[Music] welcome to another episode of the AI innovators podcast today we have with us Christian Perry from undetectable. which is an AI detection and AI humanization tool among other things Christian welcome to the podcast what was the Catalyst for founding this company and how did this idea come about sure so I've been in the AI space for a few years my last company was in the financial technology space it was called chatter Quant we took posts from Twitter Tik Tok Reddit basically any social media platform and ingested that and we're using very early llms for
social sentiment analysis so we were kind of aware of llms and how they're progressing before chat GPT really exploded and took over the world from there we started seeing after Chad BT's launch the launch of some of these AI detectors which especially at the beginning and still continue to be so are kind of flawed mechanisms of trying to identify AI generated content they are very imperfect in terms of their ability to detect content what I mean by that is they false flag people a lot of times and then they will also not pick up AI
generated content that's been humanized we saw just the way that these AI detector's work that there was going to be a way to humanize AI generated content and saw an opportunity of number one how do we help people avoid false Flags number two we're very strong Believers in adoption of AI I mean it is the future and and kind of see a lot of AI detection as stifling that Innovation and so we saw an opportunity to launch a product that would help individuals and small businesses and allow them to leverage AI in the same way
that large corporations would and give them kind of a leg up and putting out content at scale without the ramifications of AI detection one of the biggest worries I'm a marketer and I talk to a lot of marketing folks and a lot of the content that you see online these written content comes with the marketing B anything and everything that we put online is a way to Market ourselves and Market our product and we all had this sort of fear that you know with AI coming in AI generated content and then the ability to just
generate content and the click of a button in a few seconds is just going to make the internet completely unusable completely overrun with vast amounts of AI content it's good to see that there are products out there like undetectable that are coming in and helping with that space what sort of changes have you seen in terms of people using undetectable yeah it's it's really interesting that you bring that up and a lot of platforms are facing that exact issue right it's easier than ever to create content and you can do it fast faster than ever
and so we're seeing a lot of social media companies kind of scrambling as well as email providers Etc to figure out how do we just not destroy our user experience right if you're able to post a thousand posts with AI through a bot Network and each post is individual it gets a lot harder to kind of modulate or or protect your your platform from spam and so we've really seen a macro shift which has been great for our product and our business towards a lot of these very large players starting to crack down on that
AI generated content for instance Amazon doesn't allow AI generated ebooks YouTube is demonetizing videos that have ai generated scripts additionally email providers are using whether something was AI generated as one of the kind of metrics to determine whether something goes in the spam folder right and so same with Google they've kind of been flipping back and forth on you know are we going to promote your AI generated content or are we not going to promote that AI generated content through our search results and so all of that has really created a stronger need for a
product like ours point that you bring up in that all the other all the providers out there are actually just cracking down AI condom because before there was I don't think there's there was any regulation or Within These companies as to how to crack down on a gener Content so now that content came up and now they're starting to crack down on it do you think there's also a few future where things like AI content being humanized is there a way that they are able to also actually crack down on that or have the AL
algorithms developed to the point where it's going to be really hard to track down of those yeah that's a great question so there is this kind of AI detection AI humanization battle that's going on right now ai humanization is a very kind of difficult problem to to solve or I guess getting around AI detection because you're essentially trying to get a large language model to do which what by Design it's not really built to do right which is create more unpredictable outputs with you know llms are trained with large amounts of data and through that
training process they put out predictable outputs and that's how detection works at some point and we think we're getting near that point with the product that we're building we have an awesome machine learning team of very smart people but eventually it's going to become so hard to detect AI generated content that the false flag rats will just essentially make that technology obsolete it it's it's just not going to work right as AI continues to evolve and get better and and more human it's going to be almost impossible to detect it without watermarking all spes think
interesting because I think earlier this week there was a student on Twitter who had posted his essay that he submitted for one of his tests it was a written exam and then he posted the grade from the teacher that clearly said this is is AI generated and meanwhile the student posted saying there was no AI involved here well he eventually found out what sort of tools or some off the shelf tool that they were using something very basic that they were using that actually did this false Spide that was probably the first time that I
as someone who's in that space but not often thinking about this on a day-to-day basis actually thought about the fact that it's not just detection that's important but the accuracy of detecting AI content and then the accuracy of how you humanize it becomes even more important today I've seen the reviews for undetectable and also I've seen some of the numbers online and overwhelming seems that your tool is doing a fantastic job I would almost say right like sort of Cutting Edge in the industry in terms of how you're detecting what sort of training went into
getting to this point getting to this accuracy sure I massive amounts of data sets uh I I'm not the technology guy I'm more Finance marketing all of that but I'm just thrilled I have such a a great team because you're right we do get a lot of positive feedback and in terms of Enterprise Partnerships and customers I think the majority of people end up coming to our product just because of how much we have reinvested into making our humanizer high quality and not just passing cuz frankly the barrier to entry into our space to release
