013 - Is it legal for AI to learn from our books?

James is back from AuthorNation in Las Vegas. During this week's Indie Writers Club episode James discusses the legal presentation from Alicia Wright regarding the law, ethics and AI.

If you want to sign up for AuthorNation 2025 click here: https://claymore.krtra.com/t/YCtI1A27yXCp

And join the Indie Writers Club mailing list to be first to hear about the ticket release for The Self Publishing Show Live! 2025 at indiewritersclub.com.

James & Cara.

Transcript

James (00:00)
Hello welcome to the Indie Writers Club with me James Blatch. How exciting to be back in the United Kingdom where I belong.

Cara (00:04)
and me, Cara Clare.

It is exciting to have you back. It feels like I haven't spoken to you for ages, even though we did actually do the podcast last week, but it feels like a really long time ago.

James (00:16)
We did. It was a bit of a weird day for me when we did the podcast. I remember feeling a little bit, don't know if you get this when you travel, when you're a long way from your family and friends, things are going well, they go well. If there's, if you're, you you miss a meeting or something or whatever, it can be quite lonely very quickly. And I think I was a bit of a low place when we recorded the podcast.

Cara (00:34)
Yeah, you seemed a bit like I put it down to jet lag, but you seemed a bit like flat. Okay.

James (00:38)
I was a bit subject, it got better and better the week. Enjoyed it more, relaxed into it, got over a little bit of the jet lag, although it was pretty brutal all week, the jet lag. So I apologise if you got a little bit of a 65%, James. I feel we're back up to 85. I'm not gonna go higher than 85 at this stage, it's November. It's grace, guys. Yes. Send me a note to judge me. I like being judged. Who doesn't?

Cara (00:57)
I'll reserve judgment till the end of the podcast. It's too early on to tell, yeah.

to you.

James (01:06)
But I do want to talk about the conference, my takeaways for it. So I went through a few sessions. The program was really good. So shout out to Shell Honika, who led, I think, the reorganization of the program. It was the best it's been for several years. And I went to quite a of the sessions. I hosted in the afternoon in the event center, mainly in the event center, and then in Platinum, which is another big room.

So I basically introduced the sessions and I stayed for all of them. It did say on our notes, lovely Sue's said, you don't have to stay for the sessions, but actually I stayed for all of them because they were really good. There was a guy called Zach Diamante, ZS Diamante I think he writes as, did a very, yeah, he did a very energetic session on TikTok, on how to use TikTok. He's the TikTok guy, he's ex-military and I think he wrote, I think I'm, don't think I'm.

Cara (01:45)
I've heard of him.

I was gonna say, is he the TikTok guy? Yeah.

James (01:58)
saying anything out of I think he wrote as part of kind of his recovery from stuff that happened in the military, bit like James Rossone, who I mentioned to him, who didn't know, but I think they should get to know each other. But I really liked Zach. He had a lot of energy. His TikTok session was excellent and made me rethink what I'm doing and trying to get back into it a little bit to sell books. And maybe we might even get him over for the self-publishing show, of which, by the way, there's going to be an announcement very imminently.

Cara (02:05)
Mm-hmm.

I thought there might be, because I noticed Catherine changing the banner image and I got all excited on Facebook the banner image changed to say 2025 and I thought,

James (02:30)
Well I will give you a tease of the announcement at the end of this episode of what's going to happen on that front. Everyone

Cara (02:39)
Just me or everyone. I thought it was special.

James (02:44)
You're not special. You're special to me. You're special to night.

Cara (02:46)
Thanks.

Yes, yes. So I think I posted in the discord. can't remember if I did or not. Those who've been following the Greyhound saga, I brought him home on Monday, which was also the day that I moved house. So it was a really chaotic. That's probably why it feels like it's been so long since I last spoke to you because I spent three days packing. Then I moved Monday morning and the moves are just kind of moved all the boxes in and then I had to go and pick up the dog. And he's just amazing. He's amazing. He's huge. He doesn't fit in my car. I vastly...

underestimated how big he is. He can kiss my seven year old on the nose, just standing there, just standing up. And he's just a dream. It's like he's always been there really. I'm amazed at how quickly he's settled in. There's some funny things that, yeah, when you get a dog that's been in kennels, because he's an ex racer, you notice funny stuff like he's got no idea how to do the stairs. He can't do them. He just stands at the bottom and is like, well, you're gone forever. I can't reach you up there.

James (03:35)
I've seen some video.

He must have lived in a bungalow or a flat or something before he was rescued. I see. he's never lived in a house. Poor Knight.

Cara (03:52)
Well, he was in kennels. He was in racing kennels until last year. Yeah, he's nearly five. No, he's never lived in a house. I know. And he's got a little green tattoo in his ear from when he was a racer. I think he does. I think he does. He's growing some fur over it to cover it up. so yeah, he'll, hopefully next week I'll have my super fast broadband set up. So I'll be recording from my own house from now on, and then you'll be able to see him in the back.

James (04:03)
I mean they all get tattoos when they're young but I think they regret it later on. Yes.

Wow.

I would look forward to meeting night you have to bring him to the pub one day

Cara (04:24)
I will. Yeah, well, he's a bit big. He doesn't exactly fit under the table. He needs some pub training. Yeah, that is true.

James (04:31)
Yes well we're not pub trained so why would the dog be? Well that's good and what else have I missed whilst I've been out of the United Kingdom? Everything okay? It snowed in some places, some people listening will have had snow. It's cold.

Cara (04:43)
It snowed in some places, not here yet. It's very cold, very, very cold. I drove over to Book Vault today to collect my Kickstarter editions from them, which look incredible. People who are using them at the moment, just beware that they've got some delays because it's the run up to Christmas. Everybody's getting their special editions done, but the foiling looks amazing. The sprayed edges look amazing. They look really fantastic. So I'm really pleased with that. But yeah, I was standing outside Book Vault, kind of freezing. I think it was about

James (05:08)
So probably not. Yeah.

Cara (05:12)
one degree when i got there.

James (05:14)
Well, if they've got a few delays, probably not a good time for me to mention that I spent quite a lot of time with the Bookpop Boys last week in Vegas in very seedy, sketchy parts of town, which is sort of where we feel comfortable and hang out. The thing is, stay, know, the hotel where the conference is, Ortha Nation, is the horseshoe, which is probably one of the more down at heel.

Cara (05:22)
Yeah, I'm sure they'll appreciate you broadcasting that.

It is.

James (05:38)
strip hotels or the big casino hotels, but it is still a big strip casino hotel. And actually, it's quite historic one, the theater in there's got a lot of history to it. Next door is Paris, which is actually quite a nice one across the road is Bellagio, Caesar's Palaces or diving across I was in cosmopolitan because it was now these because of their location are expensive places to stay and gamble. So even horseshoe. So you find that like if you want to gamble and I

I of feel that I should because you're in Vegas or not massively into it. Well, honestly, I'm not that I get bored quite quickly gambling, but you know, the the book vault boys said, come on, we're going to gamble. So we went to these really, really, I mean, I mean, I would say sketchy casinos. The Oyo is what one was called. Ellis Island was another and this is the sort of place where they have and there was one on on Fremont Street or Fremont Street.

