31 - Creativity, AI, and Publishing with Derek Murphy

In this episode of Brave New Bookshelf, we sit down with Derek Murphy — author, artist, and expert in creativity and publishing. From the history of creativity to the ways AI is transforming accessibility for authors, Derek shares interesting insights on how writers can embrace these tools to enhance their work while navigating the fears surrounding artificial intelligence. Whether you're curious about using AI for book drafts, designing covers, or turning video content into books, this conversation is packed with actionable tips and thought-provoking ideas. Visit our website https://bravenewbookshelf.com to view the full episode notes, links and apps mentioned in the episode, and the full transcript.

[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 an episode of Brave New Bookshelf. I'm one of your co hosts CTO of Future Fiction Academy, and I'm Steph Pajonas. Of course, I just forgot my own name, because that's the kind of day that I'm having. It is snowing again, and my kids are home from school. They got a snow day, even though there's like less of an inch of snow on the ground. But it throws my whole day off. To the point that I don't even know my own name. Anyway, so we're here today and I'm with my co host as usual. So I'm going to hand it off to the lovely Danica Favorite. How are you doing today, Danica? 

**Danica Favorite:** I am good. I'm really, it's funny.

You're talking about snow day and I don't know if I should say this because I'm in Colorado and, we're in the [00:01:00] 60s today. 

**Steph Pajonas:** Oh my goodness. 

**Danica Favorite:** Which, which, okay, to be fair, we call that the warm before the storm. So we'll probably get hammered with snow pretty soon. 

**Steph Pajonas:** I'm sure. 

**Danica Favorite:** So yeah.

I'm Danica Favorite. I am the community manager at PublishDrive and we work hard to help authors on every stage of their publishing journey, whether that's formatting their manuscript, coming up with a book cover, book metadata, book description, all of that fun stuff. To distributing your book to the largest worldwide market.

And then some cool promotional tools as well as the ability to split royalties and track your royalties. So a lot of really cool tools for people at all stages of the journey, which I love, but I think that the best part of what I get to do is hang out here with my friend Steph and talk about how we can help authors with their AI process and what that looks like for every author.

For those of you who've been around for a while and listen to multiple episodes, that we're all [00:02:00] about helping people use the AI for what works for their process and what's important for their process. 

One of the guests I've been wanting to get on for a while now is Derek Murphy. He is Part of the AI for Authors group and we've talked a lot with him in the group about AI and how he's using it.

But he also gave a really cool talk at AuthorNation about AI and creativity. And I think Steph and I both are passionate about this topic and love it. And we love getting another voice in here, because I think that is one of the things that authors talk about a lot is that fear of AI ruining creativity and taking over creativity.

And Derek has such a great perspective on this, so very excited to chat with Derek today and hear about his ideas on AI and creativity, but also some of the really cool ways he's using AI. So with that, I'm going to hand it over to our friend Derek Murphy. 

**Derek Murphy:** Hi thanks for having me on. [00:03:00] So, yeah, it's interesting.

You mentioned the fear, cause I feel like that's one of the things. I'm always struggling with. I work with a lot of creative people. I've been a creative person in my life. But to the extent, like a lot of the arguments I hear online are about, people who use AI are not real writers or not real artists, which is difficult for someone like me because I have been doing this for many decades before email, I was building websites for my paintings.

I learned how to draw like a foot for three months in Italy. Like old school, I know how to draw. So people are saying that everybody who uses AI is not a real artist. That puts me in a weird spot because I have more experience than a lot of, digital artists who have started to do this more recently, similarly with writing I've published a lot of books, I've written a lot of books and it's, it's hard.

And so the, the thing I always come back to is that, I always see in Reddit all these questions like I finished my book, but now I can't revise it. I didn't know that editing would be this [00:04:00] difficult. Or I have all these ideas for my story, I don't know where to even begin putting it down on the page.

And it's always been a process because writing books is, the hardest thing the human brain can do. And there's a lot of different pieces. Not all of them are especially creative. A lot of them are skill or craft based, which is experience and practice. And it also just takes an incredible amount of time and energy, to put a book together.

I've always been on the side of helping indie authors who are otherwise limited, especially in terms of the finances, because, some people can just hire a ghostwriter or hire an editor or whatever. I've always tried to help people who don't have the time or don't have the budget to put out the best version of their work possible.

And we've never had a tool like AI before, where suddenly the barriers have come down to an extreme level where anybody with an idea can [00:05:00] start to do the things that were just unthinkable even a few years ago. So that's scary for a lot of people. It's definitely scary for a lot of artists, depending on how you define, what is a human or what is creativity.

That's a lot of what I talked about in Vegas. But there's also a lot of opportunity, not only for new writers who don't have the experience, but I think also for very experienced writers. Who know what they're doing and can still put out higher quality products better and faster. 

**Steph Pajonas:** I've talked a lot about how the fact that AI is leveling people up.

Anybody who's skilled and knows how to tell a story who's already an author, they use these tools and suddenly their product can get even better. I think about all the people who are struggling and they're just trying to get the words down. Maybe they're struggling with things like ADHD And this tool is actually helping them get past those roadblocks. So I just see it as a great level up for all of creativity. [00:06:00] That's something I'm really excited about. 

**Danica Favorite:** Yeah. I love what you were saying about the difference between the skills and the creativity, because those are two different things.

And I like that you emphasize that because there is a skill involved that has nothing to do with being creative. And so when you separate those two and you allow people to focus on their creativity, not having to worry about the necessary skill. That's really interesting. I'm also impressed that you spent a month in Italy learning how to draw a foot.

