#28: How To Use AI Responsibly In Your Writing - Heys Wolfenden

Should writers completely accept or reject using AI in their writing? 

In this episode of the highly successful writing podcast, 'What! The Heys', the YA author Heys Wolfenden discusses the pros and cons of using AI not just in your writing but also in the wider publishing process. 

He also reflects on some of his struggles with the podcast, not least booking guests, and how to use the sense of smell in your writing.

Perfect for writers and creators everywhere. 

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:01

Hello everybody and welcome to another episode of What the Haze. I am your host, Hayes Wolfenden. But unlike previous episodes, I am flying completely solo. I have to admit, I have made a complete boob of this episode. I was supposed to get the writer on JM McGregor, who is an Australian author and somebody who I've been wanting to speak to for some time. But unfortunately, like I said, she's in Australia. I'm normally pretty good or very good at working out time differences. For those of you who don't know, I'm basically in Chengdu in China, which is Beijing time. I had worked out the time difference and I got it completely wrong. So these things happen, I suppose. I'm trying to think about it as like it's the universe's way of telling me to slow down. And you don't have to think about promoting the podcast in this way, in that way. Because if you can't get on your guest that you've bucked, you've got a big problem. And to be honest for everybody out there, whether you've appeared on my show before or gonna appear on my show, for me, the guests are the number one thing, and then you know, I love when I can to promote your work as well. Like if especially if I read the book, I love to say how good it is and stuff like that. So I do feel a little silly and stupid. What what also compounded it was I'd been out with my family, I wasn't in, you know, internet contact, and then coming home, my kid's going crazy because basically it's bedtime and he's excited and he doesn't want to go to sleep. And I flick open my Instagram. What? You know, the author's messaged me well overnight before, you know, and I get it, she must be annoyed, and that's okay, I d I don't mind. But she seemed, you know, really, really nice, really nice, I've got to say, and understanding. I know she's got a young family as well. I think when you have a young family and you know you you you're speaking to or working with other young families, you you completely get it. But it at the time it wasn't like I could go, hey, it's okay, I'll go I'm gonna jump online right now. Though I wanted to because my kid was still going crazy. And we had to give him a bath and then put him to bed. Because I thought I still had an hour, but I didn't. I was basically two hours out, so great. But I'm hopefully gonna re-schedule with the author concerned. I'm pretty sure that we we can we can make our schedules match. I'm just gonna make available available a bit more time, I think, um, than I would do normally just to accommodate her, because I should and need to accommodate her, I would say. I think another thing for me is it it kind of again uh mentioned about promoting the podcast, it just kind of shows, you know, to everybody out there I'm really busy, obviously really stupid as well. No. I I w I don't do that every week, but you know, the amount of times I do podcasts and we have to we, I have to edit them quite extensively. You know, maybe one in four or one in three, there's issues. It's not nothing to do with the guest, it's sometimes it's to do with the app that I'm using. Sometimes it's to do with, you know, the time, maybe there's background noise, maybe, you know, maybe I've made a mistake. There's been a few times where I've just done the opening, you know, welcome to another episode of What the Haze, and I've completely cocked it up. I had to just delete it. But I need to listen a lot of the time. Like sometimes I listen to the podcast two or three times before it's released. So I've also got a day job, which is, you know, I'm a teacher, it's a career, it's not just you know, working at the bank or whatever. By the way, that's denigrating people working at the bank and saying they don't have careers. They do, I don't mean it like that. Maybe I can think of a better example, like, you know, stocking shelves. There we go. I don't anybody would really say stocking shelves is my career, it's not. I've I've done that. It's horrible. So I've got I've got my job, I've got my family. On top of this, I've got my own writing, which I do prioritize. I've tried to get an hour a day, which is minuscule. I'm hoping next week, actually, I'll have a bit more time and I want to get a few hours a day done. Plus, I want to read. And on the top of all this, I'm doing this podcast, and of course, there's an Instagram group and there's thread groups. The Instagram group is the main one these days. Just because it's Instagram, I think it's just having the the social group on there. It works better for me on Instagram than threads. But to be fair to Threads, and I if you if you're on my Threads group, fantastic. The best thing I think about Threads is that there isn't much discussion. I post things and I can people are, you know, liking it and and reading it, and so then hopefully, presumably, you know, downloading the podcast and or streaming the podcast and listening. So I