Cara (06:07)
Yeah, yeah, I feel like I should.

Are you about to say that the Book Vault boys talked you into it and took you somewhere dodgy?

James (06:32)
where they do $1 blackjack tables instead of $5, $10, $50. I mean, we walked past the table in the cosmopolitan, it was $100 each hand. Do know how long it takes to be dealt two cards and told you not one, which is what happens? That's exactly how blackjack works. You get dealt these two cards. mean, initially I took $40. We went to this table, it was $5 minimum. They weren't doing $1 that night. And the woman got 21 three times in a row and that was it, I was done. And that lasted about 45 seconds. It's a complete...

Cara (06:59)
I hate it. This is why I hate it, because it just winds me up so much. I don't know, because I just hate it. I hate losing and I hate wasting money. So I just, no.

James (07:02)
Yeah. How do people get addicted to that?

Yeah, I know. I feel sick. I mean, there's only $40 but I did feel a bit sick just handing it over for no

Cara (07:16)
Yeah, I just think I could have spent that on, you know, giant pizza and some cocktails.

James (07:20)
Give me an amusement arcade. I'd happily, $40 will last you a long time on Space Invaders. I mean, I'd be very happy with that. We should have gone, there's lots of stuff. mean, do, Vegas grows on me every time I go there. And I decided on this last trip, I like Vegas. And everybody at the conference, including you, says, I hate Vegas. Which is fair enough, I sort of understand that. But I think it's one of these places that you...

you don't take at face value. You've got to find the little nooks and crannies where there's good stuff. I'm in very, very good restaurants. We didn't go to any spectacular restaurants this time, but some good ones. And they're very easy to find in Vegas. The eateries are really good. We went to a close up magic show, which was really fun. And I started to notice stuff we'd never done before. There's a place called Area 15, which is kind of like a supermarket, but behind the, open the fridge, there's a speakeasy in there. There's the skate rooms and other parts of it.

Cara (08:02)
I love magic.

James (08:13)
There was a VR set up in MGM Grand which we've not been to. I played Topgolf for the first time with Ernie Dempsey in Vegas. I was non-stop working. I worked, do know my working time was from 4.30am to about 9, 10 o'clock when I went over to the conference, which is basically done more as a working day. Although I went to the gym a couple of times to break that up, but that was just, know, did. Woohoo!

Cara (08:20)
you do any work while you were out there, James Blatch?

Yeah.

Well, I'm definitely going to go next year. And I think they've got at the moment actually an early bird offer. And I think if you pay, check this on the website, but I think if you pay an extra $15 insurance, you can then cancel it if you need to and get all your money back. So for $15, you're locking in the cheaper price for next year. And if circumstances change and you can't go, you can get your money back. So I thought that was a pretty good deal.

James (08:43)
I have.

Now I've seen that offer on email. Let me just see if it's on the website.

Cara (09:08)
It is on the website, yeah, because I saw it. Somebody sent it to me yesterday and I was having a look at it.

James (09:13)
Okay, I can't see on the front page. Get your special offer. Get digital access. No, it's digital access. I don't know if I can see on the on the web page. Maybe it's got its own. no, I've pressed on home and it's gone to tickets. Get my ticket. No, I think we should give out this link though, because I know as we do this.

Cara (09:27)
on do you need me to find it?

This is some thrilling listening for everybody, me you trying to find the link. Hang on. For me, was coming up on the front page.

James (09:47)
Is it? Is it? For AuthorNation.live?

Cara (09:50)
Yeah. except now it's gone. That's weird. No, get your special. We need to do this off air and then just put it in the YouTube.

James (09:57)
Okay, we're gonna put it, we'll put it in the show notes. We'll put a link there, but I'm gonna grab my ticket as well. And I think also you can pay by instalments. I think you can pay over three, three or four months. So Joe and Sue's.

Cara (10:06)
can you?

I mean maybe the early bird has ended already. Maybe it was only for like 24 hours or something, I don't know.

James (10:13)
Maybe it has, but if I reckon if I send an email to Joe, he might extend that for a couple of days for us. Let me see if I can do that. I'll do that off air. See if we can include a link that goes out on Friday. It might only be live for the weekend, something like that. But if people want to join us in Vegas, it is, you know, it is a large gathering of indie authors. I think the self-publishing show is as well. They're kind of almost on a level now.

Cara (10:19)
Yeah, just for the listeners. Okay.

James (10:38)
with each other. It's a place to first and foremost to go and hang out with people doing the same thing as you and speaking the same language as you, which is so important. And it's hard to overestimate the sort of benefits of your motivation, your mental health and everything of talking to people who are doing the same, having the same hurdles and struggles and the same wins as you. And there's only so much, you know, our partners.

my wife Jill sort of glazes over if I start talking in any detail about story structure, which is completely understandable because she talks to me about injecting people at Boots, which is what she does. And there's only so much I can hear about that, about how difficult the old people are when they come in for their injections. I'm sure she loves all the old people who come for injections at Boots. Boots does not endorse this message. People in America wonder what Boots is, it's CVS.

Cara (11:30)
You

Yeah.

James (11:34)
It's Walgreens CVS in the UK, but you go and get your jabs there.

Cara (11:38)
But yeah, I think every time I go to one of those events, even if it's the smaller ones, I just, remember how much of a boost it gives you. So if you have a couple of these throughout the year, or even if you can only go to one of them, but I mean, Vegas and the self-publishing show are nicely spaced out. So if you can do both of those, that kind of gets you through the year. That's like your networking, your kind of like time, spending time with your tribe and you leave feeling so energized. Like everybody I've spoken to who's come back from Vegas has been like,

Yeah, I'm shattered, but I've come back with a million ideas. It was so good to see everybody. And a lot of us, we've got friends who we've only ever spoken to online. think AP Beswick, Adam Beswick, he does a lot of the TikTok stuff. He and I have been friends for a year and we'd only ever spoken online. And then it was the first self-publishing show where we actually met in person. And it was like, wow, we're actually, we're in the same physical space. This is amazing.

So definitely like start planning. think we talked about this already, didn't we? When we did our conferences episode, but start planning for next year and try to get to something if you can.

James (12:44)
Yeah, and air tickets and everything and hotels are all cheaper the further out you are. And the big hotels, if you book direct, they're very flexible so you can cancel, can, you know, free cancellation. In fact, I decided to come home early and I went down, because I booked direct with the Cosmopolitan, I wandered down to the front desk and said, can I cancel my last couple of days? We'll get back. She said, because you booked direct.

don't even cancel, just come and check out on the day you want to leave and it will cancel automatically, which it did. And I've been, I've seen my charges now, so that was great. So that paid for the change in flight and, and gave me profit on that. So yeah, book direct with the hotels as a sort of

Cara (13:09)
Wow, that's awesome.

That's amazing.

Yeah.

And I think for me, was a sign when I first started going to conferences, it was a sign to myself, I'm taking myself seriously now. A lot of people think we're just sort of going for a jolly bit. It's really not that. was to me, that was the moment where I was like, right, I have made enough money that I can reinvest that from my books into my first conference ticket, which was a self publishing show. And that was a really big milestone for me. And it was a point where I was like,

James (13:28)
Mm-hmm.