That's incredible. Three 

**Derek Murphy:** months. 

**Danica Favorite:** Three months, like holy 

**Derek Murphy:** hell. 

**Steph Pajonas:** Yeah, that's pretty 

**Derek Murphy:** cool. One drawing. It was cool. I did a reproduction of a classic painting and I forgot who I copied it from and then my father in law he took Google Lens to my painting and it could it was close enough of a reproduction that it could find the original painting, because it fooled Google, which I thought was cool.

**Steph Pajonas:** That is amazing. 

**Danica Favorite:** And here's what I like about this, because, and I'd love to hear you talk a little about [00:07:00] this, because one of the things that Steph and I have shared, and some of our guests have shared, is this idea that, to learn how to do something, you do have to learn to copy from the masters.

Like that's how you learn how to do art. That's how you learn how to paint or draw or whatever it is. That's how you develop those skills and that's how the whole artistic process works. I think that's really fascinating because, that's something we've covered a lot in terms of the AI is learning a similar way to how you or I would learn and how you just described learning how to do this painting.

**Derek Murphy:** That is how you get better at things. Writing is the weirdest hobby because it's the only one where people think that the skills don't really matter. And that, that, like, technical proficiency or audience reception is not the main point. So in the writing community, a lot of writers assume that if you write, well enough to sell commercial things to readers who [00:08:00] enjoy your work, then you're not a real writer because that's selling out.

You're just writing pulp fiction, you're just writing popular stuff, it's all templated, it's not creative. So all the people who are really making money are writing books that satisfy readers, but the majority of authors believe That that's not what writing is for, that the purpose of writing is self expression and that that comes down to creative originality and exploring my feelings.

Which is a barrier because a lot of writers, they believe that they shouldn't think about the end result and they believe that it shouldn't be too similar to, anything else that is successful. And they have this idea that originality is the entire thing and that their works are more valuable if they are more human, which means they are less like anybody else's work. And that's just not true on a commercial level so a lot of authors they start off that way and they figure out that they're [00:09:00] doing two things wrong.

Nobody wants to read their book because they didn't write a book that people want to read. They didn't use, universal storytelling principles. It doesn't have any drama or intrigue or scene description. All of the things that are important for satisfying story, they're avoiding those things on purpose because they're only focused on the originality.

And then they also, once they finish the book that they wanted to write and they promote it and they realize that it doesn't get good reception, some people will either give up and get jaded and angry, or they will say, okay, I tried and I was wrong. Now I'm going to pivot and try something else.

The reason that's so difficult is because for writers specifically. It's an identity crisis where, you know, the thing that they believe about who they are and how the world works. is proven untrue when the thing that they claim has more value, even if nobody likes it.

When actually nobody likes it and they can't sell it, there's this huge [00:10:00] cognitive dissonance between, yeah, I did it the right way. I believe in this book so much. I have all this passion. Why wasn't it successful? Because that's not the way that it works. But in order to get past that hurdle and write books that people enjoy reading, it's a huge personal crisis for some people.

My entire blog, which I started like 10 years ago was because I used to be a starving artist and I used to believe all that stuff. And it was a shift when I finally figured out, okay, I have all these skills and I'm tired of being ignored not having anyone take me seriously, having nobody want to buy the stuff that I'm making.

It's weird because as an artist too, like I used to have paintings in a gallery and the gallery owner told me like, well, if you could just paint like this other guy, if you could paint this other stuff, this is the stuff that sells, this is the stuff that's popular.

And at the time I was like, no way. That's completely not what I wanna do. And for art, that makes some level of sense. But I guess I got over that [00:11:00] hurdle, especially with writing, because I was an artist first. I never really considered myself a writer and I still don't.

But I was working as a book cover designer or developmental editor. I was definitely on the business side of things, people needed help getting their story turned into a book and then marketing it. And through that process, most of the time it's a story problem. I can't sell or package or market a book that just isn't constructed in a way that's going to satisfy readers. That's the problem. 

So I've started to focus a lot more on, how do we tell good stories? What does that process look like? The structure and the templates. And that's what I enjoy doing, at the moment. 

**Danica Favorite:** I think that's what a lot of that fear that we've talked about is coming from it is the identity crisis. Who am I now? If all this work that I've put into it is no longer work that needs to be done to be an author. The whole idea of selling out, so to speak, I'm listening to that going, yeah, because what people don't understand is once you decide [00:12:00] to put that book up for sale or that piece of art for sale.

It's a commercial product. So you have to make that decision. If you want to freely express yourself and all of that, go write in a journal. But if you want to actually sell the work and get readers, you have to actually do something that's going to be commercially viable. Sitting with some of those points because I'm like, Ooh, these are really good points.

And now I see where some of these people who are haters are coming from, because it is that fear of that. That identity crisis. 

**Derek Murphy:** And they are told that. 

A lot of books, I won't name names, but they tell people that you should just follow the passion and explore those feelings, and that's what art is. And a lot of new people, who have trouble with the motivation to put enough time in the chair to develop the skills or to finish a massive project like a book.

It's not a short story. A book is a massive time investment that people are attempting without the requisite skills. So it's, it's something that [00:13:00] you're, you're shooting for the moon, literally. And you cannot get there, at least in the first draft. There's books that are, they say that what creativity actually is is pretty much the same, but a little bit different.

So when you're learning to paint or whatever, you have to learn the skills first by copying other things, but then you have your creative original ideas and the experience to really make something better than what's out there. But you don't make something better by first avoiding all the skill set.

