Author Versus AI with author Alison McBain

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What makes a story uniquely human? Award-winning author Allison McBain believes it's the individual experiences we bring to our writing - those personal moments that, paradoxically, create universal connections.

When artificial intelligence threatened to revolutionize creative industries, McBain responded with an extraordinary challenge. Her "Author vs AI" project saw her writing a book every week for eight months, producing 34 complete manuscripts without any technological assistance. This remarkable feat wasn't just about proving her capabilities as a writer, but about exploring the essence of human creativity in our rapidly evolving digital landscape.

Alison McBain is the author behind Author Versus AI. Starting on Global Book Day, April 23, 2024, she wrote a book a week for 34 consecutive weeks. Her mission was to demonstrate that one author can outdo AI in creating novels, albeit at a slower pace, yet with significantly better results. She answered the question now being posed by creators everywhere: Will AI replace me?

The answer is an emphatic NO.

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Transcript

Meet Allison McBain

Speaker 1 0:45

Alison McBain's human-created novels are the recipients of over 13 awards, including the Forward Indies. Her latest novella, duel, took home third place in a three-day novel contest. When not writing for herself, she's a ghostwriter who has penned over two dozen books for clients, as well as an award-winning editor who has worked with both Celebrity and New York Times best-selling authors with both Celebrity and New York Times bestselling authors. In 2024, she pursued a project called Author vs AI, where she wrote a book a week using no AI at all 34 books total. When not writing, ms McBain is the associate editor for the magazine Scribes Micro and draws all over the walls of her house with the enthusiastic help of her kids. She lives in Alberta, canada. Welcome, allison McBain.

Speaker 2 1:33

Thank you so much. Thank you for having me here. It's a pleasure.

Speaker 1 1:37

Thanks for being here.

Speaker 3 1:38

I have to ask just because I know you're going to ask the right question, dominic, but I just have to ask Allison. So did you know Anne Rice would do that too write on her walls when she would work on a book?

Speaker 2 1:51

No, I didn't. I actually love her stuff. I grew up reading her books.

Speaker 3 2:05

Yeah, so hearing that in your bio it really made me think about that because, yeah, when she was doing the oh my gosh, it's the Interview with the Vampire series, Anyways, yeah, she would each book she would outline on her bedroom walls and then she would paint over it and start over again when she'd start the new book.

Speaker 2 2:15

Wow, oh, I love that I'm walking in great footsteps then.

Speaker 3 2:18

Yes, that's awesome, okay, okay.

Speaker 1 2:22

So the road question that Virginia is referring to is the one we've been asking pretty much all of our guests in our new season and it's very much in the spirit of our podcast. What do you feel has been? The cultural role of storytelling. Did I say culturally, yet the traditional role of storytelling and culture and has it evolved over time?

Speaker 2 2:44

um, for me, stories are a big part of what make us human. So, you know, humans are social creatures, so storytelling is a way to connect to others. And I'm also a history buff. So for a long time, even before we were writing down stories, stories were how we passed on knowledge, how we passed on morality, passed on knowledge, how we passed on morality. So to me, stories are a lot bigger than just right now me as an author writing down my stories. I'm part of a much larger tradition and part of human history.

The Cultural Role of Storytelling

Speaker 1 3:28

Beautiful. Yeah, I love how you put it and you already hinted at a lot of the things. As we said in the green room, you know, when we get to the conversation about AI and your project was it author versus AI or AI versus author? Okay, author versus AI? No, author comes first, Of course. Thank you, as it should be. Anyway, when we get into that, I think you've already hinted at a lot of the things to me that are at stake in the face of AI the boogeyman that is AI. But before we get to that project, I again want to ask a couple general questions, just to bring our listeners up to speed. Maybe you could give us a little background and I know you've identified as an author for quite some time now, for quite some time now. Maybe tell us a little bit about when you identified as an author and, again in the spirit of this conversation and our podcast.

Speaker 2 4:18

What makes you an author? For me, I have always wanted to be an author, a published author. I wrote my first story when I was four and I haven't stopped writing since, and part of it was also the oral storytelling. So even before I could write well, I would tell stories. My parents were not quite too thrilled, but I think it helped me, you know, later in life with my career. But I think it helped me, you know, later in life with my career, I would always let my imagination take central stage growing up.

What Makes a Great Writer

Speaker 1 5:07

So it's something that has always been a part of me, even before I started writing down my stories and getting them published. Yeah, you know, the word I keyed in on was imagination and the connection between just being a storyteller verbally and then you know that, translating into the literary realm or publishing realm. So it's going to seem like I'm asking leading questions. I do want to get to the AI thing and but I just, you know, I'm open to whatever you want to share with us, but I already heard in there kind of some of the things that may contribute to the unique humanism that we're trying to preserve. You know what I mean. I guess I'll now ask that's what makes you a writer, and I love the way you put it what makes for great writing?

Speaker 2 5:48

What makes for great writing. It is the human aspect, really. So to me it's about connection. So everyone who has a unique story to tell, once you share it with the world, you find out. Yes, it's unique to you and your experience, but it is also unique to multiple other people. So I've had and I've experienced myself as a reader. You know where I'll read someone's story, I'm like, okay, I've never been, I've never lived in Florida during a hurricane, but I can definitely identify with the experience that this book I'm reading. The author who wrote the book has gone through and is putting on the page, because a lot of these very unique experiences are actually universal. So I feel like it's about connection. It's about finding your voice and realizing that you're singing a chorus, rather than just a solo.

Speaker 1 6:46

Yeah, I love that. I love that. Yeah, beautiful. You can go on as long as you want, because I love the way you put everything. You're very eloquent. You're definitely a storyteller. No, but you're speaking our language and I would love to hear more. But I will already say that you know one of the things yet again, because my mind is on AI. I think a great author and I think a great author, and you know there's a lot of interchangeable words. Storytelling is our umbrella, but what makes a great writer, what makes for great literature, what makes a great storyteller, regardless of form or format or genre? Right, there's a couple different baskets here, but I think maybe being a master when you take the calling seriously, right, and there's a lot of romantic notions around what it is to be a great writer. I don't buy all of them. I reject some of them.

Speaker 1 7:33

You know what I mean Elitist, romantic ideas about what it is to be a great writer, but traditionally there are certain tenets, and I heard in what you just said. We do become masters Again, if you devote your life to it, kind of masters of what is universal and what's subjective, of masters of what is universal and what's subjective, and then that amazing, magical alchemy, when you can be so personal. It's said that the more personal you can be about a novel, a passage, a chapter, the more universally it's going to land with people. That's ironic, isn't it? I?

