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CTP (S3ESepSpecial2) AI vs. Human Creativity

• Joseph M. Lenard | Christian Activist & Author in Politics

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CTP (S3ESepSpecial2) AI vs. Human Creativity
Writer Allison McBain shares her personal challenge of writing 34 books in one year to prove human creativity still outshines AI-generated content. She explores the fundamental differences between machine and human writing, highlighting the "human spark" that AI cannot replicate.
• AI's infiltration across creative industries and its impact on writers and publishers
• Legal and ethical problems with AI mining authors' works without permission or attribution
• McBain's writing challenge: creating a book per week across multiple genres
• How AI fails at mimicking authentic human emotions and reactions in storytelling
• The changing publishing landscape from traditional gatekeepers to self-publishing
• AI's tendency to fabricate information, as demonstrated by the Chicago Sun-Times publishing fictional book recommendations
• Growing concerns about AI's use in education by both students and teachers
• The broader economic impact as AI displaces white-collar workers alongside blue-collar jobs
• The importance of maintaining human creativity despite technological advancement
Find Allison McBain's work at http://AlisonMcBain.com.


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Speaker 1:

Welcome to the Constitutionalist Politics Podcast, aka CTP. I am your host, joseph M Leonard, and that's L-E-N-A-R-D. Ctp is your no-must, no-fuss, just-me-you-can-occasional-guest-type podcast. Really appreciate you tuning in. As Graham Norton will say, let's get on with the show. Hello, oh, my alarm clock. Can you hear it beeping? Uh, no, no, okay. Well, those on the video can see me holding up my alarm clock. It's indeed going off to remind me my alarm clock. It's indeed going off to remind me. And people seeing the video can see Boo, the cat wandering around behind me decided he wants to be part of this conversation too, I guess. Welcome to the show, allison McBain. How are you Okay?

Speaker 2:

boo's running off now, that's good, hey, I can actually move back on my own couch. Nice Well, thanks so much for having me, and normally I have a cat wandering around in the background too, so this time it was you, so that's great.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, it's something you're familiar with. Yes, it's actually my sister's cat, but he's been spending more time up here looking out the front door wanting to get at the birds of late, of course. So, at any rate, completely off the topic, we're here to talk about AI, yes, yes, definitely. Ai, yes, yes, definitely. And your experience? What raised your alarm? Well, before we get into that, I'm skipping the usual, obvious first question who are you? Where are you from Right? Where were you born? Where were you raised? Where are you now?

Speaker 2:

How much time in prison? For what crime did you spend? Well, no time in prison, yet you never know what is coming around the bend. But yeah, I was born up in Canada, in Alberta, but I grew up in California, moved to the East Coast in my 20s and then have returned now to Alberta, so I sort of made a full circle in my life. But yeah, I'm a dual citizen of the US and Canada. I have one American parent, I have one Canadian parent, so I've been all over North America pretty much.

Speaker 1:

That's interesting. So, indeed, what got your dander up about AI that you engaged in this author versus AI battle?

Speaker 2:

Well, as a writer, as a creative, you know. Ai is on everyone's mind because it's sinking its fingers in all aspects of our lives. It's not just in the creative sphere, it's also in medicine, it's also online, it's producing videos. You can find it anywhere, pretty much nowadays. So, in particular, I was interested in the difference between AI creativity and human creativity, and I've seen the stuff that AI has produced and to me it doesn't hold a candle to what people can write, because it lacks that sort of human spark that you find in most writing. It lacks, you know, the soul for a better word of humanity. So I set about doing this challenge where I would see if I could write almost as fast as AI, but hopefully much better, and I think I might have succeeded. I don't know. I guess the proof is in the pudding. So people have to read my books and find out.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, that's, I guess, for every person to read and decide for themselves. Indeed, I am a former IT guy, so I've known of AI coming down the pike for a long time. We're just now, of course, really seeing it hit the fan, so to speak, with it permeating, as you alluded, to all aspects of life. Now, and what worries me the most is full disclosure. Sometimes I cheap I'll use Galaxy AI to create an image. I've got an image in mind. I describe the image. I'll let it create it for me, but I don't claim to be the creator of it. Right? That would be a lie. Right, that would be a lie, right.

