December 18, 2024 • 27 mins
Explore how artificial intelligence is transforming the publishing industry! 🌟 From ethical AI practices to reshaping creativity, this video dives into how AI empowers authors, publishers, and creators in this new era. Learn about the future of book publishing, the role of AI tools, and the ethical considerations shaping the industry.
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💡 Topics Covered:
Want to finally write your nonfiction book? Grab my FREE Guide: From Overwhelmed to Writing here: http://authornation.online/writing
💡 Topics Covered:
- The rise of AI-powered publishing
- Ethical AI use for authors
- AI vs human creativity in publishing
- The future of storytelling
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:10):
Hello everybody, It is Melody and welcome to Author and
Nation Today. I'm super excited because we're going to be
talking about an incredibly controversial topic AI, Artificial intelligence. We're
going to talk about how it can elevate your nonfiction
journey because I'm here to guide you with actionable insights
(00:30):
and strategies that will help you elevate your writing career
because of an authoration. We are committed to equipping you
with the tools, the inspiration in the community you need
to succeed as a nonfiction author. So you can visit
authoration online and find a treasure trove of resources just
for you. All right. So, whether you're sipping your morning
coffee or winding down after a long day, or maybe
(00:52):
deriving to work, settle in as we explore how AI
can transform your ability to share your story with the world.
And first though, let me introduce our guest. A native
of Northeast Ohio, ed Christo Sick has lived in Chicago,
San Francisco, and Reno graduated from Ohio University. He co
(01:12):
founded our ac Projects AI, an AI automation agency, and
serves as the Chief AI Officer CAIO. He's also an
avid cyclist and he's really excited to learn how to
ski now he lives near Tahoe. Let's welcome Ed, Hi, Ed,
how are you today?
Speaker 2 (01:33):
Wonderful Melodie, and thank you very much for.
Speaker 1 (01:35):
Having me, Thank you, thank you for coming. I'm super
excited about this topic. I know that some people have
pulled their chair closer and some people have turned us off.
It's like there's so many emotions around AI. So I'm
really really excited to be talking to you about it.
So let's start with misconceptions. What are some misconceptions around
AI that you find?
Speaker 2 (01:57):
Yeah, that's a great question. So the biggest one that
I see and talking to to hosts and clients and
just anyone off the street who wants to talk about AI,
say you do AI on an airplane and have the
plane will ask you questions the whole ride that's happened.
So the biggest one for me is that AI is
sort of a one stop, fix all solution that you
(02:20):
can just say AI, write me a book, make me
a marketing campaign, do my work for me, and it's
just going to somehow do it properly one quickly, two.
And the third is that there's some repeatability in it.
And we find that that's just not the case. It's
a lot more nuanced, right, It's it's not something that
(02:43):
can just take over and accomplish all of your tasks.
You really have to know how to weave it into
other processes, other tools, and know how to wrangle it
right and through your prompt engineering and how you use it,
and to understand also when it should be put aside
(03:04):
and say, you know what, this is not even worth
trying to use AI for I see people bang their
head against the keyboard and just try to produce some outcome.
And like Jill, how you could have written the thing
three times already yourself, yeah, rather than try to like
wrangle the AI into what you think it can do.
So that's for me. The biggest one is that it's
(03:24):
one shot fix.
Speaker 1 (03:26):
All, yeah, exactly. And it's interesting because AI isn't human, right,
and so there's a lot of things that it can miss,
especially those nuances, right, especially those nuances. So thank you
for saying that. Let's talk about ethical considerations. I want
(03:46):
to talk get really practical later on, but let's just
deal with some of the misconceptions the ethical questions that
people have. So are there ethical considerations that you see
that authors should be keeping in mind when using AI.
Speaker 2 (04:01):
Yeah, I think it applies to authors, but I think
everyone should be concerned about ethics when it comes to AI. Right,
So both you know, coming from the AI side and
from the human side. So dealing with the AI side,
you have to understand that the AI models have been
trained on a lot of information, global information stores of information,
(04:23):
and so there can be biases baked in. There could
be you know, skewed information baked into those models. And
as as even AI researchers don't really know how AI
models are built. They say it more grows than it
is built, right, so you don't actually know what it's
I'm going to use air quotes here thinking. So you
(04:46):
have to always have a skeptical lens on when you're
approaching the outputs of AI. And then from a human standpoint,
you have to think about, right, your own brand, you're
honesty to your reader or the person who's going to
be receiving this output if it's not an author, it's
some other work product, and you know, do you feel
(05:06):
comfortable passing this off as your own? And where is
that line? And I was talking to you earlier I'm
not an ethicist and I'm not a content attorney, But
you know, where is that line that goes from totally
human to totally AI and somewhere in between? Right, Because
if you think about the pre AI way of creating,
(05:30):
we're all informed by writing other people's writing lectures what
we've learned, and then we then create from that knowledge.
So what AI is doing is taking all the knowledge
theoretically of ever and allowing you to sort of sift
through that and action not much more quickly. So if
(05:52):
you stay in that lane where you're using it as
a tool, I think there's really very little risk in
getting ethical bound up. But if you again go to
that first point I made of just one line, one click,
one output and post it, then you're really on the
other side.
Speaker 1 (06:11):
Yeah, and that's a really great segue into the idea
that what's in what's in there? There have been some
class action suits brought against AI from content creators and
authors about, Hey, you know, I don't see why Melody
should be able to get AI to summarize all this.
(06:34):
Why she should go buy my book and read it
if she wants to use the information. Where do you
sit in in kind of that that arena.