Cara (13:47)
this is part of my career development. This is something that's really important for me. And it felt so good to buy that ticket with the earnings from my books and to see that as kind of like, yes, this is now me saying, I'm doing this. I'm an author. you know, actually taking the steps to create the life that I want.

James (14:02)
Yeah.

And it's Craig Martel, who organized a related conference in the same place previously, he made the point that we don't have CPD, I think, it's continuous professional development. So if you're in most other fields, and this used to be just the professionals like lawyers and doctors and stuff, and they would have to do a certain amount of professional development alongside their careers. with...

with authors, we don't have anything for this becomes that it becomes you investing in your career, just doing the same thing over and over again, it's not probably going to wash but picking up new ways of doing it and having some of your own discoveries confirmed that you're barking up the wrong tree with stuff is really important and

I think one of the big things that you can discover at the conference like this, when you go to some of the genre sessions and the panel discussions, is you might discover you're not writing the genre you thought you were. Or you might think your audience is women aged 50 plus, and it turns out that lot of men read that genre stuff. That's the sort of thing you learn from other people writing in those areas, and that can be very important.

Cara (15:11)
Yeah, absolutely. mean, like I said, everybody comes away with a to-do list as long as they're on going like, my God, I'm going to do this. I'm going to do this. I'm going to do this. I'm going to do this. Because you're just, there's also some sort of magic, I think that happens like in the air when you get so many creative brains in one place. we are quite, Indies are quite a unique breed. Like we're creative, but we're also entrepreneurs. And you put all those people in a room.

And it really is magic. It does something. It gives you a certain energy that you come away from. it really does sort of see you through the next few months. And if you've been getting to a point where you're feeling a bit stagnated in what you're doing or you're not sure, or you're feeling a bit burnt out, it's medicine, I think.

James (15:56)
Yeah. So there are a couple of shows coming up. We mentioned we did our shows episode last week. Was it last week or the week before last week? Before, Yes. Yeah. In my dark place. We talked about the Irish publishing show, which is Te Anna and Siobhan Purcell was in Vegas. I caught up with her and that's taking place in March in Ireland on the Western side of Ireland. Beautiful, beautiful part of the world.

Cara (16:01)
Mm-hmm. I think it was the week before and then last week was kind of you lying on a bed feeling sorry for yourself.

We did, yep.

March, yeah.

James (16:26)
And after that in the summer, I might as well do my little teasing announcement now is the self publishing show. So we do have dates and we do have a format and I'll tell you what's going to happen with the way we're going to release tickets because we think we think it's going to sell out one day. So we need to be careful how we do this. we are well, listen, listen, how you get on the special list. So

Cara (16:45)
God, I mean, can I reserve one? Am I on the special list?

James (16:54)
We are going to hold the conference, a one day conference on June the 26th, sorry, June the 25th, June 25th, 2025, 2025 in London in the same building we've held the other four conferences, which the Southbank Centre, the Queensworth Hall and the Southbank Centre and using that fantastic, lovely atrium, there will be a kind of big vendor show in there as well. One thing that's dawned on me when we started doing the conference,

We got sponsors in thinking we need to, you know, you don't want sponsors. So you want to be your own man and have your own, but you need them to fund the conference. It's hugely expensive to do it. Now I realized those vendor tables that having Vellum there and Amazon and ACX and draft the digital and publish drive and so on.

is actually part of the show and people like going to meet the people that they deal with and they find services they didn't know about and a lot of the feedback is how much they enjoyed the shows. It's almost like a trade fair. So we're going to focus on that a little bit. There'll be a little bit more time in the lobby there, but it'll be a one day show. It will be 79 pounds a ticket, which is the cheapest it's been and

Cara (17:47)
Mm-hmm.

God.

James (18:07)
That's plus VAT, unfortunately, so but that makes it 99, which is kind of the target figure. So if you've got a VAT registered company in the UK, at least you get some of that money back, but it's £99, which is a bargain for that day, that trade fair, that big conference. I think we're probably going to sell out the whole I think we've got about 850 seats where you can potentially sell tickets to. And we sold we had 650 in the whole last time it's £240 for two days. So so we think we're going to sell out.

Cara (18:10)
Yeah.

You will, yeah, you'll sell out, I think you will.

James (18:36)
The next day is going to be smaller. It's going to be more expensive. It's going to be £299. Although that would include the first day as well, the conference and that will be higher level learning. So if you think about it, it's kind of Ninc will be day two and maybe 20 books or most so author nation will be day one. So that will be if we have so for instance, we had to tick tock talk on both days. I don't know if we're going to tick tock talk on both days. But if we did the first day at the conference will be this is why you should be on tick tock. And these are the sort of results you can get.

The day two will be these are the strategies that are working for people selling books on TikTok. So it'll be more intense and it'll be smaller. So we think probably about 200 people are gonna call it the workshop day. It's gonna be held very close by in a hotel with another lovely big shared space and then sort of breakout rooms around it. We're gonna have the sessions repeating themselves all day. So it'll be like a hooter going, everyone goes off into whichever chosen session, probably be me shouting.

chosen session they want and then come back out for tea and coffee. There'll be lunch provided for that. That's going to be £299. There will be a ticket 249. It will just be the workshop, but we suspect most people are going to want to do the conference as well. So £299 and that will be aimed more at authors like yourself, people who are making a bit of money from their books and want to take it to the next level. So we're going to have sessions. Haven't confirmed a lot of these. got, mean, everyone I've spoken to.

who's on my target to speak there has enthusiastically said yes. And I was in Vegas last week with kind of one sole purpose was to talk to potential sponsors and speakers. I hadn't had to persuade anybody. So I've been emailing, getting emails back yesterday and today from people saying it's a double thumbs up, definitely going to be there. So we're probably gonna have a room on the non-English markets in the workshop day. So Germany and France represented by people working in those territories so they can talk to you about the detail there.

Cara (20:08)
You

of amazing.

James (20:30)
which is increasingly important, particularly to me. My buy books do very well in Germany. We're gonna have things on Kickstarter, we're gonna have a session on Kickstarter in there from somebody who runs those very well. We're gonna have direct selling as well from somebody who's doing a really amazing job. He's doing something like a quarter of a million dollars a month. And he's doing, not selling books, he's selling a little adventure series that go along with his books.

almost like the sort of thing that we did as kids where you sent off a letter from the back of Lookin magazine or something and you've got an adventure sent to you every Saturday. He's doing that for adults and is making a quarter of a million dollars. I'm gonna say that's the sort of learning you're gonna get, you're gonna come away with on the workshop day. And also I'm hoping to put together a panel of big earning authors so you'll get to meet some stars of the indie world close up and have a chat with them. So I think that it's gonna be a really super day but it is.

Cara (21:01)
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Yeah.

James (21:23)
is priced a bit higher. You do get food and stuff the rest of it and it's going to be aimed at people and it's smaller. So the whole whole rentals are almost the same by the way. You're already have to charge more for. Yeah it's ridiculous. Well we could basically hold the conference in this space. It's big enough because of the central area but we're going to use that for mingling. But anyway that's the that's that's just how London pricing works.