Speaker 1:

Sometimes, with this show, I have behind-the-scenes videos and, rather than write from scratch a piece for Before it's News or Substack or Blogspot or Savaged Unfiltered Blogs, I'll run a video through Galaxy AI YouTube Video Summarizer, but I'm not asking it to create something out of whole cloth for me to claim as my own. In that case, it's just, I've created content. Help summarize it for me, so I don't have to write it all down. And as long as I am honest about what's going on, I don't think that's a problem. The problem is and copyright and plagiarism and fair use and trademark law and everything else hasn't caught up to people trying to claim under terms of service oh well, I told ChatGPT to create something about XYZ and it gave it to me. I instructed it, therefore I own it. Well, you may own it, but you didn't create it, and to claim otherwise to me is a lie and plagiarism.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, there's definitely a lot of moral and legal problems right now with AI specifically. You know where it was created, like it was created by basically stealing a whole bunch of authors' works without their knowledge, without their say-so, and then using it for currently profit they're for-profit companies. So, and people who are now using it and saying, oh, companies so. And and people who are now using it and saying, oh, you know, like I programmed in the prompt, so it must be my work. No, it's. It's really the work of the people whose whose writing has been stolen. So that is, you know, without any accreditation or attribution.

Speaker 1:

None of that. And again, like I've said on the cam Journal, talking about the subject also, if because, as you said and as an IT guy I know right it's scouring the web, other people's works to formulate something based on your prompt, well, if person X said Y about topic Z and you're inquiring about topic Z and the AI spits out a quote without it being in quotes and it's telling you person X said this about Z and you're using it, you're the one on the hook for it because you didn't do any research. You're the one guilty of the plagiarism and the theft and the copyright violation at that point for that accreditation to not be there.

Speaker 2:

That's true, and right now AI is sort of like the Wild West Pretty much.

Speaker 2:

You know there are rules, but a lot of these programs aren't really following them because they weren't programmed to you know, which is why, like the law, courts right now have a number of lawsuits that are in progress and will probably be for a long time about the legality of using what AI produces. And yeah, so it is murky waters indeed, and we probably won't know until a couple of years down the road where this is all going to be headed. It's sort of hard to put the genie back in the bottle, though it's out there and AI is helpful, as you pointed out. It's good at summarizing, it's good as being used as a tool, not a creator. So, for example, there are specific cases where, in the medical field, it has saved lives, it has diagnosed very rare diseases because it has access to all the information. So it can be a very useful and helpful tool. But again, when it comes to the creative realm and the legal ramifications of copyright, it's definitely crossed the line, in my opinion, at lazy worthless.

Speaker 1:

Whoever's paying the lobbyists that are paying them to do things rather than right, wait till it becomes a major crisis rather than deal with it? As an IT guy, I could have told you these things were coming. It could have been dealt with, but it wasn't. And, as you said, things are happening in the courts and courts are making it up as they go because the law doesn't cover it and it will take several years for the lawmakers to bother to deal with it and indeed update copyright, plagiarism, fair use laws, as they should have already 10 years ago.

Speaker 2:

Well, the problem is, yeah, the legal system is reactive, it doesn't see down the road and it's very slow. So, again, it takes a long time for it to catch up to all of these quandaries that we're now faced with. So I mean, hopefully it errs on the side of creatives. That is my hope as a creative, but you never know. You never know what's going to happen next, but just speaking from a writer's perspective, the publishing world has been in upheaval for the past couple decades, you know with the advent of eBooks, and you know self-publishing, and so who knows what the landscape will look like several years down the road with AI now in the mix too. It's going to change a lot. From when I was, you know, sending out my first queries to magazines and getting my first reject in the mail, I used to send the ones out in the mail Like it was. It was a whole different landscape back then, and now it is super fast, super easy, and unfortunately AI is in the mix and can can interfere with that too.

Speaker 1:

I'm writing down a note here so I don't forget. One of the notes is Rush, not Limbaugh. The Canadian rock group right, spirit of Radio. They talked about those who used machines right, all this machinery creating modern music can still be open-hearted. It really is just a question of your honesty, as they wrote and they sung about Right. It's the same thing now with this stuff as a book and claiming it book, and in claiming it and also to to what you're saying uh, egg, oh what. I can't think of her, edgar jones. I can't think of her first name, the kind of younger looking ann hathaway which was in the the crawdad sings. Did you see?