Speaker 2 (06:45):
Yeah, I think it's one of the most Silicon Valley
capers of all time. The way that the models were trained,
I think it was very much sort of beg forgiveness
later rather than ask permission, because had they asked permission
up front, they know that they certainly wouldn't have gotten it.
So we have to come from it from that lens. Okay,
(07:06):
if they wanted to ask for permission, they would have.
So that being said, you know, I think that it's
important that that authors are are credited not only in
the credits, but also monetarily for the work that they've done. Right, Why,
it's not any more or less valuable than someone digging
a ditch, right, it's it's it's labor, it's it's work,
(07:29):
it's time. So I definitely think there needs to be continued,
legislation continued. There's gonna be lawsuits and those will work
their way through the courts, and I don't know what
the outcome will be, but I certainly hope that the
courts do the right thing.
Speaker 1 (07:44):
Yeah, And actually, to your point, you know, forgiven us later, right,
don't ask now, don't ask for permission, and you know,
say sorry later. There AI. Some AI companies have gone
to some of the publishing houses now and said, hey,
you know, we're willing to pay x dollars to authors
to use their content. And so the publishers have gone
(08:06):
to the authors and some of the authors have been
reading some of the authors and the reactions. Some said
no way, and others have said, yeah, it's five thousand
dollars right. So even authors don't agree on how people
should be using their content. But some AI companies are
are now, you know, being willing to pay authors for
(08:28):
their content, which I find really interesting. So let's say,
do you have anything you wanted to add to that
before I move on?
Speaker 2 (08:36):
Yeah, there's there's there's two quick points I think they're
interesting here. So one is the technology on the creator
side is catching up a little bit to the AI
scraping side. So there's now a lot of uh, you know, robots.
Dot text is a file on websites that tell scrapers
not to scrape this information. There's also other blockers that
(08:57):
are actively blocking this this scraping, this bulk scraping of
data into AI models. So there is a bit of
a cat and mouse game going on right now until
it's all worked out. And then the second thing is, Yeah,
I think it's very important to acknowledge that there are
large publishing houses Lapen, I think in France, some Spanish newspapers,
(09:19):
I know the New York Times is still I'm not
sure the resolution on that one yet, but there is
a large, large number of licensing deals that will likely
go through and continue to go through in the future.
Speaker 1 (09:29):
So, yeah, that'll be really interesting to see that unfold.
Thank you for that, So Amazon, because of course what
happened when I came out. Amazon is flooded with books,
and Amazon wants to make money, but they also have
their you know, their you know, they need to keep
(09:50):
up the reputation. They need to stay within the law.
They don't know what's happening they actually have on the website.
Now you must declare if your content is AI assistant
or AI generated. Now you can still publish it. You
can do it fully AI generated book and publish that
on Amazon and make money from it. Amazon's okay with
that as long as you declare it. So I wanted
(10:12):
to ask you the difference. What's the difference between AI
assisted and AI generated.
Speaker 2 (10:17):
Yeah, that goes back to the question of ethics. And
it's a gray, gray area. So the way I would
define it is AI generated is going to be you
put in some prompt or it's the AI tool is
prompted and outcomes some output, and then with even a
(10:37):
large amount of editing is considered to be still AI
generated and then edited, and that can be disclosed, but
that would never rise to the level of human generated.
Now AI assisted, right, or leveraging AI in the content
creation process is it's very nuanced, but it's basically you
(10:59):
are They're going at the front end ideation, creating outlines perhaps,
but then at the end of the day you're actually
doing the writing. In the case of writing here, the
other thing would be graphics images. If you're doing the
bulk of the creation but using AI as a tool. Right,
(11:21):
no one would accuse a hammer of building a house.
So if you think of it that way, right, making
analogies for yourself might be useful. And okay, where is
the line for me? And again with Amazon, they do
want to protect their brand. And again, if you disclose
that it's AI generated, that's perfectly fine. I believe as
(11:42):
long as it is disclosures go a long way for
a lot of things, right, I have a colleague who
wrote and I can't remember. It was very early on
in the in the AI revolution, and he wrote an
entirely AI generated book, a fiction book, but he was
prompting it down this like choose your own adventure story.
(12:04):
And it was it was fascinating, it was very interesting.
It was like months after a chat GPT was released,
so it was like this novel, little tool, and it
was very cool and I thought it was fun. But
it was fully disclosed and the prompts were included. It
was almost a chat that was was released as the book.
Speaker 1 (12:22):
So yeah, I love that. I'm going to write my
own write your own adventure. I used to just love
those books as a kid. I choose your own adventure books.
I love those. I'm going to write some now, you
say AI just for fun. So I have a question.
I have authors come to me and say, well, you
know what if AI just helped me like fix one
(12:43):
sentence or help me come up with the title. But
they didn't, you know, they didn't really do much. Where's
that line? Where would you put that line at?
Speaker 2 (12:54):
Yeah, so when when it comes to things like that,
I would consider those to be and again, this is
my own personal bent.
Speaker 1 (13:01):
Right.
Speaker 2 (13:01):
I can't make that decision for anyone else, but I
use tools like grammarly. Right, those would be considered an
AI assisted grammar punctuation tool. Right. I don't think anyone
would say, oh, you can't use grammarly. Same thing with
using AI to degenerate hooks. If you're doing social media
(13:22):
to create captions for images, if you're doing titles things
like that, I think that's perfectly fine, right, because there's
an element of you know, there's a stylistic element for
writing a great title, and as long as you know
you preview it before it's published and approve it that
(13:45):
I think that would fall within the ethical bounds.