Cara (21:33)
they.

I see. It sounds amazing. It sounds amazing. And I think that's what so many people have said is that we're missing out on that slightly higher level stuff. So that's, yeah, I'm so excited. excited. Yeah.

James (21:54)
Yeah so the way you can get tickets and I can't give you the links yet because we are in the process of setting this up but what's going to happen is we're going to have a what do they call it when you pre-register like a pre-sell code type thing a pre-register. Fairy Tailor Swift so there'll be a pre-register code now I don't think 850 people will sign pre-register so basically for anybody who really wants to come

Cara (22:10)
Yeah, you're going to all Taylor Swift, aren't you? Like...

James (22:20)
Particularly to the one-day conference. It's going to guarantee them getting a ticket So you sign you pre-register for that and when we release tickets, they will be released Exclusively to the people who pre-registered so nobody else will get the link to where you can go and buy tickets So that will go out at a certain time in a place will give 24 hours or 48 hours for people To make sure that they've got a chance to get it and then it will go on the rest of the tickets We go on general sale to everyone else. So I can't give you the link yet

I promise you I will send out an email if you're on our email list you'll get to the link at the time we release the pre-register page so if you're not on our email list you need to get on it now and that if you just go to IndieWritersClub.com there's a sign-up form on that page so get yourself on the list you will receive well you might not be coming then

Cara (22:58)
Yep.

I'm not actually sure if I'm on our list.

James (23:10)
You'll get an email and we're hoping to do that in certainly in the next two weeks Maybe even the next week. So we're not going to give us a date on it yet. But yes, I'm Everyone says that everyone remembers that in Vegas everyone was saying if I start talking to anybody I come to our show they always say yeah, but the weather's brilliant in June in London. I hope it is

Cara (23:18)
And the weather is always amazing for that show. It's always amazing. Yeah, every year.

Yeah.

James (23:31)
So I'm excited about that. And there is a great opportunity, especially if we do get knocking on a thousand authors, 850 is probably the most seats we can sell because we need to hold some back for, but there's another 150 potentially for speakers, guests, sponsors, and we give tickets away to people who otherwise couldn't afford it towards the end, we have some leftover. So we could end up with a thousand authors.

Cara (23:32)
Me too.

mean, 79 pounds, like the chance to go to, for one day, so you wouldn't have to buy, you know, overnight accommodation and all that kind of stuff. That's just incredible. That's just, yeah, I'm so excited that people get the chance to do that. Yeah.

James (24:04)
Yeah, and that's the strategy. The strategy is to get 1000 authors together in the room. And that's good for all of us, I think, to experience that.

Cara (24:14)
Well done, Catherine.

James (24:16)
Catherine hasn't done anything. I've done it all myself and No, Catherine is yes very much the organizer behind this we've been taught and these things take so much organization Catherine I've been going backwards and forwards on a lot of this stuff for six months, know, since the the last conference finished We've been down to London. We've been to the venues constantly in dialogue with them These are not these are not easy decisions, you know when you're committing that amount of money

Cara (24:22)
You

James (24:43)
Yes, okay, look, let's move on from that. So that is going to come in the near future. Get yourself on our mailing list or the Learn Self Publishing mailing list either way, if you're not on that. Right, so I was going to talk about...

Cara (24:57)
You were going to talk to me about your favourite session in Vegas.

James (25:00)
Yeah, so I thought I went to a lot of the sessions and genuinely they were good. The TikTok session was very good, but the session that I made the most notes from and took the most pictures of the slides was a session given by a woman called Alicia Wright. I think Alicia or Alicia Wright. She is a Princeton educated IP lawyer, been an IP lawyer for 17 years. And she gave a presentation for about 45 minutes on the state of AI.

from a legal and ethical point of view. And she was very authoritative and very objective on this. So she's an author herself and part of the community, but she was talking about what the trends are in the legal machinations that are going on. And one of the key things she talked about, there are four big cases going through at the moment. I think they're in the UK for strange reasons, but they will affect the world and the US and the world. Actually, no, I think these ones are in the US. There's something else going on in the UK.

but they're all sort of interlinked. So you've got something called Cadry versus Meta, which is Facebook, Anderson versus Stability AI, New York Times versus OpenAI, which is ChatGPT, and Authors Guild versus OpenAI, which is ChatGPT. And she said there's been one, two, three, four, there's been five rulings in those four cases. So although none of them have come to fruition, come to actual trial, whether they will or not, don't know, but there's along the way, the way these litigations work is the judge will make

rulings and so that is inadmissible that argument so we settled that before we get to trial. Nothing significant has happened in New York Times and Authors Guild but in Cadbury versus Metta these are the the rulings have happened so far. The court has dismissed the claim that large language model is itself a derivative work calling the claim nonsensical because there's no way is it a recasting or adaptation of the plaintiff's books.

So first of all, that's, mean, all of these are good news for people using AI and bad news if you thought you were going to be able to sue them because they've used your book. So basically the court is leaning towards this is fair use and fair use for learning and teaching AI is not the same. Basically what they're saying is it's not the same as using your books to sell them. If I copy your book and start to sell it on Amazon, that is a clear copyright breach.

Cara (27:05)
You

James (27:26)
breach of your IP and you can sue me. If I take your book because I've building a language model, building a language model, even if I'm going to sell access to that language model, the court controversially is leaning towards the idea that that is not a breach of contract, a breach of copyright because it's not selling the book onto anyone. No one can read it.

Cara (27:44)
No, it's not copying the book. It's using the book to teach the way I understand it. It's using the book to teach the AI the same way that we as humans learn from reading books. It's just that it takes us much, much longer and the AI learns instantly.

James (27:58)
Yes.

And she talked at the beginning about how AI actually works. And Elizabeth Anne West is very good on this subject. So when you type in a sentence to AI, it looks at the order of the words that you've put in. It doesn't understand the sentence. It looks at the order of the words you put in. It looks through the trillions of words it's ingested and it spits out words in order that match what you've asked. So it doesn't know what you've asked and it doesn't know what the answer is, but it does know that when those words in that order come out,

are asked, these are the words in order that come out. So it's very clever because it does feel like you're having a conversation, but really it's a ones and zeros thing. And the breakthrough is just the scale of the data in there and the speed at which you can process it. That's what generative AI does.

Cara (28:45)
And that's what they mean by language processing, isn't it? It's just predicting what word should come next based on all of its learning. Like you said, it's not understanding, you're not actually having a conversation. That's why it's really convincingly wrong sometimes. I remember asking it who I was as an author, and some of it was totally right. And then it listed like three books that don't exist anywhere. They were great titles. I was like, I might take those. Sounds totally plausible, but it was completely incorrect.

James (29:00)
Yes.

Yeah.

Yeah, when I first asked ChatGPT probably a year ago to tell me about the author James Blatch, it was convinced that I was James Ross, LJ Ross's partner. And which was news to Louise, I can tell you. And it's wax lyrical about how James Blatch is a key part in the partnership of LJ Ross and does a lot of the promotion work.