do like that too. But yeah, Instagram seems to be more dynamic. And so but it all takes time, all takes input. And as all this is going on, I've also got to, you know, book, you know, new guests or the next guest coming on. I've got to find time to message them and get things like biographies, you know, links for different books and stuff. You know, the and and if my school life or my family life goes from, you know, maybe just what's routine, what's normal, to really busy, like it did at work like two the last two or three weeks, it's just it's crazy. So my point is here, I can't do everything. You know, I with especially with the podcast when it comes to promotion, I do my best. For me personally, I do believe word of mouth helps, but I also believe that as I mentioned, these groups I've set up, that's one of the things I'm doing to kind of you know get more writers involved. And you know, I think writers want to listen to other writers, right? I think so. So I think that will that's the best way of helping the group. And so and I do I would like other ways to help help the podcast, but sometimes it's just not possible. Or I just don't I need time in the future to find time. A really good example is, you know, the writer A. L. Liska, she does her own podcast as well, which is great by the way, and I do recommend it. Now she talks a lot about doing newsletters. Wow. Sounds fantastic. Ryan Null talks about, you know, getting your books into bookshops. Wow, fantastic. Yeah. I want to do both of those. Right now, I do not have the time. Do not have the time. But I'm hoping to, aiming to within the next couple of months, but it's not something I could be constantly doing. My podcast is also on YouTube, and I find it really hard at times to give that the kind of effort that I do with my my BuzzPro, you know, Spotify, Apple, Apple Tunes podcast, you know. So I do feel at times I'm being pulled in different directions. So this is maybe why I've made this tremendous cut-up with Jane McGregor. And again, I heartily apologize to the writer in question. And I but I'm pretty sure, and I'm very sure I can make it up to her and we can rearrange probably later this month, hopefully later this week, at a time that's convenient to both of us, though I'll I'll be more convenient to her than than me. Right, moving on. Now I've got my sincere apologies out of the way. Just want to say a bit more about writing. As some of you know, I've got my write a series of young adult books called Jack Strong, uh Jack Strong Chronicles, and five of the books. At the moment, it's just gonna be five. I sometimes toy with the idea of writing a sixth book. I'm definitely gonna be writing an extra epilogue on the end of book five. Now, if you've got to the end of book five, you might what? Or maybe, oh, okay. Well, yeah, okay. There's some there is and I've been thinking about this for a few years, but I'm not gonna write it until I re-edit. Now re-edit makes it sound like I'm gonna chop it to a million pieces with a pair of literary scissors. No. I think if you were to read book five now and then read the re-edited version, say in a couple of weeks, you'd be hard-pressed to find or notice the changes. It'd be very minuscule. It's in many ways I'm rereading these books and re-editing them just so I can become more familiar with them, so that when I'm saying to you guys, hey, this is my book, Jack Strong and the Red Giant, and Jack Strong and the prisoner of her giraffe, etc. etc., I can remember the story. Because I know the story for Jack Strong and the Red Giant, the first book in the series. But I'll be honest, since I finished the books five, six years ago, I'd largely forgotten the plot for the rest. And as I was reading it, I was like, you know, remembering, oh yeah, I I remember this. Or this is gonna happen, and I really enjoyed it, you know. So yeah, that's what I'm working on at the moment. The biggest thing I've learned from that is that as I'm as I'm editing my books, I've noticed that as I I'm now in book four, and I'm hoping to finish book four and book five the next two or three weeks, I think. Partly because I don't have to read through them a lot. I'm reading through it and go, oh, change that, change that. When I'd written my first Jack Strong book, done a lot of run-on sentences. I had this thing where I thought I was Ernest Hemingway. Guess what I'm not, right? Okay. But as I'd, you know, gone on with the Jack Strong series, I'd been influenced by other writers and I'd stopped that. Or I'd largely stopped that. There's still a couple I find, but or the ones I do find sometimes. I think I think they're fine. I think they they work, you know, with the book, which is great. But yeah, I I do find that the more I've written, the more books I've written, the more accomplished as a writer I've become. So I do encourage everybody out there that's writing, particularly if you're writing your first series, like I always when I did Jack Strong, keep writing, keep writing books. You will get better. It's you're sharpening your sword with each book, maybe even with each paragraph with each chapter you write. So I really do encourage people to do that. Another thing I'm going to talk about is reading as well. Read around a lot. I think it's great to read a lot in your chosen genre and do read popular books as well. But I'm also a big fan of read a bit of nonfiction. Like I I'm finding with my podcast, for example, as I talk