Episode 851 - Martial Arts and AI Benefits

In this episode, Jeremy and co-host Andrew Adams talk about artificial intelligence and how it can be used in martial arts.

Martial Arts and AI Benefits - Episode 851

Welcome, martial arts enthusiasts, to an intriguing journey at the intersection of tradition and technology. Today we're delving into a realm where combat meets coding and discipline meets data.

While we assist various martial arts schools, there's an emerging powerhouse that has grown interest - Artificial Intelligence. It all began with Chat GPT, a tool that took off like wildfire. A valuable lesson for entrepreneurs: being the first doesn't guarantee success.

Today, we're embarking on a journey that explores how martial arts, the very essence of combat and discipline, can harness the power of AI. The discussion focuses mainly on how students and martial arts school owners can leverage Artificial Intelligence for various purposes, from generating graphics to enhancing marketing strategies.

But before we dive in, let's contemplate a thought-provoking question: How can martial arts itself benefit from AI? Imagine an AI that learns from observing fights, shaping a martial arts curriculum based on its insights. The impact on training, techniques, and strategy could be revolutionary.

Join us as we explore the uncharted waters of AI in the martial arts world. From AI graphics generators to AI's potential to transform the very essence of martial arts, we're here to uncover the future possibilities and spark conversations that will shape the evolution of this timeless discipline. So, fasten your seatbelts, dear listeners, as we embark on this thrilling martial arts AI odyssey.

(This was written with AI)

Show Transcript

You can read the transcript below.

Jeremy (00:00.86)
Hey, what's going on everybody? Welcome, this is Whistlekick Martial Arts Radio. And in today's episode, Andrew and I are talking about martial arts and artificial intelligence, the benefits. Which direction do we mean? Both, we're gonna talk about a variety of different things that you will find interesting as we look into the future, as we talk about AI as it relates to being a martial arts school owner, and a whole bunch of other things. No matter who you are, AI is going to impact nearly every part of your life. But...

That also includes your martial arts lifestyle. So stick around. If you're new to what we do, go to whistlekick.com, see all the things that we're working on and use the code PODCAST15 to save yourself 15% in our store on apparel or a training program or protective equipment or any other number of things.

So Andrew, AI of course means artificial intelligence. And we were talking before and you've got very little experience with the AI tools that are out and available now.

Andrew (00:54.466)
Mm-hmm.

Andrew (00:59.278)
Correct. I've played around with chat GPT like a small amount, but that's basically it.

Jeremy (01:06.044)
Yeah. And many of you out there know that as Whistlekick grows and as we get closer to profitability, I've had to pay bills. And how do I pay bills? Well, I have a consulting firm and that consulting firm does work with a variety of martial arts schools, but not entirely. I'd say just more than half are martial arts schools. There are a variety of clients and industries from tech startups to...

human and animal medicine and all over the place. And I am using AI in some form or another often for nearly all of them. And of course you mentioned ChatGPT, the tool that kind of set the world on its head once people learned about it because it worked. AI has been around for a long time and we often...

Andrew (01:47.234)
Hmm.

Jeremy (02:06.428)
Like chat GPD was the first thing to come out of the gate But it was really just the first one that caught fire and that's just a tip to those you got there who might be starting businesses Just because you're your first doesn't mean that everybody will catch on

Sounded like I cut you off at the end, I apologize, did I? Oh, okay.

Andrew (02:24.426)
No, no, no. Chat GPT, it's become huge. It's one of the reasons that the Screen Actors Guild is on strike right now. I mean, it's huge, and I don't know that it's gonna go away.

Jeremy (02:39.788)
It's not. AI is here to stay. You can, we could, what we're not gonna talk about today. We're not gonna talk about much about the ethics. We'll talk a little bit about that. That's a whole different conversation and it's also a very personal conversation. So, you know, you acknowledged that SAG-AFTRA is on strike because of AI, a number of other reasons. But it's a really fast way to generate content. We experimented with

Andrew (02:41.663)
Yep.

Andrew (02:54.236)
Mm-hmm.