I will name names actually, because The War of Art is really popular, and it's one of those books that everybody loves. It gives creative people the confidence to just keep doing the work, and that's very important in the beginning. But people haven't read Stephen Pressfield's other book, which is Nobody Wants to Read Your Shit, and I feel like that's a much, better book because that book is all about his 20 years as a screenwriter and how to tell good stories and what's absolutely critical if you want to tell a good [00:14:00] story.

So that's like all of the practical How To stuff but nobody wants that stuff because they really just want the permission and the motivation which I understand.

When you're trying to complete like your first ever draft, your motivation is going to be the thing. And the War of Art definitely solves that problem in a way that resonates with people. And that's why they enjoy it so much. The funny thing on my end is that that particular book was basically just a collection of rough notes about writing from Steven Pressfield, and it was his editor who actually named it and organized it and turned it into the book the product that it was.

So the argument about which part is original, which part is creative, is it the editor who is polishing it and making it consumable in a successful way to the audience? Or is it, the guy with the ideas? There's a relationship. There's been movies about that. There's some books about that, but for most authors, you're [00:15:00] working on your own.

You don't have the luxury of somebody else, an editor or a ghostwriter is a lot of expense you're not you're never really going to have somebody else in your corner that you can, bounce all the ideas off of or who will take your messy pile of notes and turn it into something.

That's something most authors will never be able to afford. That for the first time ever, they can access through AI, which is exciting for some people and it's scary for other people. I can understand both sides. 

**Steph Pajonas:** Writers have this sort of hubris about them, right? I'm going to sit down. I'm going to write this book. And they may not even have the skill set to write that book. And I feel this comes because we use language every day. I know how to speak English. I write English when I'm writing emails, when I'm conversing with people, so I understand the language. So I have that skill set. I have the skill set of language. 

I certainly could not sit down and write a whole book in French because I do not know [00:16:00] French that well, right? But I have the skill set of English, of language, and a lot of people think that they can translate that directly into telling stories. When really, there is another skill set on top of that, of storytelling, that people just don't know or don't have. 

Some people who have consumed a lot of stories over their lifetime, they've watched a lot of movies, they've read a lot of books. They can see the patterns, and so they may be better off getting started on that process, but there are plenty of people who have no idea, no idea. They write a 10, 000 word horror story, and they're amazed that it's over already. Because they didn't know that you had to build tension and you had to reveal things and you had to do the storytelling in order to get the reader from point A to point B.

So I think that that is one of the reasons why a lot of people think that they can be an author right off the bat, because they have [00:17:00] language and they have that background, but just like you can't be an amazing painter, if you've never picked up a brush, but you know what a brush is. There's that skill set that's missing somewhere in there.

So I think that that's why we keep seeing this in our business. 

**Derek Murphy:** There's, there's two awesome things, if you'll indulge me to talk about the first one, you mentioned hubris. So this was my PhD thesis, basically going back to the history of creativity, because for most of human civilization, creativity was seen as a dangerously foreign, influence and even now people talk about when you are writing, it feels like magic because you don't know what you're doing and you're stumbling forward and you get stuck and then suddenly like an epiphany, the idea comes to you.

We don't understand how our brain works, but it feels like magic. And that's what's so satisfying and mysterious about creativity in general, which is why it's scary to feel like i f the robots can do that, then I'm no longer special as a human. 

But in the history of [00:18:00] humanity, the way that all of our myths are structured are warnings against hubris, people should not be confident in their creativity.

Plato said that, poets were dangerous and crazy because they're too tapped into that foreign muse or whatever we're not supposed to be able to conquer it or tame it or understand it. And we, we're not supposed to be proud of it because it's not us that's creating, something else is creating through us.

That's the way it was for thousands of years until the enlightenment and really until the late 18th century, where suddenly this thing that used to be evil and dangerous became the core belief about what humans actually are. 

A fun fact that most people aren't aware of, a lot of people have read Think and Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill, but his other book was Conversations with the Devil, which was only published recently because it was considered too controversial. But there's a huge literary subgenre [00:19:00] of creative artists and writers using symbolically the character of the devil... it used to be a warning, like the devil will promise you fame and riches and talent and success without all the hard work, but you have to sell your soul for that purpose. 

But more recently most people fully believe that it's our natural right to embrace our creativity, our originality, that we deserve those accolades. 

That's what we're shooting for. There's nothing You know, prideful or sinful about doing that. That's who we are as creative artists that were, expressing our soul or whatever. That's a relatively modern philosophy that was seen as antisocial and dangerous for thousands of years. I don't think anyone has really explored that fundamental societal shift.

And I feel like it's really important. So it's why I like to talk about it a lot. We [00:20:00] don't believe the things that we used to believe. 

**Danica Favorite:** I think that's super cool.

I, I could geek out listening to all of this stuff. I think that is important because we tend to have a different view of creativity now than we did back then, but the creatives were those revolutionaries. They were the people that everyone was afraid of. And they say the pen is mightier than the sword. All of that power that creativity had and people feared. And I'm actually going to go look for that Napoleon Hill devil book now, cause I'm like, Ooh. 

**Derek Murphy:** At the time, the only character, my PhD was on Paradise Lost. So I have a lot of, background knowledge on this character, but the devil is the only character who, allowed artists to tap into their own human creativity, where previously human creativity was the problem. That's where humans were broken. That's why humans were being punished was because of the human creativity and the freedom to explore and self express. So there is a pretty significant change, [00:21:00] but now instead of the character of the devil, there's conversations with angels or, other guided spiritual.

Aliens, whoever, whatever you believe in, there's other things that don't have the same moral connotation because we've moved past that. 

**Danica Favorite:** Yeah, that's so interesting. I do want to hear and this is still a really interesting tie into how you're approaching AI and publishing.

