Welcome And The AI Problem

Ellie Alexander 0:05

Hello, hello, hello, and welcome to another episode of Reality Writes. I am author Ellie Alexander, and this is the podcast where we talk about all things bookish, writer-ish, and we try to take you behind the scenes to give you a sense of what it's like from the writer's lens, the reader's lens, and everything else in between. And I am here with the Tech Guy.

Tech Guy 0:26

Hello, hello. Yeah, and today we are definitely going behind the scenes. So we're going to talk about some writer-ish topics, but that also impact readers, right?

Ellie Alexander 0:37

The topic that we're going to do a deep dive on today, from my perspective as a writer, but also as a reader, I don't think is escapable in any way, shape, or form. Darlings, I guarantee you that this is in your world right now, whether you want it to be or not.

Tech Guy 0:54

Yeah, it is everywhere. Uh, it is inescapable. And I think that there are definitely different differing opinions on this, but we're going to come at it from our viewpoints and make a case, and we'll go from there.

Ellie Alexander 1:07

That's right. So let's get right into

Drawing A Line On AI

Ellie Alexander 1:09

it. Today, we're going to do an episode that I am titling To AI or Not To AI. That is the question. And let me tell you, darlings, you might already have guessed this, but spoiler alert, I already know the answer to that question, and it is no.

Tech Guy 1:27

When it comes to writing a book specifically or just in general?

Ellie Alexander 1:32

Uh, you know, I mean, definitely from this viewpoint, let's talk about it from a writing perspective. But there are so many other issues that I think we need to be tackling as a culture in terms of the environment, like so many pieces. But we're gonna narrow our focus and talk about this from a reading, writing, creative lens.

Tech Guy 1:50

Awesome. So where do you want to start with it?

Ellie Alexander 1:53

Well, let's start from the beginning, which is when AI first came onto the scene and suddenly all of us had access to Chat GPT and large language models. This was three or four years ago. And when it first came on, I sort of thought, like, oh my gosh, maybe there is an opportunity here for me, never from a writing perspective. And we'll get into why. A lot of what I do with myself and with writing students that I'm coaching is talking about the why we write. And that is so important to me in the whole reason that I write. But that's a little teaser. We'll come back to that.

Authenticity Versus AI Images

Ellie Alexander 2:27

I did think, like for the first time, I could create pastries that I imagine tort creates and has in their pastry case. So when I'm writing the Bake Shop Mysteries and Jules is making this beautiful eight-layered torte and she's hand piping flowers and everything, I know what I imagine that to be. But if I'm baking that in my own kitchen, it doesn't come out looking like that. So initially I was like, oh, this could be great. And I think early on we shared a few images of like, oh, this is what tort could look like, or I would have Chat GPT like make me a map of what I thought Redwood Grove would look like just for my own purposes. But my whole slant has always been authenticity. And so immediately in, after like two or three times of posting an image that now I can so clearly identify immediately an AI image, and it gives me a visceral reaction, right? It's not authentic. When I am writing the bake shop mysteries, I am literally baking everything that you see at the back of the book, and I'm baking it two or three times in our home kitchen here. And they don't look perfect, and that's the reality. This podcast is called Reality Rights. So I think immediately I realized, like, no, this isn't gonna jive with me showing up in an authentic way, which is very important to me.

Tech Guy 3:51

And I can attest that she definitely does bake everything that uh is in the in the in the bake shop mysteries and and other books. And and those are the just the final recipes. So there's a lot of testing that goes into it before that. But if you go back and look at the history of your social media channels, you'll see that authenticity because you'll see that maybe what you describe on the page and what shows up in real life in the photos doesn't always match exactly. Or there you do make something that does look beautiful, and there are crumbs on the counter to in the upper right hand part of the picture. You know, it's just it it there's always something, and that's because it's real life, it is really happening that way. Uh, so what you see is exactly what what we're seeing.