Speaker 2:

oh, yes, yes, we're the Crawdad Sing yeah.

Speaker 1:

A great film. It's kind of like an old To Kill a Mockingbird style 60s, 70s throwback type film, really really kind of slow but very good. And to your point in there was the whole point of her being told while you should write, put your illustrations together in a book and indeed sending them out to publishers hoping to get them published, whereas, as you're saying, today, everyone just throws it together on their computer and can upload it to Amazon unedited, unchecked.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, it's pretty wild, like I often like to say, because I'm a very optimistic person. So I often like to say this is sort of the golden age of publishing, because there are many routes to getting your work out there and almost anyone could be a writer right. So it's a very democratic type of landscape for writers, which I love. I love that there are so many avenues, there are tons of contests, there are small press publishers, there are, of course, the traditional publishers self-publishing. It's wonderful to be in this age, but that means there's also a lot of other stuff to wade through. So if anyone can be a writer, that means there are also people who don't take the time or the effort that you used to have to put in because there were gatekeepers. There were more gatekeepers making sure that too many books didn't get to print.

Speaker 1:

There's a lot of good stuff out there that might not otherwise been able through the old ways, the old days. But there's also, of course, a lot of crap giving people who are trying to put out good content a bad name because they just throw something together and see if they could sucker people into buying it on Amazon. And I go into that in my how to Write a Book Again at Publish Hints, tips and Techniques. I talk about the old publishing and the new publishing ways and indeed, like Rush sang about, it's really a question of your own sense of honesty and wanting to provide something real, as opposed to your quick, get rich quick kind of scheme of throwing something out there. Because there's a lot of people who have stories in them. No doubt people should hear and I want to help them get that out, but at the same time I don't want them cheating using ai to do it.

Speaker 2:

Yeah Well, the thing is it's like any get-rich-quick scheme, you know, like almost inevitably it doesn't work, and most people who are in the creative realm are not doing it because we want to get rich. If it happened, I'm sure we wouldn't say no.

Speaker 1:

But at the same time, most writers are not JK Rowling or Stephen.

Speaker 2:

King or Patterson or Clancy or even Exactly, but we're doing it because we love the storytelling, we love to tell stories, we love to entertain, we love to have our voices out there, and so we would probably do it, even if we didn't earn a single cent, and I think that's the genuine writer that still wants to be creative. I heard there's a meme going around that I saw on one of the social media platforms that said I don't want AI to write my books for me. I want AI to do my laundry and wash my dishes, so I will have time to write my books. That's what it should be used for.

Speaker 1:

That's what it should be used for that's what like Jetsons and all those visions of the future had in mind and in store for us to want, right, yeah, so we would have more free time to do things and less of the tedious stuff and it's bass-ackwards, so to speak.

Speaker 2:

Right, yeah, yeah, it pretty much is at this point, but hopefully it will turn around and again, it's not just the creative realm that is being upended by AI. I don't know if you've seen the news recently, but a number of the larger companies, especially like tech companies, are laying off thousands of workers, and this is sort of different from like some of the other layoff trends that we've seen. Usually, it's the people at the bottom getting laid off. It's the blue collar workers, it's the people in, you know, factories, it's the people who are doing the producing of things like cars, steel workers, things like that, that have been getting laid off. Now it's also the white collar workers who are now getting laid off by AI. Ai is taking their jobs, so it's sort of an overall trend, I guess. So we're going to have to find a new model, a new model for people to have jobs that they want to do, that they're able to do, and not just you know, what else are we going to do if everyone's getting laid off?

Speaker 1:

Right, if we're all at home, nobody's working, and I hate to break it to people. This idea and notion that the government can just print money out of nowhere to give us all ask the Weimar Republic, ask Venezuelans. Even today, that money made of whole cloth and just given to people so that we would have money would create superinflation and it just isn't going to work. We need meaningful, gainful employment where we're making things and we're getting paid for that, so that we can afford to buy the things we're making. And yeah, so, being IT, the computer programs can write the computer programs. Now, there's a lot of that in IT. Right, I need a program to report. I want this, this and this information out of this related data files. It may take days for a human to write that program, whereas the AI can write it in minutes.

