Meet Your Hosts

Kathi (00:02.275)
Well, hey friends, welcome to the Writing at 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 tell our stories. And I’m very excited. I don’t think I’ve ever had two guests. No, that’s not true. I have had two guests and one of them was Roger. Okay, nevermind, nevermind.

But this is still exciting. It’s been years and years since I’ve had two guests on the podcast at the same time. Now, one of them is just in the other room. It is Roger Lipp. Roger is our tech guru for everything. And I think he would push back against this title, but I’m just gonna say it. An AI, if not an expert, let’s say craftsman. So craftsman with AI, yes. And then also,

Roger (01:04.838)
Craftsman. Oh, wow. Okay. Yeah, let’s go with that. Sure.

Kathi (01:10.839)
I have my agent and one of my favorite human beings, Kathleen Kerr with a live agency. Hey Kathleen.

Kathleen (01:18.114)
Thank you so much for having me, Cathy.

Kathi (01:19.835)
Oh my goodness. I, okay, so I am so excited about this conversation. And by the way, Roger, I was not the one who suggested it, Kathleen did. And I know, right? So what we’re gonna be talking about today is an agent’s perspective on AI. And so Kathleen, my first question is, how are you using AI? Because I always, I enter these conversations with fear and trembling. Because…

Roger (01:28.036)
Oh, wow.

Kathi (01:49.311)
There are some people who are very excited about the potential of AI in publishing, and other people who think it’s a tool of the devil. So, yes, please.

Kathleen (02:00.53)
Right. OK, so I am in full disclosure. If you go into my social media analytics and what Google knows about me, I am officially tagged as a late adopter of everything. In fact, this is a true story from 2016 or so. 2016, 2017, somewhere in there. I was working late at night, and I just had my Spotify playlist going on. And it was generating new music for me, and I was just kind of listening in the background.

Kathi (02:12.72)
Oh! Really?

Kathi (02:19.106)
Okay?

Kathleen (02:29.954)
Kathy, I heard this voice, this voice. And I was like, what is that? What am I hearing? And it was Beyonce. So I learned about Beyonce in like, recently, like eight years ago. Yeah. Did you know? Oh my gosh, she’s amazing. And then it was like, yeah, everyone else, the rest, the other 8 billion people were there, but I’m a late adopter. So that gives context, I hope, my initial fear and trembling is about AI.

Kathi (02:42.477)
Wow, okay.

Kathi (02:54.151)
Yes. Okay.

Kathleen (02:59.062)
which were the machines are coming. They’re coming for us. They’re going to displace us. My brain is so much more extraordinary, but people don’t appreciate the value of the brain. That was where I was. And then I tried it. And then I realized how for the last 25 years of my life, I have been using my computer like a typewriter. That’s it. That I have not been exploiting any of its potential.

Kathi (02:59.431)
Right. Yes, yes.

Kathi (03:11.231)
Yeah.

Kathi (03:23.123)
Mm.

Kathleen (03:26.398)
And I spend so much time just trying to generate, what are some good title options that I can present to publishers? What are some really strong key selling points? I’ve got this sample chapter. How do I show the publisher where it fits into an outline? I need to help the writer create the outline. Cathy, you and I have done a lot of this work. We have just brainstormed. Yeah, just throw all the noodles at the wall. Throw.

Kathi (03:50.253)
A ton of this, yes.

Kathleen (03:55.258)
everything up on the whiteboard and then see how we can organize it. You and I have spent days, literal days doing that. And it’s… Yes, it’s good work, it’s fun work. AI just does it for me. It just does it. It gets that done in minutes what has taken me hours. So for me, it’s a lot of those titles, it’s key selling points. It can give me that initial, here’s what the outline could look like.

Kathi (04:01.671)
Yes, you have spent the night at my house doing this stuff.

Kathi (04:09.619)
Right. Yeah.

Kathi (04:24.447)
Mm-hmm.

Kathleen (04:24.482)
Can you group these ideas around a common theme? And what can I do with that then? What can I do with the time that I get back? That for me is the massive win. For me, it’s, I can, I can.

Kathi (04:30.505)
Yeah.