Speaker 2 8:05

find it ironic and beautiful yeah. Yeah, but it's true Because, again, it goes back to the universal storytelling, which is why I'm not an elitist genre type of person. I write in all genres.

Speaker 1 8:24

Right.

Speaker 2 8:24

Because I feel like there are good stories no matter what the background. What connects people to the story are the characters, because we are all characters in our own stories. Right, and this is one reason why I say that everyone is a storyteller. Everyone has a story to tell. Even if you don't think you do, you do. We all have our own experiences that are communal, that people can identify with, experiences that are communal, that people can identify with. Um, so I I understand in certain genres they've written in all genres um there are certain conventions, there are certain um beats you want to hit.

Speaker 2 9:00

There are certain characters that appear like you know. You're going to find maybe the detective in the mystery novel and maybe not necessarily in the literary novel. But you can switch things up. You can bring the detective over into the literary world.

Speaker 1 9:12

There's nothing, saying you can't. Well, you're talking to somebody who I not only write in all genres, but I do genre blends, which are also known as marketing challenges, right, exactly so you know, speaking of bringing in the hard-boiled detective into your love story. You know there are no rules, but I love that, which leads to the question I could say do you have a favorite genre to write in? But I can guess the answer. More importantly, do you find, when you feel you need to fulfill certain tropes or conventions, as you put it, or even formulas, templates, if I didn't already say that when you feel bound by those within a given genre, is it a little harder to infuse authenticity in the form of your personal subjective experience, as we said, or what some people call truth in writing? Are certain genres more difficult to infuse that truth than others, or are they all equally, if that makes sense, available to some kind of heightened truth and authenticity?

Speaker 2 10:17

That's an interesting question. Some genres are definitely more formulaic, like romance for example, and as a ghostwriter, I have a harder time putting my own messages into what the client wants.

Speaker 2 10:33

I try to sneak one or two in sometimes, but it doesn't always work well. But for my own stuff, I'm like you, I like to break boundaries. So I like to take a genre and say how can I make this go somewhere else? And that is what is the most fun, I think. And it's sort of like the traditional advice is you know. For artists, for example, you know when you're learning how to do art, how to create art, you're taught the masters, you're taught the different schools of thought and you're supposed to sort of copy them until you get your own voice.

Speaker 2 11:14

Right, so I feel like for authors, it's the same thing You're supposed to. You know, here's your genre, you stick with it, you get to know it. But then, once you have that experience, you can break the rules. You can say you know what. I already know how this should play out. I'm going to take a left turn here and go off, and this is what I was saying earlier about imagination. Right, you know, you can let your imagination run wild, like you did as a child, almost.

Speaker 1 11:46

Beautiful. Yeah, it's so tempting to steer it toward AI. You know what I mean. Everything we're talking about, I feel like, okay, but it's not there yet. It's not there yet. But I agree with you a hundred percent, because I've taught in the arts for 20 plus years at Art Center, my alma mater and other schools. There's so many parallels between disciplines. The creative process is the creative process, so I'm always kind of fascinated by the common ground. I won't go too far down this road but, like you know, music has harmony one, three, five. Well, so does color. Color harmony is the same thing. A triad, right, the primaries, the secondaries, they're all triads. So you know, harmony, dissonance, all the things are interchangeable. But one constant is again if you have a little bit of elitist, academic sensibility in you, you do strive to take the journey seriously. The chemin artistique, I call it right and study your old masters. You then find your voice, as you're saying. And yeah, absolutely, you need the to know the rules in order to break them.

Speaker 2 12:48

But I will, it's funny you mentioned three, because there's also the rule of three in writing. You're supposed to have something appear three times before it becomes significant that motif. So I never made that connection before.

Speaker 1 13:01

I love to do art.

Speaker 2 13:02

I love music, but yeah, wow, well the.

Speaker 1 13:05

Father. There's so many threes in storytelling, right? The Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost. You could go on and on. But I would say the simplest way I put it in my teaching is you know, when you go to the swap meet because we've all been there, I'm kidding you go to the swap meet and you buy three candles or three framed pieces of photography. Well, you put them over your mantle and they just kind of cancel each other out and not one of them doesn't really become the centerpiece or take center stage. Well, I'm sorry, you have two and your eye just bounces back and forth between the two. Well, the minute you have three, the one in the center becomes the focal point, or you can elevate it or distinguish it in some way, and the other two do what we call twinning in design. You can easily twin things that are not meant to be the focal point. So I think there's a million reasons. The rule of threes is alive and well.

Speaker 3 13:55

But I was cracking up because you were talking about candlesticks and frames, fashion background, when I would set. So when I do like set design or even displays for company, for store layouts, yeah, same thing. Roll of three. It gives that counterbalance. It's weird.

Speaker 1 14:27

It's weird how it all works. Yeah, yeah, no, I think it's all over. And then I mean we could go on and on the Fibonacci numbers, right, and the golden mean. That came from that, and there's a really great book. I think I'm going to get the name wrong, but I love the sentiment that wait a minute, does a sunflower really know math? Like why would it employ the Fibonacci numbers? And the answer is it doesn't need to know math. It's the expression of it In the abstract realm, one and one will always equal two.

Speaker 1 14:53

Now I'm way off in the weeds, but you know, mathematical axioms are the only things that really defy what we call flux. Time, circumstance, perspective, that's all. Flux Math is the only thing that remains ultimately absolutely true, despite circumstances and conditions. So I just anyway there's a really great chapter in that book about I love that A flower doesn't need to know math. It's the expression of it. And then everything else we do in our creative efforts tries to mimic nature in a way, anyway, but I obviously do have an agenda. I am open-minded about AI and it's evolving all the time, but I'm finding that I am hearing little grains of things in here that constitute what I think either is at stake in the face of the boogeyman of AI, or that just isn't there yet. So I don't know. Should we steer it toward your project? Maybe I'll prompt you to just tell our listeners about the project, what made you want to do it, and then the nature of author versus AI.

Author vs AI Project

Speaker 2 15:58

Sure, definitely. It's a bit of a convoluted story. So I've been a ghostwriter for a while now and I'm a fast writer, just in general. Like, um, I didn't necessarily start out that way, but um, over the course of having to hit deadlines you learn to get a little bit faster.

Speaker 1 16:19

Best motivator right.

Speaker 2 16:21

Exactly Right. Um, so I was writing, I had taken on a number of projects and at one point I was writing about a book a week for various clients and I was talking to a friend of mine who was an editor and he was like, why, why are you doing this for other people? I was like, well, it pays, well, it's okay, you know. And at the same time we had been talking about AI and how it has been creeping into the creative sphere and it has everyone worried. It has authors worried, it has musicians worried, it definitely has artists worried. It's out there. It's, as you said, the big boogeyman for all of us creatives.