Ellie Alexander 4:42

Yeah, and I think especially from a writing lens, it is so critical that you approach writing from a place of authenticity and writing from the core and who you are. And so if I'm doing that in any other way, shape, or form, that doesn't feel authentic or true. And, you know, I love seeing the reality of like people who I admire and their kitchens are a mess. They're covered in flour. It's not always like beautiful sunshine and roses in this glossy pastry case where everything is perfect. So that was my initial entry into any sort of large language

Pirated Books And Plagiarism

Ellie Alexander 5:20

model. And after about a month or two, I stopped using it and have never used anything since. I don't have it on my computer. I don't have an account. I'm not interested. Now, about the same time, I learned that I was part of the largest creative lawsuit in the history of the United States, where Anthropic and Meta used pirated copies of pretty much every book that has been published prior to 2022 to train said large language models. So, my number one reason that I do not will not use any sort of large language model in any form of my writing is because it is ultimately plagiarism. And this is a message that I keep having to have with new writers and students. And I think it's easy to kind of fall into this idea of like, oh, okay, well, it's gonna make my writing better. I just had a couple coaching sessions last week where writers are like, well, I write myself and then I put chapters into a large language model and I tell it to make it better. Okay, that's not making it better. That's not finding your own voice. That's using other writers' voices to try to make it sound like your own. And then you just sound like everyone else.

Tech Guy 6:40

Sound like a robot. Yeah, right. And I'm not sure that a lot of the writers out there who are using large language models understand that that is what is happening. This isn't some objective, unique, creative programming that can take what you put into it and just, you know, quote unquote, make it better. What it's doing is it's using all of the things that it's quote unquote again learned.

Ellie Alexander 7:10

Trained on, yeah.

Tech Guy 7:12

Through being trained on uh works that are both legally and illegally obtained and violating copyrights and so on and so forth. And it's essentially applying all of that to what you've written. So it would be the same as a writer writing something and then bringing those chapters to you, Ellie Alexander, and saying, hey, make this better, and then you handing them over to Gigi Pantian and saying, Hey, Gigi, you make this better, and then handing and then Gigi hands those to another author and says, Hey, you make this better, and then they give it back to the writer. And and now maybe it is better, maybe it's not, but it's not that writer's content anymore. It ceased to be their content at all the second that you asked multiple people to have inputs on it.

Ellie Alexander 8:06

Absolutely. And you know, you could take it a step further because one important piece of becoming a writer is finding your voice. And that doesn't happen overnight. That takes time, and that's okay. Like I talk a lot about the fact that practice drafts and all of the bad manuscripts that are never going to see the light of day, or books that you didn't finish, or pieces of things. That's all part of you learning how to develop your voice. So if you used this same model of thinking, you could go to the library or bookstore and just take swaths of, you know, writing from any book on the shelf and decide, like, I'm gonna make it my own. You would not do that. That's just outright plagiarism. But I don't think we wrap our heads around it the same way because it's like, oh, it's this abstract model that's doing this magical thing. No, it's not. It's spitting back material based on what it has been trained on, which is every other author's work.

Tech Guy 9:02

Illegally trained on every other author's work. Um, yeah, because that is a huge lawsuit. And it continues to be a problem today, even after the lawsuit.

Ellie Alexander 9:13

Yeah, there are ongoing issues as we speak where you know we're going back to court over new issues, things like the fact that many big AI companies are buying up copies of books and scanning them and destroying them. Um, you know, the legal ramifications are far reaching, and I don't think we're gonna see how that plays out for a while. But to your point, you sound like a robot, you sound like everyone else. It is really easy for me to spot AI writing, and I see it everywhere. I can see it in social media posts, I see it in emails, I see it potentially in sample chapters that writers send me. It all sounds the same. Large language models have this cadence, and it might seem like, oh, it's zippy and you're making it better, but I promise you you're not. And I will tell you from the publishing side of things, I've had so many conversations with agents and editors and people in the publishing business, and they are desperate to read anything that sounds like it is written by a human. In fact, one agent was talking about the fact that they get so much AI slop where they can just tell, like, okay, this is just another person who's put it in and said, make it better, whatever that means, that when they see bad writing or maybe writing that has some room to grow, they're like, Yeah, send me those pages. Where maybe 10 years ago they would have been like, oh, this one's not quite ready, but now they're like, you're a human. I want to read that.

Tech Guy 10:35

And it's not even necessarily that it's writing that has room to grow, but it's human writing. It's it's unique writing. It has a unique voice, it has character, it has personality, it has depth. I mean, you talked about seeing examples of AI writing, you know, every day, and we and we do, because you must get, I don't know, a dozen or more AI solicitations every day, and they all have the exact same phrases, and you can spot them a mile away. What stood out to me, what impacted me most, what was immediately apparent. These are all things that no one talks like that. Nobody talks like that. It just doesn't, it it it should be obvious to everyone, but it it unfortunately it's not. And I think a lot of the times the trap that people fall into with LLMs is they'll put something in and say, hey, make this better. And because what comes out may to them sound smarter, sound more mature, whatever, they think, oh, that's better. But it's not better. It's different. And it's different from the way you would have written it, which makes it not yours any longer. And it makes it just like all of those solicitations that we see every single day, and it's embarrassing.

