Meet Your Hosts

Kathi (00:01.943)
Well, hey friends, welcome to the Writing of the Red House podcast, where we gather at the table to break bread and tell tales with some of our favorite writers and creators who share their wisdom to help us all share our story. And I am back with two of my partners in crime. First, it’s Roger Lipp, who is an

AI, we’ve decided AI craftsman, because I know that there are people who are working in AI, who know more than Roger, but when it comes to publishing and creating, Roger’s in the trenches and he’s making it happen and is super smart and just a great person to have on here. Welcome back, Roger.

Roger (00:55.563)
Thank you. I think I’ll have to have business cards made. Roger Lipp, AI craftsman. Yeah, yeah, could be good.

Kathi (00:58.331)
I know, right? I love that. AI is your tool and you’re creating beautiful things. And back with me is my agent extraordinaire. She’s with a live agency. It’s Kathleen Kerr. Kathleen, welcome back to the podcast.

Kathleen (01:15.606)
Thanks so much for having me again.

Kathi (01:17.747)
You know, this is going to be a regular discussion here on this podcast, because AI is not going away. And I’m personally very grateful for that. I use AI not just in my business life, but in my everyday life. I’ve been known to go to my refrigerator, look at the ingredients in there and ask AI to say, what am I having for dinner? And it is, it’s a beautiful thing. I’m not going to lie. It’s a beautiful thing.

Because here’s what I will say. I wrote a book several years ago with my friend Sherri Gregory, Overwhelmed. And because I feel like the number of decisions I am required to make every single day has grown exponentially. And I’m not gonna say that my life is harder than Laura Ingalls because it’s not. My life is much easier. But I will say it’s more complicated.

And, you know, she didn’t have to decide what she was going to have for dinner because whatever was there was dinner or Pa had to go kill it. So, you know their decisions were taken care of from her and How I like to use AI is to help me make decisions I am I still make a thousand decisions every single day But we’ve used AI from everything from what’s for dinner to how to plant our garden to writing cover letters

to, Roger, I can’t even think, but we’ve used it for a thousand different things. Yes, yes. And so, for these things that do not require my creativity, that do not require my internal intelligence, I mean, that’s probably a bad way of saying it, that are not.

Roger (02:50.455)
Developing training packages for our team. Yeah.

Kathi (03:14.527)
something I sign my name to, let me put it that way. They’re not the book, they’re not the article, they’re not the devotion, they’re not the blog. I use AI for almost all of it. And so I wanna talk to you guys today because you are both using AI every day as well. How are you using it? And if you didn’t hear our discussion about how we are putting bumpers around the efficacy,

of how we’re using AI. Go back and listen to the last podcast because I feel like we’ve come up with some pretty simple but pretty profound ways of saying, this is what we’ll do and what we won’t do. But I want to hear from you guys, if somebody is just dipping their toe into the AI pool, Kathleen, as an agent, what would you expect to see from your client and what would you not expect to see?

And then I want to talk a little bit about what tools we’re using, because Kathleen’s using different tools than Roger and I are, and I want to hear all about that. So somebody’s just starting out, and they’re an author, they’re working on their book. How would you see an author that you are representing using AI ethically?

Kathleen (04:32.934)
So can I first say unethically? What would concern me? And I would say this conversation used to be when I saw a writing sample, I can tell right away if you lifted it from Wikipedia. I can tell right away your voice changes. And I am trained to recognize an author’s voice, to recognize the semantic patterns of what is going into your writing. And I can tell. And if you present one way in our conversations,

Kathi (04:35.219)
Okay, yes, please!

Kathi (04:45.951)
Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Kathleen (05:00.094)
and then I’m seeing a writing sample that’s clearly AI generated, I will know. Another editor will know. That would be an unethical use if it’s just writing that you are passing off as your own. Cathy, I thought it was so interesting the way that you said for the, those everyday decisions, just to prevent decision fatigue, things that require your decision making, but not necessarily your creativity. I actually. Yes. Yeah.

Kathi (05:05.699)
Mm-hmm. Right.

Kathi (05:25.271)
That’s what I was trying to say, thank you.

