What the Experts Really Think About AI | How I Write Compilation

Summary

Podcast Summary: "What Professional Writers Really Think About AI"

How I Write with David Perell | Compilation Episode, July 20, 2026

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Main Theme & Purpose

In this compilation episode, David Perell assembles thought-provoking commentary from renowned writers, thinkers, and industry insiders on the rapidly evolving relationship between AI and the craft of writing. Across diverse perspectives—ranging from enthusiastic adoption to deep skepticism—the episode explores how AI is transforming, challenging, and, in some cases, fundamentally redefining the practice, artistry, and business of writing.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. AI as Tool vs. AI as Creator

• AI as Supercharged Research Assistant:
  • Many writers leverage AI to streamline research, generate references, organize background info, and accelerate prep.
  • Tyler Cowen:
    • "Having AI do research for me is a bad idea [...] It's the time I spent researching that was the most important time. Having AI do research for me is a bad idea." (03:02)
    • AI is "a better Google," but letting it process and connect information removes the essential processes that define a writer’s unique voice.
  • Helen Castor:
    • Uses AI to quickly gather legal or historical information but insists on doing her own synthesis:
      "I want the writing to be my own. It's like my little baby, so to speak. [...] Whenever it's better than I am, I—I'm still not going to let it write for me." (09:55)
• AI as Editor and Collaborator:
  • For some, AI has become like a tireless editor or sparring partner.
  • Zat Rana:
    • "It's an incredible tool for writers, but definitely not a writer. Like a sparring partner, like a collaborator, like someone you can give like a subtask to." (22:30)
  • Cobie Smulders:
    • Finds value in having an always-on editor, especially for punching up language, finding better word choices, or strengthening arguments:
      "I now have the world's greatest editor, the world's smartest editor, who never complains, who never gets tired, who never turns off." (33:12)
  • David Perell (sharing Balaji Srinivasan’s idea):
    • AI excels at "middle to middle work"—the grunt-work and iterative processing in the writing pipeline. Humans still need to bring vision and verify the end product. (35:02)

2. Limits and Dangers of AI in Creative Writing

• Embodied Knowledge vs. Downloaded Facts:
  • Tyler Cowen:
    • Argues that the essence and transformation of knowledge require engagement and wrestling with ideas over time; AI short-circuits this process:
      "What knowledge is supposed to do is change you, and it changes you because you make connections to it." (04:54)
• Emotion, Suffering, & Human Experience:
  • Rebecca Solnit:
    • Asserts the singularity of human feeling in art:
      "AI will never have feeling. AI will have the simulacrum of feeling. AI will never write the great American poem, the great French poem, because it hasn't suffered." (08:02)
    • She distinguishes between information ("AI can tell me about the eye of the scallop") and writing that moves through felt time and experience:
      "All the writing for me that moves me is made of feeling in time, of which AI has neither." (08:50)
• Authenticity and Connection to Author:
  • Both Jonathan Franzen and Lena Dunham insist on the importance of a perceivable human soul or imperfection in art:
    • Franzen:
      "For every fuck up, there is a writer, somebody who's grappling with the fuck up and bearing witness to the pain and the suffering and the joy and the hope [...] And that's the soul." (19:33)
    • Lena Dunham:
      "Why would I? [use AI to write] It'd be like hiring someone to have sex for you. You know, I love writing, I love the materiality of it." (42:50)
    • The notion of betrayal or loss of meaning when AI creates "personal" content is echoed by David Perell's story about AI-penned wedding notes:
      "I would have so much rather you written something that's half as sincere as that ... than to have AI write that. It felt like a violation and a betrayal.” (45:24)

3. AI’s Impact on the Business, Culture, and Future of Writing

• Changing What Gets Written—and How:
  • Helen Castor:
    • AI is changing the economics and practicality of long-form, predictive writing. Books about the near future become rapidly outdated; writers shift toward immediate, high-frequency formats like Substack and blogging. (15:05)
  • Some genres (corporate writing, formulaic content) are increasingly automated, reducing opportunities for certain writers but highlighting the enduring value of the distinctive, subjective, or embodied.
• Reader Preferences and the Human Element:
  • Writers across the board argue that readers crave connection to an actual person, not just polished prose:
    • Zat Rana:
      "When I finish a great book, the first thing I go do is like, I want to know about the writer ... and I don't think I'll ever have that feeling to like AI writing." (25:09)
• Legal & Copyright Uncertainties:
  • John Maxwell (publisher):
    • Articulates the gray and shifting landscape around AI-generated content and copyright:
      "Our copyright law does not protect things created by AI." (50:48)
    • Authors must disclose if AI contributed and publishers must ensure “substantially created by a human” to secure protections:
      "If you use it as a tool, a great example would be a research assistant ... that's a fine use of AI." (53:05)
• Style, Banality, and AI’s Distinctive “Voice”:
  • John McWhorter:
    • AI writing is generic, structurally sound, and clear but rarely fresh, distinctive, or memorable. It's "the most attractive composite"—solid, orderly, but ultimately prosaic (26:32).

4. New Creative Possibilities and the Coming Transformation

• Enhanced Productivity and Experimentation:
  • Several guests describe using AI as a way to bypass writer’s block, reduce anxiety, and explore new storytelling techniques.
  • Cobie Smulders:
    • AI accelerates rough drafts and liberates writers from internal noise:
      "AI is an anxiety antidote [...] For me, it's been the ultimate antidote to the thing that prevents me from getting my work done." (38:06)
• Pair Writing and Collaborative Workflows:
  • Kevin Kelly:
    • Envisions a future where “pair writing”—the partnership of human and machine—is the default:
      "The same thing is going to happen for every other form of writing. I think prose writing and fiction writing and everything else in the future, I think most professional authors are going to be working in that kind of format." (46:01)
• Ethical and Philosophical Questions:
  • True intelligence, creativity, and consciousness remain undefined and deeply debated.
  • Gary Marcus:
    • Cautions against anthropomorphizing LLMs and underestimating the rabbit holes of epistemology and intelligence:
      "We don't even know what those definitions mean. We don't have a collective definitions of even what the word intelligence means." (40:15)
  • Warns of arrogance from both STEM and humanities silos slowing progress:
    "Everyone needs like a massive humility pill." (42:40)
• Resistance and Critique of AI's Presence in Art:
  • Maggie Nelson:
    • AI normalization tools like spellcheck can dull distinctiveness; more broadly, she calls out the unlicensed use of writers’ work to train LLMs as “piracy”:
      "Writing broadly does have a lot to fear from AI and we should resist it, including the absolute piracy of our books that we now know large language model, composers have been undertaking for years now." (50:04)