a poor product is not very high right AI detection looks at a text and says is this AI generated based on all the training sets that we have if you stick a bunch of errors in there spelling mistakes dashes commas in the middle of words things like that it's going to be completely illegible but also pass it's not going to be AI right because it just doesn't look like something that was generated by AI but it's also not usable from an Enterprise perspective or even a personal kind of Email exchange perspective and so our team
has done a really good job of continuing to train and we really focus on reinvestment into making our product as robust as possible in terms of data sets that went into training this well was this all really curated data sets that you had to come up with to sort of train V models sure yeah towards the beginning of the process we were trying to find data sets that were available just on the Internet or out there written by humans but have since shifted towards curating our own data sets which actually means that we get AI
generated content and humanize it and do that thousands and thousands of times but we do that manually yeah yeah that makes sense but I want to shift gears here a little bit in terms of growth I'm in the landscape for a while you know salad while we also Market to AI companies and I think undetectable completely was off my radar just at least in the initial months until I think the first time I noticed was one of those leaderboards that show the AI tools for websites that have really huge amount of traffic and then all
of a sudden I saw undetectable in one of those AI tools list with the really high Mor of traffic and then yeah looking into your story you bootstrapped I think to what 10 million users now we're now at 15 15 wow and how many months has it taken to get to 15 million we were we launched in March of 20203 my goodness we're almost coming up on two years and so that is a phenomenal world of growth and as a marketer I can see how hard it is often for AI TOS to achieve that sort
of traction in the industry can you talk a little bit about how do you actually manage to pull this off what was what was the secret you are some of the leaders behind getting this this rocket fueld growth sure I mean so obviously it's super important to have built up a really great team so I I I guess kind of you know thanks to to my team but that's also my background is finance uh but growth hack marketing is really where I think I thrive my last company chatter Quant we did a million dollar in
Revenue in our first three months and that was just through just really hammering and pounding the pavement and focusing on on lowcost growth and I think that's just something that I have a little bit of a knock for not to bat myself on the back too much but that's really where I excel and and feel strong but also I I think it's really important especially for companies that are bootstrapped to lean into how can we partner up with other people and build mutually beneficial Partnerships we leaned very hard into an affiliate program very early on
right so and we were very generous with our affiliate program a lot of affiliate programs out there say Hey you get 20% but only for the first three months right and then we keep the rest of the revenue we went straight into you get 25% you get it for the lifetime of the customer if there's support or resources that you need you're always welcome to reach out we try and help those Affiliates and and partners and I think those Affiliates and partners really recognize that and we're willing to kind of go to bat for us
which is super important when you're a small team with not a lot of funding from there it's really leaning into I mean everybody talks about social media marketing but there's there are ways to do that at scale right people a lot of companies will have one one account one Tik Tok account one instagram account whereas we go and have created multiple different accounts with some of them more focused on branding and others more focused on AI we put out valuable content through those channels as well and I I guess lastly it would just be we
have a motto internally of and it's not obviously a term that I came up with but we try to move very quickly kind of move fast and break things right it's the saying that people bring up a lot especially in the VC space and we try to keep that internally about things don't need to be perfect when we initially launch them and then after that we continue to focus on how do we improve that product and experience but first we want to collect user feedback and make sure we're actually building for our customer I think
it's not very often that I see a CEO or funer that actually also has some marketing jobs who can actually take the product to to the market and so I'm I'm sure that helped a lot in just architecting this this insane growth that that you achieved and in terms of the affiliate prod I also think that's not something that I've also seen anywhere like some companies might be doing it it's just not apparent but giving 25% for the lifetime that's definitely one of the key growth hacks I think that other Founders can take because there's
a lot of b2c AI tools coming out day in and day out there are a lot of great tips there from undetectable growth Journey that others can tell I want to ask about another thing so undetectable today is language detection right and one of the biggest fears with AI content that we see today is fakes AI fakes right like deep fakes of voices and people imagery videos is that something on your radar in terms of uh tackling sometime in the future yeah it is we actually have and are in the process of training an image
detection Suite of tools as well as a deep Peck video detection Suite of tools in terms of player I don't know that we want to get into that space with images or videos just because I I would agree with you that that's a little bit more nefarious in terms of the way that people would likely use a product like that true true yeah I agree I agree it's the ideal World in my mind would be an internet where everything that we see if it's AI generated especially in terms of video and imagery content you know
there's an automatic badge that says this is AI I'm I'm not sure if we'll ever get to that space But yeah it's it's really hard these days to just look at even some of the ugc ads right like that you see on Tik Tok for example I've been going on rabbit Hol of companies just using haen and other AI tools to create AI Avatar and some of them look so real that I didn't even recognize until I actually read about it somewhere else and then you go back and look and you I think no way