Speaker 1 (13:47):
Yeah, yeah, you make a good I make.
Speaker 2 (13:49):
That decision for me. Everyone else makes themselves.
Speaker 1 (13:52):
Yeah, you make a good point. I don't think there's this.
You know, there's probably very few books on Amazon that
are not AI assisted. If you if you consider grammarily
and pro Writing Aid and Hemingway and all of those
programs AI assisted. I think if you included those, I
think everyone has to tell Amazon that they're AI assisted
(14:13):
because those are in great use and those but those
are editing.
Speaker 2 (14:16):
Tools, right exactly, they're tools, exactly all right, they're not
creating the content, they're helping you to polish it right.
And and if you look at there's there's something like
with when you have a ghost writer and AI that's
one that's been brought up to you before. Well what
about ghostwriters. Well that's that's your own ethical choice to
(14:38):
say if you wrote it or did you write it
with some other author ghost wrote. So I think it
kind of falls similarly in that vein of ghostwriter, human ghostwriter, aiah.
It's going to have to be worked out over the
next many many years exactly.
Speaker 1 (14:54):
Oh, I agree. This has been really fascinating. Thank you.
So if you've really been enjoying this information which I have,
you can get lots more of that at ADS newsletter,
which you can find it's right in front of you
right now if you're watching the c aio newsletter dot com.
Of course that will be in the show notes along
with linkedin' so you can get in touch with ED.
(15:18):
And I want to turn now to you know, people
who are listening who are thinking, yeah, maybe I do
want to use AI, but they're overwhelmed. Right. Do you
sit in front of AI and you think, oh my gosh,
what do I do. What advice do you have for
authors who feel overwhelmed at this rapid pace of AI advancements.
Speaker 2 (15:43):
Yeah, fantastic question. So one of the problems that I
see currently with people being overwhelmed is if your listeners,
I'm sure are familiar with sas software the service. Basically,
in any subscription you get to some kind of tool online.
The amount of those that have exploded onto the scene
(16:05):
since AI started, and we would call those in the
AI industry as AI rappers, right, So they don't fundamentally
create anything new. They use the chat GPT model, the
claud model, the Gemini model. They just put a pretty
wrapper around it that solves some very discrete problem. Now
that's very cool and very useful, until you need like
(16:27):
twenty of them, and now you're wasting more time switching
tabs in your Chrome browser to solve some problem where
if you've just done it yourself, you'd probably be done faster, right, Right.
So that being said, what I would encourage people who
really want to dig into this without piling up all
these subscription fees is a tool called make dot com.
(16:50):
It has a free version which is extremely powerful. I
was on the free version for almost a year before
I went to the pro and I was doing a automation,
automation and agency work with it. A free version that
you can get into. It's a dragon Drop, very visual,
and it allows you to string together some of these
tools that you're already using, already natively built in. It
(17:13):
allows you to access AI Claude, Chatch, YOUPT Perplexity, which
is a great research tool, and string together steps in
a workflow to allow you to sort of slowly build
up your toolkit of AI automations. It's very simple, it's
a lot simpler than you'd think.
Speaker 1 (17:34):
Yeah, I'm going to drop make dot com also in
the show notes, so if you're looking for that, that's
where you can find it. So let's say someone drops
into make dot com and they're looking at it and say,
I think where do I start? And one of those
first three steps what should they do?
Speaker 2 (17:51):
Right? So the first step is thinking about what you
actually want to accomplish, because so many times, if you
open up that screen and you're staring at it like
a blank page, if you don't know where you want
to go, you'll probably never get there. Right. So I
strongly suggest look at your daily tasks, look at the
things you do repetitively.
Speaker 1 (18:10):
I have.
Speaker 2 (18:12):
Steps in my workflow of after a client meeting, a
transcript will gets fed in and feed out a report
and that's done automatically per a set of instructions that
I've given Make and the AI models and the prompts.
So that's the first step is decide what it is
you want to accomplish. And one of the discrete steps
in that two is to identify what tools you're using
(18:36):
currently or if there's a gap that you need to
fill in with AI, perhaps some data transformation or some
creative piece. And then three, really just go and have
fun with it. I mean, just start playing around with it.
You can't really break anything. You're just going to have
to play with it. And it's very simple. You log
in and there's a gray circle with a plus sign
(18:59):
in the center and a list of all the softwares
that you can link together. Pops up.
Speaker 1 (19:05):
Yeah, thank you, the.
Speaker 2 (19:06):
Next one and link it together, then the next one,
and then it's just a chain and it's it's it's
very very intuitive and it's very simple.
Speaker 1 (19:15):
Thank you. That's that's amazing. Again. I'm gonna drop make
dot com in the show notes for people, go check
that out and if you want more, grab as newsletter
as well, because I know I am, this is just
fascinating for me. So we can also and I don't
want to get to two kind of in the weeds,
but we can also customize AI solutions, right, oh yeah,
(19:36):
so you know, without getting too much in the weed.
Do you want to just give us like a kind
of like a forty thousand foot view of what's possible.