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• "AI will never have feeling. AI will have the simulacrum of feeling. [...] It will never know what it's like to collide with its own impossibility. So AI can only ever succeed. And without suffering, what kind of true art can there be?"
  — Rebecca Solnit (08:02)
• "The idea that O3 can summarize it for you in addition to all this stuff you just will not have read, is it you didn't have the engagement. It doesn't impress itself upon you. It doesn't change you."
  — Tyler Cowen (03:43)
• "To me, you write with something of a soul. [...] For every fuck up there is a writer, somebody who's grappling with the fuck up and bearing witness to the pain and the suffering and the joy and the hope."
  — Jonathan Franzen (19:33)
• "I would have so much rather you written something that's half as sincere as that, filled and littered with typos than to have AI write that. It felt like a violation and a betrayal."
  — David Perell on the wedding notes story (45:24)
• "I don't see any evidence whatsoever that AI seems to be killing writing [...] I don't think anyone's serious. I don't think Paul Graham is sitting around being like, AI is going to kill my writing here."
  — Zat Rana (25:09)
• "Learning AI, learning how to use these tools effectively is a skill unto itself. Learning how to ask better questions, create better prompts, use it for things like numerical analysis, use it to write code."
  — Cobie Smulders (35:33)
• "Could I write them by typewriter? Sure. But I'm choosing to use a word processor. That's how I think about AI. AI is the next iteration of that. I am choosing to use this tool. The words are still my own, the research is still my own, the facts are still my own, the interviews are still my own."
  — Cobie Smulders (39:19)
• "Our copyright law does not protect things created by AI."
  — John Maxwell (50:48)

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Timestamps for Key Segments

• Tyler Cowen – The limits and proper uses of AI in research and writing: 00:29–06:45
• Rebecca Solnit – AI, suffering, and the essence of art: 08:02–09:55
• Helen Castor – AI as research tool and implications for productivity: 09:55–17:39
• Jonathan Franzen – Writing as bearing witness, the soul in writing: 17:39–22:30
• Zat Rana – AI as collaborator; human connection in reading: 22:30–26:32
• John McWhorter – AI writing style, banality, and structure: 26:32–28:46
• Cobie Smulders – AI as empowerment, partner, and antidote to anxiety: 29:12–39:52
• Gary Marcus – Definitions of intelligence and philosophical humility: 40:15–42:43
• Lena Dunham – Authenticity and the human need for imperfect art: 42:47–44:22
• David Perell – AI and personal meaning, the wedding notes story: 44:22–46:01
• Kevin Kelly – The near future of pair writing: 46:01–48:14
• Maggie Nelson – Distinctiveness, AI’s threat to writers, and piracy: 48:14–50:48
• John Maxwell – Legal implications and best practices for using AI: 50:48–53:32

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Flow & Takeaway

The episode masterfully weaves a tapestry of insights showing that writers are both seduced by AI's efficiencies and apprehensive about what may be lost—the labor, suffering, authenticity, and connection that animate literature and art. While AI is already transforming how professionals conduct research, edit, and even draft, most believe that the irreplaceable core of writing remains human: shaped by curiosity, feeling, grappling, and the ineffably personal. The debate is nuanced, ongoing, and—like the creative process itself—alive.

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Transcript

[David Perell]

AI and creativity. I've asked dozens of writers for their take. Some think it's a godsend. Others think it's the literal scum of the earth. So Here are the 12 best responses you're going to hear from literary award winners like Robert McFarlane, builders like Sam Altman, and journalists like Ezra Klein. This is what the people at the cutting edge are saying about how AI is going to impact writing, creativity, and also the culture.

[Tyler Cowen]

I'm not completely against anything, and I have not, and not for lack of trying, and I think not for lack of being informed or interested in the issue, found a way that I consistently use AI in my work. I'll sometimes use it right now as a replacement for Google searches, and it's valuable for that. And deep research has been good on some kinds of preparatory work for me. It's just. It's very hard to not be outsourcing the part of the work I need to do the most. AI is better at the things I need to do than the things I don't need to do. And so having AI step in, which I will sometimes do in a crunch if I don't have time to make the spreadsheet myself and gather the data in the way I'd like to gather it. But having AI summarize a book or a paper for me is a disaster. It has no idea what I really wanted to know. It would not have made the connections I would have made. It's the time I spent researching that was the most important time. Having AI do research for me is a bad idea. But if you had other people on the show, they'd give you something different. I think somebody like Tyler Cowen has made AI much more fundamental to his workflow than I have. But I'm interested for the thing I will see that other people would not have seen. And I think AI typically sees what everybody else would see.

[David Perell]

So on one hand, I hear what you're saying with that is the most important part of my work. And I agree. I think that the years have proven that out. On the other hand, I wonder how much of it is prompt. Issue of can you prompt it in distinct ways? And all of that. I think of AI almost like looking at the world through a kaleidoscope. And I agree that the default prompt gives you the way that everybody else is looking.

[Tyler Cowen]

But that's assuming that I know what my prompt should be. There's no prompt that would have told me, just go read more books, man, you're not there. You haven't gone far enough. I'm not saying AI can't be useful, not saying it won't be useful, but I think I'm pretty against shortcuts. And obviously you have to limit the amount of work you're doing. You can't read literally everything. But in some ways I think it's more dangerous to think you've read something that you haven't than to not read it at all. As somebody who knows the people at these labs and has talked to them about how to use it and has access to the good models, it has not become an honored partner in my creative workflow.

[David Perell]

Right. So then that seems like a pretty important fault line of there is your writing and you're like, ah, it's not that useful. Then there is the. I'm doing research, I'm trying to figure out what's going on. I'll use a super concrete example. We're talking about homelessness as a housing issue. You know, the kind of thing that is really great for AI. Like, I haven't really thought about that. I grew up in San Francisco, so it's like very near and dear to my heart. Kind of watched the city get destroyed by homelessness. I would use AI to basically say, hey, O3, can you give me a list of how housing has changed over the years? List of papers that have been written. But what I'm hearing you say is, yeah, that's like a better Google. That's not. Then there's something else of like, I want you to write this for me and that you wouldn't use. Yeah.

[Tyler Cowen]

Also I wrote a piece about this a couple years back. It was called against the Matrix Theory of the Mind. And I think I used to conceptualize knowledge the way you see it in the movie the Matrix where it's like I wanted the port in the back of my mind that the little needle would go into. And then I had read John Rawls's Political Liberalism. I thought that what you were doing was downloading information into your brain. And now I think that what you are doing is spending time grappling with the text, making connections. It will only happen through that process of grappling. And so the idea that you could speed run that, the idea that it could just be summarized for you. Part of what is happening when you spend seven hours reading a book is you spend seven hours with your mind on this topic. The idea that O3 can summarize it for you in addition to all this stuff you just will not have read, is it you didn't have the engagement. It doesn't impress itself upon you. It doesn't change you. What knowledge is supposed to do is change you, and it changes you because you make connections to it.