I just clicked on an ad made by you know that that where a robot spoke to me or an a avatar spoke to me and it looks so real and convincing that I clicked on it going okay this is someone like me who's using this product let me go and try it the use cases that I see are absolutely massive in this space and it's good to know that you know undetectable is also thinking about going into other other areas of detection yeah we're really excited about that space and our hope is we can partner
up with some of these platforms to identify how to help them with the massive amount of AI content that's coming out I don't know if you've seen it yet but Instagram actually already has that right they try and label AI generated images and maybe they rolled it back because I know some people were getting frustrated with essentially they upload an image and it's thumb on a Mountaintop and then they Photoshop out one person right so that there's not just some random person in their picture on the Mountaintop and it'll get automatically labeled by Instagram as
AI generated so Instagram and some of these platforms are already trying to tackle some of those problems you know yeah I don't think I've seen that on Instagram but maybe that's just because I don't usually update my Instagram and it's still an older version now in terms of reach obviously detecting language is different in different countries were there any challenges did you face in terms of localizing like does it does under would do a great job in some languages or other some languages where it's really really hard yeah so we do focus our machine learning
resources and development resources into the languages where we have the most adoption but we are pretty Global so we have internationalized our product we support currently 63 languages we have primary support for larger languages English Chinese Spanish p Portuguese and and kind of the most spoken languages if you look at the top 15 those are our primary support languages and then we also have secondary support for all these other languages which means we've essentially trained with smaller data sets and still have some of the best or the best product out there for those languages but
just aren't able to put the same resources into it because they're not driving quite as much revenue are there particular regions of the world where AI detection is a lot more popular than the others or is it just purely a numbers game based on how many native language speakers there are yeah I would actually say it's interesting that Philippines and India are where we see a lot of uptake for our product and it seems that people are more familiar with these tools there and I think a lot of that has to do with you know
there's a lot of Outsourcing that's done over to India in the Philippines and so if somebody's being hired to write blog posts they're very aware of a detection and how AI detection works because maybe they've had a bad experience where they tried to serve something to a client whether it was handwritten or AI generated and the client goes no I'm not paying you or no I'm not accepting that because this detector told me that it's a c city in India in Chennai and right outside my window is a bunch of Indian it companies and every
single like is on and it's almost yeah it's midnight and every single light is on and that's because yeah we do have on this the world we have a huge I like to call it yeah the back office of the world sure so yeah that I know a lot of people personally who work in content generation for a lot of the western companies in the west and TOS like this I can see are big Point especially when you say right like it's very easy for clients to say no this is air generate I'm not paying
for it or you know it also just accelerates the process of someone generating the content and actually expanding their business yeah that's good and then in terms of use cases outside of content creation what other use cas bis do you see they're very popular undetectable so yeah we have a lot of great Partnerships with companies where we humanize their content I mean that that really is our our core product right is what we're doing is we're humanizing content and we're also offering detection of for these Enterprises got it got it do you also have a
lot of universities tie up or you know students just come in and TR to do the humanization part yeah we do have some things and place to try and prevent our tools use in academic misconduct that's not what we want to be known for or who we really try to Target it's not a very high LTV customer anyways right students are not known for I know when I was a student I didn't have a lot of money right and so our Focus really is how do we find and put together really great Enterprise Partnerships at
the Enterprise level yeah spinning up content is very very easy but also everyone's looking for the differentiation in terms of the humanizer when someone uploads you know say for example I'm a marketer working for an Enterprise my companies task me with writing a Blog on a certain technical topic I'm reasonably knowledgeable to where I can sit down and write something in a day but to accelerate it I've generated something with chat jpd you know two or three different variations of do concepts and everything I have kind of a draft now when you're humanizing it are
there also angles where I can control the level of humanization that is needed right like like how unique it needs to be what sort of voice and tone and everything that needs to be or is it just a single straight shot humanization yes we do have customization options for this we have different readability levels which means that we have a lot of different model models running right so we have more readable more focused on you know being as readable as possible versus more focus on detection as two models and then we have one in the
middle as well as the ability to change your tone and reading level to match college level writing or there's a lot of data out there that suggests if you write at an eighth grade or High School level it performs better on search and so we also have that as an option kind of the high school reading level for SEO and bloggers I'm assuming companies also the Enterprise customers they would also have sort of like brand voice brand tone and everything that they can bring in correct one of the tools that we have slated to come
out this quarter is actually called authorship replication which allows you to match brand voice brand tone or even I could say hey I want everything I write to look like it was written by Trump's team or something like that and all I have to do is essentially put in a couple of samples and you'll still get humanized undetectable outputs that match the style of writing that you are looking to Output that's interesting I think your team is really at least just listening from this conversation looking at your future product road map or just the tools
