculations so that I can report to the state. And that’s a repetitive item that yes, I could do it myself, but oh my God, it takes me so long. I’ve been doing it for 15 years, Allison, and I still have to go and look at the formula to do the math. I can’t commit it to memory. I can’t.
Allison Tyler Jones: Yeah. No, that’s so great. Yeah, because we don’t have math brains, and so having that left brain help is so great. But I think just coming full circle, we realize it’s not left brain thing. It’s also an idea generator. In a way, you’re kind of uploading our brain.
Kira Derryberry: That’s what I’m telling you. We’ve complained for years that we need clones of ourselves. Here’s a way to do it. You do it and you’ve got something that thinks like you, talks like you, as long as you give it the information, as long as you give it the writing examples. The most amount of information you can give it is the best way to get this working. And sometimes there’s repetitive tasks that somebody else has already made a custom GPT for. There’s a whole marketplace in there that you can explore. There’s one for Profit First that I use every single month. I have one long conversation for Profit First, and I just paste in the number amount that I’ve got to divide up into my different accounts and it just does the math. It’s easy math. It’s not hard math, but I mean, I don’t want to sit there and do the math.
Allison Tyler Jones: No, because I do it and I think it’s right and then it’s not right.
Kira Derryberry: Yeah, and then it’s like what happened? But yeah, so there’s things that exist that you can look up and you don’t have to reinvent the wheel. Maybe there is something that does a repetitive task.
Allison Tyler Jones: So it’s like Photoshop actions for business, for life, but even more, I think it’s so far beyond that.
Kira Derryberry: GPT presets.
Allison Tyler Jones: Yeah.
Kira Derryberry: Yeah. That’s what it is. It’s just applying that every single time to the content.
Allison Tyler Jones: I love that. Well, I have five pages of notes and lists of things that I’m like, oh, this makes me think of other things in my life that I want to figure out.
Kira Derryberry: Yes.
Allison Tyler Jones: Parties or vacations or events. What are some fun activities? We love this. Oh, you know what I used it for? Okay, so can we stop talking about business for one second-
Kira Derryberry: Oh, yeah, yeah.
Allison Tyler Jones: … just talk about fun things? Okay, just one night I thought, “I’m just going to try this.” I said, “I love Tana French and I love Susie Steiner novels.” Okay, so they’re like Irish, dark, character-driven police procedurals and these two women, their work is so great and I love those books so much. And I’m like, “There has to be more like it. Can you tell me, give me 10 book recommendations?” And it did this whole thing. It was like, “You like character-driven, layered, atmospheric, dark, blah, blah,” listed all the qualities of those and then it gave me like, “Here’s police procedurals, here’s cozy mysteries,” just a whole list. And of course, this is what was hilarious. I’m like, “I’ve already read all of those. Give me more.” And they’re like, “Oh, okay, here’s next level.” So I mean, even stuff like that is just so cool, or like, “Kira DerryBerry, my friend, loves karaoke, loves this, loves that. What would be a good gift for her 50th birthday?” or something like that. I mean, not that you’re even close to 50, but whatever birthday.
Kira Derryberry: 45th. There we go.
Allison Tyler Jones: Yeah, there you go. You’re barely… yeah. So I love that because otherwise you’re like, I think of how much time I spend. I try to look something up online and then you’re down a rabbit hole, especially on social media. And this actually can make me… I feel like it gives me a little more focus and makes me more targeted. So then rather than, “Oh, I started by researching books on mysteries and now I’m over here researching slime for my grandkids,” it keeps me on one track.
Kira Derryberry: Yes. It keeps you on one track and it allows you to have multiple tracks in different conversations too, you know what I mean, like, “Let me go back to that conversation I was having about party planning for my friend’s 50th birthday,” or whatever, you know what I mean? They have folders now that you can organize your thoughts in, and we had our Greece trip. My husband and I went on our 20th anniversary trip to Greece and I had everything in this folder. I had all my conversations pertaining to our itinerary, the cars that we had planned for pickups and reservations, all that stuff, my flight info. I just gave it all that info and put it in the folder, in that project folder, and I was able to just go back and continue conversations about planning that trip.