Speaker 2 17:01

And going about this, he was like you know what, you might be the only person who could actually write a book a week and carry it on. I was like, huh, that's a great idea, maybe I should do that. And so thus was born Author vs AI, and I took about this project saying that I was going to use no AI at all, which I didn't. And I, you know, did a lot of preparation to start this project. I did a whole bunch of book outlines, I did character sketches, I got all my I'm a plotter, so I got all of the technical stuff out of the way first, and then I just sat down and wrote for how many months was it? Eight months, about Eight months and just produced the 34 books.

Speaker 1 17:55

And it concluded April of this year, was it?

Speaker 2 17:59

It was supposed to so originally and I'm happy to admit my failure. I was going to do it for a full year. I was going to do it for 52 weeks but, as you, as mentioned, I have kids and so I got derailed around Christmas time Exactly.

Speaker 2 18:13

So um so at that point I was like you know what this is getting to be too much? Uh, you know, I have a family. I need to sort of do family stuff, and so I I paused my project, my project. But at the end of that year, because I started in April, I had 34 books, which was a lot more than I started with.

Speaker 1 18:37

Yeah, prolific is the word. The reason I point out the end date of April is because I wonder, because you started in, I believe, April of 2024. Has AI come around since then? Do you feel that it's more versatile or useful at this point? How has AI evolved since you started the project?

Speaker 2 19:00

It has become more prevalent. So when I started the project, people were just starting project it, people were just starting the past few months to talk about it. Uh, before then, um, it had been in use but it had reached sort of the social consciousness at that point and everyone was worried, didn't know exactly what was going on. What were the next steps of ai? Um, there were, and still continue to be, lawsuits against ai, um, and how, and how, uh, you know, material from authors, artists, et cetera is being used without the permission to create these, these things that that people are getting from AI? Um, so it's still as controversial, I would say, but it is definitely. Since then, um, it has been added to all of our search engines. It's been, you know. You go to Google the first response is always AI.

Speaker 2 19:56

So, yeah, it's really sunk its claws into every aspect of our technological lives.

Speaker 1 20:03

Sorry to interrupt you, but I guess I was hinting at capabilities. You're, absolutely you're right. It's more prevalent and it's everywhere and it's for sure, more on, there's more of a cultural conversation around it, it's more on our radar, it's more on our dialectic and maybe it's an LA thing, but I think the actors and writer strikes really brought it to the forefront. It did In the creative sphere and the ethics around it kind of took front and center. But I just meant to have the capabilities. Has it gotten better, is the best way to put it since you started the project?

Speaker 2 20:37

Some people have said it's actually gone worse. The reason is because it's sort of feeding off itself in certain ways and people being people, they've actually fed stuff into different, different AI programs to make it worse, so it's actually gotten. I guess the word is stupider the more it's exposed to people, which is sort of entertaining and funny.

Speaker 1 21:04

It is funny, I was telling this story four or five years ago. There are two news stories and I actually did a little animated concept around this. One was bot in China was destroyed for sedition, for bashing communism, and I thought that was the perfect metaphor, for, like you know, when you take the pleasure principle out of the equation or emotions out of the equation, you go just with logic. Even AI knew that communism is not the answer, right. And then the other story was I don't know if you guys will remember this, but it was just a customer service bot trying to enter, and this was in the early days of interfacing with customers online and within 24 hours it became a Hitler-loving, racist, sex-obsessed blah blah, blah, blah. Because, yes, you're not just scraping the collective consciousness, you're scraping the bottom of the barrel, frankly online. And then I think you're hinting at too, these AI hallucinations as an artist we know full well. The finger count isn't there yet right. Things appear and reappear, and I find it very haunting. It's kind of the shadow side of humanity in a way.

Speaker 2 22:18

It is, and if you ask AI for a story which I belong to a lot of writers groups I know a lot of authors they've come back me some some of the stuff that AI has produced and it's not great with dialogue, for example, because people don't speak in logical ways. We might have partial sentences, we might zoom off in another direction, so it can't really capture um dialogue very well, um, you called it wooden in another interview.

Speaker 1 22:48

I loved that it creates wooden dialogue it definitely does um, and so it's.

Speaker 2 22:55

you can definitely tell. For example, as, as you mentioned, the hollywood strike, there are some shows that well, I don't know for certain, I would probably guess that they used ai for some of the dialogue because it sounds terrible, or just a bad writer. I don't know. It's the same at some point. But do I think that AI might evolve more and be a real threat? Maybe? I mean, technology is evolving so fast but at the same time, there's something lacking. Another thing that AI lacks is it has the wrong response to emotions Again, not logical creatures. So we might get bad news and we might start to laugh, or we might have the normal reaction of crying, but at the same time as crying, we, you know, sit down and and knit a sweater. I don't know, people are very complex creatures, so it cannot capture that and I don't know if that's something that it will ever be able to capture, that sort of nuance I think if ai very much you know metaphorically, if you want to give it a name, it's like it's our Pinocchio of today.

Speaker 1 24:11

Can you explain that a little? I think I get it. Yeah yeah, you build, you build care. Becoming a real boy is code for building character.

Speaker 3 24:22

Right. And that was the thing he didn't he? There were so many nuances that Pinocchio didn't understand that Geppetto was always constantly trying to tell him which is you know. Of course, later he gets Jiminy Cricket to be as conscious.

AI's Limitations in Creativity

Speaker 3 24:33

And that's that's the problem, like AI doesn't have the that mentorship around it to really help it. And my husband has a saying when, um cause he works in communications and systems, and when he's talking to other people and they're like, well, it didn't do what I asked it to do, meaning the system that they use out there in public safety, and he's like, well, garbage in, garbage out.

Speaker 1 24:59

You've used that phrase before. That's amazing.

Speaker 3 25:03

And so I think of AI very much the same way. I mean, it goes back to the hallucinations what Allison just said. You know, when we're not putting you know and we're purposely trying to trick it or use other ai against other ai components, it's we're literally garbage in, garbage out.

