First Cup of Coffee – June 2, 2025

On a few recent bruhahas regarding Generative "AI" in the writing world, author chat groups, writing as "grunt work," and why it's so significant for all creators that Taylor Swift bought back her masters and owns her catalog now.

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Transcript

00:01.61
Jeffe Kennedy
Good morning, everyone. This is Jeffe Kennedy, author of Epic Fantasy Romance, also writing as Jennifer K. Lambert. I'm here with my first cup of coffee,

00:16.13
Jeffe Kennedy
which is, as always, delightful. um Today is Monday, June 2nd, 6-2-2025. hi Marching right along in this year. Here it is, June It's a um actually a ah cool and breezy, potentially rainy morning here in Santa Fe, which we always love.

00:37.11
Jeffe Kennedy
It was a great weekend weather-wise. I hope you all had a great weekend, too. ah And let's see I have actually a list of things to tell you about.

00:51.73
Jeffe Kennedy
um One of them is for those of you interested in industry things and not so much my furniture shopping and gardening sagas.

01:03.32
Jeffe Kennedy
ah If you were listening before to my saga about find a way voices, And how they did not want to approve the strange familiar audio book because I said it was a human narrator and it was obviously and they didn't call it AI they called it a digital narrator.

01:24.14
Jeffe Kennedy
Um, but and they gave me no recourse except to say, you know, they're like fast up. It's a digital narrator and you have upload it with that those words.

01:38.63
Jeffe Kennedy
uh, under that category, whatever. And there was no way for me to say, but she actually has a human narrator. I've like seen her and I email with her and she has like a face and two arms and two legs. So far as I know, not that those are criteria for being human, but still, uh, and, uh,

02:00.51
Jeffe Kennedy
We had to go back and forth for a while. My narrator contacted them. I contacted them. Um, as is so often the way with these tech companies, it seems like they figure the easiest way to handle things is like to not give you the option to argue.

02:18.87
Jeffe Kennedy
Even though it was the truth and it turned out she's like an audio book narrator groups and there were quite a few people who got flagged that week by their new um is this a human detector.

02:35.69
Jeffe Kennedy
So anyway, it was happily resolved. It still took. Over a week, but um they approved the book. They sent me an email saying that they had corrected corrected the problem or adjusted something right.

02:51.30
Jeffe Kennedy
found some other way to do the quality control and that I could re-upload my book, which I did, resubmit it. And yeah, I would have been annoyed if I'd had to totally re-upload it because you have to do it chapter by chapter and it takes while.

03:07.33
Jeffe Kennedy
So anyway, they said resubmit it. I did. It's been approved. It'll start getting uploaded. Um, and then interestingly, i got an email from Amazon saying that the book had been approved for distribution, but they're having a site wide sale, uh, until like through the ninth. And so they're going to hold my audio book until then. Um, presumably because it's new and they want me to be able to get full price.

03:39.10
Jeffe Kennedy
Doesn't seem like they would be that concerned. guess they want to get their cut of full price. ah But they said I could go ahead and do it. And I don't know.

03:50.32
Jeffe Kennedy
I'm torn. I was trying to decide what was the best business decision that way.

03:58.16
Jeffe Kennedy
In fact, I asked and other people did not answer me. I went back to see if anybody gave me an opinion and they did not. I don't know what the right thing to do is there.

04:09.02
Jeffe Kennedy
I'm sure you all are like, release the audio book now. But, yeah. I don't know. I don't know. It's kind of a funny thing because I did ask in my author group chat, and which has become a thing lately. um Because, like, one of the brouhaha's last week was um Victoria Aveyard, who writes YA, I think. I don't think I've ever read her.

04:35.85
Jeffe Kennedy
But she was... went to on threads to decry a traditionally published book that she said was written by generative a AI.

04:49.39
Jeffe Kennedy
Apparently it was like indie published first and then traditionally published and she was, was, you know, going on about how wrong this is and how we should contact our publishers and, you know, fight against generative AI. And it was kind of funny to many of us because it was as if we should just discovered that generative AI was a problem in the publishing industry.