Kira Derryberry: And it’s like taking the things out of your brain and just putting them in very organized files and putting all the relevant data in there. I use it every single day. I use it every single day. My husband thinks I’m crazy. He does not use it to this level or maybe even at all. But there was a time where he was not feeling well and he was describing the feeling and I just went into ChatGPT and I was like, “ChatGPT thinks you need to go to the doctor, that it could be this and you need to go to the doctor,” and he went to the doctor and it was that.
Allison Tyler Jones: Yeah. I heard, there was an article in, I don’t know what it was, I think there was an article in The Atlantic recently and they were talking about how that one of the things you do need to be careful of is that chats can be subpoenaed in court cases, so just like texts and emails and that sort of thing, so if you’re going to plan a murder-
Kira Derryberry: Don’t ask it how to-
Allison Tyler Jones: … probably not the best idea to put that information in there. It’s like in the olden days there was this funny quote that says, “Never say on the phone what you wouldn’t want your mom to hear at your trial.” Don’t put into ChatGPT what you wouldn’t want the police to be reading.
Kira Derryberry: It can be subpoenaed even if it’s deleted, even if it’s deleted. It exists somewhere. Again, I almost need to make a caution list, you know what I mean, I feel like, and put it out because there are things that you just… this common sense stuff, but I think because it’s so new and exciting and it opens so many possibilities, I mean, but there’s so much room for fraud. Oh, my dad, I bought him, it’s called Story Worth. Have you heard of it?
Allison Tyler Jones: Yeah. Yes.
Kira Derryberry: So I bought my dad Story Worth because we’ve done it for my mother-in-law. And if the listeners haven’t heard of it, it prompts you every week and it gives the user, “Tell us your favorite childhood tradition.” Just write it in an email.
Allison Tyler Jones: “Did you have a pet?”
Kira Derryberry: Yeah, yeah. And at the end of the year, it’s written a book about your life. Kevin’s mom really liked it. She completed it and then I gave it to my dad for his birthday. And he hasn’t done any of the prompts, because I’m getting emails saying, “Hey, your dad isn’t using this. Your dad hasn’t entered anything.” So I talked to him, he goes, “I started thinking if I put all these stories into this, and even if they’re secure, if they get hacked or scammer gets a hold of this data, they could fake your voice using AI,” because they can. There’s ways to do that now. “They could call me and they could say something that you would know because these stories about my life and they could trick me into thinking it was you and I don’t want to get scammed. I’m really worried about getting scammed.”
Kira Derryberry: He’s 81. And he’s super smart, obviously, to think this way, but he’s like, “I don’t think I want to do this. It’s not that I don’t want to write the stories down. I’m just so afraid to put the stories out there and open myself up to the possibility that somebody could use it and scam me.”
Allison Tyler Jones: I think your dad is related to my husband.
Kira Derryberry: Really?
Allison Tyler Jones: They might be the same person, but that’s a fair concern.
Kira Derryberry: Yeah. I mean, as advanced as we’re using this to advance ourselves in our businesses, villains and criminals are also using it.
Allison Tyler Jones: Bad guys.
Kira Derryberry: Bad guys are using it to make better scam artist plans, more automated, more easy to get. And so it’s being used for evil as well. And so I was disappointed because I paid 80 bucks for this, but-
Allison Tyler Jones: Refund.
Kira Derryberry: Yeah. But he understands that the intent was good and he thought the idea was great, but the more he thought about it, he was like, “Ah.”
Allison Tyler Jones: Well, it’s like the 23 and Me thing. There’s always going to be this unintended consequence of new technology. So I mean, how many people do you know, literally personally know, who have been like, “Dude, I didn’t even know I had a brother”? There has been stuff going down and now it’s like having your DNA out there, if bad actors, if the government, if Skynet ever takes over, they have all of our DNA. So yeah, that’s why we’ve never done that either.
Kira Derryberry: They’ll just clone us. I mean, there’s ways to deep fake people looking like they’re doing something that they’re not, saying things that they’re not saying.
Allison Tyler Jones: Yeah, totally.
Kira Derryberry: And with the DNA thing, I mean, they went out of business and they’re selling-
Allison Tyler Jones: Yes.