Cara (29:22)
Yeah

You

James (29:36)
etc. And obviously it confuses completely. But I did it the other day because I'm egomaniac. I googled myself or chat GPT'd myself and it was much more accurate. In fact, it was quite pleasantly. It's always very flattering isn't it? Chat GPT about you. But it didn't know who I was. So that was the first ruling in Kadri versus Metta. The other one is it dismissed vicarious infringement claim because plaintiffs, which is the people bringing the case against Metta.

Cara (29:49)
Claude.

really interesting.

James (30:02)
failed to point to any specific large language model output that infringed on copyrighted material or even incorporated in some form a portion of their books. So they know that the model has been learning from their books, but they can't say, look, that's my book being exported by it. There is one surviving claim. There's only one surviving claim in that particular court case against Metta, which is the unauthorized copying of copyrighted works to train the large language model.

that's where it's going. But Alicia said, obviously, if I was a betting person, I would say looking at the other rulings, they're not going to be successful on that one either. we remain remain to seeing that Anderson versus stability AI. So stability is obviously a lot is one of the image generation. I can't remember which one is behind it might be mid journey or is that diffusion? can't remember. Anyway, they had a couple of rulings already.

Cara (30:53)
I'm not sure.

James (30:57)
they've dismissed claims of vicarious infringement because there was no allegation that outputs incorporated protected expression of the inputs. Basically the same as we just heard in the Kadri versus Meta. So they can say this has clearly been, they say this has been trained on our images, but the outputs didn't incorporate their images, or least not clearly enough for it to be an infringement of copyright. But there is a surviving claim there, which is direct infringement for training stable diffusion with copyrighted works.

However, plaintiffs may have to show that the large language model includes compressed copies of the copyrighted works, which is a much stiffer test than saying this is quite similar to my image. The Holton Film Library or whatever they called, say this is a 1930s picture, we think it's quite similar to the one if you asked about this scene. But unless it's actually generated a copy of that picture, it seems less likely that they're going to be successful.

in that case as well. So that was interesting in the way, just the general way in which the court cases are leaning is not supporting those authors and publishers and copyright material owners who've tried to sue or are in the process of suing the AIs. So then she talked about fair use and she said fair use. So fair use, I remember fair use for my journalist days. If you do a story about Star Wars,

Cara (31:57)
Yeah.

James (32:23)
So let's say you're doing a fluffy, you're doing Jimmy Fallon show in the evening, or you're doing the one show in the UK. And if you're in Australia, come up with your own cozy little entertainment show in the evening. And you're talking about Star Wars and you show a clip of Star Wars. basically, depending on how you're talking about it, you probably have to get permission from 20th Century Fox to use that clip or Disney as it is now. Because you're using copyrighted material,

Cara (32:35)
You

James (32:52)
to sell your show and make your show more entertaining. If however, you're covering that as a portion of your show because it's newsworthy, because something's happened with Star Wars that day and you want to illustrate the point, that's called fair use. So in journalism, you're allowed fair use and we used to speak to lawyers and say, it okay to use this without asking permission? And they'd say, yes, that's fair. But they're nearly always on the side of that. And the industry understands that. So, you know, if I want to, if I think, if I'm reviewing a book,

and I want to read out a portion of it, you can do that under fair use. And there's kind of case law that says how much you can use and so on. So fair use is pretty powerful way of allowing people to use copyrighted material that does exist. And fair use seems to be again, the way the courts are interpreting what's happening with training AI. So fair use allows limited copyright material without permission. There are four factors that come into play in the US courts when they're

Cara (33:41)
Okay.

James (33:50)
whether fair use applies or not. So the purpose and character of the use, which is what I just talked about, the nature of the copyrighted work, is it creative, is it factual? The amount and substantiality used, so do you use, if you showed the whole of Star Wars in the evening and said, I'm going to review this film, watch it first, that clearly would be a breach, then effect on the market. Does the way you've used it harm the market for the original work? That's quite a powerful one because

Cara (34:10)
Yep.

James (34:19)
Even if Disney said we didn't give you permission to use a clip of Star Wars on the Jimmy Fallon show, Disney would have to prove to the court that people are now not going to buy Star Wars because they saw a clip of it on Jimmy Fallon, which would be very hard.

Cara (34:32)
Yeah, and actually it's probably the opposite, they're actually advertising it for them.

James (34:36)
Exactly. So if you think about that being applied to AI, in theory, those factors need to be evaluated against two distinct events generating content with the trained model. And our focus is copying copyrighted works to train a model. And in both cases, it does seem like fair use is going to allow us to use a entire book to train an AI.

that we might then use, which sounds again controversial, but the point of fair use is, the fact that the AI has read the book going to stop anybody else reading it or buying it?

Cara (35:05)
Yeah.

Well, no, and the AI isn't reproducing that book. It's learning from it, but it's not reproducing that book.

James (35:23)
And I tell you, is interesting. I don't know if I mentioned this on the bed in Vegas last week, but this has definitely moved. The mood music around AI has definitely shifted in the last 12 months. 12 months before we had people walking out of sessions at Vegas because it mentioned AI. And there was one guy who said, I'm, you know, in this presentation at the beginning, AI is the devil. I'm not. Yeah.

Cara (35:43)
I walked out because he said AI was the devil. Cause I found it so he put up this big red slide that said, anyone who does work with AI is doing a deal with the devil. And I walked out because I just found it so reductionist and not the conversation that we needed to be having and stoking the fires of all those people who were getting angry about it. So I walked out of that one.

James (36:04)
Yeah, and 12 months later, those people weren't there or they changed their mind because their mood music around it now was what do we do with AI? How do we use it? How are you using it? And then some discussion about the efficacy and that's the wrong word, ethical nature of it and so on. So there was some case law which Authors Guild versus Google took place in 2015. So there was a similar case came up in 2015 when Google

Cara (36:09)
Mm-hmm.

James (36:32)
was using copyrighted works to index its search engine. So Authors Guild, same people suing ChatGPT today, sued Google, alleging Google's creation and use of digital copies of copyrighted books for its library project and Google Books Project constituted copyright infringement. The court found that the purpose of the copying is highly transformative. The public display of text is limited.

and the revelations do not provide a significant market substitute for the protected aspects of the original. So all the things I talked about before, it's sort of like fair use. So first of all, it's not using the book as a book. And second of all, it's not provable, it's not likely that anybody has used a Google search result as a substitute for reading a book.

Although I'm immediately now thinking of a student. Yes, we both had the same thought. Yeah. Do you know, my life would have been different if I had a chat GPT at school or even the internet.

Cara (37:23)
No. Well, all the people doing their English degrees.

I'm pretty sure I did that in a couple of seminars. Yorknotes though.

God, what on earth is that? I can't even think about how they're managing it at universities. Like, I've got no clue.

James (37:45)
pretty certain my son used chat GPT quite a lot. There you go. Initiative. Google, yes.

Cara (37:48)
Well, you would, wouldn't you? You would if you were absolutely. And like that's, you know, I've shown my seven year old how to use it and done a couple of, you know, funny things, just messing around with him because that's the world they're going to be living in. There's no point pretending it doesn't exist.