Speaker 2:

Exactly. Yeah, that's true and a lot of like. For example, my dad used to be an engineer. He's retired now, but a lot of people that he's known like, yeah, their jobs are threatened, right. So, like, a lot of the tech industry right now is thinking what's what's going to happen? Yeah, what used to take them? As you pointed out, we used to take a person weeks to write and, of course, then they're paid and employed during those weeks. Now you just plug in a plug in an ai system and it does it for you.

Speaker 1:

So now, what were some of the things in your kind of challenge to challenge AI that, hey, anything you write, I can write better. What are some of the things that you did write as part of this overall concept project of comparison? Yeah, compare my work versus what chat, gpt or whatever may spew out.

Speaker 2:

Yeah well, part of it was to show that the human computer is just as impressive. Hopefully, as you know, the computers on your screen.

Speaker 2:

It just takes us a while to type it, it can, it can. So essentially I was writing a book a week for most of a year, so I ended up with 34 books and I did them in all genres and I did release as I was going through this project, I did release excerpts from the works that I was working on every week so people could get a sampling of the story. I released the summary and I actually went on a radio show a few months back where the host, who was very gracious his radio show was about reading AI stories, so he'd invite authors onto a show and have them. He'd cold, they didn't know what they were reading and he would have them read it and then ask the authors what do you think of this AI story, which I think is a great concept. It's funny, right?

Speaker 2:

So, with my permission, he took some of the summaries of my books and plugged them into AI and then gave me the script to read and I knew what I had written for my own books, and so then I read them and some of them were, you know, they ended up being short they weren't book length, obviously and some of them were interesting. Some of them were very odd and didn't really fit what I had written, but in the end it was sort of agreed upon, I guess, by the both of us. That you know, ai isn't matching up right now, so, ai, the dialogue was sort of stilted, the human reactions were off. So, like you know, someone would die and the other character would laugh.

Speaker 2:

Which is normally not the reaction you're hoping for in a serious novel. So yeah, so the reactions were off.

Speaker 1:

And it looks like it's the villain laughing.

Speaker 2:

No, that's true. Yeah, If the villain dies, maybe you laugh.

Speaker 1:

It's an evil laugh, but that's part of knowing the process and the point, of saying not just daddy laughed, the evil laugh. That makes the point, sets the tone.

Speaker 2:

So I think the thing that AI is lacking is that humans are also a mass of contradictions, so sometimes, as you pointed out, our reactions aren't you know, hey, someone dies and the villain laughs. That's perfectly okay for that kind of character. So I don't know how soon AI would be able to mimic those type of authentic human reactions. And so I, you know, as I've been telling a lot of people, one reason why I did this project was to actually hopefully inspire, because I've talked to a lot of authors when AI came onto the scene and they were getting sort of especially new writers, were saying you know, this is sort of depressing.

Speaker 2:

I've always wanted to write a book and now AI can just do it for me. Why should I write? And I'm like, well, you still should, because you have a story to tell and it's an authentic story from your own experience and that cannot be replicated. And so I wanted and several people thought, like you know, my project was inspiring. And they're like I'm going to you know what, after hearing what you're doing, I'm going to sit down tomorrow and start writing, and to me that is the biggest compliment ever. That is exactly what I wanted to happen.

Speaker 1:

Your own personal gratification that comes from knowing me, knowing every word in all of my books are my words. They came from me. Well, I like to say often I'm not that smart. They come from somewhere and come through me onto the page, Like most of my writings over the decades have come through dreams and I turn them into a book. I share that story. It's like I'm not that necessarily clever, so they're of me and from me, but really they're just through me.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, it often feels like that. It often feels like the story is just living out through your fingertips and you're just the one channeling it. So I definitely agree with that point. Because not always. Because, like, writing can be a lot of hard work, and I've done other careers in the. I wear a lot of hats, I'm also an editor, I'm also a ghost writer, so writing can be work, especially when you have a deadline around the corner. But, yeah, when, when you're just in the midst of creativity and you feel that flow, yes, the story is just there and you're just typing it up, it's already there.