Kira Derryberry: … to whoever can buy it. I mean, yeah, the intent was good. The intent was good. And I have it. They have my data. I learned a lot about myself. I don’t regret it. Like, okay, you have my DNA.
Allison Tyler Jones: Right, right. Okay. So now we went to scary, so we have to end on a happy note. Skynet is not coming. It’ll be called something else. It’ll be called something different. But yeah, so I think basically common sense, if you’re uncomfortable, kind of figure out why. But I am loving. I am learning a ton. I love that you are so ahead of us, like always, and helping people learn. Do you have any resources that people can come to you for classes?
Kira Derryberry: Yeah, so I have a little side venture because I have been doing this a lot and helping a lot of other business owners with it. It’s called Boss Level AI. Boss Level AI. It’s bosslevel-ai.com. And I have been doing six-week workshops. So I did one in the spring, I did one in the summer, and our fall one, and I’m not sure when this airs, so it may already start, but it’s starting August 11th and it’s a six-week class. We meet Monday afternoons on a Zoom, and because it’s so much, it’s a fire hose of information. I teach these classes, these one-day classes, and I tell them, “If you just get started, even if you don’t retain everything, but you just get started, that’s progress.”
Kira Derryberry: But this allows us to focus on week one, we’re going to explore how to customize it, where everything is located, and then you spend the week doing that exercise, so you have time to actually apply it. And then the next week we open up a new concept. We’ll get to custom GPTs and how to make them. So I’ve been teaching these classes seasonally in small classes and we record them and it’s been going really, really well. I’m also teaching at Imaging USA again, a pre-con this year. And it’ll be on the Thursday before Imaging USA, which is in-
Allison Tyler Jones: That’s 2026.
Kira Derryberry: 2026. And so I believe you can already register for those pre-cons now at imaging.com
Allison Tyler Jones: Okay, we’ll put links to it.
Kira Derryberry: Yep. And so I’ll be doing that one day class, which is honestly, it’s going to make you want to do the six-week class, I’m going to tell you.
Allison Tyler Jones: I love it.
Kira Derryberry: But yeah, that’s where you can find me. And of course I do private coaching too, so you can always reach out to me for that.
Allison Tyler Jones: Awesome. All right, well I feel like we opened Pandora’s box, but only good things came out. And I would say for the photographer who’s listening who’s feeling maybe a little hesitant or maybe a little bit overwhelmed by AI, what would you encourage them? What would you say to encourage them or to dip a toe in if they’re like, “I don’t know that I’m ready for a class. I don’t know that I’m ready for… This is scary, but I’ve heard about it,” is there a place to start?
Kira Derryberry: Yeah, I would say first validate your feelings of caution or overwhelm, you know what I mean? First, it’s okay. You could be scared of it or you could be overwhelmed by it or both. It’s fine. It’s normal. But maybe think about in your business, one repetitive task, one repetitive task that you have to do all the time. Maybe it’s your quarterly checkup, you know what I mean? Maybe it’s a calendar for marketing, your marketing calendar. Maybe you got to plan that, something that you do every single year, month, week, and see if there’s a way that you can automate it just with one conversation, without having to super customize everything. Just say, “I wonder if I could make this easier on me.” What is really taking up a lot of your time that you have to do every month? And I think dip your toe in that way, and I think that’s a great place to start.
Allison Tyler Jones: I love it. Well, this has been awesome and so helpful and inspiring and I can’t wait. As soon as we get off, I’m going to go mess around. I think you’ve really shared a real world look at how… a practical way in to experiment, and then of course you have resources to go forward with that. And I know you’re so busy, you have so much going on and you’re trying to make up for the three months of the broken foot, so thank you so much for taking the time to help our listeners, and as always, everything that you give to the industry.
Kira Derryberry: Glad to do it, happy to do it, and glad to be here.
Allison Tyler Jones: Thank you.
Recorded: You can find more great resources from Allison at DoTheRework.com and on Instagram at do.the.rework.
Recorded: Welcome to The ReWork with Allison Tyler Jones, a podcast dedicated to inspiring portrait…
Recorded: Welcome to The ReWork with Allison Tyler Jones, a podcast dedicated to inspiring portrait…
Recorded: Welcome to The ReWork with Allison Tyler Jones, a podcast dedicated to inspiring portrait…