[David Perell]

What you're saying is knowledge is more embodied.

[Tyler Cowen]

Yes.

[David Perell]

Than just looking up something on AI. And then that because knowledge is embodied, it has a way of becoming a part of you and flowing through you. Into the writing.

[Tyler Cowen]

Yeah, into the writing. Into your thinking. When I sat down, I read a Rand report recently on housing construction costs in different states in California and Texas and Colorado. If I just had 03 spit that out, it would have been some useful factoids. It actually mattered that I spent more than an hour on the report marking it up, looking at the I just think there's something about your process of grappling with something that is what makes it. That integrates it into the way your mind actually works. I think shortcuts often operate off of a misguided metaphor of how our minds work. That again, we sort of have this download model. I'm downloading the information. And Sam Bankman Fried is one of many tech people I've seen who would be like, what's the point of all these books? Shouldn't every book be a magazine article? And ideally, shouldn't every magazine article be a tweet? And the answer is no, it shouldn't be. In part because that actually doesn't contain the information. I can tell you that for sure, having written books and then always thinking about how much fidelity is lost to them when I do the excerpts, when I go talk about them on podcasts. But also because it cannot change you. A magazine article will change you less than a book will. A tweet will change you less than a magazine article will. You may not realize that at the time, but I think for most people, most of the time it's true. It's a reason, by the way, podcasting is powerful because when they spend two hours with you over and over and over again, it's like, what changes you isn't the wave, it's the erosion.

[David Perell]

When you think of school, what comes to mind? For me, it was lectures, homework, sitting at a desk. And the worst part is, it doesn't even work. 54% of Americans read below a sixth grade level. That's over half of Americans. We need something new. And that's why I'm excited to have Alpha School as the flagship sponsor for how I write. At Alpha, you go to school and do all your academics at only two hours per day, so that then you can spend the rest of the day Learning life skills like launching a business, writing a musical or giving a TED talk, you know, the kind of things that make you a capable and well rounded person. And it's working. They have academics figured out. Alpha classes test in the top 1% nationally. And more than 90% of Alpha students say they love school now. I used to live in Austin, where Alpha school started, and I was consistently blown away with what was happening there. I personally mentored a bunch of Alpha students and what stood out to me is how much the team believes in the potential of kids way more than what I ever got in school. Alpha's approach and the success it's already having is why it's the Most talked about K12 school in the world world right now. And it's also where I want to send my kids to school one day. So if you want to learn more, go to go Alpha school.

[Rebecca Solnit]

Howirite that one thing that only the artist has access to is the feeling out of which something was created. AI will never have feeling. AI will have the simulacrum of feeling. AI will never write the great American poem, the great French poem there, because it hasn't suffered. I mean, AI has not the capacity to suffer because even if you try to make it suffer, meaning write a command that is to execute failure, it'll already be succeeding at executing failure. It will never know what it's like to collide with its own impossibility. So AI can only ever succeed. And without suffering, what kind of true art can there be that that is

[David Perell]

what the essence of art is.

[Gary Marcus]

I'm not.

[Rebecca Solnit]

I don't subscribe to the torture genius myth. I don't think it's necessary to suffer in order to create. But I do think that out of what we have suffered and do suffer comes that restlessness to find meaning, to find beauty, to find wonder, to give voice and shape to what we feel that can be so lonely. I mean, I guess it goes back to the question, why do we read? And if we read, to be moved and to be changed. I think there are ways to change intellectually, which is with information. And AI can do that. AI can tell me about the eye of the scallop without me spending many days in many scientific journals and papers. It can give me a pretty good enough. But had I not spent all those days, I wouldn't have written about it with feeling. And I think all the writing for me that moves me is made of feeling in time, of which AI has neither. It's an instantaneous, unfeeling delivery of pure Information.

[Helen Castor]

I don't directly use AI for writing, typically. Now, sometimes I do in the following sense. If I'm writing on a legal issue and I'm not a Lawyer, I will ask 01Pro for the relevant legal background to something I'm writing on. So I just wrote a column about declassifying classified documents. I don't know that law very well. I asked the AI for a lot of background on the topic. I didn't use what it gave me, but now I feel like I'm not an idiot on the topic. And what I wanted to say, whether or not it's correct, you can debate, but it's not what you would call flat out wrong. But I don't let it write for me. I want the writing to be my own. It's like my little baby, so to speak. I don't care. Whenever it's better than I am, I. I'm still not going to let it write for me. Also, a lot of the sources I write for wouldn't let me. I agree with that decision on their part, but even if they would let me, I wouldn't do it. Most of all, I use AI when I read things, so I use it as the secondary literature. So I'm preparing a podcast for a British historian. She does history of Richard II and Henry V. Now, in the old days, I would have ordered and paid for 20 to 30 books on those kings. Now, maybe I've ordered and paid for two or three books on those kings, but I'll keep on interrogating the best LLMs about the topics of her books. Helen Castor is the historian, and just keep on going. And I acquire the context much more quickly. It's pretty accurate. Keep in mind, I'm the questioner, so if there's a modest degree of hallucination, it doesn't matter for me. I'm not giving the answers. And I can now do many more podcasts than I used to because I'm using AI for my prep.

[David Perell]

Okay, so do you think that this is about saving time or improving the quality of your prep?

[Helen Castor]

It's improving the quality of my reading, which I use for my pleasure reading. So I reread Shakespeare's Richard ii, which is a wonderful play. Again, in the old days, I would have piled up a lot of secondary literature. I'm also rereading Wuthering Heights. I just keep on asking the AI, what do you think of chapter two? Like, what happened there? What are some puzzles? What should I ponder more? How does that connect to something else later in the book. And it just gets me thinking. It's the new secondary literature for me, so it's more fun. I learn more just by being more actively involved asking a question. I think that improves my epistemics of the reading. And then I think I'm smarter about the thing in the final analysis. But mostly I'm doing it because for me, it's fun and a pleasure to learn.

[David Perell]

When you're looking at how other people use AI and you're like, ah, you're using it wrong, what is the thing that they're doing wrong?