Speaker 2 (19:47):
Great? Yeah, So when it comes to using sort of
your off the shelf AI models so chat, GPT, Claude, anthropic,
the best way to approach those is there are settings
with in those dashboards that allow you to create stylistic
notes for the AI. We do a lot of work
(20:08):
and what's called meta prompting. So for example, my newsletter,
I write entirely by hand. I don't use any AI
to write the newsletter. That's important for two reasons. One,
I think if you're reading about AI and strategy, you
want to hear it from a human. You don't want
to have to just query the AI. The second is
I want human content that I can then use to
(20:31):
repurpose over time for LinkedIn posts or little one liners,
or I can feed that information into a tool called
notebook LM from Google. It's free, and basically create a
library of my own work that I can then interact
with as an author that I work with, who we
took all seven of his books, fed them into and
(20:52):
made a notebook of each of his books, and then
he can ask questions of his own content with sources
and it will show him where it's at and that
he can use that as a jumping off for a
new piece. So for me, it's getting that meta prompt
into the model where it's going to start to write
(21:14):
like you or know your style or what you're looking
for in ideation or things like that.
Speaker 1 (21:21):
Yeah. In fact, for fiction authors or anyone writing a
book series, one thing that AI does really well. And
I know a couple of authors who do this. They
have all of their books in their own personal AI
they and they say, okay, AI go through and do
character sheets for all these characters so that I don't
forget that so and so has blue eyes, and so
(21:44):
and so is short, and so and so is tall,
and so and so hates spikes and so they actually,
because you know, if you're writing a series of books,
you think Lord of the Rings as an example, how
did he keep track of all his characters and all
the nuances of all the characters? He did character seats.
He had to take detailed notes of everything that happened.
(22:07):
But if you're using AI, AI is not writing your
book series, but they're keeping track of your character seats
for you. And they can also a I can also
keep track of your plot points for you, so you
don't leave any plot holes. And so I know some
fiction authors who do that with AI, and that's that's
a customized solution, and I thought that was brilliant all right.
Speaker 2 (22:27):
Last Notebook LM is definitely a tool that if you're
interested in something like that. It's again if you log
in with your Google Notebook LM. It's a free product
from Google, and it is an incredible way to put
your data, your content and be able to interact with
it like you're interacting with an assistant who knows everything
(22:49):
about everything you've ever written.
Speaker 1 (22:50):
Oh that's brilliant. And is that data safe?
Speaker 2 (22:55):
Yes, it's not used to train the models. It is
your own private, it repository, right, So if you put
your notebook together, it's your law, it's your Google login,
so it's controlled under your login. It's not like a
publicly available piece of content.
Speaker 1 (23:11):
Brilliant, and I'll put that in show notes for people
as well. Okay, so my last question, I really want
to just look ahead a little bit, and I know
you don't have a crystal ball, but what do you
think authors should be preparing for when it comes to
AI in the future.
Speaker 2 (23:27):
Well, it's going to get better. It's going to get
easier to write, use AI to sound like a human.
Right So, right now, the most of the AI content
you can sniff it out from a mile away, like
you see one or two words delve or uh, there's
a bunch of words you can kind of are tells,
but there's really you know, and you can you can
(23:50):
sense it. So I think for authors going forward is
your quality, your relationship with your readers, that that you know,
becoming more of a personality rather than just a name
on a book jacket, podcast, YouTube, LinkedIn or any social network.
And if you create that relationship, no one's going to
(24:11):
go to AI for what you offer, right So, not
to be afraid of it, but it will get better,
it will get faster, and people will learn to use
it more effectively and more quickly. So we're going to
see a huge rush of content, but Google and Facebook
and all the other platforms are going to get better
as well as tamping that down, and so the platforming
(24:34):
or lowering the voice of AI content. So it's going
to be an interesting kind of showdown at the high
noon Corral.
Speaker 1 (24:42):
So it is do you think the bias that exists
in AI now will accelerate or do you think that
will even out a little bit.
Speaker 2 (24:56):
So if we're referring to like the in the innate
bias of the model itself towards certain genders or races,
I think that. So. Actually Anthropic who released Claude it's
some really interesting research, and they did a mind map
(25:16):
of AI, and it was a very fuzzy map, but
they were able to identify sort of neurons or areas
of interest within the AI's quote brain that they could
either stimulate or suppress. And so they created a AI
chatbot that was the Golden Gate chat bot, and they
found an area that was referencing the Golden Gate and
(25:38):
they pulled that up to like a great deal higher
magnitude than it should have been, and everything it talked
about reference back to the Golden Gate. So they're going
to try to They're going to start to map these
models and say, okay, we can see that there's some
bias here. We could see that there's some trouble areas
over here, and start to be able to manipulate those
little bit more meticulously. So I think it's never going
(26:04):
to be, never going to go away, but I think
that it'll get better over time.
Speaker 1 (26:08):
Yeah, that's so interesting. Thank you so much. A final words,
and where can people find you?
Speaker 2 (26:15):
Yeah? So thanks everyone. I read a newsletter on AI
strategy for business owners including content creators. You can get
that again at thecaio neewsletter dot com. A lot of
resources there. Also, I'd love to connect on LinkedIn.
Speaker 1 (26:30):
And I will put link your LinkedIn in the show notes,
So go grab his LinkedIn and connect with ad through LinkedIn.
I just is such a fascinating topic.
Speaker 2 (26:39):
Ed.
Speaker 1 (26:39):
Thank you so much for coming today and talking to
us about.
Speaker 2 (26:42):
This, Melodie, and thank you for having me.
Speaker 1 (26:45):
Yeah, and everyone out there, thank you for joining us
on alternation. I hope this conversation has really kind of
helped you understand where AI might fit in your life
and in your writing journey. And thank you for joining
us Always appreciate your feedback. Always appreciate your support. I
know you know an author who needs to hear this.
