Zohra: 0:01

Hello listeners. Welcome to season 7 of Inside Techcom with Zahra Mutabana. In this season, we have a series of standalone episodes, each tackling a critical issue shaping tech and content today. From hallucination-resistant content and AI adoption to ethics and equity in tech, this season is about navigating change with clarity, integrity, and impact. Let's get started. This is another standalone episode that I decided to do and just to explore AI more in depth, not specific to how AI relates to technical communication, but just the expansive new frontier of AI and its impact on how it affects our lives, our professions. And with that, I have Julie Trostad, and we are going to be talking about ethics in AI, intellectual property, copyright. So we are going to be touching upon a whole host of things here. And Julie's going to be educating us on that. I have been personally interested in how with as AI models are trained on massive amounts of digital content, often without permission, creators are left wondering who controls what and how do we protect the value of our work? So Julie is here with us to guide authors and publishers through shifts in this industry for over three decades. She's the head of US publishing at AMLET.ai and the founder of Paperbacks and Pixels. And she helps creators navigate the emerging world of AI content licensing and sustainable publishing strategies. With that, Julie, welcome to my show. And please introduce yourself.

Julie: 1:48

I think you just introduced me beautifully. I've been working in book publishing since the 1990s, and I've been one of these really lucky people to get to ride the whole wave of technology as it sort of entered the field. I mean, it used to be just about paper and books, but uh we had desktop publishing, then we had ebooks, and then we had social media, and we had online stores, and now we have AI. So throughout my career, both as an editor and as a publisher, I've sort of hit this from a number of different angles. And I'm excited about what we can do to protect authors' work and also to find new revenue streams for writers and content creators in the future.

Zohra: 2:31

I'm excited equally, Julie, to sort of understand how this new wave of technology affects our future with content creation and compensation and ownership. What I would like is just to ground this discussion, I want to start with some fundamentals. What is intellectual property and why does it matter so much for anyone creating content?

Julie: 2:55

Sure. Intellectual property, I guess it's the ownership of the words that you write or the actual work. It's not like each individual word. It's that particular collection of words or music or a song. In the book publishing industry, it's really about that work that is copyrighted, that is actually published. It's not all like the draft manuscripts in a drawer, but it is the work that has been produced, polished, and presented. And it's really the capital that an author has. You know, they own a body of work over time. Or if it's work made for hire, then a company or the publisher owns that work and not the author. And you mentioned collection of words. Would that also include collection of ideas? Uh yes, anything that is put together, it could be graphic, it could be audio, it could be visual, it can be any kind of creation that is, I guess, put together and then made public, distributed to the public. It's not your private diaries unless you plan to publish them.

Zohra: 4:00

Maybe, maybe I should start thinking about it. So when we talk about intellectual property, we are talking about a collection of the very things that you mentioned, words, ideas, concepts, visuals, anything, and that is made, that is published, that's made available to the public.

Julie: 4:15

Or that is work product. I guess you could also say, you know, it's not just like a lot of it isn't given to the public, but it is used for a client, or it's it's something that's created that then can be used again or modified. And like once you create one client report, you can use that intellectual property to do the same for another one. So maybe the definition's pretty broad.

Zohra: 4:37

It is broad. And I'm glad that you brought up that distinction because as a technical communicator, the content that I create does not belong to me, it belongs to the company. It's the when I say I be intellectual property of the company. I wrote a book on decluttering, but that belongs to me, not to anybody else. So there is that distinction.

Julie: 4:58

Exactly. And that's very important. If you are an employee, everything you create is generally it belongs to the employer unless you have a specific written agreement contrary to that.

Zohra: 5:11

Right. How do we protect intellectual property in this digital environment where copying and reuse is so easy?

Julie: 5:19

It's really hard. I mean, so online in the past, that's what copyright did or trademark did. Copyright is a legal standard that says when you register it or you publish it, this belongs to you as a creator. And so on the web, there are things like robots.txt, which is a piece of code that can go into a website. And if it's like publicly facing available on a website, there's that little piece of that. But you know, there's nothing that's really machine readable for books or and that that's what Amlet AI is designed to do. It's designed to create a digital fingerprint that a machine or an AI or like anyone using a computer can recognize as property that belongs to somebody else. For the most part, digital content that's been put up on the web since it began can be pulled apart so that it no longer sits with who the author necessarily was. You know, it can be copied and pasted, and a lot of times that gets completely disconnected from the original creator or the original producer of that. So it's really a challenge, and that's why AMLET AI was created was to combine the content with a digitally identifiable source. So even down to the paragraph level, you can tell where that content came from if it's registered in the content database.