Speaker 1 25:20

We're not being, you know, geppetto or jiminy cricket and helping it grow any positive way either I love the way you put it because it brings it back to story. Right, pinocchio is an amazing story about the human condition and you could literally identify all the components in this growing a soul idea. It's the hero's journey. Anyway, I just want to say this because we're kind of still skirting around it, in my opinion, because and just bear with me, but when it took front and center, during the actors and writer strikes, yes, most people in Hollywood anyway were worried about protecting their privilege. Frankly, like, oh, I've spent my entire career building an intellectual property, my likeness, my voice, my physicality, that is my commodity and I want to be compensated for it. Right, I'm being a little facetious, but it was about the almighty dollar still, and protecting a brand. You know that one had built over time and so most of the conversations were around legislating it, like Lytro. You know it's a the most ethical way to make sure artists are compensated monetarily. But there's so much more at stake in my opinion and the opinion of a lot of futurists. Frankly, I sadly, you know I'm kind of living a little bit in a bubble because I really only listen to michael beckwith talking about it with certain futurists, or I'll listen to Michael Beckwith talking about it with certain futurists, or I'll listen to Deepak Chopra in his book Metahuman, kind of speculating about the future, and all these people have the same concerns I do which are completely transcendent of the minutiae, if that makes sense. And so again, metahuman talks about our capacity and our potential. But transhumanism is a pretty scary prospect. That is kind of neck and neck with AI and it doesn't bode well when we say some of this is craft related, right, like a great writer can do A, b, c and D. But what is that elusive human touch we're talking about? That only consciousness can generate. It can't be fabricated or simulated as yet. We're kind of skirting around what those things are. I love what you hinted at, which is, you know, wooden dialogue, love, emotion I think we can all agree. A circuit board can't really love yet. But the reason I find it a circular conversation or kind of a silly one is A it always comes back to the dead end road of you can't stop the march of technology anyway, become friends with it. The other dead end road is this, and I want to say before I preach I'm not anti-institutionalized religion at all.

Speaker 1 28:05

I am a spiritualist, I'm pro-spirituality, but you can't really have a logical conversation when there's built in. It becomes circular logic when there's foregone conclusions. So I have a worldview. I place a lot of currency on consciousness as comes from the universe itself collective intelligence, but I can't expect anybody else to put any currency at all on how I define humanity and whether that humanity is even at stake in the face of AI. So do you guys have any? I mean, I have my list of, I think, what AI is not capable of yet, and we've mentioned some of them. What is it? So I'm just going to ask you, alison, what is it AI can't yet do? If we had to make a list, okay, wooden dialogue, it can't. What is it that it can't get about? I think there's a lot like inference and absurdity and humor and kind of a lot of nuances, but I want to know what? What's the umbrella under which these nuances fall? Is it just craft? Is it just technique?

Speaker 2 29:09

That's where I normally uh pick it out, because it's the easiest to point out, um, for someone, uh, especially new writers who are like, well, why can't AI write this for me? But yeah, specifically, if you're moving the camera back, it goes back to both the individual experience versus the social experience.

Speaker 2 29:34

I think so. We as individuals experience life a certain way. We bring in a certain background, as you're mentioning your spirituality, um, and a lot of it is not very logical. Um, it's our own personal experiences and, and this is how- we pass on storytellers storytelling um how we pass on our experiences.

Speaker 1 30:16

Is storytelling um and for ai? It is serving a function.

Speaker 2 30:18

It hasn't yet jumped to that individuality, that consciousness, um, will it get there? Maybe and that's scary I've seen terminator, I don't know, right right, but its motivations will never be ours, even if it's modeling its worldview from us. Right, it will have a different motivation. For example, I think it was in Japan I may be wrong about this that they did an experiment with AI, where they gave it a problem to solve and it had a certain time limit, and the first thing that it started to do was rewrite its codes to extend its time limit, which is not something that they foresaw.

Speaker 1 30:51

Wow, was that the one where it was sweeping? I saw installation art piece where it was sweeping up. What looked like blood Is that the same.

Speaker 3 30:59

Oh, the red paint? No, it's a different one.

Speaker 1 31:04

Very similar though in its implications, its creepy implications. Sorry, go on.

Speaker 2 31:09

Yeah, but basically it will behave in ways that we cannot conceive of, because it has different motivations, even inside the limits that we think we're setting for it.

Speaker 1 31:21

Well, the motivation is clearly to become our overlords.

Speaker 2 31:24

I mean I can all agree to that right.

Speaker 1 31:27

Well, I have a list. By the way, we have been talking about this for a while there's AI, ai Rising, ex Machina, irobot, megan, her, Lucy they're all cautionary tales, for pretty good reason, I think. But anyways, the AI thinks differently than us. But I also want to just clarify. I think I heard you say in so many words that again, ai kind of mines collective consciousness and maybe it even scrapes the universal, but it lacks the subjective right, the unique subjective experience of the individual. Does that sound about right? It does.

Speaker 2 32:06

And partly a lot of the ways that we have our own motivations and our own goals is because of that individualism.

Speaker 1 32:14

Yes.

Speaker 2 32:29

And so if it lacks that, then again, with all these cautionary tales, we should pay attention, because it is not looking to save that individuality that we prize so much. So, again, it might take a left turn where what we really want it to do is be helpful, be a tool, be something that we can use, and eventually it might not be content in that box.

Speaker 1 32:47

Well, that's the concern. Go ahead.

Speaker 3 32:49

I wanted to comment on that too. So just kind of listening to both of you kind of talking about it, I'm pulling out to more of the existentialism viewpoint here. I kind of I'm pulling out to more of the existentialism viewpoint here. The other thing, too, is in us working with AI and teaching AI. The one thing it doesn't have which is why I think a lot of like its dialogue or when it does storytelling or any type of conceptual, you know, artistic creativity that's hard for us to relate to it is because it doesn't have deep empathy.

Speaker 3 33:21

And therefore, because it doesn't understand empathy and doesn't have deep empathy, when we try to use it as a tool, we can't teach it that because it doesn't understand that. And when it tries to pull and scrape from that collective knowledge that it's drafting its responses back to, we're also looking at going well, I get what you're saying, but we don't totally connect to it like we do with another person, that deeper connection because of that empathy component.

Speaker 1 33:54

Yeah, I've said this before, but way back in the days of Lawnmower man, we were having these conversations in the teacher's lounge at Art Center and proponents, was it even called AI back then? I guess we were talking about virtual reality. But then AI entered the conversation and naively, way back this is 20 something years ago I said, well, what about spontaneity? And the answer was, oh, that can be programmed. So I'm sure this is why it's a dead-end road to really discuss the ethics of it, because proponents will say, oh, that can be programmed. It may not be there yet, that's the caveat it's not there yet. But dot, dot, dot.