James (38:03)
Yeah, no, no, the digital natives. mean, my my kids struggle to comprehend life without the internet. They can't understand us not having it. I had that conversation with them. how did you learn things? I thought I don't really know. I asked adults. I went to the library, I guess sometimes to look stuff up or a book, know, was now the answers.

Cara (38:12)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah, bought a book. But I think it's incredible. Like my seven year old, taught him because his vocab is way better than his actual spelling and stuff. So I taught him how to dictate a story that he's writing into the notes app on his iPad. So he does that. He sits and dictates it himself. And he says, be quiet, mummy. I'm writing my novel. And I don't have the heart to tell him it's not a novel because it's not really long enough. And then I showed him how to put that into Claude because we had a very difficult conversation about editing.

James (38:46)
Might be the start.

Cara (38:51)
because he was quite upset that it wasn't always coming out the way he wanted it to. And I said, well, that means you're a real author because we all have to edit our work. So then I showed him how we could copy it into Claude and ask it to tidy up the dictation. And then we went to mid journey and I showed him how to do prompts to create all the images for his story. And then we went to Vellum and we made a book and then we took it into his school on World Book Day to show the kids how to make a book. And everyone was like their jaws dropped. I was like, we did this at the weekend and now we have a book.

and it's four days later and they were all just like, And he's like, but the problem, wants to do it like every day now. He's like, can I, can I, can we make another book? Can we make another book? But it's just like, that's, that's what his world is going to be. Well, it's not even going to be that, is it? It'll have moved on a million steps from there.

James (39:36)
Yeah. And the great thing is, you know, we could, guess we could always somehow put a book together more physically than that, but now he can publish it as well. Right. Thanks to that publishing. Yeah. Yes. We're millionaires now. Thanks to that.

Cara (39:46)
Yeah, yeah. He keeps asking me if I've published it. Is it on Amazon? Can anyone buy it yet, mummy? I'm like, I think it needs to be a few more pages. He did ask me when he was getting his royalties. No, he actually did. We sold some at school for charity. And then about a week later, he said, so you know those books we sold for charity? And I said, yeah. He said, am I getting any royalties from that? And I was like, I've taught you so well, but no, it's for charity.

James (40:00)
Yes! That's very savvy.

Cara (40:16)
Ha

James (40:19)
That is hilarious, but it takes after you. Where are my royalties? I'm not doing this for free. Okay, just to carry on with this, there were a couple of other rulings. Well, a couple of other, this is the case law. This happened in 2015, but is now being quoted and being used in the current court cases. So another finding in 2015 was that Google's commercial nature and profit motivation from taking everybody's work and indexing it.

Cara (40:23)
Yeah.

James (40:48)
as part of its project did not justify denial of fair use. So I sort of feel in the UK, that's quite interesting. So I thought in the UK in news, news, BBC is a non-profit organization. News is a service rather than there for commercial gain. And that was part of the protection we had from fair use. So if we weren't sure about using an image or photograph, we erred on the side of using it because the chances are we're not going to be found in breach.

of copyright and the lawyers had to be fairly gung-ho in that environment. But I always thought if you were doing it for pure commercial gain, which Google is a massively commercial organization, that would weaken that case. But this ruling in 2015 says no, that's irrelevant to it. So Google's unauthorized digitizing of copyrighted protected works, creation of a search functionality and display of snippets from those works are non-infringing fair uses.

So that was 2015. if we think, if we project to today's court cases, if they have the same mentality, it's not going to find in favor of the Authors Guild or the other people or the picture libraries who are currently suing. So I thought that was interesting. And I've heard a few people say that, but I do wonder if it's confirmation bias or what we used to call wishful thinking. We have to call it confirmation bias now. People hoping that's going to be the case if they're investing in AI and using it a lot.

Cara (41:51)
Yep.

really interesting.

James (42:15)
I do use it for imagery a lot, I don't really use it for writing, well I'm not against that but I use it a lot for imagery and maybe proofing.

Cara (42:23)
I use it a lot for brainstorming these days. And I mean, don't necessarily, I think we've had this chat before and I've had it with other authors where I'll probably won't use any of the ideas that it gives me, but I definitely, it's completely obliterated writer's block for me. Cause I never have a situation where I'm sat thinking, my God, what do I do next? Cause I can be like, I've got these characters and they're doing this and now they need to do this. What do I do?

James (42:34)
No.

Cara (42:48)
Yeah, I think we should have another episode where we talk about uses and stuff, because I don't think we've gone into it in a massive amount of detail.

James (42:53)
Yeah, no, no, and how we use it, we should definitely do that.

Cara (42:57)
Mm.

James (42:59)
So I'm going to carry on with a gun called a Dr. Alicia Wright. Well, I think she's a BBSC rather than a doctor, but Alicia Wright, a very educated IP lawyer talking about this session that I made, as I say, lots of notes. So she talked about copyright eligibility. So this is the next big question is if we've used AI, can we copyright our works? And there was this early case in America, a guy had used AI to create images and he wanted to copyright them and they caught initially

Cara (43:04)
Okay.

Yeah.

James (43:29)
said you can't do that and that sort of set the precedent for everyone saying you can't copyright AI stuff but obviously it's more nuanced than that. So here are the current legal thinking on that. Ideas are not copyright eligible so when you input only ideas and AI generates the expression of those ideas that's not protectable human authorship. Your authorship as edited by AI is protectable

as long as your authored expression remains. So if you put your story in, AI's edited it, you can copyright that because it's your human element of that, which is the copyrightable aspect. Revisions to AI output can also be protected if they include your creative expression. So that's interesting. So you could get AI to write your book, can't copyright that. But if you rewrite the book based on what AI's come on, yeah.

Cara (44:16)
Yep.

If there are substantial changes, yeah.

James (44:23)
then it becomes copyrighted. So basically the more human input equals stronger copyright protection in that case. you know, there's we are I don't know you've seen this clip going around. think who is it? Not Ryan Reynolds. It's the other guy who did Goodwill Hunting. Who did Goodwill Hunting with Matt Damon? No, the other guy Ben Affleck. There's a clip with Ben Affleck talking about actors being replaced by AI and he gives a really good answer on this.

Cara (44:38)
The other guy. Matt Damon, Ben Affleck.

James (44:50)
And he gives the answer that I absolutely agree with, that AI is so far away from being able to replicate that human experience that goes into novels in particular, that it's hysterical to think that we're being replaced by AI. We're not being replaced by AI, but you are being replaced by people using AI to make their writing process work quicker, more efficiently, and become more inventive. But the idea that AI can produce novels is fanciful. It will produce dreadful novels that nobody wants to read.

it is doing at the moment. But the more human inputs.

Cara (45:21)
Because it's the ideas and the human experience that it's those little bits of magic that the AI can't do right now. Like it really can't. And I mean, we've all tried, we've all tried to get it to write a chapter or something and it's just hilarious. It's not.

James (45:37)
Yeah, no. If the only time I ever had success with it writing chapters, I had written a chapter of a chase scene, which was pretty straightforward, standard sort of thriller-esque chase scene. And I asked it to rewrite it and make it more exciting. It did a better job than me, I would say, of rewriting that. And I incorporated quite a lot of that into my, I'm happy to say that, into my book, but I'd already written the scene anyway. So it's effectively was editing it, I guess.

