This is The Writers Secret Weapon volume 10, a special audio edition where I’ve collected my thoughts about AI in publishing and as an author.
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Hi, I’m John, and I’m a writing coach here to help you write better.
Today, let’s talk about AI.
If you’re already a part of my Discord, you’ve seen me go through a lot of thoughts around AI. I’ve talked about it in a lot of spaces including but not limited to my podcast, some streams, and a few spots on social media. I’m expanding that discussion here in audio.
So let’s talk about AI. Here’s what I think, tell me what you think after you’ve heard this. I want to know how you, as a creative, are feeling about AI. Do you use it? Do you question it? Does it help? How would you make it different? Let me know.
And if you want a transcript:
JOHN: [00:00:00] My original plan today was to talk all about book marketing and talk about how you can develop a pitch and then from your pitch, come up with two or three or four different kinds of ads that you can put all across every different kind of social media, big ads, small ads, single sentences, et cetera, until you built yourself a little marketing campaign for a book, and then you'd use that as a test case to see if you wanted to change things or add things to go on, do a future book.
I instead decided I was gonna scrap all that, put that on hold, probably put that behind the paywall because it's, it's more detailed than I expected. And I want to turn today to audio because it's just easier for me to, to talk my way through this. I've been writing about it over and over and over again in a load of places.
And I thought it'd be easier if I just sat down and talked it through. So prepare for a slightly rambling writer's secret weapon as today I want to talk about ai, uh, not Alan Iverson. I [00:01:00] I want to talk about the proliferation and the, the growing menace that is the infiltration of artificial intelligence when it comes to writing and editing and revising.
And I'm doing this entirely out of personal reasons because one of the big things you'll see when we get into talking about AI is that one of the most common functions people use AI for is to eliminate me. Eliminate the idea of writing, coaching, eliminate the idea of editing because they farm it out to this software, whatever kind of software it is.
It doesn't really matter whether we're talking about chat, G P T or whatever number it's on, or Bard or any other kind of AI from any other kind of company. It ultimately doesn't matter. The problem fundamentally is a lot of people use it in place of somebody doing my job for clients, making me. , really very scared for the future because, , I, I like surviving [00:02:00] and eliminating my role.
Is, , pretty terrifying and I don't appreciate the tech bro response of, well, you just have to adapt and innovate, uh, because I'm hoping that in the course of me, , giving you this audio, you'll see that they're not innovating either, but that's neither here nor there. Let's start with some basics and then we'll bring it back to why I'm absolutely terrified and angry about this, and I hope you should be too.
So artificial intelligence is always been this sort of thing of science fiction, this idea of, you know, Jarvis and Kit and how 9,000 these, uh, these digitized existences that allow us to, uh, Gain some access to stuff, hack into things, be successful, be rich, be superheroes, be whatevers right. AI is taunted, is, heralded, I guess might be , the best word for it, as [00:03:00] these tremendous, saviors of the future. But at the same time, they're almost always demonized in these, like if it goes wrong, they become this strange totalitarian like Skynet level thing. And it's always those two extremes, right?
There's always like it's the greatest thing ever. Or they're the robot up uprising and there's no real gray room, there's no real wiggle space between them because, um, Well, we haven't really thought about what it would look like to just have it be a tool that we occasionally use in the same way that we think about the lawnmower or scissors or a stapler.
We, we don't wanna relegate this big amazing thing down to something so simple, but ultimately we should, because what we've done to AI is give it far too much ability to affect so many things we're doing for the love of capitalism and money. Here's what I mean. Let's start with the basics. [00:04:00] AI needs a pool of information to draw on.
It does not have sentience. It does not have the ability to just randomly, like casually tell you on Tuesday, like, Hey, I was just reading these things. You know, the same way a friend would if you bumped into them at, the grocery store. AI needs a pool of material to draw on and. In order to have a very successful ai, you need the broadest pool possible.
You need a bigger pool than your competition for sure. So that encourages a lot of tech, bro, people to, , be entirely unethical. And, criminal, even in their acquisition or use of material without consent, they're not paying writers or artists. They're not, , they're not even, they're barely sourcing them in terms of like citation in anything.
They're, they're just finding information and feeding it into their machines, they're looking for data and they're just dumping all kinds in, no matter whose it is. No matter [00:05:00] whether or not you were consulted or paid or said yes to it, even, or even were aware of it.
