In Episode 42 of "The Power of Words" mini-series, join us as Shadows Pub, creator of The Daily Echo, shares her journey in digital creation. Discover how her work with words and AI art inspires creativity and community. Explore her creative process and the profound impact on the creative community.

Greg
Hello and welcome back to another episode of the Creative Worker Podcast. Today is episode 42. The date is February the 22nd, 2025. And this is the first of a mini-series which continues on our theme of words. We've talked about words of the year, words of the month, things like that. This is a continuation of that and it's called The Power of Words. And today we're in for a very special treat. We've got someone in the show that people may be familiar with. Her name is Shadows Pub. She does this thing called The Daily Echoes, which is absolutely amazing.

Greg
If you want to know about the power of words, she will take us on a story of process that is absolutely amazing, will blow your mind, and will have wonderful links in the show notes for that. But Alessandra, when we were talking before the show, you were telling me that Shadows was going to be our guest today. Very exciting. Very exciting, isn't it?

Alessandra
Well, I'm really excited about it because sometimes this is the theme about creative work hour. is we didn't set out to create a thing called Creative Work Hour where we come together and do A, B, and C. We didn't do that. We were just answering what seemed to be an unfilled need. And that was having a safe place to come where we could be together, camera on or not, voice on or not, to do the creative work. that just didn't seem to be happening on its own in our own little silo. And something magic started to happen when we came together.

Alessandra
I guess it was like about 120 days in of creative work hour when I met Shadows Pub. And I met her, of all places, on Twitter, now called X. And if we hadn't met then and there, we might not have met, because I'm not spending much time there now, if any. But at the time, it was the tool of the job. We were, as a creative group, we were launching another group called Practice Not Perfect, and we decided to do it on Twitter. And so how that worked, Is that once a day I would do part of a practice practice session live on Twitter.

Alessandra
So, while I was figuring out how to use that, I was like, I went on on Twitter spaces live and I posed the question, what the hell is blockchain and why would it matter to me as a creative and from that. Here came Shadow's Pub, and she's like, well, I kind of have a use case I'd like to talk to you about. I'm like, OK. And that is how we met. And we have been creating together practically almost every single day since that day more than two years ago. Almost a couple of years ago, she came up with another creative idea.

Alessandra
And that's what we're want to highlight for you today in introducing you to shadows pub. She is the creator author and illustrator for a piece of work that's called daily echo. I'd like to introduce you now. to Shadows Pub and have her tell us a little about what is The Daily Echo. Hi, Shadows. How are you? How are you? I'm good. I'm excited to have you here. It's going to be interesting. So it's not just that you're here, but you're here with nine co-hosts on this podcast episode that you're usually one of the co-hosts, but now you're the featured guest to highlight your work.

Alessandra
How does that feel? Hot seat.

Greg
No pressure whatsoever, no pressure. What's a daily echo, Shadow? What's a daily echo?

Shadows Pub
So The Daily Echo actually started as a way for me to better learn mid-journey, and it's developed in layers since then. One of the reasons I call it The Echo is because it begins with the meaning and use of a single word that echoes into an image, that echoes into a quote, that echoes into a follow-up comment, then gets posted for the public to see, and it can ripple out who knows where. And sometimes it ripples into a podcast or even a written piece.

Greg
I'd love to hear some of those podcasts. We're going to have some links in the show notes, by the way, for these Daily Echoes. You're in for a real treat. What does your process look like when, you know, you run us through, you do those things, but what does that look like actually in practice doing each of those things?

Shadows Pub
The easiest way to do it without getting bogged down in detail is probably to say that I take the word and I get some background material on it, meaning, etymology, useful facts, even a initial suggestion on a reflection, which gives me a little bit of context for the word. Then I get an idea of how that word can be visually portrayed. And I get my prompts, create the images. There are roughly 200 to 240 images. Then I sort through those images to get the ones that I think most represent the way I understand the word should be visually portrayed.

Shadows Pub
And then I have GPT that I have created to analyze the words based on a criteria that I give it, score them based on how close it comes to the theme, how it represents the theme in personal growth, how it represents the theme in spiritual journey. And then I have it score, give it a final score with a weighted average. Then I tell it to do a comparative ranking, which gives me the actual image that I should use that day. And if it happens to come out in a tie, there's a thing that GPT has mentioned to me is called a quantitative analysis that it'll use to break the tie.

Shadows Pub
Originally, when I was prompting it to break the tie, I would just simply say, does one of those pictures edge out the other one? It started using this other term, and I went, OK, now I know what to use. So then once I've got the actual image, I then go down through all my notes and pull out all the pieces of information that I find helpful towards creating the actual quote. Then I brainstorm with AI on the actual quote. And from that, I can get an idea of what to do for the follow-up comment. So it's interplay between me and AI.