Jeremy (03:08.836)
AI generated content. In fact, there are blog posts at whistlekick.com that I generated with AI because I wanted to see if I could. I wanted to see what happened. I can turn out some rather low quality content very quickly. And you know, that's a bit of foreshadowing to what we're going to talk about as it relates to martial arts school owners. Can you, should you use AI to do that, to build a website?

But if we look at the probably the second most popular tool out there mid journey, which is an AI graphics generator.

Jeremy (03:50.472)
You may have seen some things out there. We've we did some we experimented with some Facebook ads that used mid journey images in them. And I've used mid journey to generate some graphics for some other projects. And it's interesting. Right. So most of what we're going to talk about is going to be in the direction of students and school owners utilizing artificial intelligence in a martial arts way.

But because that's where we're gonna spend most of our time, I wanna go the other direction. And how is AI going to benefit from martial arts? And I've kinda got a shoehorn this in, but I think you'll see what I'm talking about in a moment. Well, no, I guess it's not quite that direction. Here's the first thing I wanted to talk about. How is martial arts itself going to benefit?

from AI. I've got something that I can see coming and I'm curious if you have any ideas Andrew before I stomp on the conversation.

Andrew (04:54.134)
Um, I mean, the, the graphics aspect, I think is easily something that martial arts schools can use in their marketing or whatever, like that's how, you know, how are martial arts going to, like, you asked me, like, how do you think that that's one way?

Jeremy (05:05.128)
Right, well, we're not... Yeah.

Jeremy (05:12.764)
So not, I don't mean martial arts schools or martial arts people, I mean martial arts, the thing itself. Cause I see some, yeah, I see something there. And so if we think about how does AI work and just really simply on a technical level, you have to train it. It's an algorithm that gets trained. And what do you train it on? You train it on, I mean, in the case of chat GPT,

Andrew (05:20.594)
Oh, oh, you mean the actual physical act. Whoa. Oh, I have no idea.

Andrew (05:35.339)
Mm-hmm.

Jeremy (05:42.612)
train it on a whole bunch of text from the internet. What would happen if somebody generated a fight AI that trained on watching fights? And I don't just mean professional MMA, I mean security camera footage of fights. What would happen? What would a martial arts curriculum look like based on that?

Andrew (06:06.818)
That's interesting.

Jeremy (06:09.084)
Now is somebody going to do that? I don't know. I don't have the resources or the time to do that right now, but it's interesting to me because we have said...

And we've talked about this on the show that for a number of martial artists for martial arts schools, watching MMA has changed the way they teach and train, and what they teach and train. Not saying they should or should not, it's not a judgment, but it is an observation. AI makes those observations at a much grander scale. If every fight that the UFC has ever done has been videoed, and you can probably say the same thing about K-1,

You could say the same thing about karate combat, pride, and a lot of amateur stuff. What would happen if an AI had the ability to process that video information and look at it and understand the differences? What if a video game came out of that? Right? Like there's, you know, what? What?

Andrew (06:49.802)
Or pride, yep.

Andrew (07:05.908)
Hmm.

Andrew (07:09.546)
Yeah, I can see that.

Jeremy (07:11.952)
What if augmented reality became the training platform, augmented virtual reality, right? We can see that there's a really interesting direction this could go. And I think eventually it'll get there. Who knows how long. We tend to make these predictions that this sort of stuff is going to happen. It's going to be here in 10 years, probably going to be more than 10 years. But we'll start to see the doors open on that. And then I think the other thing and the reason that we titled it this way and...

Maybe I'm being a bit disingenuous by saying that AI benefits for martial arts, but the methodology by which AI progresses is very similar to the way we progress as martial artists.

Andrew (07:48.77)
Hmm. It will get better.

Jeremy (07:50.392)
observation, it gets better because it keeps working, because people keep feeding it information. It's less about, okay, if this, then that, right? And there are some contexts in the martial arts that we process that way. I recommend against them because that rarely works well because people can't think that quickly. But if we think of ourselves as, the term in AI would be a...

large language model, right? Like we get fed all of this stuff, right? Then we take it and we try to understand it and we try to use it based on certain contexts. It's intelligence in the same way that we're trying to create artificial intelligence.