, that's theft. That is the theft of your time, your property, your money, whatever you want to call it, however you want to frame it. And legal pet entry is up to you, but ultimately it comes down to people who you don't know are. More than likely, uh, going to access your material and use it as something to train.
I'm making air quotes train in ai, that should bother you right off the bat. It's gonna be made worse because as we're seeing with a program like pseudo, right. . Publishers are starting to gain the ability or gain interest in the idea of, well, we can just feed whole submitted manuscripts to things.
And that's, that's a very messy can of worms to get into. That's a really big problem because arguably, prior to the sale, prior to the contract signing, that material is yours and you. Aren't really [00:06:00] entering into a contract or a negotiation or an agreement with them just by submitting your manuscript because they still have the ability to reject you.
And if you're gonna submit your, uh, stuff to a publisher who's gonna feed an AI with it, um, do you get the ability to opt out? Do you believe the ability to opt out? You don't think like they'll reject you, but they'll keep your, your manuscript floating around their AI's stockpile of data. The same is true with book covers and art.
, who knows from what sources these things are being drawn or stolen or generated. The machine is not painting the thing, right? It's not going into Photoshop. It's not opening up a canvas and, and wielding a paintbrush with a robot arm. It's manipulating a collection of data according to parameters. And if that doesn't give your artist sense, uh, a real itch and a wrinkle, uh, I don't know what to tell you.
But this proliferation is [00:07:00] all done not under the blanket of allowing us to be more creative. , that's the sales pitch that's the normalization pitch. It's being done because it's faster and easier, and they don't have to pay somebody. If you can train an AI on 10,000 submissions to look for specific phrases and look for specific constructions, and flag it as passive voice, or flag it as too much dialogue.
, how many quote marks, show up. You can find ways of mechanizing at editorial concepts. Just mechanizing them, not correcting them, not addressing them, just counting them. And qualifying that number. Okay. There are 87 times where this phrase appears, and then creating a, a barrier or a flag and say, okay, well 87 times is 47 times too many, so , let's file this for rejection.
If you automate your editorial department and cut out the human factor, you are over the long term homogenizing your [00:08:00] material because eventually it will average out to be the least offensive, least original, most same content because it'll all have a certain number of quotes and a certain number of hats, and a certain number of thises and a certain number of thats, that's what publishers want to do.
Because paying editors is expensive. The process of publishing is too humanized. It takes too long. It can't be expedited, it can't be forced. For higher profit, we have to expend money companies don't really like that. Like at all. Like at all. At all. So publishers are really getting pushed to adopt AI as part of their editorial strategy.
This is. Not just going to impact me doing editing work for clients, but it's also gonna impact you as a writer because now instead of trying to say what you want to say and produce what you wanna produce now ins, you're gonna have to navigate this field of minimums and maximums. Okay? I've used two of my 50 quotation marks, I've used [00:09:00] three of my 11 semicolons, or whatever the numbers might be.
All of a sudden now, instead of producing and saying your own thing, you are following some recipe and art. Very rarely benefits from a hyper consistent recipe because what everybody's missing when they talk about how great AI is gonna be for publishing, what they're missing is that the outbound product is human facing.
Like it's not being read by machines so that your toaster set is, is happy with a romance novel, it's being read by a person. Hopefully, ideally your consumer is human and. From that point, it would make sense to have as much humanity inside your art as possible, whether that's human relatable characters or human situations or more accurately, human relatable, just notions of story and emotion triggering.
Text. You wanna be able to evoke things, and [00:10:00] you can't really do that from an ai, but that doesn't matter to the publisher because what matters to the publisher is the, the dollar sign, the bank balance, the revenue sheet, the stock, the the money and capitalism of it. AI is here to replace art in favor of commodity.
And I know we've talked about that before. I've certainly talked about it in other spaces, but. Know that every time you. Bring up AI even under benign things, and we'll talk about those allegedly benign things in a minute. Please know that what you are doing at its base is saying that it's okay to steal somebody else's work, saying that it's okay to homogenize story, saying that it's okay to cut people out of a human process in favor of.