05:13.60
Jeffe Kennedy
Whereas, um you know, a lot of us have been aware for quite some time have been fighting it. And so it's always interesting in someone who lives in kind of a,

05:25.34
Jeffe Kennedy
a more big-name author bubble suddenly discovers something and gets very upset about it. um The thing was, is she was being vague about what book it was, saying that she couldn't, which is probably true.

05:40.78
Jeffe Kennedy
But when some people pushed back and said, you know, when you just... kind of vague posts like this and say, oh, it's, you know, i know it's this book, but I can't tell you what it is. And I won't give you any supporting facts. You have to trust me.

05:59.29
Jeffe Kennedy
And people pointed out that this is damaging for the industry, that it leads to witch hunts, it leads to people being falsely accused. And when that happened, she told people that they supported generative AI, which was not the point at all.

06:14.46
Jeffe Kennedy
And I think that there was a lot of confusion probably on her part about what people were trying to say to her, but there was also this aspect of, um, that some people did know for a fact, and there were references to an author chat that she is part of, whereas presumably she presented this evidence and everyone else in the ah group agreed that it was true, but that doesn't then work for the rest of us. Right.

06:47.16
Jeffe Kennedy
you know And the thing is is, it was very easy to figure out what book this was. It took me probably two minutes of reading through comments and scrolling through things so to figure out which book they were referencing, which I'm not going to say because I don't have any evidence that this book was written by Generative AI. And...

07:12.96
Jeffe Kennedy
I'm not gonna throw stones like that, right? Are there books out there written by generative AI? Yes. Are people finding like the prompts left in the book?

07:24.12
Jeffe Kennedy
Yes. Are there authors saying, well, I'm only using it for editing. I write the book, but then I use it to edit. No, you know, I I'm very firmly far end.

07:35.20
Jeffe Kennedy
You shouldn't be using generative AI at all to write your books. You know, otherwise you're just, why are you doing this? ah But anyway, the my point is actually not any of that, but it was this kind of allusion to the author group chat.

07:52.99
Jeffe Kennedy
And yes, we all have them. Some of us are in several. Usually there's one we like better than others, but it's where we share tea and it's where we go to complain.

08:04.62
Jeffe Kennedy
And it's it's good because it means that you do not then go onto social media and say things that you should not say there. It's just, um, it was just a funny thing because there were other authors supporting Victoria's assertions.

08:24.79
Jeffe Kennedy
And it was clear that like they were coming from this group chat. So everyone's kind of like, well, I don't know if everyone, but me, me, I'm like looking at it and going, Oh, who else is in this group chat?

08:39.51
Jeffe Kennedy
Um, not that I would want to be, I'm happy, happy with mine, but, um, I thought it was, it was amusing. It was amusing to me. And there's been, um, a few things like that going on this week, uh, on the, along the lines of the generative AI stuff.

09:00.62
Jeffe Kennedy
Uh, there was somebody posted a screenshot from a Reddit site, um, that's writing with ai which is charming.

09:11.34
Jeffe Kennedy
Um, And I actually somewhat sympathize with this person. I'm going to read it to you all. um Her title is, i'm assuming it's her.

09:24.28
Jeffe Kennedy
And I don't know that it is. We'll change it to there. um Their title is AI has made my writing worse, question mark. I have a middling successful pen name and a romance niche, and the whole point of using AI was to speed through the commercial work so I could save my real creative energy for the big personal projects I actually care about.

09:47.30
Jeffe Kennedy
But it's taking longer to get a decent book with AI than it would to just write it myself from scratch. Shocking. Shocking is me. uh the constant editing loop is destroying my writing process instead of drafting and editing like every writing guide tells you like this person's not even an experienced writer because they're still following like writing guides Anyway, I'm editorializing here.

10:12.77
Jeffe Kennedy
um I'm trapped in endless tweaking of generated text that isn't even good. Also shocking. I'm spending so much time wrestling with this stuff, editing and re-editing and trying to make it not sound terrible that by the time I'm done with the commercial stuff, I have nothing left for my passion projects.

10:31.83
Jeffe Kennedy
This isn't about the ethics of AI, just the functionality. Yeah, because that's not writing your book for you like you were promised. I feel trapped. The commercial work was supposed to be the income that would buy me time and mental space for the writing that matters to me.