Speaker 1:

I'm glad you said that, being a ghost writer, I have co-authored some things and reached out to others about co-authoring some things. You know, then, it's a collaboration and part you, part them. But indeed, some people might indeed have something Like I've got a few stories in me that I'm just not talented enough to write, stories in me that I'm just not talented enough to write, and, rather than using AI as the crutch, find another human that you can actually work with and haggle through things and get a real story from another human as a ghostwriter, and in that case I also consider that cheating at times. But I understand also at times some ghostwriters don't want their names on things, whereas other times, like all those O'Reilly Bill O'Reilly books right, with James Dugard, the Killing Series, it's him and it's really James Dugard writing the stories that he thought would be good, right. So having both names there, like written by John Doe, a story from John Smith that then also to me, is being more honest about what's going on.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, definitely. And yeah, ghostwriting is one of those weird sort of professions within publishing that normally you don't talk that much about, right, because it is meant to be sort of under the radar, but it can be. So one one type of ghostwriting I do is just, you know writing everything from scratch, you know coming up with the plot, doing every. You know sending that to the client and then writing from chapter one to that finished chapter. But some of the ghostwriting that I do is actually what you were mentioning is someone will come to me with sort of a partial draft or like maybe a very short draft, like maybe 30,000 words, something like that, and say you know what? I want this to be a book-length work and I want it to be expanded. Can you help me?

Speaker 2:

And so I call that sort of deep editing, because it's more than editing, it's more than telling the author what to do, because you're actually helping them do it. But you're trying to maintain the story that's in their heart and trying to bring it out onto the page. And you work very closely with the author in that situation. You have lots of conversations, you talk about it, you send drafts, you edit. So it's just as much work as writing a book from scratch, but it is definitely their vision and you're just helping it come out on the page.

Speaker 1:

So that's a lot of fun. The human condition and the human spirit, unlike the AI that only thinks it understands things based on what data it's mined.

Speaker 2:

That's true and yeah, there are. There's some evidence of that. I mean, well, ai also does mimic humans in certain ways. For example, it lies, which is it takes some of the worst aspects of humanity. I don't know if you saw. It doesn't pick the good stuff, it picks the bad stuff.

Speaker 1:

It picks the bad stuff, originally coded to kind of do so by humans who put all their baggage into it. Garbage in, garbage out, as the IT saying goes.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, but one of the things like I don't know if you saw recently it was the Chicago Sun-Times and they had come out with the summer reading list for 2025. Did you hear about this? Okay, so what happened is they had actually subcontracted the article out and the person who was writing it actually used AI instead to write this article, and so the AI got all the authors right, but it made up the books. So these books did not actually exist and they published it. They didn't fact check it, they didn't do anything and, of course, this is a well-respected newspaper. They didn't do any of that, Supposedly yeah.

Speaker 2:

Well, they just published it, and so people were like I would really like to read this book, I can't find it anywhere. Where are these books? And so it was like 10 books that were completely made up by AI and there had been no screening of it, nothing. So like AI lies, AI makes stuff up, so like can you trust it?

Speaker 1:

That reminds me of a story of someone a teacher that was saying right. Of someone, a teacher that was saying right, kids, the lack of morals that we're like back to the 60s. If it feels good, do it. You know, it doesn't matter what it is or how the ends justify the means. Cheating is okay if it lets me be lazy and get the A right. And teachers are calling them in because there are models that identify that AI wrote this. It can tell often and some of them will say admit yeah, okay, give me a chance, I'll actually write the paper. Okay, give me a chance, I'll actually write the paper and a lesson is actually learned there, as opposed to those who then, oh no, I wrote this, well, tell me about it. They can't tell them anything about it because they were even too lazy and too stupid to read what the AI gave them. They're turning in, so give me a quote. Well, they can't even paraphrase, let alone give you a quote, because they didn't read it.

Speaker 2:

No, that's true, and that is a very worrisome trend among students, but I mean students again. They'll take the shortcut if they can. Like a lot of students will, I mean at least if they were reading it.

Speaker 1:

And if AI indeed wasn't feeding a bunch of lies? In that case they might learn something in the process, but no learning is happening.