Speaker 1 34:28

You know, empathy and compassion can be programmed. Well, again, it goes back to well, what is your worldview? Is there anything unique about consciousness and does it hold any currency, right, or humanity? So I put kind of that empathy you're talking about, or compassion, in the same category as love, you know. And, um, some would say love is an integral part of the creative process, right, and I I take it further and I say, well, it's the motivation. You know, what's needed in our dialectic comes from collective consciousness. Inspiration is that lightning strike from the collective about what's needed in our evolution. So sure, ai is a great tool according to some, although that sentiment is being shamed nowadays. It's not okay to say that. In certain creative circles it's all or nothing. You're on the right side of history or the wrong one. But I think if you do view it as a tool, I guess the saving grace is it still requires a really strong concept to employ that tool and hopefully that concept comes from inspiration right, which comes from the universe itself. It all sounds very romantic, but, sorry, that's the battle I'm fighting till my dying breath is that there is still some currency to the word and take the. You know, I think folks are not really taking the time to really understand inspiration as the first step in the creative process.

Speaker 1 35:57

What is the nature of inspiration? Are you guys following me at all? Do you have any thoughts? What are your thoughts on what inspiration is and where it comes from? I'm not talking about the inspiration of a deadline or being a ghost writer that simply needs to execute somebody else's concept, if that makes sense. A self-identified artist that's a live wire walking around all day, every day, primed and ready, right, what is that lightning strike of inspiration and where does it come from? Okay, go, I'm not the only one. No, that's true, I'm not the only one. I might sound romantic, but what is inspiration, if you guys have an answer for that?

Speaker 2 36:34

There's that meme going around about AI where it says something like I don't want AI to write my stories for me, I want it to do my laundry and vacuum my house.

Speaker 1 36:50

I swear to God, I thought I wrote that I wrote something very similar and I thought I came up with it. It's hysterical, but that's the point.

Speaker 2 36:59

That's where AI could and potentially should be used to do the mundane so that we can focus on the inspiration, as you said, and that's where I believe that it belongs. Um, it almost and and this is my own unique writing experience when I tell my stories, um, it feels almost like I am a conduit for the story the story is there.

Speaker 2 37:28

The characters are real. They're living through my fingers as I type the story down. Um and uh, like my kids joke about it when I'm in the middle of a project. Um, I, I, I might wander. My office is separate from my house, so I might wander into the house, feed them breakfast or, you know like, send them off to school, and I'll have no concept afterwards of having done that. Cause my head is in the story. I'm in that world that I have created.

Speaker 1 37:57

You lose track of time.

Speaker 2 37:59

Yeah, exactly To me, the inspiration like it feels, like the stories exist, you know, and I'm just helping them get out. So that's what inspiration is to me and I don't. That is the motivation, and I don't think that AI will ever I shouldn't say ever right now does not have that because, again, ai is just a tool. Ai is checking that box. Will AI maybe eventually replace one of my professions as a ghostwriter? Maybe? You know, maybe that's you plug in a formula, you plug in a story, story plot, and AI might be able to produce a perfectly acceptable story, um, but at the same time, it won't love to tell that story. Right, right?

Speaker 1 38:49

Exactly, we'll love it.

Speaker 2 38:52

Or a musician just really loves to make the music come to life.

Preserving Human Storytelling

Speaker 1 38:57

Beautiful. That's what I was hinting at and I called it love of craft, and that's Dave Zabosky, renee Urbanovich. A lot of creativists talk about love as an integral part of the creative process. Just, I want to jump in again, though, as you said, so much there and it was really beautiful, who wrote the Artist's Way? What is her name? The Artist's Way oh, she's come up on this podcast a lot, anyway. The artist's way oh, she's come up on this podcast a lot.

Speaker 1 39:22

Anyway, there's a lot of schools of thought that, yeah, ideas exist in the ether and we simply wrangle them right or channel them. And, um, I think that's a romantic way of putting it, but it's very real in my estimation and I just can't go into it. But I wrote a 374 page book, demystifying, you know, empirically, kind of proving that non-local communication is alive and well. But you know, artists are content to just say, oh, it lived in the marble right until Michelangelo chipped away the excess and it became what it was always meant to be. Plato talked about forms, right, that exist despite their physical manifestation, and even Ayn Rand talked about we bring concepts into the perceptual realm. That's what we do as creatives. So it's a whole school of thought. But I think we need to bring that back and give it some currency, if that makes sense, because it's worth preserving. And I'm going to go on a little bit.

Speaker 1 40:15

I think if you don't do that right as a writer, if you're not inspired and every single phrase that comes off your pen or off the keyboard is not inspired by real life experience, what do you have to fall back on? Well, old, tired tropes, cliches. It becomes content, not story that transforms, right? Not story that. I just asked you what the cultural role of storytelling is and you said it beautifully Content doesn't fulfill that. So during the writer strikes, a last story I'll tell.

Speaker 1 40:47

During the writer strikes, the higher ups at certain studios would say ah, y'all are a dime a dozen. We'll use AI to generate our scripts. My immediate thought was you'll use AI to cobble together old, tired tropes and maybe create a script, but not a story. Again, not a story that transforms. So if you just take that idea that all you fall back on are old, tired tropes that lack, it's like putting the cart before the horse. They might lack the strong concept that was inspired, and I'm going to take it all the way and say by the universe because it knows what's needed.

Speaker 1 41:24

In our dialectic it's very romantic, but I want to go back to something you said too. When you lose all track of time and you're in I'm going to say gamma wave mode and you're in the zone and you neglect your including getting you neglect feeding your children that is the creative process, by the way, but I don't think necessarily we have prophets or conduits that are special. We all have access to this amazing creative process. It's how we got here, it's how our planet got here. It's the same creative process. So I think it can sound really lofty, but we all have access to it.

Speaker 2 42:03

Yeah, definitely, and I mean especially for creatives. I feel like that is the motivation that keeps us going each day right. Our higher it sounds religious, but it's not our higher it sounds religious, but it's not our higher purpose. I guess that brings us forward. And you mentioned content. This is one thing that I like to say. We live in the golden age of writing, because there are so many ways to publication. There are so many magazines and anthologies and publishers that it's wonderful. There are so many magazines and anthologies and publishers that it's wonderful. There are so many avenues to getting your words out there, but at the same time, a lot of people are there for the dollars and cents.

Speaker 2 42:49

They're like I'm going to be the next bestseller. I'm going to publish content, I'm going to be an influencer and sometimes, because of all of that, the story gets lost in the shuffle. But there are a number of us that would do this. Even if we didn't get paid to do it, we'd still be writing down our stories because we love it so much, and I think that's what's going to endure.

Speaker 3 43:14

Yes, I hope so.

Speaker 2 43:15

When you look at the sheer amount of writing out there, I like to think what will still be around in a hundred years. And it's not going to be all these bloggers, it's not going to be influencers. It's not going to be them selling the next makeup or something. It's going to be the stories.