Kathleen (05:28.25)
So for my work, actually, sometimes I use it the opposite way. So I mean, full disclosure, I work remotely. I do not have a team that is sitting in an office right next to me. I am not constantly, I mean, I’m in conversation with everyone all the time. We have those tools. But a lot of my work that requires a lot of creativity is me sitting in front of a piece of paper sometimes. Or it’s me going to a coffee shop and just trying to brainstorm a bunch of titles. Or if I’m working on a book proposal.

Kathi (05:33.527)
Mm-hmm.

Kathleen (05:58.386)
and saying, OK, what is the kind of that sticky statement that I really want to have called out? Or what is the key benefit? What’s the felt need? I can try to craft those myself. And I will craft those myself. What I have found to be so helpful and such a big time saver is going to ChatGPT. You’re going to Jasper. Those are the tools that I use. And just punching in, like, here’s an overview of the book.

Here is what I think the book is about. AI, give me something to play with. Get the brainstorm started so that I can manipulate it from there. There was a book I was working on recently and some of the material it came up with when I asked it to generate titles was terrible. It was a book that was a lot about how Christianity looks so much like performance and behavior in religion and how can we get rid of that?

So I wanted to call the book, Kicking Off Your Goodie Two Shoes. And the author didn’t like that. She thought it was too old fashioned. I thought it was hilarious. It’s open for anyone who wants it. So I went to chat GPT and I was like, okay, I want a funny title. This is about what it is. And it just took, I want funny. And it gave me jesting with Jesus and giggles with God. And I was like, okay.

Kathi (06:59.299)
Okay.

Kathi (07:02.571)
Mm-hmm.

Kathleen (07:21.886)
OK, that’s not exactly what I was looking for, but now I know what I’m not looking for. And I was able to further refine it from there, and that’s where that Craftsman tool comes in. And it can just do that initial brainstorm for me. Sometimes repeated phrases will come up. I’ve never taken a title or a statement directly from AI, but I let it just do that initial content generation so that I can use my creativity and intelligence from there. And that’s been super, super helpful. I think generating a proposal.

Kathi (07:26.256)
Right?

Kathi (07:39.483)
No. Yeah.

Kathi (07:47.775)
Yes.

Kathleen (07:51.598)
for like, you know, a book proposal with the agent. That is the weirdest kind of writing anyone will ever do. It is self-congratulatory. It’s a marketing piece. It’s not, you know, the novel. It’s not the memoir. It’s here’s how I’ll help people and how I can save the world through my book and how it’s going to sell a billion copies. It’s not like anything else you’ve been trained to do. So let something that’s been trained to do it, create that for you.

Kathi (07:58.099)
It’s so true. Yeah.

Kathi (08:08.162)
Right.

Kathi (08:16.703)
It’s so true that there are so many aspects to this business that require the plotting. You know, we’re just plotting along, creating that sales page, creating that.

website landing page, creating a social media plan, all these things. There’s a multitude of things that are required to do what we do. And if AI can help me do some of that. I feel like I get no gold stars from…

creating that from scratch. In fact, one of the things I do is I have people who reach out to me with very complex and hard issues. And I use AI to draft a response back.

because oftentimes those letters would sit in my inbox for months because I didn’t know what to say. And AI, I never send the AI generated letter, but man, I use it. I say, I wanna give a thoughtful, careful response. Here are a couple of suggestions I could make. Can you help me craft a response to Abigail? And it will come up.

And the more adjectives I use about, I want to be compassionate, but encouraging, thoughtful, and it will do such a good job. And I can go in there and rewrite it in my voice and take out things that aren’t maybe as helpful and add a few more things. But it gets me to do that work and the soul work.

Kathi (10:15.859)
that I wouldn’t have been able to do otherwise. Roger, how do you see the best uses for people who are just dipping their toe into AI for authors? Because even though I would not call you an author necessarily, you have co-authored a book with me, but you are a part of our day-to-day business here. And so if somebody’s just getting started, how would you suggest that they use AI?

Roger (10:39.36)
Yeah.