Andrew (08:37.29)
Yeah. It'll be interesting to see how the AI grows as it continues. And I know some content creators have used it and, you know, have experimented with it in their videos. Most notably that I'm thinking Sensei Seth on YouTube has, and he got together with IC Mike and did a video on, they went to chat, beat GPT and said, write a fight scene, and then they acted it out.

Jeremy (09:05.702)
Oh, that's really cool. How was it? We should get that linked in the show notes. I haven't seen that.

Andrew (09:07.359)
And it was interesting. And. Okay. I'll do that. Um, and you know, it's interesting. It'll be interesting to see if two or three years, they do the exact same thing. How is it? How has it grown?

Jeremy (09:22.704)
Yeah. We're gonna end with the school piece, because that's the piece that's probably the... Right now it's the biggest, and it's probably the part that is of most value to the most people, right? Because the rest of what we're talking about is theoretical. That's the part that is actually there and practical. So we think about it from the perspective of being a student. There are a lot of, I would say, kind of low-value ways that you could do this, right?

Andrew (09:26.442)
The biggest, yeah.

Andrew (09:39.382)
Mm-hmm.

Jeremy (09:51.336)
We did a, we recorded a Q&A today that will have already come out where Mark Warner submitted a question about why don't more international films get watched? You could go to an AI, you know, chat GPT as we're recording, cuts off at some time in 2021, so we don't have the most recent stuff. But if you asked it, hey, what are some really cool martial arts

Andrew (09:57.386)
Yeah, last week. It came out last week.

Jeremy (10:21.48)
films that I've probably not seen. It'll tell you. You know, you can get in there. You could ask, you know, anything that you might say, you know, this would be an interesting research project, lineage, stuff like that. ChatGPT can probably cut down the time that would be involved in learning or understanding or sourcing what you might wanna find out more about next because of the way it works, right?

Andrew (10:35.629)
Mm-hmm.

Jeremy (10:51.164)
And I think that can be really valuable. I could also see if we start to combine AI with technology, sensor-based technology, what if you have, I've got this aura ring, if you have some kind of wearable that is also aware of what movements you're doing. The closest thing that is out there right now is kick AI. Shout out to those guys.

Jan Eriks has been on the show. And if we start to combine some of that sensor-based technology, now we can start to look at, well, what would...

what would happen to my heart rate if I did these moves in this way? What would happen to my heart? So maybe there's even a digital coach, an AI coach that says, you know what? I want you to do that form again. And from your heart rate, it seems like you're holding your breath at this stage. That's something that on a technical level is pretty straightforward. So there are a lot of things like that I think could be really cool. And

Andrew (11:38.604)
Mm.

Andrew (11:56.076)
Yep.

Jeremy (12:01.992)
You know, over the last few years, we saw that.

far more people are willing to train and teach remotely, you know, over Zoom or something. And there are a lot of pieces that get lost there because you're not in the same room with someone. If you and I are training together, I might hear you hold your breath. I might be able to tell that you hold your breath. But if we're training over Zoom, I'm going to have a much harder time doing that. But if I have a readout or you have the readout that says, hey, you're probably holding your breath here, fool.

Andrew (12:12.642)
Mm-hmm.

Andrew (12:24.566)
Mm-hmm.

Andrew (12:29.413)
Yeah.

Jeremy (12:36.984)
That makes that distance learning even closer to the real experience. And then we start to add virtual reality, which is really close. Sensei Seth did a video on fighting. On fighting with VR, yeah. So the stuff is here, the pieces are here, they just need to be put together. That was the other thing I wrote down. And how about the other piece of what you should spend your time working on?

Andrew (12:52.492)
He's done a few.

Andrew (13:06.339)
Hmm.

Jeremy (13:07.612)
You know, let's say you're getting ready for your black belt. You know, this is a common situation. You're getting ready, you've got six months or 12 months or 24 months or whatever it is. And quite often, people will have a...

