Should You Use AI to write your book

[upbeat music] As I mentioned in the teaser to this episode, y'all, I have been on such a deep dive down the rabbit hole of AI.

Now, I mostly feel like this is a professional obligation that I carry as someone who does own a hybrid publishing company.

And of course, as y'all know, I also work with a lot of first-time authors to do a lot of different things with writing, editing, and publishing their books, both within Page and Podium and outside of Page and Podium.

But one thing that I have really noticed as I have been down this kind of rabbit hole and reading different experts' perspectives, is that a lot of the things that I feel really matter to writers are getting dramatically overshadowed by a very black-and-white culture around AI.

And in fact, recently, I had a post on LinkedIn that got a lot, a lot of views, much, much more than my LinkedIn posts normally do, and it was a post about AI.

And one of the things that really surprised me is that I really had not seen the post as being either anti-AI or pro-AI.

I was really more just thinking about when people use these tools, what is the result? Is it actually delivering what folks are hoping it will deliver, or is it taking us off course, or is a little bit of both? Y'all, you know I come from a social science background.

I am always really curious, not only to make kind of a line in the sand, a decision one way or another, but really to dig into what's really happening and really understand it.

I feel like when we put our beliefs out there, we really have an obligation to be able to back them up with a really solid explanation.

And to make a long story long, [laughs] I realized that we weren't really getting this in most of the writing conversations on AI.

So here I am.

I decided that I wanted to share with y'all some of the thoughts that I have been having.

Now, as some kind of framework, some kind of foundation here, I do wanna mention that I have been seeing a lot of AI, and it is often from writers who I have been kind of surprised actually have been using AI.

And it's really changed a lot of the way that I think about things, not necessarily in terms of is it good or bad, and they're changing my mind or not changing my mind.

But rather in that I think it's so important that we understand when a lot of people are using a tool, why are they using it? What are they getting out of it? And that's really what I wanna focus on today.

And I do have a lot of concerns about AI.

Now, most of these are things that are being talked about all over the Internet, and they're not particularly connected to writing, but some of them are, and that's what I wanna go into today.

So just to kind of give you a sense of where I am personally, because of course my personal perspective is going to leak into this episode and our whole series, I wanted to share with you, I am really worried about a lot of things with AI.

I am certainly worried about environmental destruction.

I am very, very worried economically that so much money is being poured into something that has not been particularly transparent in terms of how the economics are working.

And maybe most of all, what I'm really worried about is that there is a technology that could be powerful at some point, and it seems as though most of the folks who really could be intervening to make it an actual social good are kind of just running a little wild with it.

It feels a little like there's not any responsible oversight.

And those are really my main concerns when it just comes generally to AI.

But I also wanna share with you that I am also very, very skeptical about these tools.

A lot of the messages that we're getting are about how AI is going to take over the world, essentially.