Alessandra
So what I wanted to ask Shadows is, so this is Smell-O-Vision. We're on an audio show. So the listeners can go into the show notes to see the image. But let's just take today's Daily Echo. So even though we're not seeing it, you can give us the word and tell us what the quote

Shadows Pub
is

Alessandra
so that we have an example. What's today's word? Today's

Shadows Pub
word

Alessandra
is

Shadows Pub
equivocal. Equivocal. Equivocal. So you've got an image of somebody standing at a crossroads and the signposts on the crossroads are not clear. They're ambiguous. Same as the clouds that have formed above it. It goes in all different directions of color.

Alessandra
And for benefit of our co-hosts, let me just direct you to Shadows, because what we do is we record the show while we're in a Zoom meeting. So what Shadows does every single day that she's here, which is six out of seven days a week, is her avatar, when she comes on Zoom, is that day's Daily Echo illustration. So as you're here as a co-host, take a look at that illustration as she's describing it, as she's giving us the quote, and then the reflection. Go ahead, Shadows. The quote

Shadows Pub
is, light often arrives at equivocal crossroads where the signposts are unclear. leaving us to search for wisdom and perspective to determine the path ahead. And the follow-up comment was the art of decision-making lies in balancing between the folly of snap decisions rooted in narrow understanding and the paralysis of over-analysis caused by the desire for absolute knowledge. Wow.

Greg
I was just thinking, I mean, this is just amazing. And Shadows, when you were talking about some of your process, this doesn't take five minutes, 10 minutes. I know that you spend hours doing this. And even with the assistance of AI, it's only a small element. And this isn't just chat GPT, do this. You've actually customized the model and made your own customized version of GPT to do this, right?

Shadows Pub
The prompts that are in there are designed to give me the information that I want from that particular stage. When I get to the point of doing the quote, I will say to ChatGBT, actually I say it three AIs, I get feedback from Pi, Quad, and ChatGBT. With ChatGBT, I actually give it the option of evaluating the grammar. and usage of the context board. So they give me feedback based on that.

Greg
So we're actually seeing, you know, the product of hours and hours of painstaking work. What originally prompted you to come up with this idea of the echoes? And I'm sure that when you birthed this, it wasn't, you didn't know exactly what the process was going to be, but how did it start initially?

Shadows Pub
So it started, like I said, to improve my prompting ability with mid-juring. And I was publishing some of the images for a while with No quote, no comment. And a friend of mine said to me one day, he says, I don't always get it. What do you mean you don't always get it? He said, I don't always get the connection between the word and the image. I said, well, art's subjective. You're not always going to get it. But what he said stayed with me. And I got thinking about it, and I thought, ah, maybe I should actually do something like a quote that kind of reflects the word and how I'm using the image related to it.

Shadows Pub
And it was only last summer that I started adding the follow-up comment Part of that was one of the constraints I put on myself is the word that is being used that day must be in the quote. So that forces me to use the word music in context. The follow up comment doesn't have to use the word. And it can just pick up on some aspect of the quote. What I love about

Alessandra
you're bringing this art with you as you're in creative work hour each time that you're here is that, well, we throw the proof of concept human element back to it. Tell us how that works, Shadows. What happens when you come to creative work hour with your art? What happens there?

Shadows Pub
People try to guess it. Some people disqualify themselves because they've already seen it, but the other people try to guess what the word is. And I try to give hints without giving the word away.

Greg
I should have said this earlier, but in the room right now we've got Devon, we've got myself, we've got Gretchen, Alessandra of course, Dr. T, Andy, Rochelle, Wei Ling, Bobby B, Shadows, of course, the star of the show. And Hilary, I saw Devin, you had your hand up. How are you familiar with Shadows work, with the Daily Echo and stuff?

Devin
Yeah, well, I've been a fan of Shadows Pub for a long time. So when she started, when this started being one of her regular things she was doing, I was, of course, you know, fascinated because whatever she does, she puts a lot of effort into, you know, it's going to be well crafted and well thought out. And of course, I love the game. I love guess the word, you know, I'm up for any kind of puzzle or game. So yeah, that's how I probably started paying the most attention to it was when I started trying to guess the word from the image that would show up in creative work hour.

Devin
My question though, was if these images, if the daily images are NFTs, and if so, if they're available in a gallery somewhere.

Shadows Pub
They're not NFTs and I am gradually making some of them available as printables. Eventually those printables will end up up on a website and some of them will end up being available as prints. When they become available as a print, they will no longer be available as printables.

Alessandra
And is there a place now that we can go and if we had to have one of the images that are available, would there be a way that we could get one and call it our own? I put them on Gumroad, but I

Shadows Pub
haven't rebuilt my website yet.

Greg
We'll make some links available. We have the link for Gumroad, for

Shadows Pub
your

Greg
Hive, of course. And then there's a place where people can actually sign up if they want to receive this every day to receive this. So we'll certainly make those available. And with Shadow's permission, maybe we can include one of the echoes in the Jonos. We'll try and twist our arm and see what we can do on that.

