Aishwarya 00:10
Welcome to the BookPeople. I'm Ashley as a writer, book editor, Podcast Producer and the head of originals at bomb. In this heartbreaking podcast, I demystify the publishing and creative industries, and uncover the biggest opportunities and challenges for writers in India today. Welcome to another special episode of The BookPeople, where I take a particular topic or a question that writers constantly asked me. And I really break it down to look at every aspect of it and provide a comprehensive view. And if you haven't checked out the previous two ones that I've covered, I've looked at ghostwriting, and I've looked at literary agents. And today, the topic that I'm covering are writing AI. And what does this AI revolution mean for us as writers, as publishers, and as creators in these creative industries? So for the past few months, all we've been hearing about is chat GPT and Bard and AI and how AI is gonna do all the writing in the world and replace writers completely. Right? Every day we see AI, you know, writing books, AI is writing articles is writing show notes is reading social media posts. Recently, I even use chat GPT to create a travel itinerary for Sri Lanka. And it gave me such a detailed and researched sort of itinerary that would have taken me hours and hours to do by myself. Right. So AI is definitely doing something and it's adding value, and people are talking about it constantly. But the question that's on everyone's mind, and I think this has become a point of major sort of stress and anxiety and insecurity that everyone is trying to answer is, is AI going to replace writers or is going to replace creators in some way. So I decided to face this beast myself. And I thought, why don't I try a bunch of different writing API's to kind of see how they work, how easy or difficult they are to use? What kind of content are they able to create in terms of, you know, the quality of writing? And finally, is this something that can really replace me as a writer or as a creator, I looked at charge GPD. Obviously, I looked at BART by Google, and I looked at AI writer write Sonic and copy. So I've used a bunch of these different AIS to kind of understand what they do, how they work. And here are my observations. So let me go back to the basics. What are writing AIs? Right now? I don't want to answer this very simple question. Obviously, it's artificial intelligence. You know, obviously, there are programs that help you write faster that help you write better, and we have used as for a long time, for example, Grammarly, which we use to kind of just, you know, after we have written something, check for grammar, for spelling for punctuation, for sort of awkward sentences, is also writing AI, right, because it's a tool that kind of helps us write better content. Obviously, recently, the API's that have come out are not so much, you know, editing or, you know, providing grammar assistance, but our AI is that kind of can write things for you, right? So they can do research, they can pull out data that is openly available, and then rewrite it or repurpose it or summarize it into its own words, in order to create anything from blog posts, to descriptions to scripts, or books, right. So that's what AI is doing right now. And how exactly does this work? So you open the AI platform, whether it's, you know, website link, or whether it's an app, you type a prompt. So there are two different types where there are API's where you are able to type a prompt or say, a title or a heading for an article, and it will give you the entire article, if you just put in the heading and some keywords. Then there are your chat based API's like charge GPT, where you ask questions, and you sort of have a conversation with them. And they are able to respond to the kinds of questions you are asking with information. Right? So it's not so much that they're writing an article, but they are responding. So you kind of have a conversation back and forth where you ask more and more detailed questions. And then they are able to give you the information that you kind of need to put everything together. So Can API is really create content based on your specifications. The answer at first glance is yes. So the first thing you need to know is API's are incredibly fast. So the moment you put on a prompt within two to say 30 seconds, it will spit out a decent amount of information, you know, based on the AI based on what you've asked for about say 100 to you know 600 To 800 words on that particular topic in the format that you want, which is pretty great. And the thing is, they also give options. So with a load of things like captions, or social media captions, it will give you options of three different captions that you can then choose from, or that you can build on further, which is a great thing for AIs. The second positive thing is that the right thing is pretty decent, you know, it's well written, it's grammatically correct. And depending on the AI, they'll also give you options in tone. So you can kind of choose whether you want a casual tone of funny tone, or formal tone. And it was right the information based on that tone, which is super helpful for articles, or for emails where you kind of want a particular tone, or if you're writing, like SEO articles for a brand where the brand has a particular tone, which is more funny and less formal. And so you need the AI to also write in that particular manner. Some AI's don't just take information from, you know, Wikipedia level of research, but they actually go and take like, the more latest information, you know, from sort of news articles, or things like that to create the writing that they are generating for you, which means that you know, it will have a lot of like dates, figures, statistics, but the thing is that because most of these AIs are still learning, a lot of the information can just be factually inaccurate. And so that what is needed is that extra step from our end to make sure that, you know, we're fact checking everything, we're making sure that the data is accurate, which obviously means that right now, they're still a little unreliable, but this is something that they are kind of building on right now. So this might not be a concern, even a few months or a few weeks down the line. But what this means for AIS is that they need a sort of human touch, right? So that still needs to be a person who is putting in the prompts, who is giving direction, who is approving keywords, who is you know, saying, Okay, this flow makes sense, the