Zohra: 6:46

Can you speak a little more to that? I'm trying to understand how with Amlet AI, what is the process?

Julie: 6:53

The process is that AMLET AI actually was created in Europe in response to the European laws that require any AI company or digital creator to pay anyone for content they use in their products. This is not true in the United States. It's not legal, but in Europe it was mandated, and then there was like, well, we don't know how to enforce this. So AMLET was created by two men. One is Titus Pan, and he is in Germany. Tietis had created something he called the ISCC, which is the International Standard Content Code, I think. The ISCC. It's an ISO standard code that identifies content on the web. But then they realized anybody could create this, and it could be created for music or a podcast or a blog post or a book. AMLT specifically creates a registry for copyrighted material. So if you create an ISCC, AMLET allows puts another layer on it. It's a registry, like an ISBN or a barcode or a UPC, like an identifier code, then also goes along with the content and tells anyone who's looking for it or wants to use it that this code is available for use for AI training, available for use for research purposes, or available for generative AI purposes. Or conversely, it's not allowed to be scraped at all. And so that tells anyone who's looking to use that content whether that's okay or not okay, basically.

Zohra: 8:38

That's fascinating. You mentioned that this is not enforced or this regulation does not exist in the US.

Julie: 8:45

No, it doesn't. At least not in again, I'm I'm speaking specifically to the book publishing industry, which is what I know the best. But for instance, you can take the big lawsuits that just have happened. There was the anthropic suit that was settled recently. It was like $1.8 billion awarded to authors whose content was illegally scraped. But the lawsuit didn't say that AI companies couldn't use that content. The lawsuit said they couldn't use pirated content because they took stolen work from databases of like scraped and pirated books. But it was perfectly okay, and as far as the US law is concerned, perfectly okay for these companies to use data, and they don't even, as long as they buy it, and buying a 99 cent copy at the Kindle store, or actually even going to a used bookstore, buying a book, and scanning in the pages, like that doesn't give the owner compensation necessarily if they're like using a used copy of a book or they're purchasing it, you know, in a marketplace where the author isn't compensated.

Zohra: 9:58

So in this scenario, I've got my book, which is on decluttering. In the US, somebody can buy that book, a Kindle copy, and then train their LLM with that content.

Julie: 10:11

That's perfectly legal. And it's probably not a problem if it's like me. Like I read your book and then I want my AI to help me implement the lessons. Right. As long as I don't share it or resell it, that's perfectly okay. Like readers can do, you know, they can rip out pages, they can highlight things, right? They can build a doorstop with it. That's all okay. But it's when they resell it and make a profit and don't share that profit with you that it's not good. So like if I took your book and I built a chatbot out of it and I didn't compensate you, that would be a problem.

Zohra: 10:45

That's true. So how would in the US without the protection of this ISCC that you mentioned? How, in your opinion, would somebody like me be able to protect their content and ensure that it is not being commercialized or monetized?

Julie: 11:04

Well, it's probably too late. It's probably been pirated. You can definitely, you know, register your book with Amlet right away. And anyone who uses Street Lib Distribution, which is related, it's by it, you know, it's created by the same group of people. Amlet is baked in. So what's really cool, you can upload your book into that system, which actually gives you global distribution into bookstores all over the world in Europe. You can also distribute in the US to Amazon and Barnes and Noble if you haven't already, or pick and choose where you want to go. But also it puts that protection on the book as it's going out into the retail market. So you could do that today. And um if anyone wants links, I can provide them. You can put them in the show notes. I would do that. Absolutely. Wonderful. And then also if you want to find out if you could get some money out of the anthropic lawsuit, there are a couple of places you can go to bookshop.org. And you can also, the Atlantic earlier this year published a list. They created a database of all the books that were stolen. So you can I'll add that. I'll I'll give you the links in the show notes as well. So you can anybody can go and look up to see if their book was indeed identified as one of those scraped. Perfect.