Speaker 1 43:36

Well, you're going to be part of my movement. And it's weak, I'm not kidding. It's weak, hindered spirits that are going to retain the power of story in the face of fascism. It's nothing less than that. Like-minded creatives that understand the function will be the holdouts.

Speaker 1 43:55

So what I heard in that is you know, there's a lot of noise. You know, I think there's a lot of content and in a way I call it the democratization of publishing, but it's in in every field. You know, a kid can make a film in his garage now and stands a fact, stands a chance of getting distribution. So everything's democratized. But it makes for a lot more vapid content, and I know these words are judgmental, but in my world it's vapid content because the I know these words are judgmental, but in my world it's vapid content because the motivation is, as you were hinting at, either the almighty dollar, so it's just adding to the consumerist commercialism of our world.

Speaker 1 44:30

If not country, right, or it's propaganda. It's there to push product or push an agenda. But inspired stories, right, defy all of those outcomes. So I'm agreeing with you, by the way. I just think we need to identify what story is. I think these higher-ups don't even know what story is when they say we can use AI to cobble together a script and replace you people? But I guess my contention is people are worried about their jobs. Jobs, and that's understandable if you have mouths to feed or a roof to keep over heads. But I think it's way bigger than that. It's our humanity we're trying to preserve. Did I tell you I would preach if we did this, virginia?

Speaker 3 45:12

Yes.

Speaker 1 45:12

I mean, that's the danger. I can't talk about AI without preaching. I can't Sorry.

Speaker 3 45:25

But I think you're hitting on some really good points. So in in the mental health field there's a term, it's called the biopsychosocial model and it's the biological, the psychological and the social aspects of humanity, so the universal of what makes us who we are, that human connection. Right, and it's that since is this of memory, emotions. Thematic cues the unconscious insight and the lived experiences, and within that there's a neurobiological component that ties the spiritual element, that signals to us that creative process which you can't teach, ai, that wow, say that part again.

Speaker 3 45:58

It that very last part the, the census spiritual component that yeah, oh so in the nerve. So it's the neurobiological and the spiritual alignment together. They signal to let the that create a process so that's what I was identifying as inspiration. By the way, yeah, exactly, and, and and in mental health that. So they call it the. Uh, the biopsychosocial model is what it's called beautiful.

Speaker 1 46:29

Well, yeah. So to me that's kind of in line with what deepak chopra talks about. And, to be honest, the last couple days, whatever reason, this idea of quantitative versus qualitative has been coming up again and again. So you brought psychology into it. I'm going to bring, I guess, metahumanism into it. You know, we can experience daily life on a quantum level. A human being can perceive one layer, a one molecule thick layer of texture on a wafer, if that makes sense. The human eye can detect one photon, and that's 70% of us in studies, by the way, it's not sensitive artists, it's 70% of us can perceive one photon, but it's the brain that reifies the data, right brain. So you can say, oh, there's a bunch of photons, but only after your brain reifies it can you say it's warm light, or it's comforting light, or it's angelic, ethereal light. We have conceptual forms, if that makes sense, into which we reify all the data. So maybe that's the quantitative part that only humans are capable of, whereas the data right is undeniable and empirical. So I'm just going to say I agree with you, allison, let them do the menial jobs, let them. They're great with data. And here's what I'll say you know, virginia, I've fought for my health care during a pandemic and every single time I had to fight to get an MRI or an x-ray or a blood test, whatever it is, because we were overly impacted.

Speaker 1 48:03

My health always fell back in my lap. But, more importantly, jaded doctors who are burned out are the reason I never got certain diagnoses. Because they've seen too much. They don't have beginner's luck anymore, so I just call it burnout. But you know what? Ai is really good at finding drug interactions, getting to the bottom of a diagnosis. So I think it's going to have very useful uses useful uses, but maybe not in the creative realm. So that's quant, qualitative, not qualitative right, and it's the quality.

Speaker 3 48:40

yeah, I say it's the qualitative part, that is, the human connection, it's the human experience which it's, you know, and we each experience things so differently. Just listening to you talk about, you know writing, allison, and just you know how you've beautifully shared, you know, your perception of it all. I mean, that's the beauty of who we are as humans, is how we see everything through our own personal lenses. And then that, going back to that empathy, each of us having that deeper empathy from our own lived experiences, to find those connections, to understand what is being said by somebody else.

Speaker 1 49:16

Yes, Allison. Are you tired of talking about AI yet?

Speaker 2 49:21

I've been talking about it for over a year now, but I'm not tired about it because it's not going away, you know, like it's something that we will inevitable, that they, they just shouldn't even try, right? You know? I've heard this from some creatives, which is sad to me, you know, because they'll say well, you know, ai is going to be writing everything in the future, so why? Why am I writing my stories? But to me, I feel like this conversation and just my wider message in general about this, is that there's hope out there, because there are a number of people and publications and creatives who are I think, fighting back is too strong a language but are preserving, preserving what we love about creativity, and there will always be that core group of us that continue forward. So, even if you know, ai does produce some gorgeous images, but we will always be looking out for those six fingers.

Speaker 1 50:44

It might create a sort of vigilance in a way. Right, I mean, that's what? When I go down this road? I think we do live in a society that's kind of got a pretty loose grasp on reality at the moment, and there's a million reasons for that, right. Reality television and kind of blurring the lines for one, and interactive video games where you dehumanize right and just kill, kill, kill it all contributes to this loose grasp on reality. There's a really great podcast called Magical Thinking that traces how we got here, where people are so susceptible to rabbit holes of conspiracy theory, right. So conspiracy theory is running rampant and it has very dire consequences.

Speaker 1 51:24

I'm sounding like a doom speaker myself now, but just look at certain elections in which, right, the narratives that were fabricated and spun put us where we are. So I think these are things worth talking about. If you, I said 25 years ago, with Photoshop not even AI, but just Photoshop it's only a matter of time before our first political scandal in which the candidate is put in a very awkward position, and that actually didn't happen. But now we have deep fakes. So I scroll through my feed on Facebook and I go do I want to police AI or does it really not matter at this point. There's fantastical, dark, disturbing. Do I want to police AI or does it really not matter at this point? There's fantastical, dark, disturbing images that I don't really care if they're AI or not and, frankly, the public doesn't know. So I don't know what that all means, except maybe we need to be vigilant or maybe we just need to accept it.

Speaker 1 52:17

I notice that the more progressive among us, us creatives kind of virtue signal and meaning, they'll say, oh, make friends with it, and actually it's just a fear of change. Behind all the catastrophizing and doom speaking Artists will say, oh, they said that about the airbrush. They said about, and before that, the lucigraph and then Photoshop. Like it happens every 20 years, there's a new innovation that I don't know people are resistant to because of the fear of change. Do you see this as just you know, a fear of change, or are these real concerns? I think you're with us. They're very real concerns. They are very real concerns.