Writing As Grief And Anxiety Relief

Ellie Alexander 12:00

Yeah, I know. Okay, well, let's circle back to the why we write, because I think creativity is the best gift you can give yourself. I've talked about this on many occasions, but I came to writing through grief. The very first book that I wrote was a memoir about losing my mom to young onset when we had just had our first and only child, and that process of watching her lose all of the same skills that he was gaining developmentally. And writing that book was so cathartic and it made her whole again. And I got to explore my grief and sit with it and transform it too. You know, that once we write and share that story, whether you're sharing that for yourself or whether it's something you want to share with the broader world, you are turning your emotional experience into something else. After I wrote that book, I kept thinking, like, what do I want to write now? Like that was that first book that I absolutely had to write. And I kept asking myself, like, oh, what do I want to write? Well, I think I would like to write a mystery. Like it would be so fun to write a mystery. And for me, then, the entire length of my career, the last 20 years, whenever I'm here in front of my computer and I'm slipping into a fictional world, I'm healing a little part of myself. It is my antidote to grief because if I'm feeling sad, if I'm in a dark place, I put that on the page. I just heard from a reader uh who had the uh, I don't know, like gift of getting to see an early copy of the Pumpkin Vice Cafe. And they sent me a DM saying, like, oh my gosh, I really cried at the last few chapters. That was so beautiful. I'm like, well, I cried when I was writing it because I was tapping into all these feelings that I had that I still will carry with me for the rest of my life of losing someone so important to me. And so, you know, I'm not in a in a place where writing for me is a daily chore of needing to like work through big feelings, but it happens. Or like other examples might be um when Sky Guy, our son, was getting ready to leave for college. Like you can see that in every book that I wrote for those two years, because there's a lot of angst that comes up with being a mother and letting your child fly and all those things. So if you are present when you're writing, you are taking an emotional piece of your own burden and you're putting it on the page and you're transforming it. There is no large language model that can do that for you in any way, shape, or form.

Tech Guy 14:33

No, they're not going to generate real human feelings. They're not going to generate real human emotions or relationships. They're going to be able to put words on a page, but they're all going to sound the same. And there are people who will argue with me and say, oh no, you tech guy, you just need to learn how to prompt LLMs correctly, and you can, you know, you can make it sound like a unique voice and everything. And I'm here to tell you, no, you can't. There's you can get things that sound different. They're still going to be detected as AI writing. Well, 100% they will be detected as AI writing. And we've already talked about authors on on Reality Writes here who have gotten caught essentially using AI to write books and then leaving things like the prompt or the response in the actual book when it got published. And that is just, it's so disingenuous. When I think of going out to buy a book, which we buy way too many books, but is that a thing? It's probably there's no such thing.

Ellie Alexander 15:36

Absolutely not, especially right now. Buy them all. Let's go.

Tech Guy 15:39

That's right. No, but but that is exactly my point. When you when you as a reader are going to buy a book, you're going to buy a book that was written by a human, that was written with that emotion, with that depth that you were just talking about. You're not going to buy a book that was written in a few seconds of somebody typing a prompt in and saying, hey, write a mystery for me. Like that, why would you pay for that? You could do that yourself if you're okay with that. Do it yourself. Don't like, what are you doing? But you're going out there to buy a book that was written by a human that was written based on real thought, real creativity, real experiences, and has that emotional depth and content on the page.

Ellie Alexander 16:25

That's right. Well, and I feel like you're somebody who can speak with some authority about this idea of like prompts, because you, in your daily work job, uh, you know, you're required to use AI, and you're somebody who knows how to fine-tune a prompt and everything like that. So let's imagine, even that it gets to a point, these large language models get to a point where they can just mimic somebody's voice completely. You are still cheating yourself. I am telling you, like my creative process is part of what keeps me grounded and what has helped me grow emotionally. So even if a large language model could somehow replicate my voice word for word, I'm still cheating myself out of that entire experience of discovery.

Tech Guy 17:12

Yeah, and I'm here to tell you because you're right. In my job, I am it, I have to. It's we're we're directed to use AI tools in in what we do. And you there is a lot that you can do with it. And there's a lot that AI can do. And I'm conflicted every day because of the environmental and social aspects of AI, the impacts of AI, especially data centers. So outside of just the writing piece, there are ramifications for that. But it even with super skilled prompting and everything, it's still at the end of the day, it is not human-created content. It just isn't.