Zohra: 12:24

I would love that. Then you could get your lawyer and see if you can get something. I don't know if I would be able to afford a lawyer, but I don't know. You can register.

Julie: 12:33

There's a place you can register as a complaint, and the the payout is approximately $3,000 per book that was stolen. So interesting. The one caveat is you had to have registered the copyright. If you didn't register the copyright, you're probably out of luck.

Zohra: 12:50

The book is copyrighted, but this is a larger question. Uh as solo authors, as individual, there's a term, right? As with solo publishing taking off. It that my objective in asking this question was how does an author protect their content? And uh you gave some great, great tips there.

Julie: 13:12

A couple of things you know you can do. I mean, people put it in the copyright page, no aid AI training. I don't know how it works because it gets separated. And Amlet, and yeah, that's about it. Just be the digital rights management software isn't gonna stop any pirates. So it just makes it harder for readers to read your books.

Zohra: 13:33

Right. And it's scary actually. Several months ago, I was in a discussion, more like a debate with a family member, and we were talking about no idea is original. We are all emulating or I guess inspired from another idea. So no idea is original. When I think about intellectual property, when when you said that it's a collection of these XYZ things, words, concepts, visuals, it's your representation. But let's say in that representation, I have an idea that I got inspired from. This is slightly deviating from just AI content licensing. But my question was, is that content copyrighted?

Julie: 14:15

Well, I guess if you kind of go by what the law would be, say you wanted to publish a book and you were inspired by somebody, but it's all your thoughts about that book, right? It could be like how many people have sort of rewritten great novels or written books about Microsoft topics, you know, like a lot of people have written about the same things. And it's really about your unique take on it. The problem would come, would be if you are taking direct quotes or you're taking someone else's ideas that are very clearly like from one person and not attributing it to them. If you needed to figure out whether you were doing that or not, you could go to a place like the copyright clearance center and find out if you can use this. I mean, this comes up a lot as like as a book publisher. We would have authors who would say use song lyrics in their novels, or so, you know, they cannot use them verbatim without paying the artist. So you need to like acquire all those rights for reprinting someone else's work. But if it's inspired by and it's your unique take on something, you wrote a book on decluttering, right? Well, Marie Kondo wrote the big book on decluttering, and many people have written books, and I'm sure your book is your particular take on it. And sometimes it's just like, is this a book for a different audience? Is it like the same idea, but for grandparents, or is this the same idea? But it's a professional high-level book for, you know, very deep and technical. So there's so many variations on a theme. But but what you're saying is true. Like a lot of times when I was an editor, people would ask before they send a proposal, they're like, Will you send what is it? A non-compete, will you sign a non-compete to look at my proposal? And I always just had to say, no, I can't, because I have to tell you, I'm getting the same idea over and over and over again. What I'm looking for is the person who can execute it in the most marketable way. So when I did architecture books, you know, I was probably doing a book on masonry. I could have had a number of different authors write that book, but the author that wrote the book that I felt as an editor was most close to the way I wanted to present it, you know, as a publishing company, was the author I wanted to work with. If that makes any any sense.

Zohra: 16:32

Yeah, absolutely. So two takeaways from this for me personally. One is attribution is important. Yes. Right? If you're using it verbatim, ensure that verbatim. Yeah. Right. If you're using it verbatim, make sure that it is that you have the permission to quote verbatim and that you are paying the royalty if if needed and you are attributing.

Julie: 16:54

Yes. And if you're writing a self-published book, I would just suggest you do not use song lyrics. You just don't even want to go there.

Zohra: 17:01

Oh God. The other thing that you mentioned was if you're inspired, this is the sort of the other, the contrast to if you're using it verbatim. If you're inspired by something, then it is your take on it. So even then, if I'm quoting something, I would give that attribution. So that's what I have done with my book. Uh when I talk about Marie Kondo, I've given the credit to Marie Kondo that this is not my idea. I've acknowledged it explicitly, but how I have adapted her techniques, her advice, her best practices in my personal life. So that is my, I would say, my the personalization to the content.

Julie: 17:38

Exactly. And I think like all literature is in conversation with all other literature. And you know, even read or understand a book, you have to know so much cultural context. And there's a great pleasure for reader to like see the author make connections or to make connections on their own from the author's page. And it's just like people worry, like, oh, somebody's already written this, or I can't write anything unique. And the truth is you have a unique perspective. And the more you sort of like look at your own take on something and understand your position, the stronger your point of view is going to be. Very true.