Cara (45:52)
You

James (46:02)
But that was a very strict little limited parameter. Didn't have to do anything coming into it. didn't to it. Yeah. And it doesn't do humor. So if you ask AI to do humor, it will tell you a joke because it can work out what a joke is and how a joke works. But you and I know that humor comes from a little observation or the way two things happen in juxtaposition with each other that make us smile. That's what happens in novels and that's human experience that leads to that not in the banter type.

Cara (46:06)
Yeah, long form, just, can't, it, no, it loses the thread.

Mm-hmm.

James (46:32)
humour it won't get which is what obviously lots of banter in my books.

Cara (46:35)
So what does that mean for images then? So you still can't presumably then copyright an image that mid-journey had generated unless you'd significantly edited it. Would that be the same sort of thinking?

James (46:48)
Well, this is what she said about cover art and images. So as with writing, AI generated cover based solely on your input ideas is not copyrightable. So if you've inputted asked for this has come out and you've used that image, you can't copyright that image, which was the case.

Cara (47:04)
So if you just said, make me a cover that features a cat and a tree and whatever, and it made that then.

James (47:10)
Yeah, and even if you said it's a cozy mystery and I want it to be set in a coffee shop with all these elements, even if you've specified all of that, you can't copyright that image that comes out.

Cara (47:19)
I love that you knew I was going for cozy mystery because I said cat in a tree. It's that Swiss cheese. Yeah.

James (47:21)
There you go, same with our genres, Vinci books. So similar to using stock images, you can own the arrangement of AI generated elements, although not the individual elements. So that is exactly the same as stock, isn't it? So you get a stock image of a fighter pilot in my case, or a hunk in your case. You don't own that image. You've licensed it onto your cover, but you do own.

Cara (47:36)
Yep.

James (47:46)
the arrangement, the copyright. So somebody takes that image in exactly the same position, surrounded by the same things, you could sue them for breach because even though you don't own the image for that, that actual human figure in the middle. So human arrangement and modification of AI generated elements can be protected. And there was, for Zyra of the Dawn, the US Copyright Office granted limited protection to a graphic novel made up of AI generated images.

Cara (47:53)
Okay.

James (48:14)
selection, arrangement and modification were protectable. So I guess that they did some arrangement of the images in order and added probably text to it and so on and that was enough for them to say a bit like the cover. There's non-copyrightable aspects to it but the overall arrangement is copyrightable. So add your own design elements or modify AI generated images to obtain limited copyright protection.

Cara (48:18)
That's interesting, yeah.

James (48:42)
So similar as you'd expect, because it's a principle in law, similar to the writing side of things. Another slide here, I don't have any more of these I've got, but she talked about the balancing acts of understanding what you can and can't do in this area. here's a question, should I use technology built on unauthorized use? You can choose to protest generative AI, but finding a balance may be the more ethical way of doing things. Should you hire someone to do that work? So this is the point of...

saying you're taking people out of jobs, for instance, cover designers. Well, what if you were never going to hire someone? And this is a point you made on a previous show that you and you've done stuff with AI that you use that you would never go and pay for and get something to do as additional extra, which is a good way of using AI.

Cara (49:22)
Yep.

Yeah, exactly. Yeah. And there was a, you know, a couple of authors recently who've been using AI, like mid journey images, and then using, think, Runway and another program to turn those into videos. And those videos have been going viral on TikTok and everybody, you know, well, not everybody, a huge portion of people kind of walked up in arms about it, got the pitch, walks out. And I was like, but they would never have hired three...

actors at however much a day and costumes and makeup and video equipment and spent thousands of pounds to film a 10 second video for TikTok on the off chance that it might work. And that's not a stock video that you could have bought either. So they weren't doing anyone out of a job in that, in that situation. so yeah, I, I made that argument before.

James (50:16)
Another point Alicia made, and she moved on to kind of the ethical side and sort of caveated it saying this is my opinion, but she's thinking like a lawyer who's been in trials before of how they weigh these things up. And one point she made is, you not hold a higher duty to your household? So yes, you might be taking some work away from a cover designer if you switch over or add image design, if you switch over to AI, and you're not giving them money, but you're making

Cara (50:25)
Mm.

James (50:46)
a go of your business and making your own profitable business profitable, which is benefiting your partner, your children, your environment. So it's a balancing act. Should you be working for somebody else when you could be benefiting yourself? And it sounds selfish, but if you're raising children, it's not selfish.

Cara (51:04)
But also I think most of us, we, our businesses grow, so if we, you know, use as an example, we used AI to make a video that went viral on TikTok and that generated loads more money for our business and our business started to grow, you're then going to reinvest that money to keep growing your business. So you're going to use that to hire other services and pay other people. You know, we don't do everything ourselves. We can't do everything ourselves. So you're going to still be spending that money.

James (51:21)
Mm-hmm.

Cara (51:32)
to generate income for somebody else, it just might not be on that thing.

James (51:36)
Yeah. She also pointed out all the very positive beneficial ways AI is being employed around the world. So healthcare, early disease detection, personalized medicine, drug discovery, robotic surgery, all of those areas are advancing hugely at the moment. Cyber security, threat detection, fraud prevention, vulnerability assessment, environmental conservation, monitoring deforestation, big work going on there, tracking endangered species.

and accessibility, obviously assistive technologies for people with disabilities. There's lots of very positive areas of AI development at the moment. So again, that person who says you're doing a deal with the devil if you do anything with AI is out of kilter, I think with the way it's developing. I I think we have to remember that AI is more than just another technology that's coming along. It's a quantum leap forward.

And I know I likened it, I think in my talk last year at SBS Live to electricity. So you had water mills and horses running factories before electricity came along. And funny enough, there were parallels with the way people reacted to it. Some factory owners said they didn't want to pipe dangerous electricity into their factories and kill all their workers, but they were scared of it. Others said, this would be great. I can get rid of the horse. I can get rid of the water mills. So they did a direct replacement and then ran the factory as before.

Cara (52:49)
Mm-hmm.

James (53:04)
But the really clever people and a Hoover was my example, came up with a product which used this newfangled technology and built their business around it. And I think that's what we need to be thinking about now is, is how can we be good novelists writing good novels that readers want to read that sell better because they've got good covers and good advertising assets? And how can we use AI and build ourselves around those beneficial

Cara (53:11)
Mm-hmm.

James (53:32)
sped up processes that exist to do that. That's sort of where she finished and where I am anyway with AI.

Cara (53:40)
Yeah, I think, you know, bad novelists will still be bad novelists with AI because they won't have the skill to edit or change or do anything with the output that the AI gives them and good novelists are going to get better. And I mean, I'm, I'm an eternal optimist anyway, but I, but I also, I've always loved technology. I've always found, you know, things like this really exciting. And I tend to be the sort of person who's like, what cool things can we do with this? How can we use this?

James (53:53)
Yeah.

Yeah.

Cara (54:09)
to make our businesses better. And I kind of choose to be excited about it rather than not, because I think it's out there now. There's nothing we can do to wind it back.