[Helen Castor]

They're asking it questions that are too general. They're not willing to put in enough of their own time generating context. Now, maybe they don't have the time, if that's what's efficient for them. I mean, fine. But I think they end up not sufficiently impressed by the AI because they're using it as a substitute for putting in their own time, which, again, for them might be fine. But it's not what I want to do. I want to put in more and more of my time to learn and have it complement that learning. And if you do that and keep on whacking it with queries and facts and questions and interpretations, you'll come away much more impressed than if you just ask it, oh, what does the rate of price inflation mean? Or, I'm interviewing Tyler tomorrow. What questions should I ask him then? It's pretty mid. Is that the term people use now? Like, mid is fine? Mid is called mid for a reason. But at the end of the day, you will be asleep on the revolution occurring before our eyes, which is that it's getting smarter than we are. You'll just think it's a cheap way to achieve a lot of mid tasks, which it is. Also, some humans will become masters of the tools. How much writing they still will be doing, at what pace, I'm not sure. But it's a major psychological adjustment. And a lot of people who thought they would be writers, I will predict they won't be. Just like the number of jobs for certain types of computer programmers is plummeting, and that will come to other areas. By no means all areas, but a lot of kinds of writing are one of them. Something like generic corporate writing is the first to go, from what I can see. It could be writing a biography of a person the AI cannot really do. It may help you a lot, but it can't go out and interview, you know, the high school teacher and so on, writing memoirs. Of course, the AI cannot do writing that is more Subjective, more personal. I think the AI already can do it very well, especially Deep SEQ program. We can get to that soon. But I'm not sure readers want the better product from the AI. They may want it from a human being. I feel that I do. So if I read a brilliant memoir written by an AI, but it corresponded to no actual life, I would read a few of those, but at some point I'd get bored. And I don't think I would keep on reading them even if they were better than human memoirs on average.

[David Perell]

So how does all this influence what you're choosing to write? Like, should you write books, articles? How is all this shaping that?

[Helen Castor]

It's affected my writing very significantly already. So there's two quite different effects at work. One is simply that AI is progressing quite rapidly and that changes the world quite rapidly. So if you're writing a book that takes, say two years to write and a year and a half to come out, maybe there's some other delays. We're talking four years. There's a lot of topics you just can't write on. Like you can't write a book on AI. It's crazy. You could write a very good book, the early history of AI, which is frozen in historical time. Now, maybe the AI will write that book better than you could, but at least you could consider doing it. So what I call predictive books, books about the near future, they don't make sense anymore. You've got to cover those by writing on this ultra high time frequency every day, every week. Something like substack, blogging, Twitter. That's a big change. So some of the recent stuff I've written is about the more distant past that is frozen in history. But the other question is, what can the AI soon enough write better than you can? And it may not be that the AI writes a book. Don't fixate on book. Maybe the AI is no better than to write books. They're just like a box. And you can ask the box any question you might read in the book. That's what I suspect is the case. Not that there'll be all these books written by AIs. It's inefficient. Like why this single package for everyone, Just give people the box. So it's a question box. And what you're writing had better be more interesting than the question box. So the book I've started writing recently, we were discussing it before filming started. It will be called Mentors. It's about mentoring and also being a mentee. And first, I think the extant literature is weak enough. The AI maybe can't do a great job. But even if the AI could do as good a job or better than I can, I don't think people want to read that book from an AI. I think they want to read it from a human who has been a mentor and a mentee. Just like I don't want to read all these phony memoirs from AIs, even if some of them are good. And that's a human book that only a human can truly write sincerely. Incredibly so. I'm going to write fewer books in the future because of this. I may not write any more books after this book on mentors. A lot of books I would have written, they're now obsolete. I feel I'm wise enough to recognize that. And I'm not going to write less because I'm going to do more of this super high frequency writing, much of it about AI.

[Jonathan Franzen]

To me, the idea that AI can write is sort of founded on the notion that there is no soul. To me, you write with something of a soul. And the fact that science says there is no soul and that the idea of the soul really doesn't make a lot of sense like this sort of like inner Tom or inner David. It's kind of odd, but I can tell you. So in Shelter island, there's a shed out in the backyard.

[David Perell]

This at your house out there?

[Jonathan Franzen]

Yeah. And what's. One of the reasons that we bought the house is that there's the shed where the guy, the previous owner, used to have his business and do his business. And that shed was a dump for a really, really long time. You know, people used to come to the house, oh, I can't wait to see your Rider shed. And then they'd kind of look at it and go this way. Yeah, let's go back to the house.

[Cobie Smulders]

It was kind of getting a little thirsty drink of water.

[Jonathan Franzen]

But we, so we, but we finally got it fixed a little, a little fixed a little while ago. And one of the things that I had, you know, I had these rows of bookshelves installed, you know, in the wall. And, you know, you can fit a lot of books in there. And, and I had a lot of books. And so the, and so the big, the big question I had to decide was, like, how am I going to organize the books? Alphabetical type, I don't know. I had this idea I was going to do it chronologically. The books were going to be in there chronologically. And so it begins with the Bible and ends with Finnegan's wake. That's cool. Yeah, or maybe even pre Bible there's some stone.

[David Perell]

An epic of Gilgamesh.

[Jonathan Franzen]

Yeah, exactly. How did you know? Yeah, but yeah, exactly. And the really interesting thing about doing that is that the organization of those books tells its own story. And the story is of humanity. Like everything it does is wrong essentially. I mean, we fuck up again and again and again. Any piece of technology that we develop, we put, we either got from or put to use in war. Any sort of religion that we talk about is, you know, is A wrong and B a tool of tyranny. I mean, we fuck up again and again and again. And yet for every fuck up there is a writer, somebody who's grappling with the fuck up and bearing witness to the pain and the suffering and the joy and the hope and the whole freaking shit show. And you see it. I can tell you the whole story. I mean like modernism comes from World War I beat America. Jack Kerouac comes out of World War II, Don fucking DeLillo comes out of Vietnam and the rise of the technology state. From that you can just see writers are there to address this flow of history. And I would say that it's like the only thing maybe that humanity has ever really done right is bear witness to its own thing. And I think anybody who writes, I'm not going to say, oh, I'm bearing witness, I don't want to be pretentious, but I think that anybody who is writing seriously from the heart is bearing witness to this onward stamping of this blind genius being that is humanity and that's the soul is the part of us that is willing to and in fact needs to bear witness to the truth, to ourselves, to God, all of it. That's the soul. And you see it, you see the soul do its work over the course of human history. And I think what I'm winding up into is like a long anti AI speech because why the fuck would we ever want to give that up? It's like the one thing that we can do and the one thing that we're gift, you know, we've been given, we've been given that gift.