Zohra: 18:14

As we are kind of diving into this conversation, there is a lot of content now that is being created by AI.

Julie: 18:24

Yeah, like that's a variation of what you were just talking about. Like, so for I don't know if there's a qu you can continue if there's a question, but I have a thought. Okay, I I would I would like you to share your thoughts. Oh, sure, sure. So when you talk about inspired by, I was with, I was helping an author at an event about a month ago, and she had written a book about a very famous figure in television and published the book. She was with Penguin Random House, big huge publisher. Within 10 days of her publishing, just less than two weeks, there were a whole bunch of imitated books that people had literally taken her book, fed it to an AI, and say, write a variation on this. And they were published even with covers that were AI variations of her cover, and it creates huge marketplace confusion. So that's what's happening right now. It's not like a human being being inspired by another human being. It's a human being saying, I think I can make a copy of that book and make a profit because it's a bestseller, and I'll price mine $2 less and put it on Amazon. So that's what they do. And I know that the retailers like Amazon and Barnes Noble and Penguin Random House, the publisher, are aggressively trying to take these books down. But frankly, they look and feel different enough. And they, you know, the algorithms are written so that it is not a direct take or a direct quote so that the machines aren't picking that up. That's kind of crazy.

Zohra: 19:59

That is kind of crazy. And is that bad news? That is bad news, exactly. Do you think we'll ever get to a point? I mean, this is and if you don't have the answer to it, that's fine. And I think I'm not looking for a utopian answer here. Uh, will we reach that point in time? But do you see regulation coming out or improvements in algorithms that could help us protect, or what can we do upstream? I think we protect ourselves.

Julie: 20:25

Yeah, I mean, first of all, as a consumer, be very discerning. So if people don't buy these copycat books, then that makes them a lot less lucrative to do. Just so like be attentive, like when you're making a purchase, like see who the author is, make sure they're legit. You know, look if there's other books and find out which one is the real one. So that's what we as consumers can do. I think it's really early days, and the publishers are very upset about this. The retailers are super upset about this, it's bad for their business. So there are a lot of people working on this problem right now, and I do think it's gonna improve as an optimist. I know even at Street Lib, they're work to not allow these kind of materials to be released. But again, it's just like saying if the AI is smart enough to whoever is writing these copycat books is telling the AI, make it seem like it's not written by an AI, although it obviously is from a human perspective, it gets harder and harder to identify.

Zohra: 21:31

Have you run into any such situation personally where somebody has stolen an idea, a book, and spun it off as their own?

Julie: 21:41

Uh well, I think there was like Jane Friedman who writes a popular blog and newsletter in the book publishing space, had her own books ripped off last year. And I think they even put her name on it, and that was like a big deal. Oh, what'd you think about it? Because people were telling her. About it. People told her, hey, I read your book. And she's like, I didn't write that book. So it is really, really hard to keep track. Yeah. So if you were an author, I would do that too. I would like periodically look at the competitive titles that are coming up. A feature that we just developed at AMLE allows you to actually drop another piece of content in that you find on the web or another book, and it will tell you how much of a match it is to yours. So you'll be able to like, so for instance, like if you have a book in French and in English, it's the same book, and you probably sold the French language rights. So that's probably legit. That would be like an 80, 85% match, even though it's in different languages. If somebody steals a substantial portion but just kind of tweaks it, you're gonna see a really high percentage match. And so that would allow you to take easier legal action than you could, you know, the again with these new tools that we're developing. And I just think most important is like readers beware. I think we should all learn or all understand whether or not we're reading AI generated content, particularly something that what's the qualification of this author. So that's that's what I would say. And if you identify it, if you purchase a book and you get it and you like open it up and say, complain, complain to Amazon and tell them to take this book down, give it a bad review, give it a one-star, you know, do those things as a consumer to help you out. Got it.

Zohra: 23:32

Great advice here. I'm just trying to soak this in. I wanted to talk about fair use. There are AI developers who claim that public content falls under fair use. What is your response to that? And especially from a rights holder perspective.

