LH131 AI for People People with Erica Farmer

Yes, you mentioned the S word.

Yes, slop.

As you'll know, there's an AI backlash underway.

Anyone who, like me, has grown up kids, especially kids in the creative industries, will know all about that.

Admitting that you wrote your book with AI as a helper is no biggie in the context that we're talking about.

Because I think people who work at all with it understand that it's not necessarily just about drafting everything.

It's fantastic as a research tool.

Absolutely.

You know, bias checking, fact checking, and so on.

Elsewhere in the forest, it's like saying that you print your own banknotes.

There are, you know, as a result of this, two book awards in July and January of 26 generated media controversy over the role of AI in writing fiction.

We've had a lot of kind of pushback on slop.

I have a friend who's a creative writing teacher at a university.

He's taking early retirement because he's fed up of sitting in tribunals trying to work out whether people had... used AI to write their work or not.

And we've recently had various examples of people, tutors who've decided to take all their exams face to face, paper and pen, because they just can't work out a way of dealing with it.

So it's causing societal problems.

But talking more broadly, perhaps, have you been affected by the backlash in your work? And how would you advise that people deal with that? You've been very transparent about your use of it and detailed and nuanced.

Your use is nuanced and expert.

You know, I've read your stuff and I don't see a lot of slot there.

I have to say, regrettably, when I scan through LinkedIn nowadays, I find that people that I like and admire who've been on the podcast, perhaps, who I enjoy talking to, suddenly I'm not getting their voice, I'm getting Claude's voice.

And if you work with it closely, you know the tells, you know how hard it is to get them out when you redraft something.

So I actually find I'm drafting less and less with it.

But how should people deal with that when feelings run so high?

John, it's a great question.

And I'm right in the middle of having this conversation with, I'm literally on a call with Liggy Webb earlier this morning talking about something very similar and some of the stuff that Liggy's seeing as well, particularly from a human skills perspective.