Ellie Alexander 17:55

No. Okay. And the last thing I'll say about this emotional piece, and then we'll get into um another thing that's come up quite a bit in a few of my coaching sessions over the last couple of weeks, is uh it is also not um news to many of you, darlings, that I have struggled with anxiety over the years. When I was in my 20s, I would have debilitating panic attacks. I have always had an overactive imagination, for better or for worse. In fact, in my first mystery series, the Meg Reed books, uh, Meg is often um bringing in little touches of me because you can't separate yourself out from who your characters become either, because they're all a part of me, right? I'm generating them in some way, shape, or form in my own human brain. Like Meg talks about the creative curse, that this thing that is so fantastic that helps me create stories will also make my brain go to really worst-case scenarios. And writing is a way for me to channel and funnel that anxiety because I'm using that then to create stories or build worlds or think about ways I can kill off people who I don't like. Um so I don't have as much time then when I'm spinning out and imagining all the horrible things that can happen in the world because I'm focusing that energy into creating something that hopefully then you're gonna enjoy, darlings.

Tech Guy 19:23

Absolutely. All right, what's the next topic that you wanted to roll to?

Brainstorming That Derails Your Plot

Ellie Alexander 19:28

Okay, I've had this come up with two different coaching clients in the last few weeks, and they're using large language models to help brainstorm characters and plots. And again, I understand the draw and why that might seem like it's something that's quick and easy. But if you're using a computer to brainstorm with, I mean, first of all, do that with a human. It's gonna be so much more fun. Like go for a walk, go out for coffee. Like, um, even if you don't have a human to bounce ideas off of, like, go do it yourself and and see what happens. But that aside, they sort of have lost the plot. They're they're struggling to figure out, like, oh now, how does that character connect? How does this person, what happens at this point? Because it's not their own. They're having this generated for them. If I map out a story, which I do, in fact, I've talked about this and shown this, but I happen to have one for any of you darlings listening. This is Death by Candlelight. I've used the same process for every book that I've written, all 50 plus mysteries. I have a blueprint for murder that I start with. I know that there's gonna be a murder. I've got five or six, five or six suspects. They all have a reason for wanting the person dead. And I know at the end there's gonna be resolution. One of them did it, and somebody's gonna be caught and brought to justice. But what happens along the way, I have no idea. So I'm working on this book. It's this is the next in the novel detectives book. Well, not next, it will be a future novel detective's book. Uh, and this one is set um at a po speakeasy. And so I'm writing a scene where this po actor is on the stage reciting this gothic poem, and there's such a big um taped X in the middle of the stage. I'm just writing this. I have no idea. This just comes out of my brain as I'm writing. And I make a note and I'm like, what is the X for? I don't know. I have no idea. So I keep writing and I'm like, okay, well, the X, like the killer might have put the X there to put the victim in a special place on the stage. Or maybe we're gonna find out at the end that somebody just accidentally put it there, or like tape got stuck to their foot, or who knows. But the point is, I don't know either because I am following the creative energy and I get to decide, but I know because. It's my story that I'm going to find a way to the finish, whether that becomes a red herring or whether that is a critical clue in the mystery. If you're having a large language model try to like give you one clue after another after another, like you can't track that because they're not coming from you.

Tech Guy 22:17

That's right. Okay. So I'm going to put this in context of an 80s villain.

Ellie Alexander 22:22

Okay.

The 80s Bully Warning

Tech Guy 22:23

An 80s 80s high school movie, let's say. So you've got the bully, and the bully is like making the the nerdy geeky kid do his homework, right? Take like give him all the answers for the tests and everything. Inevitably, something happens, hilarity ensues, and the the nerdy geeky kid can't get the bully the correct answers. So the bully now has to perform on their own. And what happens? What happens every single time?

Ellie Alexander 22:55

Every time the bully fails.

Tech Guy 22:59

And that this is my warning to new and experienced writers out there who are relying more and more and more on LLMs, it's all going to come crashing down at some point. And so if you're relying on LLMs to do all the work and you haven't learned the process yourself, you haven't developed your own process, you haven't strengthened that muscle, to put it in your terms, but you always talk about that writing muscle. When it goes away, or when you no longer have access to it anymore, what are you going to do?

Ellie Alexander 23:35

Yeah. Yeah.