about this memoirs. You know, I read Curtis Chin's Everything I Learned, I learned in a Chinese restaurant. I read Ariel Miller's memoir, which I can't mention the title. But it both great. I would not have, you know, read those books without doing my podcast. And I was already, you know, reading quite broadly, but it just got me into like other, you know, other writers, other styles of writing, other what's what I'm looking for, other urges to write. You know, a good example is you know Curtis Cheney. He's written his memoir about his time growing up in Detroit. He felt the need to write about it, you know. I but I wouldn't have read that book normally. I'd I'd have read not to denigrate the book or or that style. You know, but there's there's so many books in the world. There's so many. You you can't read them all. You can't read 1%. You can't read probably not point not one percent. But it's great every now and again to still read something that you wouldn't normally read, and it makes you think maybe you think about different things. Who knows, as a writer, maybe it doesn't have an impact on you, but maybe it will. And maybe it does, you know, allow you to appreciate maybe what's popular or how to write a memoir, for example. I'm a big fan of reading history books. Now, normally for history books, I typically mean military history. And that's uh I find that because you know, at the end of the day, for me, history, what is history? It's a story. Okay. Mostly we know it all. You know, mostly people have, you know, it's about interpretation. But again, it it's at its basic level, history is pure plot with characters. And of course, many dashings of setting as well. So I I really do believe that, you know, if you read good, you know, good, interesting, well-written history books, it really helps, you know, your writing as well, actually, and and thinking about plot and stuff like that, I think. Moving on now, I want to talk a little bit about smell. What do I mean by smell? I mean, well, when you're writing, if you're writing about something that maybe it should smell a lot. I don't think you have to necessarily write about your house and oh, this smells, that smells. I think if you I think everybody usually knows what a hell what a house smells like, for example, or you might want to put some smells in if there's something dramatically different than what the reader would expect. That's good. But say if you're writing about, say, a farm, you know, or a market, an open-air market, a butcher's, when you you not just shouldn't just be describing, you know, for example, you know, the colour of the meat, the sound of, you know, shoppers and salesmen screaming out prices, also think of the smell. It's another thing, another way to what's the word, locate the reader in that place. You know, at the end of the day, great writing is escapism. With what we all know, like I you know, I read or I write to escape, but some writers are better at escapism than others. And I think if you can get some more sensory language, but if you can get like some you know language to do with smell and odour, I think that's fantastic and fur further places you know the the reader in the scene. One more thing I want to talk about is AI. AI. AI and writing, AI in the writing process. Now, sometimes when I do my podcast, I like to ask the guests what do they think of AI. I I think it's one of those, it's hard to answer, I think, sometimes. I think nobody, certainly not me, I'm not going to say, yeah, yeah, you should use AI to write. No, I don't think you should. You know, I I think that's a huge mistake. I think if you do, it's like, you know, if you want to get yourself fit and you go to the gym, you don't get someone else to lift weights for you. That's that's what that's what's happening. If you get AI to write for you. I don't even think, I'm not sure about AI is brainstorming either. I get it. If you if give me some ideas, you know, it wouldn't be my my my go-to solution, to be honest. Where I'm more sympathetic with AI use is, and this is I don't think, guys, everyone out there, I live in China. China's attitude to AI is completely different to people in the West. I often hear people in the West, people are afraid of AI. People are gonna people talking unemployment. No, nobody talks about that here in China. It's perceived rightly or wrongly as wholly beneficial. And I do think this, especially the children here, need to be taught more extensively on how to write it, sorry, how to write it, how to use AI more responsibly, more ethically. I really do believe that. And I think everybody around the world should do that, especially every you know, student at school. But it's a lot more positive, and I think to an extent that influences my thoughts and my standpoint. And my standpoint is, as I've said, I don't think you should use it to write. Why would you? It it it's cheating. It's like, you know, running the 100 meters, but you get to like you get to start maybe 10 minutes from the end, you know. Or maybe you get to drive in a Ferrari. Not that AI writing AI right now, I don't think could write a good novel. But guess what? 10 years, 20 years, and I think it's close to 10. I think you will be able to write a pretty good novel. I don't think you'll ever be able to write a masterpiece because I'm gonna go into this in a second. I'm gonna I'm gonna actually counter my own argument. That's what I'm gonna do. I don't think