Expeditious action and higher money for a few people cuz the publisher's not sharing that money with you. Like your, as an author, your money in royalty [00:11:00] has come from selling out your advance. So if you, you get advanced $10,000, you won't see money until $10,001. So any other money beyond that goes back to the publisher.
They don't give a shit about you. They don't care about you. And AI is only gonna further reinforce the idea that you're a cog in a machine. That's, that's really hard for a lot of people to grapple with. That's really upsetting for a lot of people. But , it's true. They're not your friend.
They're not your pal. , they want a product from you. And when you can't meet their product-based needs, they will boot you to the curb. And sometimes they won't even tell you they're booting you until they drop the hammer. They have no responsibility to you. They have no care for you. So of course, they're going to use tools that are ethically unsound, that are criminal in their action, that are vague and heartless and dehumanizing because that's what a large publisher or a small publisher or any kind of [00:12:00] publisher who's not interested in helping people succeed.
That's what they are all at at their heart, and AI is their new chief goon facilitating this. That said, there are a load of writers I talk to who aren't published who think AI is just great. And, , I'd like to address them now specifically. So if you are a writer who has ever thought that, oh, well, I get stuck.
I need to figure out how to do things, I, I don't know how to connect to the dots in my head. So I go to AI to help me jiggle and rattle things free. Um, please know that you are missing the point of writing. Like severely, like you are kilometers away from the point of writing. Cuz as a writer, your job is to be imaginative.
Your job is to be creative. Your job is to make up a story. And when you say, I got stuck, so I asked some machine for help. A, we're gonna go backwards to where did the machine get the material to help you? [00:13:00] And B um, isn't your job to be creative and just make something up? Can't you? Can't you get yourself unstuck?
If you're having trouble going from point A to point B, maybe you need to invent two points along the way, and you can do that because you're the inventor of things. You get to be imaginative. I understand that AI seems harmless and toothless to you because you're just using it in this one very limited aspect, but please understand that the thing you are asking it to do is the fundamental heart of the job.
You say you want. Being a writer is about making up things that get your imagination going so that you can get somebody else's imagination ongoing. If you're only seeing, I want to be a writer as somebody who is who's I want to produce widgets, items, boxes, containers that I can sell, then you're not really writing, you're not thinking about it in terms of writing.
You're thinking about it in terms of production, which is fine if you know you really and truly want to do that. But the whole point of writing is to elevate civilization [00:14:00] through art and beauty. Which means that you get to show off your imagination, which means you get to, you know, create something that outlasts to you and moves people and affects people.
And if you can't figure out how to be creative, It's not gonna matter what the AI does or doesn't do because the whole job is about being creative. Why are you getting stuck? Maybe examine that you know well ahead of you racing to figure out what tool you can use to get. Not stuck. It's never benign.
There is no ethical consumption under capitalism, so there is no ethical consumption or, or use of material to help you get unstuck. It's your job to get unstuck. Think a little harder. Have some caffeine. Get laid. Smoke something. Take an edible, watch some cartoons. Play with your pet. Get some fucking sun.
Touch some grass, do something and get yourself unstuck. That's literally the job. Don't farm it off to some [00:15:00] software, just cuz Oh, it's easy. If you are in this and you're always looking for the shortcut and the easy route and the path of lease resistance and the fastest path to your goal, I think by default you're a shitty writer and you're always going to be a shitty writer who will get progressively shittier because this job is to create art, and art is very seldom, if ever easy.
It's. Rarely ever easy to produce, and it's even rarely easy to sit with when done well. Art should stir people. It should stir the creator. It should stir the recipient. And that's not a gentle thing, and that's not an easy, fast thing. It takes as long as it takes that rush, that urgency, you feel that panic and sense that it's gonna be too late.
That's, the commodification knocking at the door. That's that sense of like, oh, you better hurry because the window, this trend, this popularity's gonna close and then you'll be left in the dirt. Who gives a shit? [00:16:00] If you're really and truly left in the dirt, what's the big rush? A lot of the people who talk to me about, oh man, I'm using AI to, is it okay if I use ai?
Is it bad if I use ai? Are people in there like early to mid twenties who will probably live another 60 years, probably, spend another 10 to 15 years writing before they either make it or give up. They have plenty of fucking time. Plenty of time, and I don't know why they're worried about running at a time like the planet will cook itself for sure.