Send them this podcast episode so they can get sorted
(27:09):
on their AI. Leave a comment, leave a review, Share
it because your participation helps us continue delivering the insights
and the tools you need to succeed. So keep writing,
keep creating, and continue to share your content and your
unique stories with the world.
Hello everybody, It is Melody and welcome to Author and
Nation Today. I'm super excited because we're going to be
talking about an incredibly controversial topic AI, Artificial intelligence. We're
going to talk about how it can elevate your nonfiction
journey because I'm here to guide you with actionable insights
(00:30):
and strategies that will help you elevate your writing career
because of an authoration. We are committed to equipping you
with the tools, the inspiration in the community you need
to succeed as a nonfiction author. So you can visit
authoration online and find a treasure trove of resources just
for you. All right. So, whether you're sipping your morning
coffee or winding down after a long day, or maybe
(00:52):
deriving to work, settle in as we explore how AI
can transform your ability to share your story with the world.
And first though, let me introduce our guest. A native
of Northeast Ohio, ed Christo Sick has lived in Chicago,
San Francisco, and Reno graduated from Ohio University. He co
(01:12):
founded our ac Projects AI, an AI automation agency, and
serves as the Chief AI Officer CAIO. He's also an
avid cyclist and he's really excited to learn how to
ski now he lives near Tahoe. Let's welcome Ed, Hi, Ed,
how are you today?
Speaker 2 (01:33):
Wonderful Melodie, and thank you very much for.
Speaker 1 (01:35):
Having me, Thank you, thank you for coming. I'm super
excited about this topic. I know that some people have
pulled their chair closer and some people have turned us off.
It's like there's so many emotions around AI. So I'm
really really excited to be talking to you about it.
So let's start with misconceptions. What are some misconceptions around
AI that you find?
Speaker 2 (01:57):
Yeah, that's a great question. So the biggest one that
I see and talking to to hosts and clients and
just anyone off the street who wants to talk about AI,
say you do AI on an airplane and have the
plane will ask you questions the whole ride that's happened.
So the biggest one for me is that AI is
sort of a one stop, fix all solution that you
(02:20):
can just say AI, write me a book, make me
a marketing campaign, do my work for me, and it's
just going to somehow do it properly one quickly, two.
And the third is that there's some repeatability in it.
And we find that that's just not the case. It's
a lot more nuanced, right, It's it's not something that
(02:43):
can just take over and accomplish all of your tasks.
You really have to know how to weave it into
other processes, other tools, and know how to wrangle it
right and through your prompt engineering and how you use it,
and to understand also when it should be put aside
(03:04):
and say, you know what, this is not even worth
trying to use AI for I see people bang their
head against the keyboard and just try to produce some outcome.
And like Jill, how you could have written the thing
three times already yourself, yeah, rather than try to like
wrangle the AI into what you think it can do.
So that's for me. The biggest one is that it's
(03:24):
one shot fix.
Speaker 1 (03:26):
All, yeah, exactly. And it's interesting because AI isn't human, right,
and so there's a lot of things that it can miss,
especially those nuances, right, especially those nuances. So thank you
for saying that. Let's talk about ethical considerations. I want
(03:46):
to talk get really practical later on, but let's just
deal with some of the misconceptions the ethical questions that
people have. So are there ethical considerations that you see
that authors should be keeping in mind when using AI.
Speaker 2 (04:01):
Yeah, I think it applies to authors, but I think
everyone should be concerned about ethics when it comes to AI. Right,
So both you know, coming from the AI side and
from the human side. So dealing with the AI side,
you have to understand that the AI models have been
trained on a lot of information, global information stores of information,
(04:23):
and so there can be biases baked in. There could
be you know, skewed information baked into those models. And
as as even AI researchers don't really know how AI
models are built. They say it more grows than it
is built, right, so you don't actually know what it's
I'm going to use air quotes here thinking. So you
(04:46):
have to always have a skeptical lens on when you're
approaching the outputs of AI. And then from a human standpoint,
you have to think about, right, your own brand, you're
honesty to your reader or the person who's going to
be receiving this output if it's not an author, it's
some other work product, and you know, do you feel
(05:06):
comfortable passing this off as your own? And where is
that line? And I was talking to you earlier I'm
not an ethicist and I'm not a content attorney, But
you know, where is that line that goes from totally
human to totally AI and somewhere in between? Right, Because
if you think about the pre AI way of creating,
(05:30):
we're all informed by writing other people's writing lectures what
we've learned, and then we then create from that knowledge.
So what AI is doing is taking all the knowledge
theoretically of ever and allowing you to sort of sift
through that and action not much more quickly. So if
(05:52):
you stay in that lane where you're using it as
a tool, I think there's really very little risk in
getting ethical bound up. But if you again go to
that first point I made of just one line, one click,
one output and post it, then you're really on the
other side.
Speaker 1 (06:11):
Yeah, and that's a really great segue into the idea
that what's in what's in there? There have been some
class action suits brought against AI from content creators and
authors about, Hey, you know, I don't see why Melody
should be able to get AI to summarize all this.
(06:34):
Why she should go buy my book and read it
if she wants to use the information. Where do you
sit in in kind of that that arena.
Speaker 2 (06:45):
Yeah, I think it's one of the most Silicon Valley
capers of all time. The way that the models were trained,
I think it was very much sort of beg forgiveness
later rather than ask permission, because had they asked permission
up front, they know that they certainly wouldn't have gotten it.