Julie: 23:47

Yeah, fair use is usually something that if it's in the public domain, it's that the copyright has expired. I guess if somebody is putting out a blog and they're not charging for it, and you know, I think it gets really muddy. We could go back to the book example, like if it's a book sample, and they often consider like you can use sometimes up to 20% of another work and call it fair use. And that, you know, the variations, there's variations on it, but that gets a little little borderline, right? And I don't think you could just say like, oh, it's fair, it's fair game because it was on the internet. As I say though, it's like it's too late. These models have already been trained, the whole internet's been scraped. I think anything in the past is the past. And even in line with the US laws that say it's okay to use this material if you paid for it, and if it's free material, like okay.

Zohra: 24:49

So anybody can come scrape the content off my blog if I had one and use that content to train their LLM under fair use.

Julie: 24:57

I don't think they should. I mean, that's where you can find robots like Ethically, they shouldn't. You should, you know, you have your copyright notice on your blog. Ethically, they shouldn't, but they do. And and there's a curiosity here, I think we were talking in in the pre-show, is that people are gonna lock their stuff away behind paywalls, all the good stuff at least. That could be a problem for us consumers. That would be really bad and sad if we could get if less things are out there. But on the other hand, like how much do you trust an AI that is trained on WebMD and and the comments section as opposed to like a real medical textbook? You know, wouldn't you rather know where it's coming from?

Zohra: 25:38

No, that's such an excellent point. As consumers, there are things that we can do. And one, you said if you're reading a book that seems a ripoff, then complain to the publisher, to the retailer about it so that they can take those books down. And second, you made a great point about being responsible with that content. In your opinion, what does ethical AI content licensing look like? Since we touched upon ethical.

Julie: 26:08

Yeah, in in publishing, you know, I always talk about this uh concept that everyone along the chain needs to benefit, right? So, like everyone, that everyone is the author and the publisher. That also includes the distributor and the retailer and the final consumer. Like these there's a chain of value that goes along all of it. And I just think that everyone within the chain should be treated fairly, and those within the chain should treat each other fairly. So, what that means is that the author should always be compensated if their book is sold. And like one problem that authors have, and I don't know what the answer is, and and maybe licensed ebooks could help this, is that if somebody buys a used copy of their book, they don't get any compensation. Libraries buy them at a higher price than a single copy because that book is read over and over again, and and that author gets a little more highly compensated from that single book than they would. So so ethically, yeah, it's like the rights holder, the person who spent the money to create the value, should be able to receive. And so that also means the retailer, right? They should get paid, you know, for being responsible for taking care of the author's rights, right?

Zohra: 27:29

Right. So with published books, that with printed books, a used copy definitely would the author and the whole value chain that you talk about does not get compensated.

Julie: 27:43

The author and the publisher, well, I guess the used bookstore gets compensated over. But but yeah, it misses, you know, that author is is not getting compensated. And there and there's some thought about this idea that, yeah, maybe you could resell ebooks, which is super interesting. Like you could sell your ebooks to somebody else, and when you do, that there could be a little bit of that, a fraction of that could go back to the author every time the book changes hands or something like that. You obviously can't do that with paper. So actually the digital environment actually opens up more opportunities for authors and content creators to get paid. And so, like if a chat bot wants to take your book, you know, somebody who's building like a decluttering chatbot and they want to take the content from your book and create a product out of that, then you should earn royalties from that, which would be, you know, in addition to the royalties you're getting for the printed book and the ebook and the audiobook and the French edition. It's another language of rights. And they actually call these in the industry, at least in Europe, text and data mining rights. You know, that's money paid to allow somebody to use your text and your data in a new product.

Zohra: 28:56

That's fascinating. When will US catch up to this or will we catch up at all?

Julie: 29:00

Uh I hope we do. I mean, in the league, the lawyers that I've talked to about this issue are eagerly watching Europe and hoping that we can adopt some of these things in the United States. The advocacy groups for authors, like the Authors Guild and the publishers, are eagerly, you know, lobbying for these kind of laws to be put into effect. It's just like it's US is the Wild West, you know, capitalism and and and so on. So, you know, the laws are, you know, the attentiveness to the laws is a little different. But we can also say in Europe, their laws are like overly cautious because like, you know, you have to have all the privacy notices on the web. And they are very, very cautious and careful with digital anything, it being shared and privacy, um, much more so than in the US. But I think there's real advantages to creators and individuals for you know taking privacy and content rights very seriously.