[Zat Rana]

I love using ChatGPT to help me write something. Especially like as I've been trying to write this thing. If I get like stuck, it's a sort of like super thesaurus if I just can't figure out how to phrase something or I'm like struggling with something or like just can't get something to flow. But it's definitely not like going to Replace coming up with the ideas anytime soon. It's an incredible tool for writers. Like incredible tool for writers, but definitely not a writer. Like a sparring partner, like a collaborator, like someone you can give like a subtask to.

[David Perell]

Yeah, that's a lot of how I use it is a lot of times I have a word that I'm struggling with and I'll say, give me 10 words that would work in this sentence, and then I'll take the sentence, quote it, and then it'll give me the output. It's really good at that.

[Zat Rana]

Yeah.

[David Perell]

How do you think that we should be training writers differently in a chatgpt world?

[Zat Rana]

I heard this story once. I don't know if it's true or not, but it was like some creative writing teacher. They would have these students come and the first day or whatever she'd like, give an assignment which is write the first paragraph of your novel. And people would come in with all of the standard freshmen and college mistakes, like way too many stretched metaphors, way too much flowery language. And then she'd go through this exercise of I think a standard one first, which is cut one metaphor from every page, cut one unnecessary word from every sentence, cut this, cut that, cut that. You take this like 10 page thing down and you cut it down to one page and it would not be so torturously overwritten. And then the class would read them and they would say like, okay, what happened here? What's the. And the answer was there was like no story at all. There was. The instinct was try to like write this, like beautifully, whatever kind of satisfying to write thing, but it's no fun to read like the readers want a story. And the thing from this teacher is that we might teach people to write beautifully, but there's no interesting story. On the other hand, you have these sort of massively mass market successful. I don't even know what I'll pick on the Twilight books or something quite interesting story, horrible writing. Sure. And the question is, can we make it easier to get both and can we teach people how to use these tools?

[David Perell]

Is there's just a lot of people out there who are saying that AI is going to kill writing and they're angry about it.

[Zat Rana]

About it.

[David Perell]

And what do you make of that?

[Zat Rana]

I don't see any evidence whatsoever that AI seems to be killing writing. I mean, there's like a lot of bad AI writing like plastered over the Internet. And there's like a lot of like bad student assignments that have probably been written by AI, but I don't think anyone's serious. I don't think Paul Graham is sitting around being like, AI is going to kill my writing here. I think it would have to be full super intelligence. Before I was like, okay, this is going to replace human writing, full stop. And we have much bigger issues to worry about at that point. Even if that happened, let's say we have a system that can write better than a human. Do you think that the most popular novel of 2027 has a human name on it or not? Like a human writer on it or not? I think yes. I think it does too. When I finish a great book, the first thing I go do is like, I want to know about the writer. I want to know their life story. And I don't think I'll ever have that feeling to like AI writing. There is something about you read an incredible book and you kind of. You get to connect to a person even though you don't literally know them. You feel like you do, and you feel like you have this important shared human experience, and that is like some significant percentage of the enjoyment of a great book to me. And I bet we keep doing that.

[John McWhorter]

The output of LLMs is peculiar in one sense. It's well written in the sense that it tends not to be. In academies, in jargon, in. In the sentence structure tends to be pretty, sound, plain and sound. Even the progression of ideas tends to be orderly. There tends to be an introductory sentence and concluding sentence. So in that sense, it's good writing. It's bad in the sense that it is so generic and prosaic and you can almost recognize the output of a large language model. It's so banal now, perhaps it can be trained and perhaps if you prompted it. Don't be prosaic, don't be plain. It'll be interesting to see whether we'd come up with any kind of style or freshness. But it's not the way it's designed. It's designed as a mashup, as a pastiche of literally billions of examples out there. And it's an interesting question why it should be so at least why it's pro style, should be sound. I mean, I think that's the best you could say about it. Whereas the pro style of most academics, most lawyers, most bureaucrats, is not sound. Why is it better? One possibility has just been hammered into shape through the fine tuning and the feedback. That is, instead of just regurgitating an amalgam of, right, the reinforcement learning, the reinforcement learning and the stuff they don't really Talk about much. But that might be essential, I.e. they're real human beings who force it into a five paragraph essay. The other is that, and this is completely speculative, but we know in visual beauty, often a composite is more attractive than the elements that went into the composite. So that if you take a bunch of faces and you morph them together, the non existent human being that comes out of the morphing is more handsome or prettier than all of the men's faces and women's faces that went into it. Really take a high school yearbook and you mash together the several hundred faces and the result is pretty attractive.

[David Perell]

Is that right?

[John McWhorter]

Yeah. Now, whether that can be true of prose style, that is that if you were to eliminate all of the God awful convoluted constructions and just came up with kind of the generic sentence structure, it wouldn't be beautiful, but it would be clear. That's a hypothesis.

[Cobie Smulders]

I think of it as the most unbelievable tool I've ever seen to improve every single part of the work I do. Like I am, I have been blown away. I've been a power user now for a year and a half, right? Like just aggressively using every tool that comes out, trying to understand the intricacies of the tools. Like trying to stay ahead of a field that's rapidly, rapidly developing. And by the way, I'm not a, I'm not a technical person, so I'm not an engineer and I'm not like a founder of a tech company. So my interest in this is purely at the level of like tooling, like what tools are being developed for people like me to do our work better. And honestly, there's been one other moment when I've been this blown away. And it was the first time I connected to the Internet. Like the first time I connected to the Internet and I was like, wait, wait, wait, wait. I'm connected to literally everything and everyone if I want to be. The great challenge for any kind of writer is one of the great challenges is like simply getting stuff on the page that you think reflects the thing in your head.

[David Perell]

Yes.

[Cobie Smulders]

You have an image in your head and in your head it's perfect. It's like every pixel is exactly where it needs to be. Now you need to describe that image to somebody else. And that's where the challenge is. AI helps you do that better and faster. How does it do that? Well, I'll give you an example actually, from just a couple days ago. I'm working to edit in my role as a publisher, I'm working to Edit

[Tyler Cowen]

a book about grief.

[Cobie Smulders]

And the woman who wrote the book lost her daughter two years ago. This book is extraordinary. I actually haven't been able to edit it without weeping. Like, it's that good. Part of that is I'm a parent, and when you read a book about somebody's child dying, you just. It hits too close to home. There's a section in the book where she talks about how Judaism emphasizes the need for the body to be buried and in the ground very, very quickly.

[David Perell]

Yes.

[Cobie Smulders]

You're supposed to wait a maximum of three days. That's the outer limit or something.

[David Perell]

Yeah. Basically, I think the. The soul or the spirit leaves the body after three days. Yeah.