So we have to come from it from that lens. Okay,
(07:06):
if they wanted to ask for permission, they would have.
So that being said, you know, I think that it's
important that that authors are are credited not only in
the credits, but also monetarily for the work that they've done. Right, Why,
it's not any more or less valuable than someone digging
a ditch, right, it's it's it's labor, it's it's work,
(07:29):
it's time. So I definitely think there needs to be continued,
legislation continued. There's gonna be lawsuits and those will work
their way through the courts, and I don't know what
the outcome will be, but I certainly hope that the
courts do the right thing.
Speaker 1 (07:44):
Yeah, And actually, to your point, you know, forgiven us later, right,
don't ask now, don't ask for permission, and you know,
say sorry later. There AI. Some AI companies have gone
to some of the publishing houses now and said, hey,
you know, we're willing to pay x dollars to authors
to use their content. And so the publishers have gone
(08:06):
to the authors and some of the authors have been
reading some of the authors and the reactions. Some said
no way, and others have said, yeah, it's five thousand
dollars right. So even authors don't agree on how people
should be using their content. But some AI companies are
are now, you know, being willing to pay authors for
(08:28):
their content, which I find really interesting. So let's say,
do you have anything you wanted to add to that
before I move on?
Speaker 2 (08:36):
Yeah, there's there's there's two quick points I think they're
interesting here. So one is the technology on the creator
side is catching up a little bit to the AI
scraping side. So there's now a lot of uh, you know, robots.
Dot text is a file on websites that tell scrapers
not to scrape this information. There's also other blockers that
(08:57):
are actively blocking this this scraping, this bulk scraping of
data into AI models. So there is a bit of
a cat and mouse game going on right now until
it's all worked out. And then the second thing is, Yeah,
I think it's very important to acknowledge that there are
large publishing houses Lapen, I think in France, some Spanish newspapers,
(09:19):
I know the New York Times is still I'm not
sure the resolution on that one yet, but there is
a large, large number of licensing deals that will likely
go through and continue to go through in the future.
Speaker 1 (09:29):
So, yeah, that'll be really interesting to see that unfold.
Thank you for that, So Amazon, because of course what
happened when I came out. Amazon is flooded with books,
and Amazon wants to make money, but they also have
their you know, their you know, they need to keep
(09:50):
up the reputation. They need to stay within the law.
They don't know what's happening they actually have on the website.
Now you must declare if your content is AI assistant
or AI generated. Now you can still publish it. You
can do it fully AI generated book and publish that
on Amazon and make money from it. Amazon's okay with
that as long as you declare it. So I wanted
(10:12):
to ask you the difference. What's the difference between AI
assisted and AI generated.
Speaker 2 (10:17):
Yeah, that goes back to the question of ethics. And
it's a gray, gray area. So the way I would
define it is AI generated is going to be you
put in some prompt or it's the AI tool is
prompted and outcomes some output, and then with even a
(10:37):
large amount of editing is considered to be still AI
generated and then edited, and that can be disclosed, but
that would never rise to the level of human generated.
Now AI assisted, right, or leveraging AI in the content
creation process is it's very nuanced, but it's basically you
(10:59):
are They're going at the front end ideation, creating outlines perhaps,
but then at the end of the day you're actually
doing the writing. In the case of writing here, the
other thing would be graphics images. If you're doing the
bulk of the creation but using AI as a tool. Right,
(11:21):
no one would accuse a hammer of building a house.
So if you think of it that way, right, making
analogies for yourself might be useful. And okay, where is
the line for me? And again with Amazon, they do
want to protect their brand. And again, if you disclose
that it's AI generated, that's perfectly fine. I believe as
(11:42):
long as it is disclosures go a long way for
a lot of things, right, I have a colleague who
wrote and I can't remember. It was very early on
in the in the AI revolution, and he wrote an
entirely AI generated book, a fiction book, but he was
prompting it down this like choose your own adventure story.
(12:04):
And it was it was fascinating, it was very interesting.
It was like months after a chat GPT was released,
so it was like this novel, little tool, and it
was very cool and I thought it was fun. But
it was fully disclosed and the prompts were included. It
was almost a chat that was was released as the book.
Speaker 1 (12:22):
So yeah, I love that. I'm going to write my
own write your own adventure. I used to just love
those books as a kid. I choose your own adventure books.
I love those. I'm going to write some now, you
say AI just for fun. So I have a question.
I have authors come to me and say, well, you
know what if AI just helped me like fix one
(12:43):
sentence or help me come up with the title. But
they didn't, you know, they didn't really do much. Where's
that line? Where would you put that line at?
Speaker 2 (12:54):
Yeah, so when when it comes to things like that,
I would consider those to be and again, this is
my own personal bent.
Speaker 1 (13:01):
Right.
Speaker 2 (13:01):
I can't make that decision for anyone else, but I
use tools like grammarly. Right, those would be considered an
AI assisted grammar punctuation tool. Right. I don't think anyone
would say, oh, you can't use grammarly. Same thing with
using AI to degenerate hooks. If you're doing social media
(13:22):
to create captions for images, if you're doing titles things
like that, I think that's perfectly fine, right, because there's
an element of you know, there's a stylistic element for
writing a great title, and as long as you know
you preview it before it's published and approve it that
(13:45):
I think that would fall within the ethical bounds.
Speaker 1 (13:47):
Yeah, yeah, you make a good I make.
Speaker 2 (13:49):
That decision for me. Everyone else makes themselves.