Andrew (13:14.999)
Yeah.

Jeremy (13:24.58)
a huge syllabus to work from. You know, they've got to know these forms, they've got to have these competencies and these techniques. And knowing what to spend your time working on can be pretty tough. What if there was an AI that said, okay, what are all the things you got to know and you feed it? So, okay, how good are you at this? How good are you at that? How good are you at this? When is your test? And it gives you home practice routine.

Andrew (13:47.948)
Mm-hmm.

Andrew (13:53.15)
A lesson plan basically.

Jeremy (13:54.888)
lesson plan and it keeps you accountable. That on a technical level is actually pretty simple. I don't know that, you know, some people wouldn't call that an AI, but it's it is because it's feeding and information. It's processing that information per an algorithm and it's generating something that is that does not currently exist. That's kind of my definition where AI falls. How many people out there going, oh wait, can you make that? I can't make that. But how cool would that be?

Andrew (14:01.004)
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Andrew (14:22.891)
Yeah, yeah.

Jeremy (14:25.408)
We've all said and I think we all know that home training is important. If you want to progress, if you want to be the best you can, you've got to do stuff at home. But sometimes it's, what do I spend the time working on? What do most people spend the time working on? The stuff they like the most, which is probably the stuff they're the best at. So having even if it's

Andrew (14:38.846)
Exactly. Yeah. And then should be working. It should probably be spending more time working on the stuff they don't like because they're less good at it.

Jeremy (14:46.648)
Exactly exactly Is there anything that might have brought to mind for you before we go on and talk about more short schools

Andrew (14:54.194)
No, that all makes, all that stuff makes sense, for sure.

Jeremy (14:59.34)
And frankly, I'm excited for that stuff. I think it would be a heck of a lot of fun. So let's talk about the more common use cases right now for AI, being in business.

AI is often thought of in this current iteration as being beneficial really only for marketing. You can generate text with chat GPT, you can generate images with mid journey. And those are the tools I'm most familiar with. We're not gonna give you a list of tools because by the time you watch or listen to this, the tools will have changed.

Andrew (15:38.506)
Yeah, there'll be new ones.

Jeremy (15:39.416)
It is a rapidly evolving, I was at a conference this weekend, and the lecture about AI, which is part of why I wanted to do this, the gentleman was saying there are 150 new AI tools rolled out every week, I believe it. Most of them aren't great. They're figuring it out, right? The AI is AI-ing. It's what's supposed to happen.

Andrew (16:00.142)
Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Jeremy (16:04.884)
And if you were there at the early versions of chat GPT or mid journey, you know what I'm talking about. Those tools have progressed massively in a very, very short period of time. So marketing, anything that you have that you have to do that involves you sitting and typing can probably be made either faster or better by using AI tools. So here's one. So I've got this. I'm going to...

bring this up now where I'm going to ask chat GPT for some potential podcast episodes we could do. You know, cause Andrew, that's one of the things that we talk about is sometimes we go, well, you know, we keep a list, but while I'm doing that, tell people kind of like our process with that and they can see the difference.

Andrew (16:48.767)
Yep, yep.

Andrew (16:53.59)
Yeah, so I mean, essentially I have on my phone a note that I just constantly throw ideas and stuff down and, you know, sometimes I'll be, you know, out and about talking with friends often about my smart stuff. And they'll say, oh, that would make a really good episode. You guys should do that. And I'll go, oh, you know what? And maybe it's not fleshed out enough. Maybe it's just a thought. And I'll just, I'll go open my phone, open the note and I'll throw it down and

It gives me time to percolate on it more. And I check that notes page every week or so to see what's on there, to see if there's anything that just to keep my mind thinking about things. And then when we get together and record, I'll open it up and I'll say, all right, this is what's on the list. And there are things that have been on the list for months. You know, some of them require another guest and we haven't found that guest yet. But it's on the list. And so.

I'm just constantly throwing stuff on the list.

Jeremy (17:54.792)
So I've done this exercise before, so I'm taking a little bit of liberty here and leaving something out.