10:46.76
Jeffe Kennedy
Instead, I'm pouring all my energy into fixing bad AI prose while my literary work sits there untouched. In the end, the commercial work does sell, but when I look at how many hours it takes to get a decent draft,

10:58.84
Jeffe Kennedy
I feel like I would be better off drafting manually. The thing that was supposed to free up my creative bandwidth is completely draining it. Instead, does anyone know of a tool? This is the question she comes to, right?

11:11.45
Jeffe Kennedy
Does anyone know of a tool that gives you like 50 to 100 words when you're stuck? Not full scenes or chapters that change your voice just enough to get unstuck and keep your momentum going.

11:22.60
Jeffe Kennedy
Everything I've tried either generates way too much or completely derails what I'm writing. Is anyone else dealing with this where you thought AI would handle the grunt work? I put that in the air quotes because she actually put quotes around it. The grunt work.

11:38.05
Jeffe Kennedy
But it's actually consuming more of your creative resources than doing it the old way. The old way. Ah, you sweet summer child. um I'm starting to wonder if I should abandon AI entirely. Yes, please.

11:51.21
Jeffe Kennedy
And go back to pure manual drafting. And there's just so much wrong with that. There's so much wrong there. And it's it's just frustrating because i actually understand where she's coming from.

12:06.94
Jeffe Kennedy
Because lo, lo, these many years ago when I was newbie writer and I had come out with my first book, my essay collection, and which had gotten some nice critical notice and I had agents contacting me asking me what's next.

12:27.80
Jeffe Kennedy
um I was like on a list of writers to watch. And so, so yeah, people were saying, well, what's your next project? what are you going to do? And I had been working on this narrative nonfiction book and that anytime I told anyone the premise, their eyes would roll back in their head.

12:46.89
Jeffe Kennedy
And I even sent it to my editor who had published the essay collection. And she said, you're not ready to write this book, put it in a drawer for a year. And i didn't want to do that because my goal was to become a career writer. I wanted to write full time. And, and I, now I didn't, you know, like I had to come up with something else.

13:07.31
Jeffe Kennedy
And I thought, well, what I'll do is I'll write romance. Because if you're a romance reader, you believe that it will be really easy to write a romance book.

13:21.96
Jeffe Kennedy
And I'd woken up for a dream with the book that eventually became Rogue's Pawn. And so I thought, well, what I'll do is I'll bang out this romance novel and use that, the books that we'll be rolling in, ah to support my real writing career, which is exactly how this person is coming across.

13:43.45
Jeffe Kennedy
Who I keep reverting to calling she I know. They. It's how they are coming across. And... yeah I mean it was wrong headed of me.

13:55.46
Jeffe Kennedy
It's you know does spoiler alert. It did not work out that way. Um, but you know this person is continually looking for shortcuts. Did you see that?

14:06.22
Jeffe Kennedy
You like everything I've mentioned in there they're looking for shortcuts and there are not. There are not shortcuts. If you want to write, write well, you know, like maybe if you were writing in this romance niche, that's selling. Okay. Maybe devote yourself to learning your fricking craft, right?

14:25.58
Jeffe Kennedy
Um, instead of dismissing it as something, i don't know, like you you want a tool, a trick for getting 50 to a hundred words, free, right?

14:38.90
Jeffe Kennedy
No, um, right? Switch your medium. Try writing longhand 50 to 100 words is not a lot. Uh, finding ways to get unstuck. I mean writers have been searching for that for centuries, right? That's like part of it. That's like why do we do this.

14:58.79
Jeffe Kennedy
So now I'm getting myself worked up. Uh, but I want to talk about, ah

15:09.66
Jeffe Kennedy
I'll save that for last. Um, ah this is kind of a segue, this, this shortcuts thing, which is that some of the big news, um, as all Swifties can attest is that Taylor Swift has now bought all of her masters. She owns her entire catalog.

15:27.58
Jeffe Kennedy
And if you don't understand the significance of this, For example, the Beatles did not own their catalog. Michael Jackson bought the Beatles catalog.