Zohra: 29:58

We've talked about uh Europe and the US. Have you worked with authors from other parts of the world?

Julie: 30:05

Yeah, I have, but mostly on I actually represent the US for the Europeans.

Zohra: 30:10

Oh. So so apart from Europe and the US, did you mention that you have helped authors with book publishing to other countries?

Julie: 30:19

I have in a limited way. I mean, and that's how I kind of ended up getting associated with these, you know, vendors overseas. You know, we have international book fairs. We go to Frankfurt and London and Bologna, and the industry is very international. It's just different. Like even the laws around e-books are different in Europe. Like they're a fixed price. Whereas in the US, they can charge whatever you want. What about Australia? I don't know that much about Australian rights.

Zohra: 30:46

You know, I think they're probably more like the US. We have touched upon how content creators should rethink how they manage and distribute their work in this AI-driven environment. Is there anything else that you would like to add to that?

Julie: 31:00

Well, I think they should think about these potential future uses of their books. That one thing that's happening, you know, you have on Amazon, you have the AI called Rufus, which is helping people find and discover books. So the metadata around the book, that is the book description, the reviews, all the things that the data that's used to sell the book is going to be really important, even more so when AIs use this kind of information to surface books for sale. So, you know, your books are going to be discovered and recommended by ChatGPT. So what what would you suggest we consider there? It's just be really diligent about your book descriptions. You know, like like the AI shouldn't be able to read the content of your book, but you know, as soon as someone pirates it, it can. But really rich descriptions of the book that are meant to, rather than just say on the back cover or the Amazon description, a lot of people just say this is a book about and this is what's inside, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. It really should say the metadata should say this book is for curious readers who are interested in technology to really name who exactly would want to read this book, name that in the book description or in the product description so that it just gives juice for think about what people are looking for. And this isn't all that different from the old search engine optimization, but it would just be be sure that you know you're not just sticking to the facts, but you're talking more about who this is for, so that that person can find it.

Zohra: 32:35

Okay, that's interesting. I'm just thinking back. What did I do with my book? We could take a look at it.

Julie: 32:42

I actually have some tools available at paperbacks and pixels that I've created actually like a Gemini bot that will do the optimize your Amazon listing for you and help you enrich it in exactly this way. And I I've been playing with chatbots too. I created one that helps authors determine their very particular brand. I call it the little black dress, and it allows them to create something that is both very unique to them, but situates them exactly in their genre, which is what you need. You need to connect, like books sell other books, and something that's interesting about people who buy books is like they go into a bookstore to buy one book, and they probably buy every decluttering book on the shelf, which is kind of the opposite of decluttering, but it at any rate, they'll buy a lot of books. They they won't buy just one. And right, so if they buy one book, so if you are writing a book, wanting to sell a book, you really need to look at what are the other books, and they should be selling each other. They should as like being in conversation. But if you're an author, you should read and recommend those other books and authors, and they should read and recommend you because you're you're part of a body of work.

Zohra: 33:57

That's so sweet. And you're right. I was doing research on content strategy a couple of years ago, and I read one book, and then that book had good references to other books. And I love the phrase that you use literature talks to each other, one literature talks to another literature, that conversation that is happening. And I have seven or eight books of content strategy sitting in my library, but I need because not one book is going to offer you everything. So you need these different perspectives.

Julie: 34:25

Right. But once you identify who bought that other book, yeah, and as an author, that's who you market to. That's so true. That's so true. And that that person is going to be using AI.

Zohra: 34:38

I think we are all going to be in that same bucket very soon. I'm thinking of as we look to the future, again, we've touched upon this throughout this conversation. What kinds of legal, technological, or industry changes do you hope to see around IP, intellectual property, and artificial intelligence?