Roger (10:46.347)
So I think the very first toe dip is the same one that you and I did about a year ago. When we first discovered ChatGPT, we kind of thought, wow, this is something interesting that we need to understand. And we established an internal challenge with each other that we were going to force ourselves.

to use AI every day. We were going to interact with ChatGPT every day just so that we could start to understand what it could and could not do, and how best to interact and use this tool. I think that’s a great place to start. No objectives. Just use it every day for something. Go up to it and try it. Beyond that.

I think there’s a lot of amazing use cases for AI that authors really should be aware of. We’re using a tool now called Claude, Claude.ai. The reason I like Claude is that it can take large, large amounts of data, like an entire manuscript, and understand it from beginning to end.

and the thread that goes through it. It’s the only AI out there that can do that. Well, maybe Gemini from Google. And.

We’ve been able to use that for things like editorial. Could you help me edit this and find issues, including, and I’m sorry, I’m losing the word. The kind of editing where it’s looking for the thread, the plot points, you may have missed something here. That’s, oh man, yes, yes. It is.

Kathi (12:36.043)
global edit or

Kathleen (12:46.422)
The substantive edit.

Kathi (12:47.991)
A substantive edit, a global edit, yeah that’s fine.

Roger (12:50.919)
It is able to do those kinds of tasks as well. And I think that is a tremendous tool for authors to be aware of, because we’re always looking for an editor. And to have one that’s, um, at least that first edit. That’s, that’s super valuable.

Kathi (13:07.667)
Yeah, so like when I edit, I send it through ChatGPT, or you know, actually we use Claude now, first, and then I will send it to my human editor, and she says, you’re turning in much cleaner stuff these days, I’m like, thank you Claude, I’m becoming impressive. And I have to, I do both of those things because, and let me just say this, I think that this is really important for people who are very resistant to this.

something that if you’ve listened to this podcast for any amount of time, you may know I’m severely dyslexic. So of course I went into writing because that makes sense. But what this does, this is such an incredible tool for somebody who has my challenge. Because I miss things. I read things into manuscripts that are not there.

I leave things, I put things in there that shouldn’t be in there. And this really helps me. So Roger, for us, you feel like Claude has been the best tool.

Roger (14:15.575)
So let me just make the case for Claude. Claude has been designed from the beginning to be the more ethical choice in the AI space. Claude has never trained on your data that you’re interacting with it. So if you give it your manuscript, Claude doesn’t now train on your manuscript. The other AIs, ChatGPT,

can’t that feature can be turned on but it isn’t on by default and if you turn it on you give up other features so Claude doesn’t have that trade-off it’s just been that way from the beginning and this huge context what’s called context size how much information can it read at once and retain

It’s very much like a retention of a human reader. How much of the book can you retain at once? Cloud can retain the whole thing at once. And ChatGPT can’t do that. So between those two things, we’ve changed from ChatGPT over to Cloud. I think that’s a really good AI for authors for that reason.

Kathi (15:36.232)
No. Okay. But Kathleen, you use something different and you have different reasons for using it. So we want to hear about that.

Kathleen (15:42.362)
Mm-hmm. So you guys, I think, have delved further into all of this. I haven’t used Cloud before. I’m excited to try it out based on this recommendation, Roger. So my company uses Jasper, and we’ve also used some chat GPT as well. I use them for different things. If I’m just, I need some titles generated, I’ll probably go to chat GPT first to see what it grabs me. I have found Jasper to be a little bit more nuanced. It’s a little bit better at taking my direction.

for that. So for that, I would do, I’m going to give a sample chapter and let’s see that first edit. Or the sample chapter has come through and it reads young. Maybe it’s someone who has just been kind of trained herself on social media, and that’s who she’s written for. She’s written these maybe 200 word captions at most. Now she has to write a whole chapter. It’s hard. It’s hard to get that thread.

and maybe the whole chapter sounds like a social media voice, and I want to class it up a little bit. Jasper is great at just doing it. That is work I can do very easily as an editor. Many editors can do that. It takes time. It takes a lot of careful thinking. And if we can just have that first one done, it saves hours. It just saves absolute hours. And then what can you do with that?

