13 - Breaking Down AI Misconceptions in Writing with Steph Pajonas and Danica Favorite

[00:00:00] Welcome to Brave New Bookshelf, a podcast that explores the fascinating intersection of AI and authorship. Join hosts, Steph Pajonas and Danica Favorite, as they dive into thought provoking discussions, debunk myths, and highlight the transformative role of AI in the publishing industry. **Steph Pajonas:** Hello everyone and welcome back to the Brave New Bookshelf. I'm Steph, Pajonas, CTO and COO of Future Fiction Academy, where we teach authors how to use AI in any part of their process. We've been super busy at the FFA the last couple of months. We got some cool stuff coming out, which I'm totally excited about and I can't wait to tell everybody about it when the time comes. Hopefully in like late August or so, and I'm of course, joined by my lovely co host Danica Favorite. How are you doing today Danica? **Danica Favorite:** I'm good. Thank you. So I'm Danica Favorite, and I am the community manager at PublishDrive. And at PublishDrive, we are here to help authors on every stage of their [00:01:00] publishing journey through distribution, royalty splitting, and obviously creating our new tool the metadata generator, which is an AI generator to help you create metadata and keywords and everything for your book, which is Amazing and awesome. So yeah, we had kind of our exciting thing. And I know our team is working on the back end of also some more cool AI stuff. So I love that you and I both get to do for our day job, a little bit of AI fun. Development stuff. I'm not the developer person. I'm just the person with the ideas who says, yes, I like that idea. No, I don't know. I don't even get to do that much. It's do you think authors would like this? And I say yes we would. Or no. Yeah. **Steph Pajonas:** would. Not so much. **Danica Favorite:** Yeah. And I think that's a good point. Obviously, you and I are very pro AI. We respect author's rights to use AI ethically and legally in any way they can to help improve their process. And you and I were talking a little bit earlier [00:02:00] about how we've both seen a lot more of the online bullying for people who use AI or, oh no, this AI use is bad, this AI use is bad, et cetera. And I just wanted to take a few moments we've been on break for a little while. Take some summertime. So we're back from our break. And I want to reiterate our position that it's not okay to bully an author or anyone in the publishing industry for using AI as an assistive tool to help make their jobs easier. Now, obviously, we do not support plagiarism. We do not support anything that's unethical or illegal. But when we're talking about generative AI, and as we've talked about it in the context of our podcast. We really are talking about legal and ethical ways of using it. And so if you ever have questions about that, please go back and listen to some of our episodes because we have experts sharing their opinions on that. And again, just want to reiterate that stance [00:03:00] because it's really important that even if I'm not using AI for one particular piece of my process, that doesn't mean that it's not okay for someone else to. I want everyone to use AI in a way that's comfortable for them. If it's good for you to use it to write your blurbs, but not write your text of your book, you can do that. But please do not be down on someone who's going to use it for the text of their book. And so I'm going to send that back over to you, Steph, because I know you also are pretty passionate. So I'll give you a chance to share some of that passion as well. **Steph Pajonas:** yeah, it's interesting that we saw that a lot this past week or two. Very interesting. A lot of people coming into the AI safe spaces on Facebook and in other places and saying Oh, it's fin