you'll be able to write a masterpiece, and I've said this in other podcasts because AI doesn't have a subconscious and it doesn't have fears, it doesn't have ambitions. Well, you know, we just want to get published, or we wanna maybe we want to get famous, maybe we want to make money. Whatever the reason, AIs don't have that, do they? AIs just are, or are they? You know, Richard Dawkins, you know, the the eminent evolutionist, he's been asking, he's been talking to Claude, or which one's I can't remember which one Claude is. Is it Google? I could be wrong. And he thinks that that Claude is sentient, but is unaware that it's sentient, which is a really strange way of putting it. But I just wonder if if an AI wants to be human, for example, there was that movie AI by was it Steven Spielberg quite a while ago. If an AI wants to be human, it has that desire, could that help it write a book? I'm not too sure. I I typically would say no. Listen, I think AI in the future will be able to write the kind of novels that are three out of five, maybe even up to three point eight, pushing four. I think, could I do I think this is maybe a mean, do I think AI could write a Jack Reacher novel? Yeah, yes, I do. And it's not just the only one. There's there's plenty of series, book series that 20, 25, and I don't mean books in length, and I don't mean like a saga like Harry Potter or The Wheel of Time. Wheel of Time's a great book. Sorry, great book. Great fantasy series by Robert Jordan. It's 14 books. 14. I want to say it's the longest I'm aware of. I've I've heard of like There's a fantasy series about dragons that's like a hundred or something. I've I've not read the first book. But yeah, 14 books by Robert Jordan. Wow. You know, that kind of series, and Harry Potter, of course, is seven. That kind of if you count Cursed Child as eight. These kind of series, you know, where the character and the plots develop over time. You know, if you want to read book four, you've got to have read book one, two, three, and you've got these overarching themes, and it's all interconnected, and the characters grow over time and it's so meaningful. I think AI will really struggle to write books and series like that. But when you've got a series like Jack Reacher, where it's like, I'm not trying to do it, I'm dark. I'm a dark, you know, I'm I'm an expert, you know, militia policeman. Because he's almost like he's from the special forces. You know, and listen, I've read Jack Reach, I've read like the first two or three or four, and they're pretty good books, I'll be honest about Jack Reach. They're pretty good books. But it became obvious to me by book three, book four, every single one's gonna be like that. And that's and other people that have read more than me have said, yeah. Every single one. I think AI could write stuff like that where there's no character growth. Character's basically dark. He's you know, he's he's a Byronic hero, he's you know, he's a good guy, but he's dark. And he's killing lots of bad guys, he's solving problems, and then at the end of the book, he gets on the Greyhound bus and disappears into the darkness. I think that in the f not now, but in the future, I think AI will be able to do something like that, to be honest. And I think I think if anything, where I think AI will challenge us is to write better books. And maybe to write more original books, maybe more honest, more honest books, maybe more daring books. I do believe, and I've said this again on previous podcasts, that when you're writing whatever genre, I think is important, you need to know the genre you're writing, writing for. And you kind of need to know, if you've read many books, what are the kind of things that happen in in your genre? Like what's permitted? What are the rules? Now, I don't believe you should break those rules. I believe you should bend them and push them and just test them and test the reader a little bit. Hey, hey reader, are you okay with this? Are you okay with my young adult fiction book where maybe the main character kills someone who's good? Because that doesn't happen in 100%. Games and it annoys me. Now, I'm not denigrating the Hunger Games. I not my favourite novel, but I love the world, especially. I love the world, you know, the different districts and Katniss, Everdeen, what a great kick-ass female. Great. That kind of female character that just takes on or takes on the bad guys, takes on the world. Absolutely fantastic. You know, maybe aspects of the plot for me like that didn't work for me so well. Where she wins the Hunger Games, spoiler alert, but she doesn't actually kill anyone good. But everyone else that's played the Hunger Games won by killing good people. For example, like her uh mentor, tutor, what's his name now? Played by Woody Harrelson in uh in the movie. Was it Mitch? I think it was Mitch. And he's getting himself that's fantastic. He's getting himself drunk to forget because he's haunted by what he's done. Um but Katniss is not haunted, and like because you just killed bad guys. So, you know, I I think I think sometimes, you know, in your genre you can push against these things. And I think that you gotta, you know, you read these books and you think, oh, I like that, but I you can do a bit better. So again, with AI, I think that that's how we have to respond to it. Guess what, guys? Out there right now, one of the biggest, you know, problems with with writing is I think a lot of published