So what is that approach? Especially like in this mindset shift, I'm like, huh, this is an interesting way to look at AI as well. So let's talk about that. What is your approach to AI and publishing? 

**Derek Murphy:** I'll start with one other thing. I want to mention what I think, which I think is really fun because a lot of the conversation is that the presentation I did in Vegas was artificial creativity.

Because people try to distinguish between what is like authentically human versus what is artificially human. And people are skeptical that the artificial stuff will ever be as good as the real stuff, which is a whole conversation. But the really fascinating historical trivia thing [00:22:00] is that most of the best writers in history were under the influence of specific substances or drugs that might have not been around previously.

So if you go back through, like, the history of the Western canon, the decades, the movements. The romantic poets s were using laughing gas, which was, previously a new discovery. A lot of the beatnik poets were on speed the whole time. So, like, the way that they wrote, which is considered ground breakingly fresh and original, was actually them exploring, drugs and illicit substances to alter the way that their brain functioned and tap into something that hadn't been done before.

So I don't think it's a case of like real authentic humans can just get into a new brain space and make something new if we are not using our brains in a way that's never been used before.

So, there have [00:23:00] been instances of a technological revolution like Vincent Van Gogh specifically most of his work was a response to photography and printmaking, Japanese printmaking. His art would not exist if photography hadn't become a new thing.

And earlier you mentioned something about painting? My favorite painter, who's French, Bouguereau, I probably can't say his name right. He was, like, perfection, perfection technical. He was the best painter in the world. And he was not popular at the height of his career because we got impressionism and suddenly everybody with a paintbrush with no skills could go out on the riverbank and paint something in an hour and call themselves an artist.

And the art world freaked out. They're like, that's not fair. You didn't go to art school for 30 years. But at the time, those new arts that didn't require any skills and didn't require any effort. they were still considered more [00:24:00] valuable because they were fresh and new, even though they weren't, the ones that required decades of practice and skill.

Potentially we're somewhere similar where the authors who believe that originality and the idea is the only important thing, but they've never been able to prove it yet because they couldn't do the work well enough to finish the work successfully maybe we are at a shift like that now where ideas will really become more valuable than the skill set.

**Danica Favorite:** I like that because as a big fan of impressionist paintings, I'm like, yes, I'm actually an impressionist. Yay! But yeah, I think that's really important to realize that it's just a shift. We don't necessarily see it as much in the writing world where it's so much more obvious in the art world.

**Derek Murphy:** So there's this thing where like, I could do my own thing that nobody recognizes and the quality might be good, but nobody would want it cause I'm not tapping into something that [00:25:00] they like. 

It's similar with books. You don't, people don't buy books to support the author or because necessarily they love the author's writing style. Like if it wasn't a book in a genre I like to read, told in the way that I like, the sentences don't matter. The words don't really matter. That's why I'm a big focus on story structure, because when I started writing fiction, I couldn't figure out how to plot a story successfully enough to finish the story, so I always got stuck in the middle.

That was something I had to work on for a long time, but I also figured out that, I don't think I'm the best writer in the world, but I structure pretty well, because I had to figure out that process. And I also know that, my sentences may not be amazing, but my stories are good because they're well constructed.

And for me, that's good enough. I think like I could definitely do better, but I don't, because for me, getting to the end, getting to the story, telling the whole story, it's good enough that my readers are going to [00:26:00] like it. And I don't think spending extra time tweaking all my words and sentences, that extra five or 10%, it's not worth it, or at least it wasn't worth it in the past because it would take too much extra effort when I could be writing a new book.

However, maybe that's something I will revisit. I have a lot of book ones that I wrote a long time ago. I'm a better writer now. And I'm not going to go back and rewrite those books, but I could theoretically train an AI on my latest books to relearn my current style, and then ask it to edit those older books, which is something I would need to do anyway, because like I write really slowly.

So my book ones and my books four or five are pretty different writing styles because, the years went by between them. 

So yes, how am I using AI? I'm, I'm waiting for AI to get good enough to the point where I can use it. Right now I'm using it mostly for nonfiction. So some of the projects, like I'm, I'm involved in a project where [00:27:00] I have a course, but I never wrote the book for that course.

And I feel like it's a lot of good information. So I've made a transcript from my videos. I have like 30 hours of videos. Each hour long video is like 10, 000 words. I would never have the time or the energy to go through all of that and turn it into a book. And a few weeks ago, probably like a month ago when I last tried this, With chat GPT, it just could not do a good job of keeping both my style and all of the information because I talk fast and I give like a lot of value dumps. It couldn't keep up.

So this week with the new improvements to, I think it's 01 and 01 Pro. It's just a little bit smarter. I've actually found that 4. 0 is better as a writer and it's more human, but o1 and o1 Pro are smarter so they can handle more information. So I'll give it my 10, 000 word transcript and then I'll have it organize and rewrite [00:28:00] my chapter.

I've already trained it on my style because I've already written the introduction, the first chapter on my own. And I started a project so I can give it three or four of my completed books that I wrote on my own. It's definitely going to learn my style and know who I am. And then I can, get it to put the chapters together in my voice with my own information so that I have a draft that I can just go and clean up which I think is neat.

But also interesting because I talk a lot and I over explain a lot. So the other thing that I've been doing is having chapters just like, turn it into a social media post and it just uses a lot of emojis and it's all the same content, but it's like a neat cool short little bullet point That's probably gonna be more useful for a lot of people like I I like having a book But nobody really reads a whole book and consumes all the information.

So if I can have a 21 day simplified version where people can just get the cliff notes. [00:29:00] That might be more effective for people. I don't necessarily care if they read my ideas and like the effort that I put into crafting a very strong book. If I can give them a short condensed version that's more effective for them, then I want to do that as well.