James (54:20)
Yeah, and that is literally how she finished. So the final slide I've got here is it's just technology, she said. Other disruptive technologies that have changed and created industries and killed and created jobs. Cameras, when they came along, people used to draw, but they were suddenly not needed anymore. Adobe Photoshop, and I remember that very clearly. I Photoshop being hugely disruptive.

Cara (54:40)
Yeah, I think I can't remember if we had the conversation on this show or another one where I was talking about one of my favorite artists called Maggie Taylor, who was one, I think her partner worked for Adobe or partnership or Photoshop at the time. And she used to literally go out and collect objects and arrange them and take a photograph of it. And that was her artwork. And then she was almost kind of sponsored by Adobe to start using Photoshop and to start with people were like,

you're not a real artist, this isn't real art. And ironically, people would have said that previously about the fact she was using a camera and not painting it. But, you know, times changed and things moved on and now she's huge.

James (55:09)
Yeah, I remember that.

I guess it was the 90s when that happened, but I can remember people using that's photoshopped as a slur about an image. Yeah, whereas every cover is now photoshopped, know, smartphones and clean energy was another example. So clean energy is taking jobs away from old dirty energy. Okay, well, we can see the benefit that straight away. There's still a lot of jobs.

Cara (55:25)
Yeah. Yeah, I do. That covers Photoshopped. I was like, yeah, yeah, yeah.

James (55:42)
going in the old industry being replaced by people with specialisms in wind farms and solar and so on. So, so generative AI has been around for decades or that's blown up obviously the last couple of years and become more accessible and it's not going away. So that was, I felt that was the most interesting, excuse me, most interesting session. And I spoke to Joanna Penn, who's been ahead of the curve really talking about this subject for 10 years. And she was again, she was the same as me, very excited to have somebody of such.

Cara (55:47)
Mm-hmm.

James (56:11)
strong credentials breaking down where we are at the moment. And, you know, for those of us who are quite pro and quite excited, as you say about this sort reaffirming where we've got to on this subject. So I know there might be people listening who see a lot of negative sides and I'm not saying there aren't negative sides. I'm obviously some people will have to retrain and find something different to do or to work differently. But that happens with every disruptive technology. And if we resist that,

Cara (56:29)
Mm-hmm.

James (56:40)
We just stand still, right? If we'd resisted electricity in the late 19th century, can't, know, technology's happened for 2000 years. Things have developed. We can't protect jobs forever. I'm always against the idea of protecting jobs. I don't, you know, this might be a hugely controversial. There's probably a very good reason why we have train drivers, but I do sometimes wonder why we have train drivers when I'm sure AI could run trains, couldn't it? I know they'd be very angry. And I want to be a...

Cara (56:49)
Mm-hmm.

Cue all the train drivers messaging in going, you have no idea.

James (57:09)
And I think they might be right. I think there is good reasons why we have trained drivers for safety and stuff. We're not there yet, but we will be at some point. The Docklands Light Railway, runs across East London and runs quite a long way from Bank all the way through to beyond Greenwich, has no drivers and hasn't had drivers for 30 years. And the thing you get on at the airport, which is probably just one line, doesn't have drivers.

Cara (57:28)
Mm.

James (57:35)
That will happen. Now I love trains and I like train drivers. Don't come and beat me up. And I think there are good, I follow a couple of train drivers on X and they do get asked this every now and again, especially they've been on strike for more pay in the UK recently. And so they've got a bit of stick, but he has said, can't, we're not there yet. It's a long way off, but it will happen at some point.

Cara (57:40)
I swear.

mean, essentially, we might lose our jobs as authors, very, very, you know, many years down the line, or it might progress quicker than we think. But if we boil down what we are, we're creatives who run businesses. So we will just have to find another way to be creative and run a creative business. You know, if that disappears, if the way that we do things disappears, if readers only ever want books written by computers and, and they do a good enough job in the future, then we'll have to find something else to do. And that's just

the way that it is. At this point, we're not going to stop it. The best thing that we can do, I think, is to learn how to use it to make us better and to make it so that readers still want that human element and double down on... Dope N says this all the time, double down on being human, because I don't think you're to get a bunch of readers going to a convention to get their books signed by, you know, AI bots. They make that connection to the human.

James (58:44)
Yes.

No.

Cara (58:57)
So yeah, that's my two pennies worth.

James (59:00)
Yeah, very good. I agree completely. So good. Yeah, I shall try and dig out that Ben Affleck clip if you haven't seen it and include that in the show notes. Also going to include what was the other thing with the link to Author Nation. I'll talk to Joe if we can get that deal extended for listeners of the Indie Writers Club.

Cara (59:08)
Okay.

Yes.

James (59:19)
almost said show, Indie Writers Club. IndieWritersClub.com, that's where you should go to sign up to the mailing list to make sure you are going to get a heads up that you can pre-register for the self publishing show live in London.

Cara (59:20)
Show.

Yes, I'm just getting Kitty's spreadsheet downloaded. How are you doing words-wise? Did you get any done in Vegas?

James (59:34)
Yes, yeah it fell apart towards the weekend and coming back has been a nightmare just catching up with everything. Even though I worked every day in Vegas I still found I have barely touched the ground. I need to my dad, my 93 year old dad, I've not seen since I got back from Vegas. I went to Vegas and I'm going to see him straight after this.

So yeah, I've just, I mean, I had a meeting, I said it two and a half hours and I had a one and a half hour Zoom call followed by two and a half hours Zoom call yesterday. Can you imagine how much work I've got done with my list in between that? And had an hour long meeting today.

Cara (1:00:08)
Well, word count club is quite thin on the ground this week and I think it's just getting towards that time of year, isn't it? Where everyone's getting busy. I know we're in NaNoWriMo, but do you want to read out the names or yeah?

James (1:00:22)
Yeah, I'll take it. I'll take it. I'll take the first few. So if we say Rowan Ira, fallen off the bandwagon lately, just so you're saying. Golden Gem set a goal for 800 words this week. Simon Farron set a goal for 3000. Cheryl is finishing an editing pass on a work in progress. Susie Fleming did 40,000 words.

Cara (1:00:26)
Okay.

Yeah.

James (1:00:49)
Lost count but finished the first draft dog book and now 40,000 came to us edits. Okay, well done. And it's good Phil 15,000. That's editing as well. 2000 word count for the next week Lake Zipper 77 did 1200 words a day. That's a goal as well. Okay, gotcha. equine jumper 10,000 word count win.

Cara (1:00:54)
I was gonna say.

think that's a goal, that's a goal. The purple columns are goals, I think.

James (1:01:17)
back this week able to finish editing my 10k short story well done and Sheridan last one I'll do for now 11,000 sorry 1100 words this week.

Cara (1:01:25)
I'm just gonna interrupt to say that I might be about to be interrupted by my seven year old. Can you hear the doorbell?

James (1:01:29)
Okay. there you go. Well, like I tell you what, as, shall we wrap it up there? We'll do a special. there's night. Is that night? No, that's your parents' dog.

Cara (1:01:36)
I think we should. That's not, that's my mum's, my mum's Jack Russell.

James (1:01:43)
In this chaos we'll say goodbye and we'll pick up the word count next week. Thank you very much for listening. Bye.

Cara (1:01:49)
Bye.

I'm sorry.