Jeremy (18:05.925)
screen. Yeah. So here we are. And what I've pre fed in is what are some great topics to be explored on a podcast focusing on traditional martial arts training. And the reason I framed it that way is I know from past experience, because I've messed around with this, it often wants us to talk about people, you know, that's not hard for us to generate. You know, we once a week, we have a episode with a person. So if I hit go,

Jeremy (18:33.32)
Dun dun dun. Certainly a podcast focusing on traditional martial arts training can explore various fascinating topics, including history and origins. It's kind of obvious. Techniques and training methods. Okay, that's kind of obvious. Philosophy and mindfulness. Many traditional martial arts emphasize the importance of mental training and spiritual development. Episodes could focus on the philosophical teachings and how practitioners can incorporate them into their daily lives. Self-defense, health and fitness, interviews with masters and practitioners, even though I...

didn't ask you for that, I gave it. Cultural connections.

Andrew (19:06.766)
Mm-hmm.

Jeremy (19:09.624)
And it's still going. But here's the point. For most of us, when we can do anything, coming up with anything is exhausting.

One of the ways that I use ChatGPT is I'll ask it for a list of things, and I usually don't use them, but it gives me an idea for a thing.

Andrew (19:31.072)
Yeah, yeah.

Jeremy (19:33.844)
kids in martial arts, equipment and gear, challenges and common misconceptions. Right? So there's a bunch of stuff there that we could use this for. Now here's one that...

Jeremy (19:47.708)
You know, I don't want to have the screen time with this, but here's another one that I think a lot of martial arts schools might find valuable. Write me a calendar for social media posts for a martial arts school where we're posting, you know, three times a week. Because you know, many of the audience know I work with martial arts schools. And the biggest challenge for most of them is the time.

and energy that goes into, well, what should I post about?

Andrew (20:20.543)
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Jeremy (20:22.128)
Right? So, overall, this is the way that I use any kind of text generator like ChatGVT. I need to come up with an idea. I'm going to ask it to give me ideas and I'm going to work from those ideas.

Jeremy (20:36.636)
Anything you want to respond to for a Q&A?

Andrew (20:37.79)
Yeah. And it doesn't have to be you use it verbatim, but it gives you a list and it'll give you things to think about.

Jeremy (20:41.488)
Right. And you probably don't want to.

Jeremy (20:50.212)
Other thing I mentioned, I think, at the top that I've used to generate some blog posts. They're not great. But what I wanted to test was how are they received? One of the things that you may or may not know is that I'm constantly looking at these metrics behind the scenes on how whistlekick.com performs. And I was curious, what if I very quickly turn out, you know, 10 blog posts on a certain subject, is Google going to reward us or penalize us? And it was pretty neutral. Right.

Andrew (21:15.651)
Mm. Yeah.

Jeremy (21:18.416)
Because Google can kind of figure out if it's AI, right? And this is one of the things that is going to become a bigger subject of conversation in the future is, should AI-generated content rank as well as human-generated content? I'm not making a claim one way or the other, but it's something to keep in mind that, as new tools roll out, because there are already tools that'll make you a website. Make me a website for a martial arts school that has these things, done.

Andrew (21:32.696)
Hmm.

Jeremy (21:48.552)
right? That becomes really interesting.

But right now, write your own content. Don't AI your blog posts unless you need a place to start. Again, we come back to that starting point. Now, other places that you might find some interest.

Andrew (22:06.462)
Mm-hmm.

Jeremy (22:12.052)
How many times have some of you out there written something and you wanted to use an image, and the images that you had or found for free on the internet didn't fit? When we talk about martial arts, it's so rare that we have images available that fit the subject that we're talking about. Well, that's where one of the graphics tools comes in.

Andrew (22:30.802)
Yeah, yep, absolutely.

Jeremy (22:36.324)
I'm talking about this manipulation of this. I've done some stuff where I've shown cross-sections of skeletons in interesting ways. That's been kind of cool. But I think the other thing to keep in mind is that there's text and there's audio, or text and photo, but there's also audio and video. And that's where, to me, AI is...