**Steph Pajonas:** I love this because I'm a big fan of talking it out on video, either in a conference setting or in a setting like this where you have a few other people, you talk over a subject, and then you just get that transcript and you start running it through your prompts. And that is basically what I do with every one of these episodes, right?

I get the transcript when I'm done. I have a series of prompts that I run through to get me all the information that I need, make Facebook posts, make social media posts, make the YouTube description, make all that kind of stuff. And then I've done that also in the past with with content from the Future Fiction Academy where we had a basics course we [00:30:00] taught it all on video.

And then I took the transcripts and I condensed it down and made it into a book as well, because I feel like this is one of the strengths of AI is it's it can really help you navigate between different modes of communication. It doesn't just have to be a video. It can be a video and a book and it can be a pamphlet or a newsletter or whatever it may be.

And that's one of the things that I like about it because it makes information accessible to lots of different people who have different ways of learning, whatever it may be. I'm interested in hearing more about your process, especially if you're using O1 with with projects and whatnot. 

**Derek Murphy:** Real quick is that 4. 0 is better at human writing. I think O1 and O1 Pro don't have projects yet. So you can't even do that. And they don't even have files yet. So you have to copy paste rather than adding a file. But they're all improving. So I'm waiting, I think it'll get better and it'll get easier. I am excited about because I love writing fiction.

I love my ideas, but I'm pretty [00:31:00] slow because I'm a very heavy editor and reviser. So, I can finish a few novels a year, but I have 30 open projects mapped out that I will never in my lifetime be able to complete and I don't feel that I need to prove myself at this point because I have a lot of book ones that are well enough written that people enjoy them and review them well. I don't need to do anything groundbreaking.

I just need to finish my series. So i'm hoping that this year probably it will get to the point where I can feed it my book one and train it on my style and then give it the outline for book two and it can write me a draft. I feel like with fiction, I structure a lot more.

So my books make sense. Like they're readable and they make sense. With nonfiction,I'm a little bit flighty so like I can't necessarily stick on topic and I like to talk about a lot of things. So that's reduced a little bit in my books. But if I'm transcribing from a video to a book, it's messy AI is a little bit like a [00:32:00] translator because some people like that I can just drone on about a topic for an hour, but a lot of people don't.

A lot of people on YouTube will say, get to the point. Why did you talk about all this other crap? So to be able to have an assistant to help me to summarize my ideas. So that other people can access them. 

I mentioned drugs earlier, as like artificial creativity. The other thing I didn't mention was an example of John Milton who wrote Paradise Lost. He was blind when he wrote Paradise Lost. He dictated the entire thing to someone else who wrote it down for him. That's an example of if you didn't have the money to hire someone to listen to you, you would just not be able to do the work.

And he was lucky that he was in the position to hire someone. But a lot of people right now, they would never have that opportunity. So whatever skills or deficiencies your brain currently has, and I think everybody's brain probably has some drawbacks and some advantages, AI is a [00:33:00] cheaper alternative that previously would be only like a rich person benefit. 

Rich people can do more because they have the time and the money and poor people just could not. I think this is exciting for a lot of people because we can do more than we could before. That's why I'm personally excited about it because it gets depressing, when it's so hard to finish a book and you work so much time and effort and energy into it, especially when, it takes quite a few books to get good enough to start selling you have to develop your backlist first.

People say the first million words is just practice, but if you could finish your story ideas and make them better faster I think most people are on board with that. And the funny thing that I think is really interesting is that the question is whose work is valuable. I've seen conversations on Reddit where they say like, oh, it's fine to brainstorm or it's fine to flesh out some scene description or it's fine to edit or revise the center.

Like what [00:34:00] part is the creative part and what part is not. And basically they are saying non creative work is not valuable. Or non creative work does not deserve any protection in the way that creative work does because, creativity alone is definitively human and deserves patronage, which a lot of creative people believe in.

They believe that because I am inspired by the muse and because I am not attempting to write commercial work for my own benefit. Therefore, I must be supported by society. A lot of people have internalized this. And I, I get the philosophy. I was a starving artist for many years.

I understand why that makes sense. But other people won't support you for that. After expecting society and being let down for a certain amount of time, you may figure out that that worldview is not conducive to finishing your best work and getting it out there. 

**Danica Favorite:** Yeah. I love that. [00:35:00] And I love what you're saying about the idea of, not being able to afford, for a blind man, like to not be able to afford someone to dictate their books to. And Steph and I have talked about this a lot where this is really, democratization of the publishing process. And for people who need those assistants to say that they can't use those assistants, that's really ableist.

And, I remember I've been dictating my books for years now. I talk about this a lot, but I think about when I was first dictating, the people who couldn't afford Dragon, they couldn't do the dictation and now there are so many free tools out there so that the people who need that as an assistant, they can have that.

Now people for whom money was the barrier to writing and getting their books out there, that's no longer the issue. 

So, I want to find out, like, with your AI workflow because I'm really curious about what your process looks like for taking some [00:36:00] of those videos and turning them into the written work, but then also, how are you training the AI on your writing? 

**Derek Murphy:** I don't remember the exact transcript tool. I was using one before that was Spanish, and I found a new one, which I'd have to pull up. I haven't used it recently, but basically, I'll just upload the video or I'll give it the YouTube link and it will just do it.

I think there are a lot of tools that will do that pretty well, even like. I have a Chrome plugin, Loom is a Chrome plugin for like recording videos. And it has a built in AI transcriber tool where I can get the notes immediately. Or it'll turn it into a quick blog post, which is useful.

