AISW #003: Stella Fosse, USA-based author 🗣️ (AI, Software, & Wetware interview)

An interview with 'elderotica' author Stella Fosse on her stories of using AI tools and how she feels about AI using her data and content (audio; 10:13)

Introduction

I’m delighted to welcome

Stella Fosse

as our next guest in this 6P interview series on “AI, Software, and Wetware”! ! Today she is going to share with us her experiences with using AI, and how she feels about AI using her data and content.

This interview is available in text and as an audio recording, embedded here in Substack, and in our 6P external podcasts. Direct listening links: Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Pocket Casts, Overcast.fm, YouTube Podcast, or YouTube Music.

Note: In this article series, “AI” means artificial intelligence and spans classical statistical methods, data analytics, machine learning, generative AI, and other non-generative AI. See this Glossary for reference.

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Photo provided by Stella Fosse - used with her permission

Interview

So Stella, thank you so much for joining me today! Please tell us about yourself, who you are, and what you do.

Thanks for having me! Yes, I'm Stella Fosse. I grew up in California, lived most of my life there. I’m retired, in my seventies. I live in North Carolina with my partner (who is also my publicist and my live-in IT guy). My four kids are grown up now and spread around the country. And I've retired from a 35-year biotech career.

So these days I write and publicize my books full time. As of August 29th, I will have published five books. Three of them are fiction and two are books on writing. And my focus is on empowering older women through creativity. My fiction features vivid older women characters, and my nonfiction encourages my peers to write their own vibrant stories.

Write & Sell a Well-Seasoned Romance is my new book that launches this month. It's a step by step guide to create, edit, publish, and market a Romance novel with strong older characters.

And my hope is that people will write their own Romance novels following the steps in my book. I'm thrilled that even before publication, some of the Beta readers are using the instructions and writing sexy stories.

That is awesome, Stella. I love how you encourage older women to write, and how you ‘walk the talk’ with your own writing! All of that sounds a lot more like full-time entrepreneurship than being ‘retired’, though. 😏

Yeah, that’s what my brother tells me, that I just changed careers!

So what is your experience with AI or machine learning, or analytics? Have you used it professionally or personally, or studied the technology?

Just to be clear, I have zero interest in using AI as a writing tool. I'm really invested in using my own thoughts and creativity. And plus, it concerns me that AI is harvesting copyrighted material without compensating authors.

However, I have tried using AI for auxiliary tasks related to being an author.

I am totally with you on not using AI for writing, for both of the same reasons.

Can you share a specific story on how you have used AI for auxiliary tasks?

What are your thoughts about how well the AI features of those tools worked for you, or didn’t? What went well and what didn’t go so well?

Okay, well, when I was writing my previous book, a novel called Vampires of a Certain Age, I asked AI to generate a marketing plan for the book. I got back a detailed plan including a list of podcasters to contact. And imagine my surprise when about half of those podcasts turned out not to exist. It wasn't that they had stopped creating new episodes - these were podcasts that had never existed at all, that AI had simply made up.

Wow. Yeah, genAI “hallucinations” are definitely a known problem. But half?! Tracking down those imaginary podcasts must have cost you a lot of time, for no benefit at all.

It was startling, I have to say.

It sounds like you have avoided using AI-based tools for some things. Can you share an example of when or why you don’t use it? 

Well, as I said, I would never use AI to write fiction or nonfiction. People say AI will take over the interesting tasks and leave us with the scut work. And I really think it should be the other way around.

Oh, I agree!

A common and growing concern nowadays is where AI systems get the data and content they train on. They often use data that users put into online systems or publish online. And companies aren’t always transparent about how they intend to use our data when we sign up.

How do you feel about companies that use data and content for training their AI systems and tools? Should ethical AI tool companies get consent (and compensate) people whose data they want to use for training?

Yeah, they should. Now the tricky thing about this is, we all learn from each others' books, and then use what we learn as the foundation for our own work. And if we aren’t actually quoting someone, we don't typically pay them for the information.