15:40.41
Jeffe Kennedy
um It is this thing where, and I'll talk about it in terms of writing when I say rights, like my 12 kingdoms and uncharted realms books, I do not have the rights to those books because I sold them to Kensington.

15:54.10
Jeffe Kennedy
Will I ever get them back? I don't know. and They still sell middlingly well, so probably not. There's a threshold where they have to fall below before I can get those rights back. I have the rights back to all 10 of my Carina Press books, and I republished those.

16:09.86
Jeffe Kennedy
So owning her catalog is huge and I won't take you down into the Swiftie weeds, but it was a really shady thing where her first six albums got sold to someone she hated that hated her.

16:24.15
Jeffe Kennedy
It was, um, it was full of misogyny and showing that she could be controlled in the music industry that she is just another pop princess and not to get too uppity.

16:37.73
Jeffe Kennedy
And, you know, she has her song about being a mastermind and Taylor is a very shrewd business person, which is why I've been talking about her for a long time. She's excellent creatively, but she's also shrewd as heck.

16:52.47
Jeffe Kennedy
on her business and she does not mess around. And she did this heiress tour. I was wondering what the deal was. I think some of us wondered, um, like why she was doing so much merch,

17:05.06
Jeffe Kennedy
while she was coming out with additional versions of CDs and so forth, that she really did seem to be working to generate money. She's very generous with donations, with paying her people, but it did seem like a relentless push to make money that I was wondering, I thought actually thought somebody else in her organization was doing a lot the pushing.

17:29.54
Jeffe Kennedy
It turns out that she took all of that money and she used it to buy back her catalog. She bought back her masters and that's that's an incredible thing and it probably cost over a billion dollars to do it.

17:46.08
Jeffe Kennedy
And she posted a letter about it and I think it's very interesting creatively too that many of us have been waiting for Taylor's version of the reputation album because of those original six albums.

18:02.28
Jeffe Kennedy
She had started to rerecord them. And so she had done four of them and she had not yet done her debut album, which is frankly the weakest and she had not done reputation.

18:15.48
Jeffe Kennedy
And for many of us, we love reputation. It's one of my favorites. And, she in this letter, she said that she wanted to confess to us that she's only recorded a quarter of the songs on reputation. So Taylor's version was not coming anytime soon.

18:34.36
Jeffe Kennedy
And she said it was really difficult for her to get back into that space creatively because that album was so connected to a particular time in her life with the rage and the pain of everything that had happened following the Kardashians and Kanye West and all of that shit.

18:53.42
Jeffe Kennedy
And i think that that's fascinating that even someone as business minded as Taylor, who gets things done, you can't go against yourself creatively.

19:05.13
Jeffe Kennedy
And i have total a respect for her that she was like, you know, I tried rerecording it and just couldn't get back into those songs. And I'm so interested in that and so excited that she bought back this catalog. I think it's, um,

19:19.09
Jeffe Kennedy
It's an amazing accomplishment. Uh, interestingly, apparently a lot of recording contracts now have started adopting clauses saying that artists cannot rerecord their masters, uh, because of Taylor and how shitty is that shitty.

19:38.45
Jeffe Kennedy
All right. My final thing ending on an even happier note. Um, one of you left a comment on my podcast, I think from Friday, ah saying how much you love my books and especially in these trying times. And that was just a lovely thing to say. It's, um,

19:59.89
Jeffe Kennedy
I love knowing that the stories that I write for you. um the stories I tell myself, I do feel like I write for, for hope and about people having integrity and people doing things for the right reasons. And so it means a lot to me that it touches you that way.

20:21.25
Jeffe Kennedy
All right. And so, um I do not know if I'll do a podcast on Friday. I will be in Phoenix at Phoenix fan fusion. I fly there Thursday night, but I don't have anything till like afternoon. So maybe I'll record a podcast, but yeah you all know me, right? I always think that I'm going to when I travel and then I don't.

20:42.66
Jeffe Kennedy
So maybe not Friday, maybe not Monday. Who knows? We'll see. But um I hope that you all have a great week and I will talk to you all soon.

20:56.55
Jeffe Kennedy
You do all take care, okay? Bye-bye.