So I think a lot of tools already have that function. I always thought I'm not a normal, comfortable speaker, but I've gotten more used to putting my rough ideas out there, even though I know they're unpolished. They're a little bit raw. Because I want, I want to share my value quickly.

The reason that I like videos is because if I have an idea, I can just tell people about the idea and they can just go and use it. I [00:37:00] personally can't use it because I have a million projects and I'm really slow about actually getting things done. But I'm able to share ideas with people that they can use right away Even if I can't implement them for a long time. Because I get excited about the things I discover that I want to share.

So that's why I use youtube or video just because if the other people are waiting for me to organize my thoughts enough to put them in a book, it would take a really long time. But the other part about training, it's interesting the other thing I've been doing right now is blog posts.

So I think some people feel like, like for my fiction writing, I don't necessarily want AI to write the books for me yet, although I am comfortable, in the future, I think it's going to get there. I have friends who think that, If you publish AI books, then you don't care about the quality. Or if I publish AI books, it will always be lesser quality than I could do on my own.

And I don't have that belief, because I don't think my books are, amazing anyway. I've done the best I possibly can, and I think they're pretty good, but they could definitely [00:38:00] be a little bit better. The funny thing with the training is, I've tried, like, I'm writing some blog posts, and Google says they don't care about AI content. They just care about good content. So they're not going to penalize you for AI content. I have a lot of blogs, but I only blog like five times a year because I'm busy writing books, but that means I don't get any traffic. And my courses about, book marketing or building an author platform it's important to put out content so that you get traffic so that you attract the right readers so that they'll buy your books.

And I did that in the past when I started putting out books. Pretty successfully, it's taken so many years to finish my series. I just stopped blogging because it's not worth that time and effort to write blog posts rather than write the books. 

So I'm using AI to train it on my writing style so that I can finish. Like when I started my blog 10 years ago. I mapped out like 300 blog post topics that I never [00:39:00] finish because I just don't blog that often. I think for a lot of writers, there's creative work that you enjoy that you should always do. 

You should always do the things that you enjoy. Those are the things that you should keep, but you should not do the things that you don't enjoy because they will mess up your productivity. Even if they are easy things that you should be able to do and you're just avoiding them because of procrastination or psychological issues or whatever. 

It's extremely common, but rather than just not doing that one thing, I will waste a month avoiding that one thing. So if I can do it with AI because, the blog post doesn't matter. If it's free content that I'm putting out there I still want it to be good, but it doesn't have to be a book that I'm selling. There's a different quality level with a paid product and something I'm giving away for free.

Even though Google doesn't really care about whether it's AI or not. I didn't want people just saying that all my blog posts are AI. So I was using AI checkers to see hopefully they don't flag as 100 percent [00:40:00] AI. What I found was that my normal. human voice flags at like 69 percent AI anyway, because all AI checkers are completely broken.

And the AI stuff flagged at like 97, but I trained a model to just not do all the AI crap that now passes as human better than I pass as human, which is ridiculous. So I have to use AI to filter my real blog posts to make them not only better quality, but to make them more human so that they pass, which is silly and ridiculous, but also interesting.

I also found that like 4. 0 can do that, but the smarter ones 0. 1 and 0. 1 Pro are more for like logic and coding. And they cannot pass as AI. They'll understand the assignment and they will give me all these lists of things that they will do. They can't write content that passes as human. Whereas 4. 0 can. So maybe that'll change in the future, but that was interesting. 

**Steph Pajonas:** We've had the [00:41:00] discussions in AI writing for authors about these AI checkers and just how, how horrible they are. It comes up a couple of times a year and somebody will post, Hey, look, I ran this through the AI checker, this thing that I wrote 10 years ago, and it's being flagged as all AI.

And we have these discussions about it because it is. It is interesting. AI was trained on human writing, mostly, and so it is going to have a lot of the things that humans do, like the let out the breath she didn't realize she was holding, and all of the, the isms that have now become AI isms over time.

I'm doing a thing right now where I get Gemini to write the first draft of a chapter. I give it lots of beats. I tell it what I want. I get it to write the first draft. And then I actually have a fine tune model at OpenAI, a 4. 0 fine tune model. I, I fine tuned it on 25 pieces of my [00:42:00] own writing, gave it like my style and everything, and then I take the first draft chapter that Gemini gave me. And then I run it through my fine tune and I have it rewrite it in my style. 

So it is the same story rewritten in my style. And that one comes about like 1 percent AI and that's it. And so it is very interesting that you can train the AI to be more stylistic in different ways, my way, your way, whatever it may be.

And and then fool these checkers that are really terrible to begin with anyway. It gives you a little bit more freedom, gives you the chance to try out different stories that you are interested in, especially if you can just easily, get a revision in your style. And I think that that's where a lot of this writing is going to go over the next five to 10 years that people are going to realize that they have a certain style of the way that they write and if we can get the AI to write [00:43:00] in that style, then you can finally get those stories that have been stuck in your head out and on the page and that's exciting. 

**Derek Murphy:** The last time I tried I haven't been writing fiction for a few months, but the last time I was really struggling with an ending, so I was trying to make the ending better and what I basically figured out, I was very impressed with the quality of the writing.

People say AI writing sucks and I, I get it, but, I do have some experience. I have a PhD in literature. I've written a lot of books. I'm not amazing, but I feel like I'm qualified to judge good or bad writing. And the sentences it were giving me were better than my sentences.

They were much more dramatic. It's true they're melodramatic. They're a little over the top and you don't want that in every chapter because there has to be pacing and balance. But for some places, sometimes it would give me a sentence that's better than anything I could have written and it fits perfectly in the right spot. What I haven't been able to do previously was the big picture world building because it wasn't smart enough. 