Shadows Pub
It won't be much of a cost.

Greg
Gretchen, how are you familiar with The Daily Echoes?

Gretchen
I first grew here through Creative Work Hour and Met Shadows. As a photographer, I find it fascinating how she does this and creates the images through her prompts. I've done some prompt engineering myself and learning about that and she's taken it to a next level. And it's just amazing. And then her newsletter, it's it's kind of for me, I have my husband of many, many years, loves language that he's raised in Catholic schools, knows the whole etymology thing. So whenever there's a word, it used to be like, what does it mean? And she takes it seriously.

Gretchen
I don't ever want to get in a room with the two of them together because it would be like. Way, way beyond me. This is way beyond looking it up in the dictionary, but it is fascinating. And her her newsletter is often inspiring. And I love it because it's a it's just such a. kind of a way to you can pick up on it in any little different way and kind of challenge yourself and take your own mind in a different way and how you see things and I love that idea of looking into how people think or how people interpret you know I mean how people interpret my art is always different and then how she creates it from from a word I create from nature or from wildlife or from out there.

Gretchen
She creates it from a word. And that's just what kind of blows me away.

Greg
Yeah. Dr. T, how are you familiar with shadows, daily echoes?

Dr. Timeka
Again, I learned about Shadows Daily Echoes through this venue. I am just taken back, as Gretchen stated, about how she takes the word and makes it something of her own. And typically, I tell Shadows all the time, I love trees. So anything that posts with a tree, I place it on Gumroad. I really want it. She gets it out there, I procure it. But I'll tell you, on yesterday, I think Fridays are the days that she takes off, but I opened the post, as I do every morning, and the picture just pierced my soul. The name of it was Dauntless.

Dr. Timeka
And it was literally myself standing in the middle of a forest with my sword. And I collect swords. So it really just brought to life so many things that I had been thinking about these last two months into one picture. And I will be working to procure this one as well. I think it's amazing work. The excitement and the passion that Shadow shows as it relates to this work is unmatched. And I really do appreciate her sharing this with us.

Greg
to move quickly if you want that artwork dr t to the post andy how about you how are you familiar with

Andy
the daily echoes i will echo the same thing like everybody else as a creator and as a composer i can truly appreciate and be amazed what she is creating here and it is small symphonies really. Vocal and gestures and everything it's like a mini symphony I will say she creates every day and I would be so much less as a creator myself if I didn't come in here and saw that artwork every day. So that might take me.

Greg
Thanks Andy. Rochelle, how about you? How are you familiar with Diary Echoes?

Rochelle
Yes, thanks Greg. I try to participate as much as possible with the creative work hour and I started noticing the beautiful avatars and pictures and I'm not great at games but I am a writer and I used to be a visual artist and I am a musician and I can so appreciate that confluence of the visual and the word and the meaning. And one day, and I don't want to cry, I probably will. I was really, really at a low point and really struggling on so many fronts in my life. And Shadows Pub had this avatar and the word was regal.

Rochelle
And like Dr. Tamika said, I'm like, oh my gosh, this is what I would aspire to or I need to help me. And it was this beautiful golden lion on top of this mountain. And it was almost like mosaics in the picture. And he had these golden wings. And it really hit me as the courage, that beauty, the mystery, that strength, energy that I needed. And that power has helped me so much, like creatively, personally, spiritually, just in healing. And I actually went immediately and I purchased it and I loved the words that went along with it.

Rochelle
And it is on my screensaver of my computer. So every time I open it up, I have this creative burst of energy. And I think that the biggest thing I don't, I don't know, shadows pub, if you realize, like our creative work, how we can touch people, you know, there's the echoes and the ripples. And it just helps me to realize I'm not alone, you know, in that creative way. But there it is. So it just really helps me every day, and it changed my life at a really low point. Thank you so much, Shadows.

Greg
Such a heartfelt share. Thank you, Rochelle. These truly are more than words. They're echoes on many, many levels. They're very meaningful. Hilary, how are you familiar with Daily Echoes?

Hillary
Thank you, Greg. OK, well, my follow up for that's not going to echo where Some of you guys went, I've met shadows here, you know, at creative work hour. And my interactions with that has been nothing but spectacular. Always willing to help somebody who's just, you know, when you're on here and you just kind of mentioned something that, you know, they know a little bit about, they're the first one to speak up to say, I can help you. And that's something I've noticed and value and appreciate. But in regards to the artwork, and I subscribe to the newsletter.