authors, sorry, when I say published, I mean traditionally published, I think there's a lot of traditionally published authors out there, rightly or wrongly, after several books. I don't think they're editing their own work anymore. I think they might write the first draft, and then I think they're giving it to editors, and you can normally see with certain series as how the quality goes down. We can't do that. We've got to put more work in. Go back to like the gym. You can be a great writer and you can get traditionally published and you can make millions, maybe probably not billions, millions, tens of millions. And you can you could win pulites and Nobel Prizes and this award and that award. But if you stop editing, just like going to the gym, if you start, you know, working out maybe at the highest weights, and if you start, hey, can you lift these weights for me? You know, your physicality, your your literary progress, your literary prowess, it's just gonna suffer. There's no nowhere around that. You know, I think anything in the world, whatever your trade is, whatever your skill is, you've got to keep doing it. If you're a violinist in the London Symphony Orchestra, you don't get better by not doing it. You know, you might be, you know, technically the best violin in the world, but if, you know, guess what? If you stop doing it for especially for a length of time, you'll get rusty, you know, and and really good a really good audience probably can tell. So, yeah, you know, keep editing your books, keep editing your work. And yes, sure, that that's different from giving it to beta readers and different from maybe giving it to an edit editor at the end. I'm not saying that's a bad thing, but you've got to do your own work first. Why? No one knows what you want to achieve with your book. No one knows your characters, the setting, the language like you. You're the number one. And it's great sometimes to have extra sets of eyes and all that. Yeah. But at the end of the day, they can't and shouldn't write the book for you. Uh going back to AI, writers need to work a lot harder, basically. Where I'm more amenable to AI, and this will be cause of shock to some people, but I'll be honest, I think more writers out there are using AI for what show is say, things on where on the periphery. Book covers, I think, used. I personally don't have a problem with writers using AI's book covers. The only problem is it it's and I've not I've not used AI as as for book covers. I've been tempted to, but I haven't done. My biggest worry about this is that employing an artist who uses AI anyway, and to charges you you're more for it. You can do AI, you know, book covers on Chat GPT for free. I've seen some people on Instagram, some this is the thing, artists like and I because I I don't normally follow them back, they follow me, and obviously they want they want some business, but it doesn't interest me at the moment, to be honest. If I'm gonna find an artist, I'll I'll reach out to one. I use one for my Jack Strong box, by the way. It was someone called, I think their their their handle was Fantabanner. Yeah, go figure, where'd you get that from? And they're from Sri Lanka, and I use this, it predates AI. So if anyone says, oh, you used AI, no, it wasn't invented. Sorry. And they did some really, really good job. I I I don't know now. I don't know. They might use AI to be honest. Um but yeah, the ones I'd seen on Instagram, I looked at what they'd done, it's just okay for me. You know. The problem is, is so for example, if you use AI to write your book or as part of writing the book, one of the biggest problems is it is in America, for American copyright law, it's not under copyright. So if you wrote, you know, used AI to write 50% of it and someone stole your book, you couldn't do anything about it. You could still publish your stuff, sure. But then they could there's nothing you could do in a court of law to stop them, you know, doing what they wanted with your book. They could do another version, they could change characters, blah, blah, blah, blah. You couldn't know anything about it now. With the cover, the if an AI cover, how is that class? What what's the input? I don't know. I don't know. How do you know that an author has used AI to write a book? Honestly, you don't. You might suspect it, but unless they say I use AI to write this, but no idea. So again, I don't know how that would in a court of law it's proving it. I think it's one of those things that is evolving probably faster than the the law courts can kind of what's the word I'm looking for, can kind of legislate for, to be honest. I mean, I'm going to be AI. Listen, this is the way I have used AI. I've used AI for, for example, this podcast doing like posters that I share on Instagram. I want to say it's the only way. It's not the only way, but it's the only way to do it quickly. You know, if I have like a five, ten, fifteen-minute window, not in my day, in my week, as I said at the start of this episode, yeah. I am immensely busy. Yeah, sometimes that's what I do. I just I get the image, I get the photo, I I I direct ChatGPT what to do. And it's it is just promotion. Of course, I could. This is the thing, somebody would say, Oh well, why don't you well, you could pay an artist to do that. Yeah. I I could, but like I say, as I said before, I'm not entirely sure that the quality would be there, and I'm not sure that they don't use AI. Of course, they