[Cobie Smulders]

And she talks about how there's actually a decent amount of writing in, like, Jewish liturgy about the importance of the speed, like, why the speed matters. Where does that come from? And there are sort of two, like, abiding explanations. Right. And one is that the spirit needs to be back to God as quickly as possible, or back to the. Back to, you know, the heavens as quickly as possible. The other is that bodies, if they were left out, could become decayed. They would start to. Like, the flesh itself would start to smell and rot and all these other things. And so there was a reason that was spirit and there was a reason that was flesh. I wanted to understand that better and to understand what the rabbinical sources said about that better so that I could confirm that one. She was telling me like, she was speaking the truth. I'm not Jewish. I don't come from this tradition. But also, in case I missed anything, like, did we miss any quotes or ideas or something from the Talmud that should be in here? Could I go and spend a month really getting understanding Judaism?

[Kevin Kelly]

Sure.

[Cobie Smulders]

But instead, I could use AI to take the paragraph and ask AI to really give me sources and quotes and texture and nuance and please explain what this word means and what this word means. Is this the actual explanation? And it gave me really incredible thoughts so that I could verify the information. I could share some things with her that I learned that might make for better editing.

[Helen Castor]

Right.

[Cobie Smulders]

Like, it actually enhanced that paragraph, taking it and putting it in AI and just asking it a series of questions. There are people who could say, that's unfair. And I would say, well, all I did was just Google on steroids.

[Rebecca Solnit]

Right?

[Cobie Smulders]

Like, all I did was just, like, Google what would have taken me 10 Google searches. Took me one query with Claude. The point is that I think what it does is it one. It enhances your ability to research, and it allows you to pull sources together that you wouldn't have otherwise thought about. Right. There's a second thing, psychologically. Having an editor that's always on call is new and super powerful. It used to be, and it still is, that you have editors and they help you punch up your work.

[Zat Rana]

Right?

[Cobie Smulders]

No writer works alone. They have people who work with them. I now have the world's greatest editor, the world's smartest editor, who never complains, who never gets tired, who never turns off. So if I'm working at 4 o' clock in the morning and I need my editor, I've got it. It's right there. So if I have a paragraph that feels flabby, or if I have a word that doesn't quite sit right, I can put it in and say, what are some other options for this? Or what's wrong about this?

[John McWhorter]

Right.

[Cobie Smulders]

So that's like the editorial function. There's another important function that I use it for, I think. And this is something that one of my. Another one of my kind of people in the hall of Heroes is Tyler Cowen. I know you're close to him as well.

[David Perell]

Love Tyler.

[Cobie Smulders]

One of the things that Tyler talks a lot about is the ability to argue the opposite position is insanely important. And so sometimes, particularly with OP eds, when I have an OP Ed I've finished or something I've written where there's an argument, like a real argument, I will have Claude argue the opposite position for me. I will have it write a takedown of this. Oh, I Love that. This op ed. That's a great prompt. Please criticize in 700 words this op ed. And I tell it I said and do not hold, hold back. I'll like, add personality to it. Once I see how it's criticized the piece, I can then go back to my piece and strengthen it against those criticisms. Because everybody's got blind spots. And so I have to actually be able to, like, unearth those blind spots so that I can address them. And I would say nine times out of 10, the arguments that it makes really force me to stop and think. Everything I've just described obviously has hazards. There are hallucinations, there are problems. There are times when it gets source material wrong. But that's the whole point of human operators running these LLMs and using them judiciously. I'm not substituting for the work of getting up every day and doing writing. I'm using the tools in the places where it matters. And I cannot emphasize enough how much better and faster my work is as a Result.

[David Perell]

Balaji Srinivasan has a line where he says, AI is not end to end, it's middle to middle. And what he means by that is when people criticize AI, they say, well, you're going to need to figure out what is the thing you want to do in the first place. Hey, there's going to be hallucinations. You have to check it at the end. That's the end to end stuff. Humans have to work at the very beginning to set the vision. Humans have to work at the very end to verify, to fact check, to make sure everything's good. But a lot of that middle to middle work can now be done by AI.

[Cobie Smulders]

And also, look, I think a lot of the criticism about AI is being leveled by people who don't use it. I'll just be honest. Like, I think a lot of the people who are critiquing it are people who have an understandable anxiety about how it might threaten their work, their income or just their like, position in life, right? But a lot of them don't actually use AI. Like, they don't actually sit down with the tools and sit down and like put things in and play around and learn how to use it. Learning AI, learning how to use these tools effectively is a skill unto itself. Learning how to ask better questions, create better prompts, use it for things like numerical analysis, use it to write code. I had a friend who's an engineer at a very prominent technology company that is doing a lot with AI, let's just say that. And I asked him about AI because engineers in particular are also feeling the same pressure that AI could replace them, that it could be a threat to their livelihoods. And I asked him what he thought. He has a family, he has a stake in the future of his financial life, right? He's not independently wealthy. And he said, AI is the sharpest knife that an engineer has ever been given. He said, but it's still a knife. I've still got to cook the meal, right? And so I think of it the same way. I'm still cooking the meal when it comes to the Cobie book. I'm still cooking the meal when it comes to all of my other projects. But AI is an exceptionally sharp knife and it is unlike anything I've ever seen. There's one final piece that people don't necessarily think about that I talk about a lot when I encourage people to try using AI. My daughter doesn't have a hard time writing. It's because she has no self consciousness about the quality of her Writing, she doesn't care if it's good or bad. She just does it. And it's an unadulterated, childlike approach to creation. And by the way, it's marvelous. All parents have experienced this at some point. It's why, by the way, we put our crappy drawings of our kids stuff on the fridge. It's cause we're just like, oh, look at this. But the bigger point is, ego is not interfering. Self consciousness is not interfering. Between the impulse that my daughter has to write something and the act of writing it, between my impulse to write and the act of writing is people who are gonna hate me, things people are gonna say on Twitter, all the interferences that get in the way. All of the stuff that clouds up, cabbages up your brain that leads you to say, I should shelve this essay. It's not gonna be any good. Like, and what if somebody doesn't like it? Or what if they think less of me? Or what if they think. What if they think. What if they think? What AI does is actually allows you to short circuit a lot of that noise because it gets you to a finished product much more quickly and effectively. So I'll give you an example.

[Maggie Nelson]

There's a.