Hillary
What I do with it is a little different than everyone else. I stash them in my email so I can reference them for Toastmasters. At Toastmasters, each meeting, one of the roles is the grammarian, and that person presents a word of the day that people should try to incorporate while, you know, impromptuly within the meeting. And so now I've got this major stash of just words. And when I, if I'm the grammarian, I'm presenting the word, I can even use, you know, something in there to kind of, you know, make it interesting. And it kind of gives me an edge when I'm the person in that role of having a really unique way to talk about a word.

Hillary
So that's what I do. and I recycled them. Thank you, Hilary. Denon,

Greg
did you have a thought?

Devin
Yes, I love hearing all these great stories and I will agree with some of the folks that chimed in that some days it's just the right word and oftentimes I come across the images either on Instagram or on Hive and yeah, it's almost kind of eerie how the echo can be just what you need. Absolutely.

Greg
Bobby

Bobby. B
B, how are you familiar with the Daily Echoes? Like a number of other people here, I came across as being part of this group. To me, what I absolutely adore is that it really tickles both sides of my personality. Okay, I am 50% hyper-analytical and 50% just wildly out-of-the-box creative side with a compassionate streak. So when we see that, when we first come in, It drives in from both sides. The etymology side, I want to know this. I want to dive into this. I'm actually more of a lexicologist. As a writer, I want to understand, okay, where does this word come from?

Bobby. B
But also, how does it tie into other words? Where does it live in the grand thesaurus of life? So that's a big deal for me, because I'm always wanting to come up with other words in my writings that are not too crazy, but just enough to tickle the mind. So when the artwork comes up, it's the elegance of, oh my gosh, I wonder what that word might be. Where's this coming from? What's the emotion? What's the mindset behind it? And then as that evolves and becomes aware to all of us, then the lexicology side dies in.

Bobby. B
Okay, what else is this tied into? Where is this going to show up in something I create? So it's an absolute joy to experience what she does for us on a daily basis. You know, it's just such a loving thing. Thanks,

Greg
Bobby. Wai Ling, how are you familiar with Daily Echo?

Wai Ling
Very much like everyone here, I learn about Shadow's work whenever I'm in here. I would say that I've never gotten to match the word to the picture, but I always enjoy learning the new word. And there is the obvious connection. For example, today, she was describing the picture and the word, and I was like, oh, wow. And I really appreciate the little details, like, for example, the signage not being clear, and it lends itself to the word to tell the story. So I really appreciate that. But as someone who works in higher education, we hear so much about the use of AI and how we still don't really know how to use AI properly, but I'm really, really impressed with how Shadow's rigorous methodology to do it.

Wai Ling
And the phrase that stuck with me was brainstorming with GPT. And there's a lot of ideas out there saying like when you're using AI, you know, you are not really producing your own work. But when you have a very clear idea and an objective and you know how to use it right, you are producing original work. And so that stuck with me. And I'm just like thinking, you know, like, there are so many ways we can use AI to produce original work. And we just have to know, like, just know the capabilities. So yeah, it's just, it's just a really great case study on how we can use AI to do the things that we want to do.

Greg
Absolutely. And, you know, even using AI as a tool, as an element, you know, there's hours and hours goes into this. I don't think there'd be enough hours in the day if we were to take those elements away. And I don't think we'd have the same results, really, as a system. But, Alessandra, did you have any more thoughts?

Alessandra
I did have a thought, and what I wanted to say is because I've been with Shadows every day that she's been working on this in some way or another, there's not a day that goes by that we're not in touch with each other. And what I love about it is that she starts simply. Whatever her new thing is in her creative work, she starts simply. And the thing has to energize itself. And when that is kind of, okay, I see what that is, then she waits until another layer of what it wants to be presents itself.

Alessandra
and another layer of what it wants to be presents itself and really when you look at now here's the outcome here she is and we're looking we're looking at equivocal the word for the 619th edition of the daily echo but at the same time she started simply as if with a a simple word and words are the building blocks of all communication. And what she's done this way is she's taken the words and the energy that she's gonna devote to love and to bring about the full life of that word. And she just takes them playfully, like Lego bricks.

Alessandra
She takes those Lego bricks and she makes a thing. And the thing amazes us every single day. And what I love is that I know that I can count on all of those layers of creative faith that she's put into this process. And I know that tomorrow when I wake up and we come into creative work hour, boom, we're going to see the next word and the next works and all of that just to show us that the picture is worth, shall I say it, a thousand words? Greg?

Greg
I thought it was 600 words or another 600. We're just about 600. Yeah, absolutely. And I met Shadows through Creative Work Hour as well. I do subscribe to the Daily Echoes. And we'll have those links in the show notes and some artwork for you as well. You won't regret signing up to get those every day. But, Shadows, thank you very much for agreeing to come on and talk to us. It's been a real pleasure, but it's that time again. You've wasted a perfectly few good minutes listening to the Creative Work Hour podcast, when you could have been doing something else, but you weren't.

Greg
So come back next week, and we'll have something else in store in this new miniseries called The Power of Words. Thank you.