could say to you, I don't use AI, but I don't know if I really trust them. And then you've got the you've got the problem of you need it that minute. You need it right then. Not tomorrow, um, not in several days' time. You know, that's understandable for for for uh you know an artist out there. I I totally get that, but sometimes you need it right that minute. And you know, I'm I'm doing this podcast, this costs money. You know, it costs about it's maybe it's not that much. Depends, it's about how many dollars a month,$30 or$40 a month for the like two apps that I use. And these are not perfect apps either. I do get, you know, I I do think I just wish that they kind of would both cover each other a bit more, or I could do a bit more with BuzzPro, or Instagram would be a bit more, you know, a bit better for creators. So there's all these things to consider. And I just think to just get the word out about an upcoming guest, yeah, I I I I have to cross that rubric on I just have to admit it and just say, yeah, that's what I do. Don't like it, get over it, to be honest. I want to say in the nicest possible way. It's just it's just yeah. I use it, no, I I'll give you a bit more context. Like the first few, maybe one of the first few I did, I used another app called Canva, which does have AI, but I wasn't using AI, I was doing it manually. It took a lot longer, and it was it not as good, to be honest. So that's one area I used AI in. The other one is doing podcasts like these. So I don't know if you notice, you should note, you should notice. When we do the podcast, and when you when I upload it and you listen to it, you might notice there's no pauses. There's almost no mistakes. Now the mistakes I manually cut out. I'm normally, if if just say for argument's sake, I'm doing this podcast now with with a guest, and there's some noise in the background, saying an alarm goes off, right? I know it's happened. I'm usually making note of the time, but it's 35 minutes in. And I find that and I cut that out. That that bit's easy, you know. There's other bits you're gonna find that are harder, and again, I do all that manual where AI is used on Riverside, which is the app I used, it's cutting out pauses. Now, this is again another way you can compare. To cut out pauses, all I have to do, if you see this on my video, but you'll see just my finger. I just swipe my finger, what, half an inch, one centimeter, and seven, eight minutes of silences completely cut out, and AI is detecting that. Now, I could use a sound engineer or do it manually. If that was to happen, the podcast is never getting released. So I'm a big believer in writers, artists using it somewhat on the fringes of what they do. Now, some people, this is the item that's been put to me. I think it was on threads. It was like, well, for example, like if you're making a literary query, if you're querying literary agents and you use the never thing. Hang on, I'll get into this is a very good point. If you use ChatGPT or whatever, German Alex, to write your query letter, and the the agent will assume that everything you've done is AI. Maybe. There's an argument here that that annoys me, and it is there is a fallacy. It's like just this is what I want to say. Just because you eat a hamburger doesn't mean you stuff your face for the the rest of your life. You know, just because, you know, you you have a beer on a Monday night doesn't mean you're drinking whole bottles of whiskey by the weekend. You know, you can use AI a little bit. I think if we're I think if we're all true writers and we we read a lot as well, I think if we're all ethical about this and we all think about, you know, who we are. I I get it that listen, I get it. There's there's somebody out there, there's somebody out there that's an artist or there's somebody out there that's a sound engineer, there's somebody out there that's an editor that are not getting money because you're using Chat GPT. I get it. Listen, this is horrible. It's the way of the world. It truly is. You know, everything we, you know, we're do the kind of jobs we're doing were done differently 20, 30, 40 years ago. And as a result, some, you know, some careers, jobs have completely disappeared. You know, just think about all the people who are living in Alaska, you know, processing whale oil. It disappeared overnight once we discovered electricity. Now, I get it, killing whales is obviously a lot worse than you know kill killing artists. I totally get that, but but it it is an example. I think that we have to understand that, you know, progress happens. Think about okay, I think of a better one. Horses as a means of transport have been replaced by the motor car. That's really bad for anyone involved in the horse trade. And in the early 20th century, that wasn't millions. That would have been tens of millions of people, and their jobs disappeared boom overnight. And so I'm sympathetic because yeah, one day it might be me. Maybe teaching becomes threatened or endangered. I I don't think it will do. I'm by I'm 48. I don't think it will do by the time I retire. For writing, yeah, maybe. As I said before, I think that for me to compete against AI, I have to be a better writer. And that means writing more. Maybe writing different types of books, it means taking more risks, it means reading more broadly. It's and when I think about AI, I try to think about it every day. Or I try to re-evaluate my positions. You know, again, just