Well in advance of them not making enough time to sell their story. Like what's the rush? Is it just, I need money really badly? Cause if that's the case, I can recommend to you a variety of legal and illegal activities you can do to make money faster. Also, isn't the point of telling a story to tell the story, not so much to make the money from the profit of the telling of the story, isn't it?
Shouldn't that play a [00:17:00] factor? So to answer that question, writers out there who use AI to brainstorm, yes, it is bad. And yes, it does make you a shitty person, or at least a person who's willing to compromise what they believe in, in order to accomplish a goal that ultimately is still out of their hands.
Because they can use AI to produce a story. They can even use AI to to publish it themselves. It's still gonna get bought by a human. Which brings me to the story of the lady who wrote 20 something versions of Pride and Prejudice. She swears she's a writer. She swears that, you know, taking the same story.
She's not Jane Austin, she didn't write the thing, but taking a story and coming up with 25 subdivisions of it. Ooh, let's do, about, let's do a version over here. Let's do with this. Let's, let's add in bears, let's take it from a different character's perspective. Let's, you know, add roller skates. Let's make it rain all the time.
Let's put it in space. [00:18:00] I don't know what kind of stupid fucking flavors this lady put together, but she's got about two dozen of them. Did she really write it? She farmed it out to an ai. For all I know. She copied and pasted the AI output straight into a text file and then slapped it up on the on Amazon.
And from the reviews, it certainly sounds like that's what she did, because there are paragraphs that repeat. Because she was copying and pasting, and there are statements that don't line up because it's not a clean and easy select all. Control A, control C, control V kind of paste job. It's this hatch hatchet thing where she's clicking and pasting, clicking and pasting, and it gets messy and.
R Beyond all that, if you have vanilla ice cream or chocolate ice cream or any single flavor of ice cream, and all you do in different bowls is add crumbled up Oreo cookie bits or add graham crackers or add marshmallows or add chocolate sauce or add cut up fruit. Are you really inventing a whole [00:19:00] new flavor of ice cream or are you just taking the vanilla ice cream from the container that somebody else, some other company made and just you're just adding shit to it?
Which one of you made the ice cream? It's the same concept. The lady with the 25 flavors of Pride and prejudice didn't actually write Pride and Prejudice. She just added some cookie bits, and that's very, if ever seldom. Enough of a level of creation. Like there's no legal standard here. I'm not talking about like, you know, the 7% rule for creating a knockoff, um, Louis Voyant instead of Vuitton bag.
I'm not, I'm not talking about how to like get around the copyright issue. Uh, I'm talking about just the. The sense of how much you actually did, because if you're asking software, whatever it might be to output a thing, and then you're just copying and pasting, how much work did you really do? Like, yeah, you pressed some [00:20:00] keys, you interacted with the keyboard, but how much work did you really do?
If your job is just to pay something in there, slap it up. Onto a website and collect your $2. Like I understand that there is a, a capitalist urge to claim that is success because, oh man, look, I'm doing the least amount of work for $2 over and over and over again. But ultimately since the thing you're making is gonna be read by people and people, according to the reviews I'm looking at, certainly did catch on to the idea of, hey, this is some really low effort, nonsense.
I can't believe I spent my $2 on this. Aren't, aren't you just opening yourself up to returns and chargebacks and, and you know, not the financial success you may have expected or wanted? Like, doesn't this just make it worse for you? Because you got impatient, because you just wanted to race ahead to the money part of things.
AI is not some kind of divine, brilliant thing that's going to facilitate and help you. [00:21:00] It is a tool to expedite the commerce. Of whatever we're making. It is a tool to encourage people to do the least amount of work fast for allegedly or the dream of the largest profit possible. It's the lazy person's way to create, and if me covering all this for the last 20 minutes has been totally fine with you.
And you think I'm just an old guy yelling at clouds and it doesn't really matter because for whatever reason you swear AI is the future and that this is just how publishing is gonna be as it farms out more and more formerly human run services to machinery and quotas and formula so that you know more books happen, but they're lower quality books because we've lost that human connection in production.
And you're totally fine with that, and you're totally fine with using software that is very clearly stealing from other people's efforts in order to develop itself. And you're okay with [00:22:00] that. And you're okay with 25 different flavors of pride and prejudice and people bragging about it. If you're okay with, you know, all different kinds of things like that, then nothing.