Speaker 1 (13:52):
Yeah, you make a good point. I don't think there's this.
You know, there's probably very few books on Amazon that
are not AI assisted. If you if you consider grammarily
and pro Writing Aid and Hemingway and all of those
programs AI assisted. I think if you included those, I
think everyone has to tell Amazon that they're AI assisted
(14:13):
because those are in great use and those but those
are editing.
Speaker 2 (14:16):
Tools, right exactly, they're tools, exactly all right, they're not
creating the content, they're helping you to polish it right.
And and if you look at there's there's something like
with when you have a ghost writer and AI that's
one that's been brought up to you before. Well what
about ghostwriters. Well that's that's your own ethical choice to
(14:38):
say if you wrote it or did you write it
with some other author ghost wrote. So I think it
kind of falls similarly in that vein of ghostwriter, human ghostwriter, aiah.
It's going to have to be worked out over the
next many many years exactly.
Speaker 1 (14:54):
Oh, I agree. This has been really fascinating. Thank you.
So if you've really been enjoying this information which I have,
you can get lots more of that at ADS newsletter,
which you can find it's right in front of you
right now if you're watching the c aio newsletter dot com.
Of course that will be in the show notes along
with linkedin' so you can get in touch with ED.
(15:18):
And I want to turn now to you know, people
who are listening who are thinking, yeah, maybe I do
want to use AI, but they're overwhelmed. Right. Do you
sit in front of AI and you think, oh my gosh,
what do I do. What advice do you have for
authors who feel overwhelmed at this rapid pace of AI advancements.
Speaker 2 (15:43):
Yeah, fantastic question. So one of the problems that I
see currently with people being overwhelmed is if your listeners,
I'm sure are familiar with sas software the service. Basically,
in any subscription you get to some kind of tool online.
The amount of those that have exploded onto the scene
(16:05):
since AI started, and we would call those in the
AI industry as AI rappers, right, So they don't fundamentally
create anything new. They use the chat GPT model, the
claud model, the Gemini model. They just put a pretty
wrapper around it that solves some very discrete problem. Now
that's very cool and very useful, until you need like
(16:27):
twenty of them, and now you're wasting more time switching
tabs in your Chrome browser to solve some problem where
if you've just done it yourself, you'd probably be done faster, right, Right.
So that being said, what I would encourage people who
really want to dig into this without piling up all
these subscription fees is a tool called make dot com.
(16:50):
It has a free version which is extremely powerful. I
was on the free version for almost a year before
I went to the pro and I was doing a automation,
automation and agency work with it. A free version that
you can get into. It's a dragon Drop, very visual,
and it allows you to string together some of these
tools that you're already using, already natively built in. It
(17:13):
allows you to access AI Claude, Chatch, YOUPT Perplexity, which
is a great research tool, and string together steps in
a workflow to allow you to sort of slowly build
up your toolkit of AI automations. It's very simple, it's
a lot simpler than you'd think.
Speaker 1 (17:34):
Yeah, I'm going to drop make dot com also in
the show notes, so if you're looking for that, that's
where you can find it. So let's say someone drops
into make dot com and they're looking at it and say,
I think where do I start? And one of those
first three steps what should they do?
Speaker 2 (17:51):
Right? So the first step is thinking about what you
actually want to accomplish, because so many times, if you
open up that screen and you're staring at it like
a blank page, if you don't know where you want
to go, you'll probably never get there. Right. So I
strongly suggest look at your daily tasks, look at the
things you do repetitively.
Speaker 1 (18:10):
I have.
Speaker 2 (18:12):
Steps in my workflow of after a client meeting, a
transcript will gets fed in and feed out a report
and that's done automatically per a set of instructions that
I've given Make and the AI models and the prompts.
So that's the first step is decide what it is
you want to accomplish. And one of the discrete steps
in that two is to identify what tools you're using
(18:36):
currently or if there's a gap that you need to
fill in with AI, perhaps some data transformation or some
creative piece. And then three, really just go and have
fun with it. I mean, just start playing around with it.
You can't really break anything. You're just going to have
to play with it. And it's very simple. You log
in and there's a gray circle with a plus sign
(18:59):
in the center and a list of all the softwares
that you can link together. Pops up.
Speaker 1 (19:05):
Yeah, thank you, the.
Speaker 2 (19:06):
Next one and link it together, then the next one,
and then it's just a chain and it's it's it's
very very intuitive and it's very simple.
Speaker 1 (19:15):
Thank you. That's that's amazing. Again. I'm gonna drop make
dot com in the show notes for people, go check
that out and if you want more, grab as newsletter
as well, because I know I am, this is just
fascinating for me. So we can also and I don't
want to get to two kind of in the weeds,
but we can also customize AI solutions, right, oh yeah,
(19:36):
so you know, without getting too much in the weed.
Do you want to just give us like a kind
of like a forty thousand foot view of what's possible.
Speaker 2 (19:47):
Great? Yeah, So when it comes to using sort of
your off the shelf AI models so chat, GPT, Claude, anthropic,
the best way to approach those is there are settings
with in those dashboards that allow you to create stylistic
notes for the AI. We do a lot of work
(20:08):
and what's called meta prompting. So for example, my newsletter,
I write entirely by hand. I don't use any AI
to write the newsletter. That's important for two reasons. One,
I think if you're reading about AI and strategy, you
want to hear it from a human. You don't want
to have to just query the AI. The second is
I want human content that I can then use to
(20:31):
repurpose over time for LinkedIn posts or little one liners,
or I can feed that information into a tool called
notebook LM from Google. It's free, and basically create a
library of my own work that I can then interact
with as an author that I work with, who we
took all seven of his books, fed them into and
(20:52):
made a notebook of each of his books, and then
he can ask questions of his own content with sources
and it will show him where it's at and that
he can use that as a jumping off for a
new piece. So for me, it's getting that meta prompt
into the model where it's going to start to write
(21:14):
like you or know your style or what you're looking
for in ideation or things like that.