Speaker 2:

That's true, but even more worrisome to me at least, as a mom of three kids. A worrisome trend is actually teachers have started using AI in order to do their lesson plans, in order to do questions, and I know this from personal experience for my kids. They've come to me and said oh, my teacher used AI to generate this list of questions, exactly.

Speaker 2:

So that to me is a problem because and hopefully you know the teachers they're adults and they can look over what AI produces and hopefully modify it however they want. But it is worrisome if everyone is taking these shortcuts, like our learning curve they've done studies about since we got cell phones, since we got computers like we're having more problems learning because information is just there, you can just look it up, you don't have to remember it. Our memories are going down, really, so what?

Speaker 1:

does this mean? Yeah, as an IT guy? In my Christitutionalist Politics II book there's a quotations chapter. A couple Joe originals in there and one is I don't have it memorized either just paraphrasing right Never before in the course of human history have we had facts so readily available at our fingertips. But conversely, those who wish delusional bubbles have confirmation bias bull readily available to feed their delusion bull readily available to feed their delusion.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, the algorithm right. The algorithm of every site.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, it's such a shame. Yeah, I had something else I wanted to say.

Speaker 2:

I've forgotten now too, if I don't make a note. I'm the same way. I write lists. I like to write lists everywhere, but then of course I lose the list, and then I forget all right.

Speaker 1:

So I as a tool to help research oh, I know what it was. It was to back to what you were saying, the the laziness to not confirm anything like that story. These books don't actually exist when in kids in school and whatnot using them, they don't read any of it to learn anything out of it. It can be a good research tool, but it can't be your sole crutch Because, again, it wise, garbage in, garbage out. If it's data mining garbage, you're going to get garbage. It's like Wikipedia, right? Anyone can edit that and put whatever delusion they want in there. Oh, it At Twitter. I used to call it TWATER to be insulting, right, I call it today's TWATER. Attention span to your point about the studies. Details matter, but no, just give me the headline 250 characters, even though that could be misleading. Like a news story, the headline says one thing, but six paragraphs down you really get. It's the opposite of what they said in the headline.

Speaker 2:

Well, part of that is, of course, but it's the twatter attention span. No, that's true.

Speaker 1:

TikTok videos. Just give me the short version. I don't want to be bothered with details. They can't spell thesis, let alone write one that can stand scrutiny.

Speaker 2:

That's true. I mean, it's clickbait, right, and that's what makes money. So it's all about the almighty dollar in a lot of ways.

Speaker 1:

for that, Okay, Well, thank you, Alison McBain. I didn't do the McBain of my existence joke. Did you get a chance to hear the Rick Springfield Alison song that I mentioned?

Speaker 2:

I did hear that and actually I hadn't heard that one before, but I did. I get a lot the Elvis Costello, alison, okay yeah, there aren't a whole lot of songs with Alison as a title and not necessarily spelled the same.

Speaker 1:

Alison is one of those kind of names. It gets creatively written.

Speaker 2:

No, that's true. There's multiple ways to spell it.

Speaker 1:

So yours is 1-L-A-L-I-S-O-N-M-C-B-A-I-N. So to lay that out, because, as we just said, people might be putting in Allison, I can't find her because they're spelling it wrong and I'm sensitive to that, because my last name looks French it's not Lenard, it's Leonard, without an O. It was Leonard Owoskiewiczki or whatever Some Polish thing. At some time it got chopped up Right. So I'm sensitive to the whole name thing.

Speaker 2:

Exactly yeah.

Speaker 1:

Thank you for joining us today. Take care, god bless.

Speaker 2:

Oh, thanks so much for having me.

Speaker 1:

Thank you for having tuned in for Krista Tuchel's Politics Show. If you haven't already, please check out my primary internationally available book, terror Strikes, coming soon to a city near you, available anywhere books are sold. If you have locally run bookstores still near you, they can order it for you. And let me remind, over time the fancy high production items will come. But for now, for starters, it's just you as a very appreciated listener by me. All substance, no flaw, just straight to key discussion points. A show that looks at a variety of topics, mostly politics, through a Christian, us constitutionalist lens. So again, thank you from the bottom of my heart. Take care, god bless.

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