Kathi (04:35.964)
It’s so true, right? Because we are out here, just we are working so hard to do not just the creative work, but the business work of selling these books. There are multiple things. Okay, Kathleen has balloons flying up her screen and we’re trying to keep straight faces and it’s not working.

Roger (05:01.434)
The AI has taken over there. It was very excited. Yes, that’s right.

Kathi (05:03.735)
It has, but it likes you Kathleen, so that’s good. The robots are fans. So Roger, I wanna talk about, excuse me. I wanna talk about this from a creator’s perspective as well because you and I have tried to come up with our guidelines for using AI in our business, in our writing, those kind of things. So I would love for you to talk a little bit about that.

and for Kathleen to listen and say, no, you guys should go to jail, or we’re kind of aligned. So I would love to hear your thoughts on, like where we’re, as an organization, where we’re going with AI.

Kathleen (05:38.51)
I’m out.

Roger (05:38.894)
Please don’t say that. All right.

Roger (05:49.326)
Yeah, you know, we’ve had to think long and hard about this. I’d say we were more early adopters for AI. And we’ve had to think through the question of, okay, how can we use AI to take us individually from one level of competence to another level of competence? You know, how can we use AI as a tool to enhance what we are able to do?

both individually and as an organization, because there’s a lot of potential here. When it first came out, we were all doing the party tricks with AI, talk like a pirate, any of those kinds of things. It was real fun, but it was very clear that this tool had the potential to enhance our productivity and enhance the way we do business. We wanted to leverage that.

Kathi (06:33.941)
Right

Roger (06:49.262)
But at the same time, we wanted to do that responsibly and ethically. And we’ve come up with a very small set of guidelines for us and our team on what that means. And the first and foremost thing is that we’re not going to use AI to misrepresent who’s talking to you. So if, if we’re generating AI content,

and we’re asking it to write in the voice of somebody else, we’re not going to present that as if it were written by somebody else, that other person. We’re not gonna lie to our customers, to our readers. And that was kind of the first bar that we had to pass, that we’re not going to misrepresent. But we are going to use AI as a research assistant, we’re going to use AI.

to help generate titles, we’re gonna use AI to help generate promotional content. That takes me to my second point though. We’re also always gonna keep the human in the loop. And that’s one of the terms that you’ll hear thrown out in the AI community, the human in the loop. And what that really means is that anything that AI is generating, a person is going to touch after that AI has generated it to edit it.

to make sure it’s right and to make sure it’s really on brand with what we’re trying to say. So I think those are the two really important things that we’re keeping in mind as we’re trying to use AI ethically. We’re not going to misrepresent, and we’re going to keep the human in the…

Kathi (08:31.683)
Yeah, we’ve said we want AI to assist, not replace. And that’s just kind of the basic thing we’ve talked about. So Kathleen, I’m curious, you’re in rooms with agents and publishers and people who are having these conversations. Can you tell us, can you spill all the secrets is basically what I’m asking. What are the fears? What is the excitement?

Roger (08:36.377)
Yeah.

Kathleen (08:54.222)
I’m going to go to bed.

Kathi (08:59.891)
what are the guidelines people are discussing, all of this. I mean, we’re creating, it’s almost, it feels like I lived in Silicon Valley when the internet was coming to be. And I was very young during those times, but I remember the excitement around it. And this very much reminds me of that. And so there’s excitement, there’s also fear, but there was also fear of, you know, I think about when automobiles, because we didn’t know how to,

maneuver all that. There was fear around the internet. And so there’s obviously, and justifiably some fear around AI. But I want to know what those rooms are talking about.

Kathleen (09:42.966)
What those rooms are talking about are what Roger just outlined. The fear is that people won’t use it ethically. So Roger, you just outlined here’s what AI is not for and here’s what it is for. Just you have those parameters, that box around how you intend to use this. And the concern, and when I say concern, I mean, this is now at the highest levels of the courts being litigated, is when people are not using it ethically.

Kathi (09:49.972)
Mm-hmm.

Kathi (10:09.12)
Right.