So I think your solution is probably what I [00:44:00] will end up doing. Either, I haven't tested the other models. I think Pro is probably good enough now it could write a decent first chapter, but then 4. 0 could actually make it Sound like me.

I quit because it wasn't good enough. And obviously I could have just finished it myself, but I got frustrated. It's really hard when like, once you get used to AI, like when it works and it's so much easier, it's hard to go backwards.

Obviously I could do it all myself, but it's not the best use of my time anymore. 

Now, the other interesting thing about the models. was that the AI checkers and AI, it's been trained on human writing. So there is more mediocre amateur fanfic writing than there is original writing. And also it's a separate argument between, I don't believe that like original writing is better quality writing. I don't believe that commercial writing is worse quality writing. I think if readers like it then that's great. And I think if you want to be an author who makes money, it's probably [00:45:00] smart to write in genres that have more active, larger audiences, because even if you write an amazing literary fiction, and even if it's very successful for literary fiction, even if it's a hundred times better than the commercial stuff, you won't sell enough copies to make it worth that level of time and effort investment.

That's a personal choice. Of course, you don't have to write for the money. But the interesting thing is how, like a lot of writers feel that AI can only write like amateur, cliché, basic work, but most human writers cannot reach that level yet. That's the default. You have to just get good enough to tell a full story and make it okay, like readable.

Most people aren't there yet. I get a lot of manuscripts that just, they have a story idea, but it's just not told in a dramatic storytelling narrative way that satisfies readers. It's just a broken story. So it's not [00:46:00] worth it to them or to me to rewrite it completely. An editor won't do that for you. And even most ghost writers will struggle with that. 

Anyway, so for a lot of writers who only care about self expression. They only care about this feels good to me. AI is not a threat to them. It's not going to replace the thing that they enjoy, but all of those writers who only care about the expression, they also hope that they will sell a million copies.

They say, I don't care about the money, but they have this idea that because it felt so inspired and magical in the development, it must be good. And now they just need marketing, which is when they usually reach out to me and they say, Can you help me get this on the New York Times bestseller or whatever?

And I can do the marketing and the packaging, the book cover design, but you can't sell a story that isn't well written. 

Anyway, that's the funny thing I think about AI is that the reason that authors think their work is better is because it's actually worse. Like they're not hitting that [00:47:00] bare minimum amateur level fan fiction quality yet, which you need to get to before you can actually make like the really good higher level stuff.

**Danica Favorite:** That is so cool and interesting because I think that that's a discussion we dance around in the writing community, but we don't actually have it. What is good writing? What is your goal in writing? Is it to have the ego boost of saying yes, I have a book published. Is it to make money? 

What are those goals? What are those desires? And you've really hit it on the head with the idea that you say you don't want to make a lot of money, but because you put so much of yourself into it, there's that secret little hope that it's going to sell a million copies.

**Derek Murphy:** And the reality is, is it's not because you haven't considered all the things that need to go into it in the first place to sell that million copies. And so I'm like, yeah, this is really an interesting discussion we don't have in the writing community often enough, [00:48:00] because the ideas are actually conflicting ideas of what our goals and our aims really are. 

It comes down to the identity thing where they put themselves into it, and then they can't get distance from it. And so they feel like it's good, but they won't necessarily listen to constructive criticism. On Reddit, somebody was like I got all these negative Reddit comments criticizing my work, but my editor thinks it's great. So therefore, Reddit is wrong, basically. 

**Derek Murphy:** There was some, similarly with AI, the danger is that it'll always tell you, it's great writing even when it's not. But the difference is that AI can actually help you to fix it if you want to fix it. If you don't want AI to do your writing for you, great. You can save a thousand bucks on proofreading where it will just fix typos and grammatical mistakes and punctuation. That should be a robot job that shouldn't cost hundreds of dollars. 

But it does [00:49:00] because previously, if I was going to proofread a book and there were thousands and thousands of typographical errors, it would take me hundreds of hours of work. So I would have to charge a lot to do it. 

I know that it replaces human proofreaders, but I don't think that's a high level creative skill. I feel like that's something that robots can do. It sucks for people who previously made money as a proofreader, because that used to be a high level human skill that has been replaced.

I think we underestimate the amount of things that robots will be able to do for us. I think it came for the artists first, and that's why it's so scary right now, because art and writing is how we process and feel good about ourselves and enjoy ourselves. It gives us a sense of meaning and purpose. 

Where if robots can do that stuff, or hobby stuff, and we, no longer have, purpose and meaning, then of course that's devastating, but I think soon robots are going to replace a lot of the real jobs [00:50:00] as well, and that's going to be scary too.

I feel like the other part of the discussion is that people always assume I will be pro AI and anti human, and I don't think I am. The people who are building AI say there's like a 10 or 20 percent chance that it'll end humanity, and I think that's probably fair. I understand that it may be very dangerous. 

On the flip side of that, for example, AI can already diagnose cancer 30 percent better than doctors can. So you can, it can do medicine better than the best human experts and medicine is one of those things. And it's not a particularly creative skill. It's extremely high value. Same with lawyers. It's, a very high level skill that you spend years studying and training for that you can make a lot of money with, but people don't consider it creative. It's just, a lot of knowledge and you can apply the knowledge. 

So there are the AI is going to come for non creative jobs as well. And I think that conversation [00:51:00] about, whose work do we protect, whether or not, only artists and writers should be preserved or what kind of knowledge has to be human and cannot be robotic, even if robots do a better job, consistently a cheaper and better job that is saving people's lives.

If we're having a moral discussion, that puts a different spin on things.

