5 - Insights into Writing with AI with Rachelle Ayala

[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:** All right. Hi, everybody. Welcome back to Brave New Bookshelf. I'm Steph Pajonas. I'm the COO and CTO of Future Fiction Academy. And I'm joined by my lovely co host, as always, Danica Favorite. Danica, hi. **Danica Favorite:** How are you? I am Danica favorite. I am the Community Manager at Publish Drive, and we help make your publishing process more simple and more efficient. And one of the ways we do that is with AI. And so since Steph and I are both with companies that have passion for AI as well as in our own personal lives, we love AI. So, we're here to talk about that with you. Last week, if [00:01:00] you didn't catch our last episode with Melle Amade, she was amazing. I love her tech background and she has such a great business insight into AI and the use of AI. So if you didn't catch that, go back and listen to that.  **Steph Pajonas:** She even name dropped NASA. That was, whoa. **Danica Favorite:** Hey, right, NASA. Like, I love that. I mean, one of my favorite parts of the interview was when she was talking about how we're using AI to get people to the moon and Mars and all of that stuff. And whoa, mind blown. As we have been saying all along, we know that AI is kind of a controversial subject in the author and publishing worlds. But we also recognize that it is in every part of our lives. So let's figure out how to harness it for good and use it ethically and responsibly for authors in ways that are going to benefit our careers. So [00:02:00] today we have an amazing author with us who uses AI for her writing and has some really cool stuff. Steph, you can tell us a little bit about Rachelle and then we'll have Rachelle introduce herself. **Steph Pajonas:** Oh, Rachelle's fantastic. I've met her in the past year or so since I've been in the AI space. Really love her and her books. She writes about writing with AI, and she's also put AI into some of her fiction, too. So that's really cool as well. I wanted to introduce guys to Rachelle Ayala. She's here to talk with us today. How you doing, Rachelle? **Rachelle Ayala:** Doing great. Thanks for having me.  **Steph Pajonas:** Please introduce yourself. **Rachelle Ayala:** I'm Rachelle Ayala and it is a pen name and I actually do have a technical background. I was there during the days in the mainframes and have a Ph. D. from Cornell University in Applied Math where we did parallel processing. We now know that you need parallel processing. For A. I. But yeah, I started writing [00:03:00] fiction about 12 years ago. Well, actually, 14 years ago. But before that, I actually worked on AI with optical character recognition back in the early 90s. We were only going from zero to nine. That was the big deal. You were trying to. Yeah, it was. I worked at NYNEX science and technology. And they wanted to automate reading checks. So when people wrote their checks, they wanted to be able to read the numbers off the checks. And I do remember all the backpropagation and the feature recognition and all this matrix multiplication and going forwards and backwards, adjusting the weights. It's so amazing to me that years later, we have LLMs, which are billions of parameters more than our little check writing thing. But I do remember we had a lady she would, she used to sit there and her whole job was an image would flash on, and she was the trainer. The image would flash on [00:04:00] the screen and she would decide if it was a number from 0 through 9. And s