[Cobie Smulders]

There's a particular AI tool I like called Whisper. I think it's called Whisper Flow. Yeah, W, I, S, P R. And it's really, really, really effective voice dictation. And so sometimes if I'm feeling really stuck or I feel like I'm not, like I'm not myself that day or something's off, I will use Whisper Flow to just dictate thoughts. And it'll do a very good cleaned up transcription or translation of what I just said. And then at least I've got a bad first draft that I can play around with. And I didn't get in my head about it, and I didn't wait and wait and wait and agonize and research and clean the kitchen and make sure my shoes were all lined up by the door and all the stuff that we used to excuse ourselves from actually finishing the work itself. AI is an anxiety antidote. People think AI causes anxiety, and I'm sure for some people, it does. For me, it's been the ultimate antidote to the thing that prevents me from getting my work done. Because I can get to a bad first draft very, very quickly, and then I can bring to it polish and flare and attention and refinement and all of those things. And I think that's seriously underestimated. Think of it like this Could I write my books by hand? Yeah, Robert Caro does so, you know, no shade. Literally, like, literally by hand? Yeah. Could I write them by typewriter?

[Kevin Kelly]

Sure.

[Cobie Smulders]

But I'm choosing to use a word processor. That's how I think about AI. AI is the next iteration of that. I am choosing to use this tool. The words are still my own, the research is still my own, the facts are still my own, the interviews are still my own. All of those things are still, they still belong to me. They're still coming from my brain. AI simply accelerates all of that and gives me a far bigger just canvas of research and potential options for words and phrases and paragraphs. And so I don't, I don't see how any modern writer couldn't use AI. And I think the idea that it is like stealing work or. No, it's been trained on work.

[Zat Rana]

Right.

[Cobie Smulders]

It's not stealing, it's borrowing to learn. So did Google Books. But there was no outcry about Google Books, right? Like, like there were. There's plenty of information on Google that is the quote unquote, like Cliff Notes version of a given topic or fact or book or novel or something. There's not the same outcry. I think of it very much in the same spirit. And I think the courts are going to, by the way, are going to find the same conclusions too.

[Gary Marcus]

Think about the current narrative around AI. We people who've never thought about thinking, never thought about thinking. We're engineers. We've thought about how to build things from the ground up using code. There's been a lot of philosophical thought on what is like, what it talks like, justifiable belief. That's the field of epistemology right through to what it means to define agency. And you have all these AI researchers now who are like, we've built this code and we've anthropomorphized it in such a way that this language calculator is going to become conscious. I'm like, these are very loaded terms. These are very loaded terms that you haven't introspected on a lot. We don't even know what those definitions mean. We don't have a collective definitions of even what the word intelligence means. There's no single answer of what intelligence means. There's something that a spider can do when it creates a web that's intelligent, that's going towards a preference and a goal.

[Cobie Smulders]

There's bees and ants.

[Gary Marcus]

Exactly. There's like murmuration in birds. There's many different types of intelligence to have the Arrogance to say if we can make it resemble our intelligence in this way, like to build these kind of very smart, very human sounding, you know, language calculators because we can see ourselves in it. That is a primary form of intelligence. Like I think something that's way more scary from an existential risk point of view is synthetic biology. We'll actually try and build biological intelligence. Right? Like how do we build organisms from non organic matter? Like that to me is a little bit more like we should be thinking about that as opposed to like if we just keep adding thousands more training inputs to this giant language calculator, it's going to walk out the screen and kill us when it comes with this arrogance. Right? Of like everything is logical and we are so with such a great paradigm science that we figured out what consciousness of thinking is. Like no, we haven't, like we don't have a definition of what the goal even is. We don't even know what intelligence is that we're somehow going to get there even though we don't really know what the goal is. So yeah, the Arab, the like current hubris in STEM to disregard the humanities. I've been thinking about these questions for a long period of time. Like it's just, it was just saving much more time if people were talking to each other like every. I mean a lot of the machine learning examples come from behaviorism. They used to in the past, like looking at like Pavlov's models and trying to understand like how you do reward functions. That was some of the beginning basis of machine learning. And then it kind of separated out and became much, much more about code and not even looking at memetic behavior as intelligence and intelligent animals. It's like this divorce, like you say, like, I mean, how much is that slowing down progress is extreme arrogance between both camps.

[Zat Rana]

Right?

[Kevin Kelly]

Right.

[Gary Marcus]

Like everyone needs like a massive humility pill.

[David Perell]

Have you written with AI at all?

[Zat Rana]

No.

[David Perell]

Why? No. You're like, because.

[Lena Dunham]

Why would I? It'd be like hiring someone to have sex for you. You know, I love writing, I love, I love the materiality of it. My partner has, my partner volunteers in a lot of things. So at one point she had to do governance papers for a charitable organization. You know how their board works, like just legalese, small print kind of stuff. So she used AI to generate that because AI could access the kinds of rules that a charity should have in terms of how it operates, so it's legally protected. So for completely non creative stuff like that, sure, I'll go to AI. You know, my shoulder hurts. I'll go to AI on the computer. But for anything creative, I said, why would I want to use it when it's the very creative language that I like? So I've never used it, and I suspect we'll tire of that quickly. I'd rather read a bad short story by a human than a good one by a computer. Because, after all, what you want in art is connection. It's connection with another human being, a chatbot that's your boyfriend or girlfriend. That's short term, long term. You don't want that. You do want that human connection. So I find AI will probably be a useful tool in medicine, possibly a useful tool in the legal system, but for the creative endeavors, even for music, I gather AI music can be quite good, but it's a question of whether you know it or not. It's the deception. If I'm told it's AI music, if it's really background stuff, like, you know, really ambient background stuff, then possibly, I guess I'll listen to AI but if it's something that actually is meaningful, I want it to be human, because it's precisely that imperfection that I want.

[David Perell]

I think the question that's coming to mind here in terms of how much I want to read something written by AI is how much does it matter to me that there's a human on the other side of this? So I need to draft up a contract later this week. I'll probably use AI to help me do it, to think through the finances and stuff like that. Because when I send that out, the person isn't looking at me, saying, david, did you dig into the depths of your heart and soul to write this? But then if a friend is getting married, this happened to me a few years ago. So AI was early. This was chatgpt3 time. And we're at the wedding, and we're sitting around. It's probably 100 people at the wedding, and at every single table was a note that was written from the bride and the groom about why we meant so much to them. And so I sit down and I open it up, and, you know, it's probably 80 words, 100 words. I'm like, wow, that is. That is so touching that they did that.

[Lena Dunham]

Don't tell me it was AI.

[Cobie Smulders]

And

[David Perell]

we have some drinks. We're out partying that night, and I go up to the groom. I say, hey, I just want to let you know that was one of the nicest things I've ever seen at a wedding. And he gives me the old. The old wink. And he says, yeah, we got AI to write it. And I was just like, dude, dude. I would have so much rather you written something that's how half as sincere as that filled and littered with typos than to have AI write that. It felt like a violation and a betrayal.