Tech Guy 23:36

What are you going to do if all publishers decide to start screening and not accepting anything? Anything where AI has been used to develop the book?

Ellie Alexander 23:48

Which is already happening.

Tech Guy 23:50

Which is already happening. What are you going to do when agents stop accepting anything where AI was used to help develop the book? What are you going to do when all the online booksellers decide they're just going to put all AI-generated content over here in this section that's labeled AI content? And now three quarters or more of your readership is like, well, I'm never going in that section. Yeah. Right? That'll be like the scary room with the curtain at the old video stores that you didn't go into. That's that's where all the AI content will be. Yeah. I mean, what are you like? People need to start thinking about that because that is going to be a reality. And if you haven't done the work and you haven't built your own process and learned the skills yourself, you are going to be that 80s bully stuck in the room, taking a test that you have no idea how to pass.

Ellie Alexander 24:48

That's right. Yeah. And I mean, this is already happening in the publishing industry.

Publishers Push Back On AI

Ellie Alexander 24:53

There have been numerous stories just within the last few weeks about big contracts being canceled because things are being run through AI detectors and coming back as AI. Now, that's also tricky because it's like, okay, uh, let's pick somebody like Stephen King or myself or who what whomever. All of our works were used to train the large language model. So then there's this whole thing of like, oh, there are some authors that are also scared of that because they're like, well, wait a minute. It might sound like my voice, but I actually wrote that in. Anyway, but yes, the publishers, agents, I guarantee you, darlings, these conversations are happening as we speak and people are trying to get out ahead of this. It's even things like having the receipts, like, oh, I'm gonna show you. Like, I handwrite this, I have my handwritten stack of notes, I print out a copy, I handwrite my edits. I mean, I was talking to an editor last week who was like, you know what? Part of me is wondering if we're gonna go back to like the only way I'm gonna take submissions is a handwritten manuscript, which I mean is obviously a joke at this point, but I don't know, maybe who's to say as we go deeper down this rabbit hole.

Uploading Manuscripts Is A Risk

Tech Guy 26:04

Exactly. Well, and the other thing I would say to writers out there who are using large language models, and and especially like you said, with some of your coaching clients and others who are uploading chapters or sometimes whole manuscripts, these large language model companies, these are the most dishonest companies on the planet, people. I mean, wake up, you gotta wake up, like you're giving your work to a company, and you might be like, Oh, well, I pay my $20 a month, so they promise to never train on my model and everything. Are you kidding me right now with that? What? Like, no, that they are what come on, I'm like I'm going into after party mode already with my rant, but no, you you are running a huge risk. And if you put any effort into writing a book, you should not be uploading it into any system, no matter what they say their privacy policy is or or not. All in all, like even if it's the most honest, secure company on the planet, your stuff is now out there on a server somewhere that is out of your control. If that company goes out of business, if they're hacked, whatever, and now your manuscript is in somebody else's hands, maybe thousands of other people's hands. And so the same tool that you're using to make your writing sound like everyone else's is now going to start making other people's writing sound like yours. So think about that for a second. That is not like this is just a problem that's going to compound. Uh it's gonna snowball and it's good, it's it's gonna get out of control.

Ellie Alexander 27:46

Yeah, yeah.

The Accessibility Argument Challenged

Ellie Alexander 27:47

Okay, the last thing that I will say about feedback that I I hear in the zeitgeist from new writers and people in the creative space is like, well, no, AI is offering accessibility. I I can't write fast, or I don't know how to write. And so I wasn't able to before. It was a barrier. There were gatekeepers. And so the only way that now I'm able to write and enter this marketplace is because of large language models. Okay, well, first of all, let's circle back to plagiarism first and foremost, right? Stolen works, stolen works, people, stolen works. There's that. That's always just gonna be my baseline. But part of developing your writing muscle is just that that you said it has taken me 20 years. And the first book that I wrote took me three years to write, and then the next one took me a year, and then I got a book contract, and it was like, oh, I'm publishing two series a year. And so then I got faster. And you develop your process, you develop your voice, you develop your rhythm and how many books you can produce in a year. I was looking back to 2013 or 14. No, no, it must have been 15 or 16. I was working on four series. This was long, long before AI models, but I'd been writing for 10 years at this point in time. And so I knew. And one thing you learn, especially when you're a series writer, is you have to write well and you have to write fast. But that doesn't happen overnight. That comes with time and practice. And this idea that then somehow that was a barrier to entry is just a myth. It's not true.

