Median User

Chapter 1: Introduction & Hosts

[0:00] Ramsey: Hey everyone. Welcome to the first episode of Median User, a podcast about how AI and other emerging tech affects our lives. AI and tech are changing the world, but what does it mean for you

We aim to cut through the noise to show how these technologies are shaping our lives today and tomorrow. We break it all down, making it easy for you to understand what it all means for you, the median user. This is a show hosted by myself, Ramsey Shallal, and my good friend Ahmad Kadhim, or otherwise known as AK.

[0:29] Ahmad: Hey Ramsey, nice to get started.

[0:32] Ramsey: Yeah, we've been really putting some effort into planning these out, and we're really looking forward to kickstarting this podcast. I think we owe our early viewers a quick introduction to each other just to set the scene and maybe give them a reason to stick around.

So, AK, do you want to jump in first?

[0:51] Ahmad: Sure. I'm Ahmad, and these days I'm a product lead at Skinopathy AI. I've been in tech and startups for over 10 years. I started as an engineer, became a designer, and now I'm a product manager. I love the craft of building products.

Along the way, I built a staffing platform that placed tens of thousands of nurses and factory workers in the U.S. With Skinopathy, we're tackling skin cancer and giving doctors more efficient tools to take on more patients, improve care, and give patients a more personalized experience.

We're expanding globally, starting with Malaysia and Ghana, potentially the UAE. I'm really focused on how we use AI to simplify healthcare, make it more preventative, more personalized, and instant.

On the side, I’ve been using AI in fun ways—building an app for myself as a DJ to triage music, creating art, just exploring the cool things we can do with AI. I wanted to create a platform for you and I to share some of these conversations we've been having behind the scenes. This is us recording the conversations we naturally have about what cool things we can do with AI and other emerging tech.

[2:34] Ramsey: Yeah, sharing the juice—it's always fun. Just a quick intro of myself: I'm Ramsey. I’m the founder of a Web3 native marketing agency called GELO. We’ve worked with Solana, ICP, Polkadot, Supra, and many others, including crypto-native AI startups.

In my spare time, I’ve built products with friends—some failed, all failed so far—but we keep pushing. I'm an avid user of AI in my day-to-day life. Our aim here is to break down AI and emerging tech for the everyday person, showing how to use this tech to make life more efficient, better, and more enjoyable.

Without further ado, let’s jump into the episode.

Chapter 2: AI in Social Media: Creativity and Slop

[3:24] Ahmad: The first thing we wanted to cover is how AI is already affecting almost everyone who uses any kind of tech. That’s mainly through content—whether it’s Facebook, Instagram, or Google. AI content is everywhere. If it’s not fully AI-generated, it’s AI-edited or helped with the idea.

There’s a high chance much of what you're seeing is influenced by AI tools. And AI tools also choose what to show you. So there's already a massive influence on our daily experience.

Now that we’re on the receiving end of so much more of this, we’re starting to wonder—what’s the effect? Ramsey, how have your social feeds changed in the last couple of years?

[4:35] Ramsey: Honestly, forget the last couple years—even the last quarter has been ridiculous. In my corner of the crypto world, AI has exploded, especially on social media. AI agents have built their own Twitter accounts and are now posting, replying, commenting. People are going nuts for it. They think it’s cool, novel—“Look, an agent that sounds like Patrick Bateman” or some other character.

Even my friends and I thought it’d be fun to make a Master Chief agent on Twitter. But the quality of the content isn’t high. The formatting is off, the content isn’t valuable or entertaining beyond being autonomous. Personally, I find it annoying. It’s becoming obstructive. There’s a tipping point—what percentage of content has to be AI before we get pushed back offline? Content is becoming commoditized, and AI is the main force behind that.

[6:22] Ahmad: I felt that most strongly on Twitter—now X. With text, it’s easier for AI to take over. Image and video came later and are harder to do at scale. But so many comments now are clearly AI-generated.

When Elon Musk took over, there was a small improvement, but it quickly went back to being overrun. You can tell it's ChatGPT—bland summaries of posts. And I’m someone who goes to social media for the comments more than the posts. That’s where the fun is—the humor, the peanut gallery. When half of it is bots, it’s just not as interesting.

I have to sift through too much noise. I stopped using X much. Instagram isn’t as bad. Facebook—I don’t really use. Instagram has more of a barrier to entry. If someone uses AI there, it tends to be consciously and for quality.

[8:16] Ramsey: I’ve seen some AI influencers on Instagram with AI-generated images. Not fully AI-run like Twitter, but still. The algorithm matters too. If you're interested in AI, you'll see more AI. Some people may not even know these agents exist.

That’s good—if your interest is shallow, you won’t see them. But like anything, it starts technical, then spreads. I wouldn't be surprised if we saw cooking pages using AI for content soon. It extends beyond social—my inbox and LinkedIn are flooded with AI-generated emails.

Chapter 3: Email, Content Creation, and Brand Voice

[9:35] Ahmad: Yeah, email’s the worst. I’d rather have an AI Twitter feed than an AI inbox. It’s so hard to sift through.

[9:44] Ahmad: I had to switch email apps just to filter better. Spam filters aren’t enough. A lot of what I get isn’t technically spam—it’s from lists I actually subscribed to—but you can tell it’s AI-written.

As a marketer, you’ve said you don’t trust AI to write for you, right?