Andrew (23:01.868)
Hmm.

Jeremy (23:04.816)
in the next year, maybe even six months, going to become incredibly interesting. What would it look like if you took a video of your class, you know, you filmed a class and you said, okay, break out the drills with the instruction and give me text so I can send it to the students that weren't there that day.

Andrew (23:23.505)
Interesting.

Jeremy (23:25.104)
You could do that. In fact, you can get kind of close to that now.

Andrew (23:29.634)
Wow, yeah, I had no idea.

Jeremy (23:32.688)
And so the reason that we don't film every class and break it up and give notes to students who don't attend is because it takes a lot of time. But those things that you look at, if you look at something in your business, whether it's a martial arts business or not, and you say, this thing takes me time, too much time to do it, but it does have value, that's the place you should look for an AI solution.

Andrew (23:40.385)
Yeah.

Andrew (23:55.566)
Mm.

Jeremy (23:57.688)
Especially if it's something that you can automate there are plenty of things that automate You know the One of the things that we haven't talked about is we're using this new platform Riverside for our recording is that the text generation Is much more intelligent? Than your simple kind of old-school Voice to text because the original voice to text did not care what the rest of that sentence was if it thought it heard this word it gave you this word and

I mean, we've all had plenty of laughs over the years with auto-correct in our text messages. But Riverside's text generation is far more intelligent. It says, wait a second, you're trying to say this, and I can tell from these words, so even though I thought I heard this, I could also kind of tell where you might've said this, and so I'm picking that word. And we get a better transcript out of it. And that saves us time because we talked about in...

Andrew (24:34.324)
Yeah, absolutely.

Jeremy (24:55.284)
I think it was in the Q&A episode, the value of those transcripts. There's value, but it's not valuable enough for one of us to sit down and listen to it and write it word for word.

Andrew (24:58.378)
Yeah, absolutely.

Andrew (25:03.957)
Exactly.

Cool, it will be interesting to see how much AI changes in the next six months to a year. And maybe even we revisit this topic in a year or two.

Jeremy (25:19.728)
I think we're gonna have to, I really do, especially if we look at the job that a martial arts school is in.

Andrew (25:21.441)
Yeah.

Jeremy (25:29.256)
There are two ways I think you can look at AI as it comes in. It's either a tool or it's competition.

And if you see it as competition, you are going to lose because there will at some point be a way for people to learn martial arts that initially it's going to say this is AI and it won't be but eventually it will become true artificial intelligence that is teaching people martial arts. But artificial intelligence will never be able to deliver the community and the warmth and the personal understanding.

and the nuanced detail that an artificial intelligence and empathy that a martial art, that an AI bot can.

Andrew (26:08.341)
empathy.

Yep.

Andrew (26:15.51)
But otherwise, what I heard was if you get into a fight with AI, AI is going to win.

Jeremy (26:20.072)
it's probably true.

Andrew (26:22.729)
You'll have to watch Sensei's video.

Jeremy (26:28.892)
Awesome, anything else?

Andrew (26:30.33)
No, no, like I said, it'll just be interesting to see where it goes.

Jeremy (26:34.684)
Those of you out there in the audience, if you have.

Pardon me, I was coughing. If you have follow-up questions, if there are more specifics that you want to go into, there are a number of ways that you can do that. The best way, we have a newer, it's not new anymore, but a newer Facebook page, Martial Arts Radio, find us there. You can also leave comments on whistlekickmartialartsradio.com and those are the two best ways. But if maybe you've got a question that you want to keep private or something, you can reach out to Andrew at jeremyatwhistlekick.com or social media is at whistlekick.

Andrew (26:51.49)
Mm-hmm.

Jeremy (27:08.976)
Remember you can support us in any way that seems to be appropriate to you. Please consider doing so we can keep doing this, the show and all the other things that we do. That it? Okay, until next time. Train hard, smile and have a great day. I like how you did that.

Andrew (27:20.615)
I think so.

Andrew (27:24.706)
Smile.