Tech Guy 29:24

And the thing is, there are going to be exceptions to the rule because I know there are people out there who are going to be listening to this podcast and they're gonna say, oh, Ellie, oh, tech guy, this is like all doom and gloom. Like I know people who've used LLMs and they're making a lot of money writing and everything. And that's probably true. There probably are. But you need to decide as a reader is that the content that you're willing to pay for? Is that what you're going to support? Is that the human creativity that you're craving, or is it just words on a page? Doesn't matter how they were created, how they were stolen, whether or not they were stolen, you know, whatever it is. It there are always exceptions to the rule. So if you want to try and become one of those exceptions, great. But I'm here to tell you, like, again, going back to the doom and gloom piece, it will all come crashing down at some point. For those of you who are around for the dot-com bomb, when the bubble burst, we are headed in that direction with AI. And the more people become become reliant on it, the more it's gonna hurt when it happens.

Ellie Alexander 30:33

Yeah.

Reader Discernment In The Marketplace

Ellie Alexander 30:34

And I guess my last plea to you, darlings, as the readers, is to use some discernment. So a writer friend of mine who has been published for many years, writes multiple series for her multiple houses, started noticing that this new cozy series kept showing up on this author's pages. Like clearly, this new author was buying ads based on my author friend's titles, because that happens, right? You're you're like, oh, this is like Gilmore Girls, or this is like whatever. So you can do ad buys based on another book series that something might be like. That's common, that's fine, that's perfect.

Tech Guy 31:13

It's actually a really smart marketing tactic, honestly.

Ellie Alexander 31:17

Yeah, exactly. But my author friend started to sleuth it out and was like, wait a minute. The 17 titles have been published in two months, and then went a little farther down the rabbit hole, put their sleuthing cap on because they are a mystery writer, and they're like, wait, there's no social media presence, there's no author picture, there's no, there's nothing. So immediately this author clued into the fact that this is obviously somebody who's just like, okay, I'm gonna publish 17 books in six weeks on AI, and they had like 72 titles ready to go for the year or something like that. But as a reader, I think it's important that we're using discernment then too, that if you see something like that that and it feels wrong and you're seeing a cover that clearly looks like it's also AI, it might be time to just pull back and go, wait a minute, is that made by a real person or not?

Tech Guy 32:08

And I would just like to remind everybody out there, especially the writers or those who want to become a writer, that prior to 2018, 2019, when the first early, early AI models started showing up, everything, all collected written works before that time, which was probably billions of books and documents, newspapers, magazines, whatever, all of that was written by people. 100% written by people. And so you think about all of the absolutely amazing works of art that were created prior to this uh inception of AI. That's all people, people.

Boundaries, Debate, And Goodbye

Ellie Alexander 32:57

Um, okay, so to uh round out this episode, to AI or not to AI, that is not the question, darlings. You should know the answer by now. I'm a solid no in this camp. I will continue to be a no. I've been actually thinking about like how when I'm working with students and coaching students, I'm I'm working on some new policies to make sure I don't, I don't want my name attached to books that are being written with AI tools. I don't want to blur books that are written with AI tools. If you darlings decide you want to read those books, more power to you, but that's a fine line and a boundary for me.

Tech Guy 33:34

And from my point of view, from the tech guy point of view, I just I want to hear from you. If you disagree with my viewpoint, let me know. Uh, I'd love to have a rational adult debate about the subject. But I'd also like to send out a message to everyone who wants to become a writer out there and is worried that you're not going to be able to do it or to keep up without using AI. That's garbage. You need to stop that line of thinking. You can become a writer, you will become a writer. You just need to put in the work, you need to learn your own process, you need to develop your writing muscle, and you will be successful in whatever you want to do without AI.

Ellie Alexander 34:19

Yeah. And I think it's a real golden opportunity right now to circle back to the people that I've had conversations with in the publishing industry. Your work is going to stand out if it is your work. Like even if it's not perfectly polished right now, that's a good thing because it's going to sound like you. And you, as the writer, are going to reap so many benefits for your own mental health and your well-being to be able to take whatever is inside your heart and put it on the page.

Tech Guy 34:50

Okay. Well, that was, as you can tell, a very important topic to both of us. And so I hope, whether you're a writer, reader, somewhere in between, that you got something out of this episode. But let us know what you think. Send us a message, leave a comment. Uh, where do you stand on the issue? And what do you want to see with regard to AI in the world of writing moving forward? So, without further ado, until next time.

Ellie Alexander 35:20

Till next time.