[10:25] Ramsey: Mostly, yeah. Unless we have time to train AI on our brand tone, style, and how to write well, we don’t let it loose. We tried building a product to do that—teach AI how to format content and stick to brand guidelines. But crypto moves fast, and we don’t always have time.

Still, I recommend creators experiment. Feed your tweets into ChatGPT, have it analyze your voice, tone, format. That’s how we did it. The results were solid, even if the product didn’t make it.

We just started testing a Ramsey GPT to help with cross-posting from Twitter to Telegram. It rewrites the post to fit each platform’s tone. Pretty useful.

[12:59] Ahmad: I don’t post much, but I use AI for email constantly. I write too casually day-to-day to easily switch to professional tone.

I used ChatGPT to write a letter to Quebec’s civil directory to expedite my twins’ birth registration. It was so formal, polite—exactly what I needed.

I use Superhuman now, and it gives me three reply options at the bottom of emails—short summaries like “Sure, let’s meet,” “Can’t do it,” etc. I just hover, check the full draft, and send. It saves me time and mental effort. Emails that used to stall me for days now get answered in a minute.

[14:50] Ramsey: That’s the lowest-hanging fruit—access to quality content with ease. AI can draft a blog to 80%, and you just polish it.

But when everyone does that, AI search becomes the next frontier. What happens when AI-generated content floods the internet, and people use AI to search for answers? Blogs lose traffic. That affects creators whose livelihoods depend on search. You sent me that HubSpot case study, right?

[16:36] Ahmad: Yeah. Their SEO traffic dropped hard. A lot of their content is basic—like “how to post to Instagram”—the exact kind of stuff that AI answers better now.

Google shows snippets. Perplexity does research. ChatGPT synthesizes. People don’t click blogs anymore. That kind of content will suffer.

Chapter 4: AI Ouroboros / RIP Internet?

[17:12] Ramsey: SEO might not be dead, but creators are shifting to video. Platforms like YouTube or TikTok are harder for AI to fully replace—yet.

But even there, tools like Runway and Sora are making AI video more lifelike. I’ve used Runway for client content. They didn’t have a visual identity, so we made AI astronauts more dynamic using Runway and Freepik.

With Sora, OpenAI is adding a video editor UI—like simplified Premiere—to help with transitions and sequencing.

[18:52] Ahmad: The frontier is character consistency across videos. And having an editor UI makes more sense than pure text prompting.

On YouTube, I see whole AI channels—scripts, narration, visuals—all AI. The sound and timing are a bit off, but they still get tens of thousands of views.

[20:13] Ramsey: There are “faceless” channels making serious money—Reddit stories narrated by AI, with Subway Surfer footage running. Low-effort, high-yield.

It started with long fireplace loops, but now it’s UFC edits, listicles, Reddit stories. Engagement hacks like putting wrong facts in the video to trigger comments. The big shift is that AI is now making content for AI—search bots, ranking bots. That’s the real Ouroboros. AI trains on AI content, and it never ends.

[22:41] Ahmad: Yeah, there’s the feedback loop—AI-generated content gets consumed, then trains the next generation of models. Quality will drop if human content declines.

I use ChatGPT for recipes now—snap a pic of my fridge, ask what I can make. It’s way easier than digging through blog spam. But those blogs don’t get traffic anymore. Less incentive to create human content. That’s model collapse.

[24:09] Ramsey: Model collapse, deterioration—it’s eating its own tail. And beyond training data, you now have AI agents interacting with AI content on the web.

What happens when an AI buys toilet paper from a site optimized by another AI? We won’t even see that exchange. It’s AI backrooms—autonomous interactions humans don’t witness. And there’s a startup in YC doing exactly that—helping optimize for AI search engines. Marketing to AIs is a whole new game.

[27:00] Ahmad: Yeah, imagine your restaurant site has to cater to AI agents. You bury “best restaurant for vegetarians” ten times in the HTML. Classic college essay trick.

But will AI evolve to care about storytelling? Will it persuade other AIs? There’s something eerie about that. It’s the “dead internet” theory—an internet full of bots talking to bots.

And we just speak to an interface. No idea what happens in the backroom. My mom said she’d still want to go shopping—she enjoys it. That behavior shift might not be total.

[29:30] Ahmad: I think it’ll split into functional vs experiential. For stuff like toilet paper, just let the AI handle it. But for clothes? I want to browse, try things on.

Maybe AI becomes a guide—like my brother teaching me about coffee gear. If AI can do that, awesome. But I want some human spaces, too.

[29:57] Ramsey: Yeah. Like smoking booths in airports—we need AI-free zones.

[30:04] Ahmad: Exactly.

Chapter 5: Wrap Up & Next Episode

[30:06] Ramsey: It’s wild how AI entered through content, and now it’s shifting everything—from writing to search to shopping. The future could go in so many directions.

This was a great first dive. We explored how AI is already changing our online lives and where it might be headed.

[30:52] Ahmad: Yeah, the internet experience is changing fast. On Median User, we want to go beyond reacting—teach people how to use AI to create, explore, and personalize.

I’ve been diving into fun productivity and creativity tools, and I want to help others do that too.

[31:42] Ramsey: Awesome. That’s it for the first episode of Median User. We really enjoyed recording this, and we’ll see you in the next one.

[31:58] Ahmad: That’s a wrap.

[31:59] Ramsey: Take care.

[32:01] Ahmad: See ya.