I'm gonna say, nothing I could say is ever gonna change your mind because that's, that's just your. That's just your point of view. You are willing to bend ethically. You are willing to compromise on a few points. You are willing to rush towards an alleged end result than do the effort and make something yourself.
Nothing I can do will change that. But I need you to know that this is coming, and I need you to know that there are gonna be ripples through the entire industry in both traditional and self-publishing sides. And before we go, let me at least, let me at least tell you what I think is coming. Let me at least caution you so that you can keep an eye out for stuff.
I think on one hand, In, in terms of people communicating to writers, whether they are companies or experts or influencers or [00:23:00] whatever, you're gonna see more and more writers, big name writers, who people have come to know and trust because of podcasts and blogs, and newsletters, and this is, and that you're gonna see them promote.
Individual products, Hey, use this thing, use this software, download this. Get a subscription to that. Either because they're, they've got a stake in it or they get a cut of it, or they've got an affiliate link for it or whatever, but they're gonna really advocate for it because they're gonna. Leverage your, the writer, your fear, your fear of rejection, your fear of difficulty, your fear of embarrassment, your fear of struggle, your fear of missing out.
Some kind of fear they wanna leverage because they want you to click that link and make that sale because they profit from it. And what the software's gonna do is not actually help you get better. It's just going to point out your problems and then fix them for you so that you will, for however long you're writing, still make the same problems, not actually improve your craft, and not actually [00:24:00] improve as a writer, but the problem will get solved.
But you'll still have an issue with semicolons. You'll still have a problem with subject pronoun agreement. You'll still have a problem with overly long run on sentences. You won't ever actually learn anything cuz you'll become reliant on this tool to do the work for you. But again, they're just here to leverage , your fear.
They're here to make this easier for you. They're here to help you on making air quotes, but that's the writer facing side. Now, what happens, even if you wrote it yourself, let's assume you spent days, weeks, months, years writing a book and you, you're gonna go publish it. Let's take a look at the traditional publishing side first, because although both sides will be very heavily affected in terms of AI infiltration and use, Traditional publishing will experience probably the most radical set of changes like this.
Remember how we talked about the, AI in terms of editorial decisions? You'll see the same thing in submissions. Ai, automated submissions [00:25:00] should scare you, chanceless, because an AI submission isn't judging and weighing current market trends in an up-to-date human way.
It's looking at a set of formula. It's looking at an idea of, I needed to talk about X, Y, and Z to this percent in a book, to that percent in the book, to this third percent. I needed to mention these buzzwords. I needed to talk about these things. And if you don't trigger those things, if you don't hit those little flags and get the little check marks, it's, you're not gonna get represented by the agent who's trying to use AI to.
Expedite things facilitate. Things seem trendy, seem flashy, be a better pimp. I don't know what, but AI submissions should really be a problem for representation because again, you're stripping the humanity out. You're stripping that ability of like people helping people, even though. Pimps are middlemen who are looking to exploit your labor, but they still have a human component.
They're, they're still bis um, they're just doing a shitty [00:26:00] job and even automating it doesn't make it any better. But when it comes time to publish AI editorial stuff like we talked about, it's just formula completion. So you're gonna get a, a watered down, homogenized product that is, Sterile or nearer too sterile than something that's a bit more ambitious and a bit more human driven and a bit more human influenced.
Again, it's so the publisher can expedite the process. How quickly can we turn this around and get this out? How? How quickly can we do this without expense on our end if we use. AI to E, you know, to edit our stuff. We don't need to pay an editor if we use AI for our cover. We don't need to hire a cover artist.
If we use AI to generate our marketing content, we don't need to hire a marketing team. And again, we can just expedite, expedite, expedite. The same is true from self-publishing and we'll get there in a second, but, The more AI takes out a human, the more AI replaces some kind of human feeling in this [00:27:00] equation, the worse it's gonna be for the book, the worse it's gonna be for the product.
The worse it's gonna be for the author, the worse it's gonna be for the reviewer. The worse the worse it's gonna be for the algorithm because. All those things like human interaction and human clicks and stars and reviews and length of reviews and number of minutes on a page and the clicks and all that, stuff like that, all that algorithmic stuff is human facing.