[Kevin Kelly]

We're in this weird moment where the LLMs generative AI it just literally started working and it already works incredibly well. So it's like this step function thing from doesn't work at all to works incredibly well. And it works incredibly well for helping on writing and it works incredibly well for generating art. And we're sitting here in this moment where in theory, within a year or two, there is going to be a generative AI tool where you feed it an essay and it will give you the short film, but that doesn't quite exist yet, but we're almost on the verge of that. And then, by the way, if you were going to do that today, you could hand do that. You could use midjourney or stable diffusion or whatever, and you could do what you're talking about very quickly. And I could probably literally do it myself by just feeding in the text. And so we're at this. But as you know, most professional writers aren't doing this. Most professional artists. We're all sitting here knowing that this latent ability is there and we're not actually doing it yet. It's hard for me to judge this, but it may be that five years from now we'll be sitting here and it'll be like, oh, my God, this has all changed. Because all of a sudden, both verbal artists and visual artists are able to express themselves so much more rapidly and so much more vividly. And now you've got a giant change happening in real time, which is the new coding. The old coding interface was your code, and then you run it and then you see where all the bugs are and you try to fix the bugs. The new coding interface is you've got your code and then you've got a chatbot, you've got the copilot, and the copilot is like reading your code and giving you real time comments on, you idiot, you got this wrong. Or the chatbot is actually writing the code for you and then you're giving it feedback. You idiot, you got this wrong. And so now we have this old concept in the old days called pair programming, where you'd put two coders together in front of the same keyboard and they could talk to each other and kind of write code together. Now you're going to have pair, and that was always a rare thing because most people didn't do that. But now you're just going to have pair programming happening much more broadly, which is human plus machine. And by the way, I think this hasn't happened yet, but I think the same thing is going to happen for every other form of writing. So I think prose writing and fiction writing and everything else in the future, I think most professional authors are going to be working in that kind of format and you'll have this continuous dialogue going with an AI at the same time that you yourself are in charge of the overall product.

[Maggie Nelson]

The only AI I use, although I do try and switch it off, is obviously like spellcheck, you get the red. And that is a kind of AI. And I suppose it's been scrutinizing us for a long time. But actually, because my writing often is highly violating of grammatical norms, the grammar check goes wild. Doesn't like you, does not like it. And I'm like, good, this is excellent. I could give you an example of what, as it were, Grammarly, does not like. So this. I sometimes like to remove verbs from sentences, leaving them technically not sentences, but this is seeing this huge Canadian river for the first time from the sky. My first sight of the river itself catches my breath. New paragraph. A world snake in the green. New paragraph. Cliffs dropping near sheer to water. New paragraph. House sized boulders on the banks. Time falls from the rock faces above. New paragraph. Water blue, black and glossy in the deeper calmer runs peat brown where it's stretched towards and away from rapids churning green gold and cream in the falls. End paragraph. So that's five paragraphs, five sentences. Sands doing weird stuff. Cliffs dropping near sheer to water. And Grammarly, Grammarly does not approve, which I take to be a badge of success.

[David Perell]

I agree, it's sort of the paradox of Grammarly that it makes the average piece of writing, I think, much better. But it hurts a kind of write. It takes away from distinctiveness and individuality that underlies so much great writing.

[Maggie Nelson]

I think that's so well put and I like the idea of it hurting that I think that's a good way of putting it. Salman Rushdie yesterday, I think said writers have nothing to from AI until it can do comedy. And I thought that was an interesting idea. Like the hardest thing of all is to make us laugh. But I think writing broadly does have a lot to fear from AI and we should resist it, including the absolute piracy of our books that we now know. Large language model, composers have been undertaking for years now and feeding, absolutely feeding them without any kind of recompense or licensing or permission sought into the creation of LLMs.

[John Maxwell]

Our copyright law does not protect things created by AI.

[David Perell]

So if it's been created by AI, you do not own it. At Macmillan, no one can own it.

[John Maxwell]

It's not subject to copyright protection. So now as a businessman, am I going to invest in something that has zero barrier to entry? If I publish that book tomorrow and, and it's deemed not to be covered by copyright, everyone else can publish a different version of that book.

[David Perell]

And at what level is it not copied by copyright? Like in page 297, I read it, the third word in sentence 21 on that versus this was written by AI. ChatGPT.

[John Maxwell]

Well, there's no clear line for this. And that's the problem. You know, there's a test and I just honestly can't remember what the phrase is, but it's along the lines of, you know, substantially created by a human. You know, the, the copyright only protects works that are. I think it's substantially created by Hume. But you can't quote me on it. I got to get the, the exact information. But there's a test and it's not a bright line.

[David Perell]

So then if I come in and I'm going to work with you, do you have to basically look me in the eye at this point and say, did AI write this? How, how did you use AI?

[John Maxwell]

Well, we, we've had, we've had in our contracts forever. And I don't think this is different for most publishers or any publishing contract I've ever seen where the author makes a representation that the work is their sole creation and then they make a representation that they will identify any parts aren't. So here's a perfect example. There are plenty of books that might have a song lyric or might cite someone else's book. Part of the editor's job is to identify those, but really it's the author's job to say, hey, I quoted so and so here, and for fiction as well, right? You've seen it. So this hasn't changed. And I mean, I've been working for publishing companies for the last 25 years. I've been in the entertainment business, you know, for the last 35 years. This is no different than it's ever been.

[David Perell]

So then back to our thought experiment. So now I'm sitting down, I'm going to write a book. John, give me some advice. I'm going to use AI Want to use AI. How should I be working with AI, how should I be tracking? Do I need to be tracking all the AI that I use? Like, how do I do this in a ethical way that speaks to your creative side, the business side, the legal side?

[John Maxwell]

I think it goes back a little bit to what we were just talking about a couple minutes ago. If you use it as a tool, a great example would be a research assistant, right?

[Maggie Nelson]

Sure.

[John Maxwell]

If you used AI as a research assistant, you said, look, I've read these 10 books and you had permission to dump them into AI because that's a whole other thing. And you then query, you say, okay, my theme that I'm trying to get across is this, or I'm trying to get documentation or trying to annotate this thought. AI can help you find that way quicker than having to read through all those books. Again, that's a fine use of AI. I think that's no different than being able to scan an ebook.

[Jonathan Franzen]

Right.

[David Perell]

I would call that Google on steroids category.

[John Maxwell]

I guess that's fair enough. So that, to me is. That's a tool for fiction. It might be. Maybe it's a thought partner. Maybe it's like, hey, here's my manuscript. And then you can start querying the chatbot to say, Give me your $0.02 on this character development or something. Maybe that's a good example. But I don't know. I haven't given this incredible amount of thought. But those are things that just come to mind about how you could use AI to maybe sort of as a tool.