Speaker 1 (21:21):
Yeah. In fact, for fiction authors or anyone writing a
book series, one thing that AI does really well. And
I know a couple of authors who do this. They
have all of their books in their own personal AI
they and they say, okay, AI go through and do
character sheets for all these characters so that I don't
forget that so and so has blue eyes, and so
(21:44):
and so is short, and so and so is tall,
and so and so hates spikes and so they actually,
because you know, if you're writing a series of books,
you think Lord of the Rings as an example, how
did he keep track of all his characters and all
the nuances of all the characters? He did character seats.
He had to take detailed notes of everything that happened.
(22:07):
But if you're using AI, AI is not writing your
book series, but they're keeping track of your character seats
for you. And they can also a I can also
keep track of your plot points for you, so you
don't leave any plot holes. And so I know some
fiction authors who do that with AI, and that's that's
a customized solution, and I thought that was brilliant all right.
Speaker 2 (22:27):
Last Notebook LM is definitely a tool that if you're
interested in something like that. It's again if you log
in with your Google Notebook LM. It's a free product
from Google, and it is an incredible way to put
your data, your content and be able to interact with
it like you're interacting with an assistant who knows everything
(22:49):
about everything you've ever written.
Speaker 1 (22:50):
Oh that's brilliant. And is that data safe?
Speaker 2 (22:55):
Yes, it's not used to train the models. It is
your own private, it repository, right, So if you put
your notebook together, it's your law, it's your Google login,
so it's controlled under your login. It's not like a
publicly available piece of content.
Speaker 1 (23:11):
Brilliant, and I'll put that in show notes for people
as well. Okay, so my last question, I really want
to just look ahead a little bit, and I know
you don't have a crystal ball, but what do you
think authors should be preparing for when it comes to
AI in the future.
Speaker 2 (23:27):
Well, it's going to get better. It's going to get
easier to write, use AI to sound like a human.
Right So, right now, the most of the AI content
you can sniff it out from a mile away, like
you see one or two words delve or uh, there's
a bunch of words you can kind of are tells,
but there's really you know, and you can you can
(23:50):
sense it. So I think for authors going forward is
your quality, your relationship with your readers, that that you know,
becoming more of a personality rather than just a name
on a book jacket, podcast, YouTube, LinkedIn or any social network.
And if you create that relationship, no one's going to
(24:11):
go to AI for what you offer, right So, not
to be afraid of it, but it will get better,
it will get faster, and people will learn to use
it more effectively and more quickly. So we're going to
see a huge rush of content, but Google and Facebook
and all the other platforms are going to get better
as well as tamping that down, and so the platforming
(24:34):
or lowering the voice of AI content. So it's going
to be an interesting kind of showdown at the high
noon Corral.
Speaker 1 (24:42):
So it is do you think the bias that exists
in AI now will accelerate or do you think that
will even out a little bit.
Speaker 2 (24:56):
So if we're referring to like the in the innate
bias of the model itself towards certain genders or races,
I think that. So. Actually Anthropic who released Claude it's
some really interesting research, and they did a mind map
(25:16):
of AI, and it was a very fuzzy map, but
they were able to identify sort of neurons or areas
of interest within the AI's quote brain that they could
either stimulate or suppress. And so they created a AI
chatbot that was the Golden Gate chat bot, and they
found an area that was referencing the Golden Gate and
(25:38):
they pulled that up to like a great deal higher
magnitude than it should have been, and everything it talked
about reference back to the Golden Gate. So they're going
to try to They're going to start to map these
models and say, okay, we can see that there's some
bias here. We could see that there's some trouble areas
over here, and start to be able to manipulate those
little bit more meticulously. So I think it's never going
(26:04):
to be, never going to go away, but I think
that it'll get better over time.
Speaker 1 (26:08):
Yeah, that's so interesting. Thank you so much. A final words,
and where can people find you?
Speaker 2 (26:15):
Yeah? So thanks everyone. I read a newsletter on AI
strategy for business owners including content creators. You can get
that again at thecaio neewsletter dot com. A lot of
resources there. Also, I'd love to connect on LinkedIn.
Speaker 1 (26:30):
And I will put link your LinkedIn in the show notes,
So go grab his LinkedIn and connect with ad through LinkedIn.
I just is such a fascinating topic.
Speaker 2 (26:39):
Ed.
Speaker 1 (26:39):
Thank you so much for coming today and talking to
us about.
Speaker 2 (26:42):
This, Melodie, and thank you for having me.
Speaker 1 (26:45):
Yeah, and everyone out there, thank you for joining us
on alternation. I hope this conversation has really kind of
helped you understand where AI might fit in your life
and in your writing journey. And thank you for joining
us Always appreciate your feedback. Always appreciate your support. I
know you know an author who needs to hear this.
Send them this podcast episode so they can get sorted
(27:09):
on their AI. Leave a comment, leave a review, Share
it because your participation helps us continue delivering the insights
and the tools you need to succeed. So keep writing,
keep creating, and continue to share your content and your
unique stories with the world.
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