to reiterate, I'm not I'm not for AI at all in the writing process. Just to clarify, I'm just gonna drink a bit of water. Just to clarify, it's the kind of thing that's cut out. The question is, will I cut it out? If you're hearing this, you know I didn't. It's that simple. What I'm saying, yeah, you know it's I get it. I get it. It's the hot potato. It's for me in the writing community, it's the one area that nobody wants to say or hold the hand up and go, yeah, guys, I I use it a bit. And I think a bit's okay. And you know, again, another argument's been put to me. Oh, yeah, why just get yeah, AI to write a whole book? That's a slippery slope argument. Again, I don't believe I and the good thing about this whole debate is it made me realize the slippery slope argument is a load of rubbish. It just for some people, I'll use drugs as an example, you know, or maybe smoking. Just because people do a little bit of something doesn't mean they lose control of it. Some people do, a minority of people gamble and it completely runs away with them and it's horrible. Some people have, you know, start drinking a bit, and then they drink too much, and it's horrible. Most people do not. And I think it's the same with AI. Again, like, why I want to say, why would I get AI to write my book for me or read my book, read, or read books for me? What for? I'm a writer. I want I want to get published, I want to get more recognition. And maybe a little bit, that's where AI can help. Maybe, you know, I this is another thing, by the way, out there. I want to like it's such a a big issue because I I don't think people realize. I've just given you some examples of where I've I've used AI, but traditionally published companies, so traditional traditional publishing companies, not companies who are published, they're using using AI to decide which books are selling and which books are marketable. So here's the thing you may, as a writer, never use AI. And you get your agent, the agent sends the book off to the publisher, and you get published, and you've never used AI. But the publishing companies use AI on your behalf to decide that it's publishable. And I know as well the publishing companies are using AI more for editing now as well. That's coming in. Again, anyone that uses like Word, Grammarly, anything, even if it's just spellcheck, what do you think spellcheck is? If it's not AI, it's still spellcheck. You know, Neil Gaiman and Stephen King, they think we're all frauds. Okay, maybe f maybe frauds is too strong a word. I'll rephrase it. Neil Gaiman and Stephen King, they think this is not writing. When we write on a computer or on a laptop, they don't think that's writing. They think writing is writing, you know, in a notebook. Neil Gaiman goes a step further and thinks you should write with a fountain pen. You know, I I don't, although I write poetry in notebooks. But even now recently, I've also experimented writing poems on phones, writing poems on on my laptop, because sometimes you've just gotta you just don't have the time to wait you know, a few days to you know to get your notebook. Sometimes you just gotta just gotta go. Sometimes you've just got to do it. It's that simple. You know, and I'm trying to think if if I'm making my thoughts, you know, synthesizing of here. Yeah, it's slippery slope. It it's but we don't. Again, I think again, I think if the more you write, the more you read others, the more you appreciate what others do, yeah, you you you you wouldn't. You don't have to. Listen, I do think AI is a great opportunity for the indie book community. Now one terrific piece of irony is that the indie book community is well against AI. They're not completely wrong. We aren't completely wrong. As I've said, I don't think it should be in the writing process, but I think when it comes to like publishing companies, I think it can help give a lot of indie writers a leg up and get their butt covers far more professionally done. I think the editing as well. You know, if you want to get yourself, you know, an editor and it costs you like hundreds of pounds, hundreds of dollars. What if you don't have that money? You know, what if you you know you've not got a job, but you but you're an indie writer? What if you've got to support your family? I mean, these days I don't think ChatGPT can't edit more than a few chapters at a time, but as far as I'm aware. You know, but why not use something like that? You know? I don't, guys, I don't. I I'm just maybe if you know, before everybody accuses me, you use the word, I'm more open-minded. Maybe this is maybe I read around a lot and I just try to think. Think about politics at the moment, like Trump and stuff, you know, the UK politics, like Nigel Farage. I'm just very wary of extremes. You know, you should do this, you shouldn't do that, and it's 100%. And if you don't agree with everything we say, well, we're gonna cyber bully you, or we are gonna say you're not in our crowd. You know, it's okay to be, well, I'm a little bit like this. Uh I'm mostly not like that. You know, I think we can call it a wrap there. That kind of does it. Is this me or is it an AI? No, it's definitely me. So yeah, I just want to make another apology again to Jerry McGregor. What an absolute cock-up. In some ways, I'm glad I've done it. What? That sounds crazy. I take the view, especially with my podcast, I'm going to make mistakes. But the most important thing is I need to learn from