One of the clearest principles Matt Mundt has landed on after 25 years in digital marketing sounds simple: get your ideas out of your own head first. Then go to AI.
It sounds obvious. It isn’t. The default move, especially when you’re tired or on deadline, is to open a chat window and let the model start. Matt’s watched what that does over time. The output is less specific. The thinking gets softer. The work stops sounding like you. He’s teaching his 11-year-old son the same rule on their Kid Intern YouTube channel, because he’s seen what happens when you skip it.
This episode of A Good Pour: Summer of Good AI is about responsible AI use from someone who uses these tools daily and worries about them anyway. Matt runs Google Ad Grants and Meta ads for nonprofits and Christian artists. He co-founded the God Made creator community in Nashville. He knows what the tools can do, and he’s clear-eyed about the cost of reaching for them too fast.
Why the “think first” rule matters more than any prompt trick
Matt’s analogy for how to use AI is Tony Stark and the Iron Man suit. You put it on, and it makes you more capable. It doesn’t replace you. But that framing only works if you show up with something to put into the suit.
When you open a chat window first, before you’ve done any thinking on your own, you’re borrowing the model’s default patterns instead of your own. The brainstorm that comes back might be good in a generic way. It won’t be yours. And if you’re making content, running ads, writing for a faith community, or building a brand with a particular voice, generic is a problem.
The practice Matt describes is straightforward. Open a document, or even a piece of paper, and get your own ideas out first. Then take those ideas to AI as a brainstorming partner. Ask it to build on what you already have, poke holes in it, and surface things you might be missing. The AI output is more useful at that point because it has something real to react to. And your thinking stays in the driver’s seat.
What AI is doing to trust in faith communities
Matt works with Christian radio stations, nonprofits, and Christian artists. He sees the trust question up close.
AI-generated images and video are getting good enough to fool people, at least briefly. His kids will look at something that’s slightly off and immediately call it AI. That instinct is spreading. And in communities where trust is the whole foundation, anything that creates even a moment of “wait, is that real?” does damage that’s hard to undo.
He mentioned a Christian artist who used AI to make a Christmas music video last year. The pushback was immediate. The problem wasn’t that the video looked bad. The problem was the audience’s relationship to the art. Part of what makes a great song land in a faith context is knowing the story behind it. Knowing a person went through something real and wrote from that place. When the audience finds out an algorithm made it, the song doesn’t carry the same weight. The notes are the same. The meaning isn’t.
Matt’s been pulling back on AI elements in his own content, including an intro he’d been using on his YouTube channel. He removed it because he didn’t want his audience wondering what else he’d outsourced. That’s a very specific choice, and it’s the kind of decision that responsible AI use requires. Not a blanket rule. A judgment call made in context.
The zero-click search shift and what it means for nonprofits
AI is changing how people use search, and that has real consequences for nonprofits running Google Ad Grants.
When someone asks an AI a factual question, they get the answer in the chat. They don’t click through to a website. That’s called zero-click search, and it’s eroding traffic for a lot of publishers and organizations that have built their digital presence around informational content.
Matt’s response to this isn’t panic. It’s strategy. He’s spent years finding what he calls “little gold nuggets,” search terms that connect an organization’s audience to topics they’re already thinking about. His example is a blog post about whether pets go to heaven. It sounds like an odd fit for a Christian radio station, but it was exactly right for someone whose pet had just died, who was thinking about heaven, and who hadn’t thought about listening to Christian radio. You meet people where they already are, and the traffic follows.
That instinct, of finding the adjacent topic that genuinely serves your audience, is going to matter more as AI handles the easy informational queries. The content that survives zero-click is content that speaks to a specific person in a specific moment.
What the God Made community is building
Three years ago, Matt and his friend Brandon went to a video creator conference in Dallas. They stumbled into a morning Bible study at the conference meetup app and realized there were other people trying to hold together the faith dimension and the creator craft. They brought that idea home to Nashville, started telling friends, and began meeting at a local coffee shop with six people.
Now the God Made community meets monthly at WAY-FM radio headquarters with 30 to 50 people showing up each time. It’s a blend of full-time creators, people with podcast ideas they haven’t acted on yet, and everyone in between. The AI conversation comes up every month. And a year ago, some of those people said they’d never use AI. Now most of them are open to it.
The first God Made Creator Conference runs October 22nd and 23rd in Nashville. Matt’s building it to include people like Rob Clark, who has generated over five billion views across social platforms, and Tim Schmoyer, who has coached major YouTube creators with faith as the lens. The goal is simple: a room full of Christian creators who can talk thumbnails and talk prayer without switching modes.
Information is at godmadecreators.com.
Use This Today
Before your next piece of content, try Matt’s practice once. Open a blank document and set a timer for 10 minutes. Write down every idea you have for this piece, or this campaign, or this video, before you go anywhere near AI. Don’t edit. Don’t second-guess. Just get what’s in your head onto the page.
Then open your AI tool of choice. Paste your list and ask: “Here’s what I’m thinking. What am I missing? What would make this stronger?”
Notice the difference in the response you get when AI has your actual thinking to build on, versus what it would have generated on its own. That difference is the whole argument.