**Danica Favorite:** I think there's so much depth to all these discussions. And I'm like, okay, we need to have Derek back a lot to talk more about this because this is all the stuff that Steph and I are often geek out on even in our private conversations. And I know we got to speak at AuthorNation and we'll 

**Derek Murphy:** be the violinist playing on the Titanic as it sinks.

Yeah, this is our last 

**Danica Favorite:** episode 

**Steph Pajonas:** that the robots have taken over and now we're, 

**Danica Favorite:** yeah, yeah, for sure. For sure. I know we're low on time. And so our last question is what's your favorite AI tool? 

**Derek Murphy:** I'm using ChatGPT just [00:52:00] because I feel like it's easier.

For right now, I'm used to it. I hate Copilot because it's in my Windows and it's in my Microsoft Word, and that just bugs me. I understand that probably Microsoft and Google and everybody, they're gonna just put AI in products. I'm paying 200 bucks for ChatGPT, but I could use DeepSeek basically for free. Or I could use Microsoft Word and Copilot is just in there. For a lot of people, they will have access to a version that's fine and you could use whatever but they're all getting better all the time. A lot of people say, Oh, I tried AI and it just sucks. If you tried it a month ago, it's a lot better than it was a month ago. And if you tried a free version, it's probably a lot different than the paid version. 

In terms of structuring full on books, Unless you really know what you're doing, ChatGPT is not going to do a good job for you, and some tools like Sudowrite or RaptorWrite or NovelCrafter that there's a management process of keeping track of a long term project , there are some book specific AI [00:53:00] tools that I think are very helpful, especially for writers who don't have the experience mapping out and organizing an entire novel. 

The other thing that I think is interesting is Ideogram. So I use Midjourney a lot for pictures, But Ideogram is the only one that can do typography really well. And if you are trying to make book covers with AI, I haven't really talked about it yet, because it's way too good already, and a lot of the stuff I do is book cover design or book cover design templates. So basically, like, nobody needs book cover designers anymore which is terrible for book cover designers, and it may sound terrible for me to say out loud, but there are people who are using ideogram already and getting much better covers . And I won't say that AI is always better than a human designer because that is probably not true but people who previously were DIYing really crappy covers in Microsoft Word and [00:54:00] for years they have been asking for feedback and getting feedback and redoing it.

And it's just always been a shitty cover and they just can't make a good enough cover to actually sell the book. I think AI tools are plausible replacement for a DIY free solution for people who can't afford a high quality book cover designer, which is probably most people because good cover designers are 500 bucks or so.

So I don't feel like it's, a replacement for skilled humans, but it's an alternative for people who are doing it themselves. 

**Steph Pajonas:** I love both Midjourney and Ideogram and I flop back and forth between them depending on what I need. Just last night I was trying to make images of a blender and for some reason Midjourney has no idea what a blender looks like.

It thinks it's like a coffee maker plus, maybe a, an air fryer. It like keeps mashing them all together, but Ideogram knew what a blender was and there we go. So at least I have a backup for that, [00:55:00] which is great. I'm also going to say that if you're looking to keep track of long projects, like you said in your previous answer, that Claude Projects is also really great for that, too.

A lot of people seem to like it. So, anybody who's listening who's interested in keeping track of longer projects, Claude Projects is really great for that, too. So, there are definitely a lot of options out there, which is, which is a nice thing.

**Danica Favorite:** We're through all of our questions. So really, we can wrap up if there's anything, any final thoughts that Derek wants to leave with us. I know Steph, you had a A lot of things you wanted to cover with Derek. I don't know if we got to all of them, but like I said, we can certainly have Derek back.

**Steph Pajonas:** Yeah, I could probably talk to Derek for like hours. I even attempted to talk to him for hours at a party in Las Vegas, but we were all really tired and jet lagged. It was a little tough. But I'm really happy that you came and we had this discussion because I find the whole discussion about AI and creativity and also like the history of creativity to [00:56:00] be really, really fascinating.

So I'm so glad you could come here and talk to us about that. So, definitely let's go over where people can find you online so that they can come and especially like check out your blog since that seems to be up and running now again now that you have AI tools. 

**Derek Murphy:** CreativIndie is my main platform. People always spell it wrong because there's no E on creative. But I don't really blog there very often. Like I post a couple things a year. And I have a lot of other sites where I post useful resources and tools. But CreativIndie is my catch all brand where I sometimes post updates.

I'm hoping to use it a lot more. Like I said, I trained a voice that sounds just like me and we'll be able to express all the ideas I have so I can just write a short blog post and it can make it good in my style. So I hope I'll post a lot of useful content there. 

**Steph Pajonas:** Perfect. Well, we'll put the links in and people can find you that way. I'll make sure that they're all in the blog post. [00:57:00] So people who want to come and check out more of Derek's stuff, come by brave new bookshelf. com and check out the blog post and full transcript of this episode. We are just moving our way through winter here and having as many interviews as possible.

And hopefully there will be many more to come in the next couple of months. Danica, do you have any final words to leave our subscribers with? 

**Danica Favorite:** Yeah, just make sure you go to our YouTube channel, watch this on YouTube, like and subscribe to YouTube. as well as our Facebook page. So that way we can get some more folks checking out our content and extending our reach. 

**Steph Pajonas:** Absolutely. All right. So from me and Danica and Derek, we're going to say bye and we'll see you guys in the next episode. Okay. Bye. 

Thanks for joining us on the Brave New Bookshelf. Be sure to like and subscribe to us on YouTube and your favorite podcast app. You can also visit us at [00:58:00] BraveNewBookshelf. com, sign up for our newsletter, and get all the show notes.