Julie: 34:58

I think the main thing I think, Evan, you brought it up much earlier, is the huge increase in self-publishing and individuals being able to bring their books to market. And I would like to see more legal power, legal standing with the individual authors. And I even see like that authors maybe hold their property more closely, that maybe they don't sell all of the rights to a publisher. But I think the way the industry is evolving, that authors will self-publish, they will build an audience, and once they do that, then they create a business deal with a publisher. But in the future, I think that publisher is not going to own all the author's works the way they do now. I think it's going to be more of a fluid relationship where that author can, you know, sell the right rights, they can sell the hardcover rights to the best hardcover publisher. I mean, I guess it used to be this way when hardcovers and paperbacks were different imprints. But they should be able to, as individuals, enter the marketplace more freely. That and also small independent publishers, I think it's really exciting to see that maybe that this opens up new opportunities for them to be competitive because everything is digital and disintermediated, that they don't need as much infrastructure as these giant publishers do to be nimble and flexible and bring unusual and different viewpoints out into the world.

Zohra: 36:27

But with that comes, I think again, kind of going off of the whole rip-offs that are happening from well-published authors, there is a this AI content that is being generated and then being called as your own. Is that I know that is not ethical, but it's being done. Yes. Now let's say I use AI to publish a book. I'm going to brainstorm with ChatGPD, for example, and then I'm going to have a draft, and then I'm going to take the draft and then tweak it. Do I attribute AI there in that scenario?

Julie: 37:03

That is such a squishy question. Um, like, yeah, I did like I wrote a short story and I did exactly that. I like used AI to brainstorm, I used AI to research. I may have used a phrase or two from what it gave me. I wrote it myself, and then I went to enter it into a contest that a friend of mine wanted me. It said, go enter the short story contest. And I got I filled out the form to enter, and the last checkbox was, did you use AI in any way, in any way to support or write your work? And it basically, the way I read it was like on penalty of death, we will not accept your work. So I think I think that's gonna evolve, but it's really hard because if you're a publisher, if you are accepting books from an author, you don't want to discover a year down the road that this was like completely AI generated. I think it's a conversation to be had, like tools like Grammarly and the grammar check in Microsoft Word are using AI. Does that count? Um a lot of these, there's some really wonderful AI editing tools, and there's new AI writing tools like Pseudorite and Novel Crafter that are really fun to use, that basically create an assistant that help you like organize everything. And so what if it writes a paragraph that you really like and you like maybe you tweak it or edit it? I think it's gonna loosen up, and I think it's gonna be more about the craft. I think we're gonna see in the next five to ten years, like authors who use AI and are proudly saying they use AI, and they use it to be more productive, and they are working it really hard, like with a whip. Like they are not letting that AI get away with any, like, I hope you are well today, or like these kind of phrases that identify it as obviously AI. My favorite way to work with AI and writing, frankly, is the walk and talk using the voice to text. You can walk around and like dictate now, take that sort of mushy bit of thought and give it to AI and tell it to organize it for you. And it comes out sounding quite a bit like me, because I spoke those words. Right.

Zohra: 39:18

And that is where I have this dilemma. I love writing poetry and I like my poetry to rhyme. And I was running into a writer's block, and so I took this poetry, put it into chat CPD. It was my words, and I did use voice to text actually, and it produced this beautiful piece of art. I was moved by it. And one, I felt a sense of failure that I could not do that. I I was looking at a reflection of my own words, but the fact that I failed at expressing myself, but what if I ever were to publish my my body of work in this instance, my poetry, my poems, would I the specific poem, even though it was my original thought, my words, it just rearranged it. Who gets the credit? Do I get the credit?

Julie: 40:09

So these are the dilemmas that I I I think you like make sure you make a note in that file, what you're thinking. I feel like that you just used a word processor, honestly. I mean, it's your thought. Like the AI would not have come up with that concept by itself.

Zohra: 40:25

Yeah, when you when you give it that spin, I love it because that take the poetry was inspired by certain recent events of my life. So it was very personal. It's just that it was structured or organized better by AI. But I love your take on it.

Julie: 40:42

I think there's excellent opportunity. A lot of people who are using it to enhance their creativity and to build new things. I love the fact that you can do a lot more, a lot faster. I think the key is sort of keeping your creative reign in on it and just like and your discernment. You'll know if it's awkward and you'll know if it's beautiful. Like your reaction was that. If you the same thing had happened in the output was like icky, you would have gone, I think you can trust your creative instincts here.

Zohra: 41:10

Yeah. What I'm taking away from this is as we start using AI generated content, there is AI-generated content that that's not original. But the creative, you're tapping into your own creativity is a whole different thing. And you are using AI as an assistive technology to help you along the way. But the originality is coming from you, it's not from the AI.