Kathleen (10:12.806)
So the deepest concern for authors right now, and I’m talking for the biggest authors, some of the names that you would certainly have heard of, are litigating this with the AI companies because AI has been trained on other authors’ content. The New York Times is in this as well as individual authors. They’re saying that, and this is pretty clear from what I’ve been looking at.

Kathi (10:36.958)
Yeah.

Kathleen (10:38.426)
that content has been taken from these companies that is copyrighted, and then AI is really just mimicking what’s worked there. So that’s one big concern, that people could just, unethical people could just generate something that’s based on what has been stolen from an individual. The other fear, and this is what I’m starting to see in contracts, actually, is that people would.

And this would both be the author and the publisher, is that they would be leaning too hard on AI. This comes up in covers quite a bit. I’m starting to see stipulations in contracts that publishers will not use AI to generate a cover image, because that’s the same thing. The AI has been trained on other people’s copyrighted artwork and their individual pieces. So we’re seeing that all the time now, that in the publisher covenants that they will not steal other people’s artwork.

Kathi (11:09.184)
Mm-hmm.

Kathi (11:23.977)
Right.

Kathleen (11:32.906)
in a sense, to create this. But the excitement is very much in, Roger, you mentioned in the promotional stuff. You’re not going to misrepresent a voice, but that promotional language, that’s not really in anyone’s voice. That doesn’t purport to be in that. If you’re looking at the description on Amazon of what your book looks like, no one’s saying, I authored this. No one thinks that the author has put that together. That is hugely, hugely beneficial. If we can just use AI as a starting point.

Kathi (11:33.14)
Yeah.

Kathi (11:45.9)
Man.

Kathi (11:52.875)
Mm-hmm.

Kathleen (12:02.518)
but keep the human in the loop, as you say, then we have saved hours. I cannot, as someone who has written a great deal of that marketing copy, and it’s not necessarily my forte. There are people who really, really thrive there. It’s not simple to do, to say, how do we distill this concept with these key selling points down into this and make it SEO compliant, all of that. It’s really, how do we think like an algorithm instead of like a human to generate some of that copy?

Kathi (12:16.157)
Mm-hmm.

Kathleen (12:31.39)
AI can just get it done. And then you can look through it and say, does this match the tone? Are there adjustments and massages that we can make? But overall, it’s just saving an enormous amount of time. So there’s the legal and ethical concern, but also massive excitement about the time savings that this is and how this is just generating stronger copy that can get more books in front of more readers.

Kathi (12:54.131)
You know, it was interesting yesterday. I received an email from somebody who Wants to write books because she doesn’t have a lot of time and she needs to generate income and it’s and it’s a perspective that I’m like, okay, but it’s all the support things that go into that nobody thinks of and that is where I feel like

bring on the AI. As I’m creating an outline for a podcast, nobody’s ever going to see that outline. But still, I have to write and create that. The summary for this podcast, I need to create that, the titles for this podcast. So I write for encourage every month or every other month.

And so I write my article devotion, whatever you want to call it. But then I need to have support materially around that. What does my social media around that to promote that article? The script for my Instagram, my Instagram Reel, I need to come up with that script. For every word that I am writing in a book, I’m writing 10.

to support what I’m doing. And that is, it’s a lot. It’s a lot. And if AI can help me outline, produce, brainstorm all that support material, bring it on. I could, and this is, I’m not trading it for watching TV. I’m trading that time for sleep. Like that’s how I feel.

Kathleen (14:49.696)
Yes.

Kathi (14:51.651)
It is. Kathleen?

Kathleen (14:52.598)
You know, there is, there’s an old short story by Roald Dahl and I’m not gonna be able to grab the title off the top of my head, but it’s a terrifying story and it’s essentially about AI. He wrote it decades and decades ago, but there’s a machine that has been invented that can just generate content. And all of a sudden the great creators of the world have nothing to do and no one’s gonna pay for their stories anymore because they can just go to the machine.

Kathi (15:05.859)
Mm-hmm. Right.

Kathi (15:13.061)
Mm-hmm.

