When AI goes Wrong - A Wake Up Call

Hi,

I had to share this with you guys.

This is a true story that happened today…

It is an important lesson in online business - I learned it the hard way about 15 years ago. (I’ll explain below)

I’ve been getting about 1000 - 2000 views per day on my Medium articles. It is one way many of you found this newsletter.

We’ve been getting about 25 email signups per day just from those articles (plus other signups from our YouTube videos and from our website)

Today, when I logged on to my Medium account, I saw this:

It is hard to read, but it says, 

^_Terrible!  😠 

Anyone who clicked on my profile or any article would see that. It looked like I did something illegal. (which I didn’t)

I filed an appeal and went outside on a bike ride (to try to relieve my stress) 😅 

I was trying to figure out what I might have done wrong, but I couldn’t think of anything. It was driving me crazy. 🙃 

I thought back to the story of 15 years ago, when a similar thing happened with Google. We had a YouTube channel and were making decent ad revenue.

One day, out of the blue, we got a message saying that we made some kind of mistake (but they didn’t say what it was). There was no one we could talk to and it was so frustrating.

That story ended with us losing our partner account.

We were also in Asia at the time, and our AdSense account had several thousand dollars in it. It was money we had already earned. We had uncashed checks. But Google decided to close the account - take all the money back. And to this day they never told us the reason!

Fast forward to today.

I was really hoping this wasn’t going to happen with Medium. And luckily, when I got home from my bike ride this afternoon, I saw this email message from Medium.

What’s the point of this story?

Well, a couple of things.

1. That was an AI spam filter that I got caught in. This is happening more and more often. The frustrating part is that these companies will shut down your account first based on a bad AI decision. They don’t care if you lose money or your reputation. They don’t even apologize. And they don’t always reverse their decision so quickly either. I was lucky this all happened on the same day.

2. This highlights the importance of email marketing. If I didn’t have this email list, I couldn’t communicate with you now.

If you have a website, a YouTube channel, social media, or anything, you need to collect emails if you are trying to grow your business online.

This is especially true in the age of AI-generated spam content.

We use and recommend Beehiiv for email marketing. It is what we are using.

(Yes, that is an affiliate link, but we only recommend products we use and love. You can see from the bottom of this email it is what we’re actually using ourselves)

They have a great free plan for up to 2500 emails - which is very good.

If you haven’t seen our videos yet, check out our YouTube channel

Hopefully, this kind of thing never happens to you!

Talk soon,

Andrew