Kathi (17:02.519)
Who is Jasper produced by? Is that Google or do we know? Okay, I was just curious if that was one of the main ones. Yeah, so I will, go ahead.

Kathleen (17:07.196)
I don’t know.

Roger (17:13.579)
No, isn’t Jasper one that gives an aggregator, it’s pulling together a number of different AIs? Or am I getting that confused? Anyway, sorry.

Kathi (17:26.911)
Well, you know what?

Kathleen (17:27.378)
I trust you, Roger, if you think that’s… Roger, you are very much the tech guru. I am the late adopter. I am, I do what’s given to me. I don’t look behind the curtain.

Roger (17:29.724)
I have well.

Kathi (17:33.28)
Hahaha

Kathi (17:37.339)
You know what, but Kathleen, I have to say for a late adopter, you’re pretty far out in front of this compared to a lot of people that we’re talking to. I’m

Kathleen (17:45.258)
Kathy, I’m just gonna hold on to that compliment deep inside, thank you.

Kathi (17:48.563)
Absolutely. And you know what? I’m going to make a little go ahead, Raj.

Roger (17:50.583)
So.

So Jasper, I just had to do a quick look up. It is a purpose-built AI. So it is probably, it hasn’t declared what they’re using behind, but it is designed specifically to help authors. So it is a more purpose-built AI.

Kathi (17:55.873)
Yes.

Kathi (18:07.103)
Oh!

Okay, I’m gonna find out more about this.

Kathleen (18:12.462)
Can I just throw in an encouragement to authors to check all these out? Check out ChatGPT, check out Jasper, check out Claude, check out all of these different options. The machines will not come to your home and take over your world if you just give it a try. Maybe you’re looking for a title. Maybe you just, the concept of writing a summary, like writing a two-sentence summary of your book is overwhelming. How do you put everything into this? Just give it a try, see what it spits out.

Kathi (18:18.421)
Yes.

Kathi (18:27.999)
No. Yeah.

Kathi (18:42.719)
And I love that you give us that permission as an agent, because I think people, and I understand, they don’t wanna be cheating. I get it, I don’t want you to cheat either. But it’s really interesting. We’ve had a number of people come to us and say, I don’t think it’s ethical. And they sit down for a 10 minute conversation, and they’re like, oh, I didn’t know that. One of my best friends, New York Times bestseller, over and over again.

And she’s like, I don’t know, because she’s been hanging out in forums talking about this with other authors. And there’s a lot of misinformation out there. There’s a lot of true information, but there’s a lot of misinformation. And so let’s just have a rational discussion. And guys, if you are like, I don’t know about this, I think you guys are all evil for trying it. Hey, send us a message at info at kathylipp.org. And…

Let’s talk about it because we’re going to continue this conversation on this podcast Uh for a long time because we have a lot to learn and i’m just going to make one last recommendation If this is something that you are interested in finding out more about if you like this kind of discussion Uh, there is a great podcast called hard fork. It’s from the new york times And um, the two hosts are hilarious. It’s a very entertaining read

Um, or listen, uh, Roger and I listened to it every week as we’re driving into town and it’s just once a week, but they They talk about A lot of these things and I think you’ll find it really entertaining and really informative Kathleen and Roger. Thank you so much for this time. This has been such a great discussion and i’m excited to try jasper now like i’m When we get off this podcast, that’s going to be my next thing. So super excited

Thanks for being here guys

Kathleen (20:41.57)
Thanks for having us, Kathy.

Roger (20:42.967)
Thank you.

Kathi (20:43.419)
Absolutely anytime. We’re just gonna have you back that we’re gonna I think this is a good threesome to be talking about these things so I’ve just committed Kathleen because She’s my agent and I get to do things like that Outstand and Roger you have no choice literally you have no choice Because if you want dinner tonight, yeah Created by Kathy or the AI. Oh friends. You’ve been listening to the writing at the Red House podcast. I’m Kathy lip

Kathleen (20:56.59)
outstanding. I’m here for it.

Kathi (21:13.279)
Now, go tell your only you story of God’s extravagant love.