It's based on human interaction and the more you pull the human interaction out of this, even though humans have to make the sale, if the effort to get there. Doesn't have enough material to encourage humans to make sales. Then the very algorithms we are being primed and conditioned to will collapse because now algorithm produced material is going up against an algorithm selling material, and it, it two algorithms will just.
Stall out. It won't really be Algorithm Thunder Dome, where everybody's gonna, you know, enjoy Tina Turner [00:28:00] telling us that two algorithms enter and one algorithm leaves. It's, it's just gonna be a, a, a mess of low effort, bloated. Dull text and we're just gonna strip that art even further away and strip the humanity even further out and turn it into making it no different than people who just manufacture pillows or laundry baskets or companies that you know.
Paint houses by spray can like it. It's, it loses some of that personality, it loses some of that individuality, and we will get farther and farther away from the, those books and those concepts and those ideas and those artists that influenced us because they, they spent time in labored, and now it's all about expedition.
Now it's all about speed. It's heartless and it's cold now. That's the traditional publishing side. The self-publishing side faces all those same problems. Only now you get the extra layer of the [00:29:00] temptation of using it because you think it's gonna give you an advantage over everybody else you're gonna be.
It's much like I'm such a unique person. I'm getting a barbed wire tattoo like all the other people at the bar. Everybody else is doing it. You're doing it too. How are you supposed to stand out? How are you supposed to personalize your stuff? How are you supposed to express what you want to express when you give way to formula and software?
How are you really and truly being the artist you've dreamed of since you are a little kid? If you are farming out the very nature of that creative process. Whether we are talking about using AI to brainstorm, whether we are talking about AI to draft, whether we are talking about AI to revise, at what point are you stepping in and asserting actual creativity when you are just telling a machine to do it for you?
Again, the same is true with covers. The same is true with marketing, and we run right back [00:30:00] into that problem of I have used a machine and an algorithm to produce this work. It is not engaging the human element because it's obviously, AI manufactured, so it's not selling very well. If it's not selling very well, then the algorithm trying to sell my books won't really respond.
And even though I've done everything I can do to produce this book to the best of my ability, I, I, it's not really selling. I wonder why that is. I must repeat the process, but try harder. And then ultimately you end up in a situation where you were trying the same thing 20 times and surprised that you're not getting a different or new result.
AI is a giant significant problem. It's a mess. It's a nightmare. And the best thing you can do is avoid it whenever possible. Now, that said, there are uses for AI that are small, they are tools. It is a pair of scissors. It is a stapler. It is a thing to do a specific job. I'm using AI right now [00:31:00] to create an instantaneous transcript.
Of this recording as I make it so that I can trim out words and I can edit spaces and I can make it sound nice, neat, and pretty for your ears, but also readable and accessible for the non-hearing people who consume this. That's ai. That's, that's a thing that's saving me some time from repeating myself and writing out what I write.
I could easily do that myself, but I use software to do it because I use software to do it. Uh, there's a link in the description if you want to know more about it, but that is the limit of what I use, period. Other than that, it's me and a microphone talking. Why? Because AI should be, at best a tool. It is a pair of scissors.
It is a thing that accomplishes a single action. The The, there are no other templates. There are no other gimmicks. There are no other things because this is me talking to you because that's what I wanna accomplish and do. Even when I record a podcast and I use the exact same software, it's just me talking to you.
And this is the thing that facilitates that. No [00:32:00] more, no less. I don't ask it for suggestions. I don't ask it to come and fill in the blank. I don't ask it to, you know, do it for me because it has a sampling of my voice. It's always me. Always making stuff because that's what I want to do. That's, I think, really where it, the discussion needs to be.
What are you willing to do? What are you willing to not do, and how firmly will you stand on those lines? I can't make you or not make you use it. I can encourage you. I can suggest to you, I can point stuff out to you, but ultimately the decision is going to be yours, and I just want you to make the most informed decision possible because writing is the act of making decisions.
So the more information you have, the more points you can consider. That's your secret weapon. Make a smart decision, whatever it is. I'll talk to you next week.
Full disclosure - that transcript and recording were made using Descript, software that does use AI to help create transcription and editable audio.
Let me know what you think about AI and I’ll see you next week for more Secret Weapons.
Love you. Talk soon.