that you're coming up with it seems like you're really looking into the gaps in the market and where the gaps are needed in terms of product features and building it which is which is really cool to see at a startup now one question that I had was in terms of the growth going from Z to 10 million SS you said it's been two years and obviously at the startup level you want to build a culture that stays the same as you grow and that's one of the biggest that's one of the biggest piece of conversation
in the startup world is how do you keep their core culture as you skill have there been challenges in terms of keeping your core culture and what advice do you have for other Founders who were on the same path yeah that is super hard to do I can tell you that the culture has changed in the the last two years from where we when we started it how people are working how people are interacting with each other it it's different right it's it's very hard to to replicate that as as you grow one of the
things that we focused on is really I mean number one I always make sure that the culture that I want in the company I'm living and acting by it right so I'm not saying hey this is a hustle culture where we work really hard and ship things very fast and then I'm on vacation all the time right or just you know kick back clocking in once a day for one meeting I I go and I put in probably more hours and anybody else at the company and people see that and go that's what's expected and
I can do that too or as close to it I mean we want people to have a life and and all of that who work for us it's important but we are also a startup right and so if we want to keep taking over the marketplace and outpace everybody else who's jumping in we need to work harder than they do that's kind of always been my thought process and we push that through our company culture quite a bit but not only just yourself but whoever you bring on and H as kind of your first few
employees making sure that they're able to embody that culture as well if you go and hire somebody with a different culture and then they have five people or 10 people later on working underneath them then the people that are working underneath them are going to be working off of their manager's culture not necessarily yours or the other team's culture I I like that your idea of making the culture is that culture starts at the top and you the the CEO the founders they set the tone they said the vision for what the culture is but
also they said the tone in terms of execution and the rest of the team can follow I think that's a very valuable Insight that other companies can take now one final question at the base of AI Innovation already is undetectable in a year or two from now what is when you look back what do you want to be the number for sure we're really hoping that we're able to meet the needs of basically everybody I mean we really are trying to build a tool that applies to different use cases we're starting specifically within our vertical
which are you know people who are already using AI Riders as well as the industries that are being disrupted by AI generation but we want to keep on expanding that to become an all-in-one platform almost like I mean everybody wants to be Amazon Prime right but we'd love to be something where it just doesn't make sense to not have the subscription because of everything that you get offered through it and based on your team's go I am fairly certain that you will get there within a few years yeah I appreciate that working on it working
hard towards it for sure this is sort of a lightning round I just have five or six questions it's all just one sentence questions just we'll just go to Quick trying to get your take on some of the things that we see in the AI space and also as a Founder okay what's one tool or resource that you can't live without without as a Founder I mean I I don't want to be too too simple or boring here but honestly Chad GPT is massive in my workflow yeah it's mass in my workflow at the moment
yeah all right what's your favorite personal use of AI that is in business related oh that's a tough question I mean I use AI to kind of organize my thoughts I'll even kind of query AI on and I recognize that you know it's not always going to be the best insights but even just being able to write it it might not be something that I want to share with the world or something like that but an idea I have or a thought or something I'm going through and even if you're not going to get a
great answer from AI you can still get a writing it down helps right or typing it out and so I will kind of put together a whole bunch of ideas that I have or things that I'm thinking about and inquiry it and ask it kind of you know what do people do when they're thinking about this okay what's the biggest misconception about AI that you think or you would like to debang I think all the Terminator stuff when people start talking about Terminator whenever they think of AI I kind of go I'm not quite as
worried about that at least not anytime in the near future exactly at least it's it's it's a problem for Next Generation yeah has that mean something that has surprised you the most about user behavior in the AI space I think it's still interesting to me the demographics of adoption there's a lot less younger people that are adopting AI as early on like people in high school Etc maybe outside of trying to get their homework done or something like that that are using AI to try and solve their problems or even adding it to their workflow
got it and then if you could build an AI to just take care of one chore everyday chore in your life one mundane task what would it be if I could if I could have an AI or a robot that helped to walk my dog that's the one that I would buy I am a dog or and I'm kind of it kind of hurts that you said that because I think that's one of the dog's most precious time but then again yeah I get it yeah dos especially in the winter no it's it's 16 degrees
out here and so I during the summer I take my dog hiking Boise has a lot of beautiful Trails here and so I'll take my dog hiking out in the mountains I'll take her camping things like that but during the winter or if I'm super slammed one day I really want her to be able to still get out and burn off some energy right so nice so AI robots that can walk your dot if someone's listening and they need to go and build that well Kristen it's been great having you on the podcast here and
we're all looking forward to seeing undetectable growth and next time we talk to you hope that you're at 50 million users or even 100 million appreciate that thanks so much for having me on [Music]