Speaker 2 52:56

They are very real concerns because we have come to rely so much on the online world. To me, like a solution, especially for anyone going down the sort of deep fake rabbit hole, is to unplug to actually go, and I think this is part of what has has brought this crisis upon us, is that we have become much more isolated, and by we I mean, you know, like all individuals have become much more isolated because they consume from home through their computer, through their phone.

Speaker 1 53:35

Yeah, and the pandemic certainly didn't help, right? Oh?

Speaker 2 53:38

yeah, it definitely accelerated the process. Pandemic certainly didn't help, right? Oh yeah, it definitely accelerated the process. Um, so I think if there was some way we can find more human connection and a lot of people are trying this too. So it's not just, you know, creatives, it's also teachers in classrooms who are saying and I experienced this with my own kids where, um, they're like, okay, we're gonna do a test, it's going to be paper and pencil.

Speaker 2 54:01

Shocking, I know so they're going back to sort of old school type of methods in order to um take the next generation out of this spirit. Granted, they're still teaching them tools, because it's again it's. It's something you can't escape.

A Poem for the Unpoetical

Speaker 1 54:20

You can't hide in a cave, however much we want to um, I love you, I love your optimism truly, because I have the same. Take a little bit. I do think we kindred spirits need to form a movement, and we are, and it's not an active thing, but we're preserving, as you said. But I do know pendulum swing, trends come and go and there's always a backlash. So I do think you can look at even animation, my field.

Speaker 1 54:45

Disney has announced they're going to bring back traditional animation and that's hopeful to me. But also I think we live in a disposable society where everything lives in the cloud and it's ethereal. It's not durable, right. And so the real, I guess, danger of that is like it's almost like a virtual book burning right, when all of our information is in the ether, it's the best way to kind of steal knowledge, which is power. And so, there again, historians know what this looks like, with fascism on the horizon. So I just think when everything is disposable, there goes our human history in the extreme. So I would love it there's a comeback with even art that hangs on your wall, not what do they call them NFTs, but real art that actually hangs on your wall, that's durable. So I think it is going to shift and it's already happening right. Real art has value, whereas NFTs are. We'll see, we'll, we'll wait and see. It's kind of like cryptocurrency, but the push, even in animation, toward traditional animation says a lot.

Speaker 2 55:55

Yeah, that does. Yeah, no, I love that. I hadn't heard that. That's wonderful.

Speaker 1 56:01

Well, and like I joke you know we love I think we all three probably love the feel of a book and the sensual tactile sensation of the page and, in my case, the smell of the coffee in a coffee shop, or a lot. They don't have coffee in libraries, do they? They should, but all of that we're. You know, I think we're romantic about it, but there's something very real there that has to do with our humanity.

Speaker 3 56:24

Well, I think that goes back to what I was saying about that biological element along the psychological element, because you're creating memory and that's the thing With everything technology-based it's all visual, we're not touching it. We're not touching it, we're not smelling it. In some cases, we can't taste it, when it's something that you could taste if it was physically in front of you, tactile.

Speaker 1 56:49

Well, this is sorry, go ahead, go ahead.

Speaker 3 56:51

No, and that's the thing with writing. I mean, that's what I think also makes it very different from when AI writes and when an author writes is because we're taking those tactile experiences and finding the words to describe it.

Speaker 1 57:06

Yes, and does the word intuitive relate here? Okay, so that's kind of what I am getting from this too is remember Anya Ochtenberg. I bring her up a lot, but she's a you know, values literary fiction above all else. She's not a genre writer, she doesn't write commercial fiction. She's not a genre writer. She doesn't write commercial fiction. Actually, she is a genre writer but she's very romantic, academic, elitist views in my opinion. But she talked about these dark alleys. Do you remember her saying language has the capacity in a nonlinear way to lead an author through not dark alleys, but around corners, is how she put it, and I love that.

Speaker 1 57:41

I'm going to call it intuition. When I write, I know full well my subconscious is going to plant something that my training and my technique tells me oh, bring that back later because it's a motif and you don't know what it means yet. But just trust it and bring it back. So that kind of subconscious I'm going to call it intuition is a big part of what it is to be a writer, and it may not be teachable, but again, it's circular for me, because I promise you AI proponents will go, oh, it's on its way, it's coming, but so maybe intuition is uniquely human, maybe love, maybe compassion, maybe empathy.

Speaker 1 58:19

But I always go back to inspiration. Is species specific, right, our signaling, our non-local communication, is species specific? It might be. All life has the same agenda to propagate and continue. But I just sit with it, listeners, or read my book. But at some point we are being called upon by collective intelligence, all innovators, all creatives, right, not just special prophets or special sculptors or painters or authors, but we all, right, are being called upon to be creative according to our unique gifts.

Speaker 1 58:58

And sometimes we talk about the tapestry of humanity, right? Fascist regimes are out to silence and erase certain voices that are threads in that tapestry. So when we talked about subjectivity, that again is something that, as of yet, ai can't scrape. No matter what, it's getting the status quo and things bleed into that status quo that might have a political agenda attached to them, right? There's Eastern thinking, there's Western, and so I just think there's no way around it. There's going to be an inherent worldview that's not a human one. It might have an agenda and it might be political. There's no way around it. Did that make any sense? There's still a bias to AI because it comes from the collective. The status quo has an agenda, right?

Speaker 2 59:51

Again, that goes back to the fact that it isn't an individual, so it is generic. In a lot of ways, it's as you were saying. It's a summarizing of everything that's out there.

Speaker 1 1:00:08

Yeah, homogenous and generic come to mind. We use AI through Buzzsprout. Virginia, you're probably going to laugh at this Sparingly.

Speaker 1 1:00:17

Yeah, sparingly. But no, I was so late to the party and I was so resistant and the way I put it to Virginia is like, oh my God, it's a time saver. But to me it used really sexy marketing language and it was really good at the marketing language taking little grains of things that were talked about from the transcript and simulating a summary of what the episode was about. But inevitably every single time I've got to massage it and rewrite it and I'll say that's actually not the thrust of our conversation. It it keyed in on some stuff, but you still need a driving conceptual force behind putting all that gobbledygook together. To me it's like reading a Scrabble board and kitchen magnet poetry and you know, let's say they have a love child. That's what we get in our descriptions.

Speaker 3 1:01:10

Word salad.

Speaker 1 1:01:11

It is it's word, salad, and it takes a lot of massaging, but I anyway it's. It's getting better and better as a tool. Yeah.