them. And I learned from this to take a bit more greater care. What I do is when I book a guest, just in case you you're worried, I do write down a time in my calendar and I do check with ChatGPT, by the way, on the time difference. I've always, again, I used before, I used to used to use Google, but Google normally will tell you what the time now is in another time zone. And what I need to know is what will the time be in a future month at certain times. So yeah, I find Chat GPT, Deep Seek, which is Chinese AI, to be really helpful with that. So don't don't crucify me over that. But that's just just the way it is. It's like, yeah, for me to get over it. You know, it's I'm not gonna say AI is a co-pilot. AI should not be a co-pilot either. That's too much. I think it should be what? The the little switch on the dashboard occasionally, maybe something like that. But yeah, I've made a mistake, J.M. McGregor, and I am heartily sorry, and I will I'll fix it. And what I'll do is next time, I'll just do a double check. I think I need to just double and triple check. Not that I don't do that already, but I think I've got to be, you know, more assiduous with that, I would say. Before I finish, I'm just gonna just kind of give a shout out to my my myself, my own books. If you do want to support the podcast, I do recommend. I recommend, I do ask, I do, you could think about it if you were so inclined to want to support me. I've got five Jack Strong books, but you could just just buy the first one, you know. I've got a portrait book called Made in China, which is fifty sonnets. All about urban China, really, and about the lives that different people lead here, normally people in the margins, people that are quite dead trodden. It's particularly affected by my time. Well, in China, but when I first came to Beijing, which was like 2010 to th to 2017, it was very much a different city back then. A lot more polluted, a lot more industrial than it is today. And in some senses, it's like historical testament. So testament, is that right? Yeah. Testimony, not testament. Or maybe it can be both. Back to Jack, you know, so you could you could buy the maiden. The maiden giant at the moment, it's it's I think it's 99 pence or 99 cents. That might change in the future. So, you know, go and get it. Yeah, Jack Strong and the Red Giant, just to explain what that's about. It's about a young boy called Jack Strong who's being bullied at school, and then he gets beaten up by a school bully who's called Gaz Finch. And he runs away from home, argues with his parents, and he gets kidnapped by a strange alien spaceship. But there appears to be no one on there at the time. There's no aliens saying, you know, take me to your leader, or there's no one, you know, experimenting on him or anything like that. But slowly but surely he starts to meet other boys and girls, and they become like his found family. And through this new experience, he starts to become more confident, you know, and more assertive. Because guess what? It's experience. That's what experience does for you and to you. And over the course of the buck, he's getting stronger, but he's having all his adventures and finding out about his magical spaceship, and then at the end, the crash landed on this volcano-infested planet. And Jack's the one that's got to solve it. Jack's the one that's got to get everyone out of there and save the day. Read it. Buy it. I would be very much obliged to you if you did. But if you don't want to, that's fine. That's also fine. No problem. No problem, oh dudes. Okay, I think we can end there. Again, thank you so much if you're listening to this episode. Thank you so much. Gonna shout out to someone actually now as well. Not someone, I'm not gonna name someone. I I saw somebody from Basra in Iraq. They downloaded or streamed one of my podcasts, you know, from I think a few days ago, maybe a week or maybe two weeks ago, I can't remember now. And I saw it at the time, and I was like, whoa, Basra, Iraq. There's no way that my marketing had reached that person. So it's either a word of mouth or or chance, who knows? Bit of luck. So thank you to that person. If you listen to this episode, I did notice, and you made my day that day. And you're making my day now. Please keep listening. And you know what? Tell other people about it. Say, hey, why didn't you listen to this podcast? I'm gonna carry on trying to get other great writers on the show and hopefully not mess up the actual that they're supposed to be on the show. Not gonna mess up the time zone stuff. Right. Okay, guys, that is a wrap. I'll see you next week. Oh yeah, next week we've got on the show Ansuria Patel and Sarah James, two of my favourite UK poets. And I've had them both on the show before individually, but they're gonna be on together with myself. We'll each be reading a poem and talking about it. And other than that, I I just want to talk about really what we're up to at the moment, and you know, in terms of writing and reading and experiences, that kind of thing, and keep it more on the conversation level. So normally, if if you don't know as a listener, you do know if you've been as a guest. I do give guests a set of questions beforehand that we use as you know as a guide. But with this one, I'll dispense with that. We'll just we'll just get to know each other and have a good time. Right, I think we can go. Okay, see you later, everybody, and thank you again. Bye bye now.