Julie: 41:32

Agreed, agreed. And you can almost like and keep a note and say that it is, but like if we think about like I'm a terrible speller, and you know, I rely on that as like an assistive aid for it to like, you know, not a great typist. So like having these tools that can make me express myself without having to worry about my the way I stumble around on a keyboard is wonderful. Like, if I didn't have that help, I probably couldn't do that.

Zohra: 42:01

True.

Julie: 42:02

And think about those who have other disabilities or limitations or difficulty allowing them to like create something from their heart with the help of a technology. Like, what's really wrong with that? I mean, we couldn't get to the grocery store without a car, and we don't think twice about having to use this using this technology to assist our everyday lives. Very interesting perspectives.

Zohra: 42:27

And I think we are at the hour, and I want to sum this up in a manner where there are no clear-cut answers. I mean, it's still a work in progress, and this dialogue needs to happen, and this is where we need to be more introspective.

Julie: 42:45

I think so too. And slowing down, I think the biggest problem I have with AI right now is it generates so fast. And I just like I realized after like one day at work to start generated like so many pages and chats and slow it down, meter it out, dose it.

Zohra: 43:03

Yeah, yeah, but that's really important. That burnout should not kill our creativity, and that is a problem that I personally feel. And I have stepped away from using these AI tools for my day-to-day. Professionally, yes, I do, but I was using these even for for personal use. I have taken a step. I think we've all been there this year and are like to the point okay, enough of that. Enough of that, right? Because I think it's creating my creativity, it's killing my just that burnout that I'm feeling from AI. I think I've become AI fluent. We all need to be AI fluent, but then also taking taking it slow and pausing to uh to tap into our creative juices again. We need that.

Julie: 43:51

Yeah, and I think it's even like imprompting. You one thing I learned in in an AI class I took that was really great was just to create like a one pager about how you want the AI to treat you and say, like stop after two paragraphs, ask me a question. However, you wanted to do that, you can create a document like that and attach it to chats and it will slow itself down for you.

Zohra: 44:14

I love that. I love that. Yes. Yes. In fact, I do that with my own interaction with AI. I tell AI, when I'm asking you a question, I just want you to summarize at a very high level. I don't want you to spit out this 10-page answer one and then don't proceed until I say yes or no or whatever that word is. That code is.

Julie: 44:37

That's exactly the kind of thing we should be doing with AI, is just like learn how to, you know, learn. It's like good boundaries, sir.

Zohra: 44:43

With boundaries, yeah. We need to have those boundaries with AI. That's so so important. I think we've had a pretty good, wholesome discussion around AI ethics, publishing, intellectual property, who owns the content and the things that are well a work in progress. Anything extra that you would like to add?

Julie: 45:01

Oh, just saying like this is so much fun to think about it in sort of a philosophical way as well. It's just like it's not all hard tech, right? This like AI is what's so interesting about it is it feels much more human than previous technology. And I think that's why it's kind of exciting too. But I would just say, you know, what could we do with this that and how can we make it our fun collaborator who's not gonna get us into trouble?

Zohra: 45:30

I love how you ending sort of on this ended on this positive note. You're humanizing AI, the interaction rather, with AI. I really like that take.

Julie: 45:40

Yeah, I think I think it's from but it isn't human, but still it just like helps us. Everything else we've used, keyboards or you know, like using like you can really talk to it like no other technology we've had before.

Zohra: 45:54

Very true. And and some use cases that I have encountered, AI can be easy to interact with. When I say easy, I mean of course the interface, not the interface, but at a philosophical level, it is non-judgmental. Uh and that also adds a philosophical angle to that interaction. Yeah. Well, we could keep going, but this is a good thing. We could keep going. Exactly. This is great. Thank you so much, Julie, for coming on my show and sharing your insights. I had fun and I hope you had fun too.

Julie: 46:23

I did too. This is a fun conversation. So absolutely.

Zohra: 46:27

Thank you. Can't wait so much. See what you write next. I'm inspired. I'm going to see what I can publish in my personal diary. Wonderful. Thank you. Thank you. Listen to Insight Techcom on your favorite lab and follow me on LinkedIn or visit me at www.inside techcom.show. Catch you soon on another episode. Thank you for listening. Bye bye.