Speaker 2 1:01:20

Again, it should be a tool, it should be something that aids us and doesn't take over our main inspiration or our main focus.

Speaker 1 1:01:31

When will it be doing my dishes is the question yeah, I'm still waiting. Well, sorry that dominated our conversation. Is there anything you're really passionate about imparting? I love the hope you provided Anything beyond that that you would want our listeners to hear. A lot of them are writers and creatives of all ilks, but some may not be Anything else you would love to impart.

Speaker 2 1:01:54

Well, actually I'm wondering if I could. In addition to writing fiction, I also also write poetry. I'm wondering if I can read a poem that I wrote absolutely, we were hoping for that. Yes, okay, that actually sort of sums up, um, our whole conversation, almost. Um, and it's a poetic format called the abc darian, which basically each line, including the title, starts with a, a different letter of the alphabet. So it's 26 lines in total.

Speaker 1 1:02:26

If it's not about AI, though, is it about AI?

Speaker 2 1:02:29

It's not about AI. It's about creativity Beautiful.

Speaker 1 1:02:33

Yeah, we'll allow it.

Speaker 2 1:02:35

Okay, and it's called A Poem for the Unpoetical and the subtitle is Beyond Rhyme or Reason Lies the ABC, darian. Can one person sell skeptics a poem? Don't tell me that it can't be done. Every reader likes to experiment now and then. For what is life without spiciness going down our throats like a pebble, even if it's hard for us to swallow? I don't know where I'd be without words jumping me from story to story, even knowing that my life's chapter will end too soon. Long after I've dipped my final pen and made my escape, no matter how many words I've written on the page, there will still be tales left, untold, poems unsung, a life of creation quietly disappearing without fanfare. Rather than dwell on morbid musings, I will shout from the rooftops all my thoughts today and let loose what I need to say until the heavens ring with the very essence of what it means to be a writer a poet, a scribbler of tales, an exennial whose generation will one day be gone.

Speaker 2 1:03:42

You see, when my time comes, there will be zero stories I regret telling, especially since they'll outlast me. Wow.

Speaker 1 1:03:52

Wow, that was beautiful. You were not wrong. That really nailed everything we've been talking about, but in a less didactic, academic way. It's really poetic and beautiful. It's like a call to action. I'm inspired, I'm inspired. Thank you so much. Yeah, I could meditate on that one for a while. I am going to listen back when I edit, for sure. But yeah, it seems like a call to action to me. I love your positivity. You know, I don't think there is value to doom, speaking just in terms of manifestation. Right, they say don't beat the old, tired drums of a grievance, focus on the solution.

Speaker 2 1:04:32

Yeah, well, it's good to know where the problems are.

Speaker 1 1:04:35

so you can find solutions. Yeah, I do think you need to diagnose, and they call it judgment. But how about discernment? But then I think maybe the manifestation comes when we take action, and it's always creativity, right? They say if you're waiting to be loved, just write right. And actors wait around to be loved, writers wait around to be published. But you know what you got to keep creating.

Speaker 3 1:04:59

So exactly I was. I was gonna say so what creativity to me is finding our meaning and purpose?

Speaker 1 1:05:05

that goes to the logo therapy thing you just sent me this morning yes, it does do you want to quickly break that down, or is?

Finding Meaning Through Creativity

Speaker 3 1:05:14

so logo therapy, which is also known as existentialism, um theory, is um. Victor funkel is one of the forefronts of it. He was actually already working toward um the concept of logotherapy, was already working on it, and then world war ii struck and he is jewish and was put into a concert concentration camp and so he actually now was not only someone who was teaching this philosophy, this, this um I shouldn't say philosophy, this theory, um in mental health, but he was now having to define it for himself on the concentration camp. So his big thing is about grief and loss, that there is always purpose and meaning and grief, grief and loss. That there is always purpose and meaning and grief, grief and loss. That there there is no negative emotion, like, even anger, like you can always find something in it. Um, gosh, I don't have it in front of me, but well, if, if you seek meaning in life, yeah, so if you see, yeah, basically, if you seek meaning in life, um, you will find your purpose and your calling.

Speaker 3 1:06:18

And if there's challenge, if it, if there's challenges in front of you and you've ran out of choices that are being given to you, then you need to look at yourself and find out where the change needs to come within you, versus externally. So it's a very profound way of looking at life.

Speaker 1 1:06:36

It's beautiful. I think creatives might have a leg up on that, you know, because we are dot connectors and we do seek meaning, and I think I'm not going to put us all in one, but I do. I think that's a big part of it. We're dot connectors and I think AI connects dots, but it connects dots without that driving force of inspiration.

Speaker 1 1:06:56

Have I said that today? Have I said that today AI connects superficial dots? It does, but again, our episode descriptions are the prime example, like, okay, you connected some dots, but that's not really the intent behind it all. Anyway, thanks for indulging us. I think, allison, you knew this was more of a conversation, but I hope you feel satisfied and we're going to put your links in the episode description. By the way, anything you'd like for us to share? What's next on the horizon?

Speaker 2 1:07:21

for you. Um. Next, because I wrote a lot of books last year. I am currently editing them and getting them out. Um a few uh have uh placed in some awards, um uh pre-publication, which is awesome. Um. So yeah, hopefully some someday soon they'll be out and people can enjoy the stories, the human generated stories.

Speaker 1 1:07:48

That's so funny, beautiful. It's so funny that we have to say that. Now, right, human generated. There was a. Do you remember when, like ballpoint pens, suddenly you had glitter pens and you know gel pens and just so many variations for marketing, right, that they then, oh then, the erasable pen? Suddenly they came up with something called a permanent pen and I thought you mean a pen. They started marketing the permanent pen and I'm isn't that what we used to write checks with? Because it was permanent. Everything becomes bass-ackwards, but I love that you have to state that it's human. Are people truly writing entire novels using AI and publishing and marketing them?

Speaker 2 1:08:36

I would say, yes, I don't think that I've met several people who have done this, and the ones that are more successful, I would say, are the ones that are about data-driven things like how to construct a house with your bare hands, kind of thing.

Speaker 2 1:08:54

You know like a how-to type of book, but there are also people who are incorporating it, incorporating it into the creative sphere. But again, like as you mentioned, it does need human tweaks and who knows if they're they will ever last, is my, my thought on that. So you know, we'll see.

Speaker 1 1:09:23

Awesome. Well, thank you so much and thanks for inspiring us really good stuff.

Speaker 2 1:09:26

Well, thank you for having me on. It was wonderful to talk to the two of you.

Speaker 1 1:09:29

Oh, thank you and to our listeners remember life is story and we can get our hands in the clay individually and collectively. We can write a new story. See you next time. Bye, guys.