structure makes sense. So that the AI can generate certain things, then obviously, the person is required to fact check to, you know, check once for grammar to just to make sure that everything is correct. Like I said, some guys obviously have these varieties of tokens, but most of the AIS don't. So the content that they generate can also sound very, very robotic, because it's just written in this sort of neutral tone. And so sometimes, you know, again, a human is needed to edit that right to sort of edit the content to get in a certain tone, to get in a certain personality into the writing. And then obviously, you need to know how to use these different AIS, right? Like you're a human who is operating the interface of the AIS to know exactly how this works, where I need to put in prompts, what will happen once I put in prompts, you know, there are AIS, where there are three kinds of steps to even create an article where you put in a heading, then they'll give you a structure, then you approve the structure, or you make changes in the structure of the article, then they will give you an outline, then you approve the outline. And then they finally give the article. So here where there are these three steps of intervention, obviously, a human being is required to kind of assess and approve each step in order to get that final article, even though the process might just take five minutes, which is still a shorter time than actually writing a complete article. Right. And then obviously, the chat AI is like Chad GPT. Again, you need a human who was asking the right questions and knowing exactly what level of detail the question should have, in order to get the kind of responses you want. It's again, something that is a learned skill, and again, requires a human touch. And lastly, AIS can't think for themselves. So yes, they are amazing, they can collate all the research into the world and put it into your lap. And that's like a magical beautiful thing. But if you want to create original content, right, which is not repurposed, which is not summarise which is not similar to content that already exists out there, you know, something that has a fresh perspective or is a gap in the market that is not something that AIS can do by themselves. So that still requires a human being who has original ideas, right. And it requires essentially originality and creativity, which ultimately is a very human thing. And it's not that at this point yet, AI is can generate. So in conclusion, AIs are here to stay. They are quick, they are efficient, they are easy to use. Most of the time they are free, although now a lot of paid versions are cropping up, which is you know, its own thing to look at. But our AI is going to replace writers. The answer for now is no. Because like I said, AI still need the human touch. They still need originality and The space that we're in right now has to be where AI is or looked at not as a threat, not as something that can replace or is competition to write to us. But as tools that writers can use to write faster, write quicker, you know, make their own process easier and be able to write more. Now, obviously, this is a very productivity based thing where, you know, the idea is that in jobs, people will use AI to kind of make their process faster. There are also a lot of ethical concerns with AI is, you know, with when it comes to research, or when it comes to plagiarism. These are questions that are still being answered that are still being debated by different people by AI, you know, founders, developers to AI ethicists. But there are no clear answers of yet. There are also questions about copyright when it comes to AI, which, again, is a question that we don't have an answer for yet, and we might not have for the next few years. But what is definitely going to happen is that people are going to start using AI to make their jobs easier. And I think that is something that all of us as creators, as writers need to also get on board with, to some extent, which is, can we use AI to make our lives easier, you know, whether it's writing AI, whether it's just an organizational AI that, you know, makes my inbox so much easier to look at, I can navigate through. But you know, if we look at these AIs as tools that we can use, and kind of improve our writing rather than threads to our writing, then I think that is the next step to go because that will create the next sort of generation of creators and creative professionals will be able to use AI to, you know, work better have better productivity, be more efficient with their work, and in that sense, be able to go ahead with the kind of work that they want to do and create a lot more original content. So definitely try out API's on your own to see, you know, what your experience with them is, you can have a couple of ideas you can get a is to generate ideas for you can look at how they write what are the different nuances and play around with them experiment with them. Most of these platforms have free trials, even if they are paid platforms. So you can use the free trials to see what works, how does this work, there is a large variation in the quality, the kind of output the amount of content that you're able to get for free. And then if any of these areas really speak to you, or you feel like you find them helpful, you can obviously, you know, continue using them, or you can use all of them and decide that none of this works. And I don't need AI and I'm just gonna do my own thing. But whatever the decision you finally make, don't do it without trying it out in the first place. Because in order to know what a world with AI would look like in the future, you got to try it for yourself. So thank you for tuning into this episode of The Book people. I hope you found this helpful. And what I'm going to do is I'm going to put a list of the writing ais that you can start off with that I have also tried out in the description below, and you can definitely start by trying them out. Let me know what your experience is, whether you like them, dislike them, what your concerns are about AI and I can see if I can cover them in the future. I hope you found this episode helpful. Let me know what else I should cover in the future in these kinds of breakdown episodes. And if you have any questions about AI or if you need help with your writing journey with your publishing journey, then you can reach out to me I shudder at bound lynda.com to see how I can plug in and help you with that. In the meantime, keep writing and keep creating