Kathleen (15:20.59)
for any kind of story content that’s being generated. And it ends on this really dystopian note, as there’s this guy who’s like, I am a writer. The person telling the story, this narrator, is saying, I’m a writer, this is what I have to do, but I have children to feed, and my writing cannot feed my children. And the last line is so chilling. It says, give us the grace, Lord, to let our children starve. He says, I want to continue this work. I have to continue writing, even as my children are starving to death.

because I can’t feed them on my income anymore, because no one’s looking for this. It’s so scary. And I’ve kind of had that in mind. And I think a lot of people have. I think that was a legitimate fear, like will this just take over? But honestly, I see this as a massive opportunity to free us up to do the creative work. So we were looking, and I’m not going to get the statistic exactly right, so I’m not going to give actual numbers. But I saw recently a statistic that said 18 months from now, end of 2025.

The majority of content that we see online will be AI generated. The majority of that writing will just be from AI, the vast majority. What then does that allow authors to do? How can we use that to our benefit? Well, a book, certainly an ethical person, I hope, and, you know, writers and publishers will be watching out for this. They’re not going, you can’t just generate a book and have that go to a reputable publisher.

Kathi (16:26.656)
Yeah.

Kathi (16:37.984)
Yeah.

Kathleen (16:48.886)
with that’s just generated that way without keeping the human really significantly in the loop. If you go to the internet maybe in early 2026 you can just assume that a computer created some of this, but if you go to a book you know that the human’s in the room, you know that you’re getting the actual voice, and that will be a real distinction of books. For a long time I think, you know, we’ve always been talking about the decline of the book over the last 15 years.

Kathi (16:53.475)
Mm-hmm.

Kathi (17:00.543)
Yes.

Kathleen (17:14.326)
And I think for so many reasons, that is because our need for story is met through the little screens in our hands. And we don’t need to go to a novel anymore because we can just start scrolling. But maybe this will be a real differentiation for books again. And we can see this is the author’s actual voice.

Kathi (17:21.42)
Yeah.

Roger (17:33.902)
And I wonder, Kathleen, if that’s going to be a differentiation for a traditionally published book even more so, because we’re already starting to see self-published books that are written entirely by AI. So even that is getting diluted. So this could put traditional publishing houses in a good advantage.

Kathleen (17:40.617)
Hmm.

Kathleen (17:49.069)
Yes.

Kathi (18:01.371)
Yeah, I mean, I think a lot of people see those ads that come up on Instagram. You know, I wrote my whole book by AI. I created the advertising by AI and now I’m making the money and I’m like, no, you’re not. No, you’re not. It’s that’s not. And by the way.

Kathleen (18:01.568)
Absolutely.

Roger (18:10.338)
Ha ha

Kathleen (18:15.508)
No.

Kathi (18:19.411)
I don’t want to read something by that. And I don’t want to write something like that. I mean, write, I’m putting that in heavy quotation marks. Because there are a lot easier ways to make money than the publishing industry. If that’s the only reason you’re in this, there are so many different side hustles that AI can help you with. Go do that. But this, you know, and people think, well, I could do that. I just saw the best video.

Kathleen (18:34.082)
No!

Kathi (18:48.683)
where somebody was going into an art museum and there’s a big black square. And they’re like, I could make that, I could make that. And then an artist gets on and stitches that video. Go do it, go do it. But we, as humans, we recognize the soul in something and we are sparked by soul. And AI, as wonderful as it is, and I’m gonna say Claude is very encouraging,

but there’s no soul. And our soul is looking for soul. I don’t, you know, that’s what we’re looking for. Okay, here’s what I wanna do guys, because this conversation is so important. I wanna stop for this week and I wanna come back. And I wanna talk about super practical ways that we as authors can use AI ethically and with,

How do I wanna say this? In ways that are of real help, but are ethical, and can push us towards freeing up time, freeing up brain space for that creativity. Will you guys come back and talk with me about that?

Kathleen (20:04.066)
Can’t wait.

Roger (20:04.303)
Sounds awesome.

Kathi (20:05.443)
Okay, friends, you’ve been listening to the Writing at the Red House podcast. I’m Cathy Lipp. Now go tell your only you story of God’s extravagant love in your life.

Okay.