But if you’re quoting someone, shouldn’t AI be bound by the same legal requirements as human authors? Training on materials available online or in a library might not require payment. But quoting or scraping material from books definitely should. And I think it would be great to talk with a literary attorney about this.

And also, I should mention that the Author’s Guild is very involved in this problem, and has, I believe, litigation going on this subject with some of these AI companies.

That’s very good. I would actually like to learn more about what the Author's Guild is doing. (Readers: see footnote¹ for links.)

So one thing we have definitely been seeing is that public distrust of AI and tech companies has been growing. What do you think is THE most important thing that AI companies would need to do to earn and to keep your trust? And do you have specific ideas on how they can do that?

A couple things. One is, I don’t understand how AI makes up false information and mixes it with information from reliable sources, which is what they did in the case of my book marketing plan. This goes way beyond the old "garbage in, garbage out" to the creation of new garbage. Investigating that problem and solving it would help a lot.

And so would compensating authors whose work is harvested. I don’t even know that they are paying for a copy of each book, much less paying to quote material like you ordinarily would if you’re writing a book and you are using a quotation.

The other thing that would help would be building in safeguards to prevent AI from regurgitating the biases and prejudices it encounters as it’s gathering information.

Yeah, agreed. One of the big ethical concerns with the current AI chatbots and the large language models like ChatGPT is that they don’t compensate authors whose work has been harvested, or even ask permissions; they just scrape it. And bias is also a major issue.

Is there anything else you’d like to share with our audience?

Yes, we did have an interesting run-in with AI recently. My publicist used AI to create an image of an older woman writing a Romance novel. This was preparing to launch my new book, Write and Sell a Well-Seasoned Romance. But the image that AI came up with is, I would say, a gendered ageist abomination. This "woman writer" has white hair in a bun but also a full white beard, dangling breasts, six fingers on each hand, and a cat watching over her shoulder.

So, once we saw that, my publicist (for comparison purposes) asked AI for an image of an older man writing a Romance novel, as opposed to an older woman. So this image shows an older man who is appropriately attired, looks like an attractive older man; the only odd thing about it is he is writing with a quill pen.

But it's as clear an example of AI rehashing bigotry as I have seen.

Yeah, I saw your post on that, and I couldn’t figure out at first whether to laugh or groan at that awful picture of the woman writer. I’ve settled on groan. It really is an abomination!

For anyone who hasn’t yet seen it, this Substack interview article has a link to Stella’s Aug. 2 post that shows the terrible AI-generated image. The post is titled “Fun with AI” ².

Question mark!

Yes 😆

Conclusion

And that’s a wrap! Stella, thank you so much for joining our interview series. It’s been really great learning about what you’re doing with artificial intelligence, and why you’re still using human intelligence for most things. So best of luck with your book launch on August 29!

Folks, I was lucky to be a beta reader for “Write & Sell a Well-Seasoned Romance”. I can say without a doubt that it’s one of the most practical and useful books on writing a book (of any genre) that I’ve read. And if you’re an older woman (like us 😊), definitely check out the rock-solid advice on how to write and sell your own romance novel. And you can find preorder information for the book on Stella’s website.

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About this interview series and newsletter

This post is part of our 2024 interview series on “AI, Software, and Wetware”. It showcases how real people around the world are using their wetware (brains) with AI-based software tools or being affected by AI.

"AI, Software, and Wetware": a new interview series 🗣️

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Credits

• Stella Fosse’s website and pre-order info for her new book, “Write & Sell a Well-Seasoned Romance”

• Stella Fosse on LinkedIn

• Stella Fosse on Substack:

1. References provided by Stella Fosse on the Authors Guild lawsuit activity:

• “The Authors Guild, John Grisham, Jodi Picoult, David Baldacci, George R.R. Martin, and 13 Other Authors File Class-Action Suit Against OpenAI”, 2023-09-23 (updated 2023-12-05)

• The Authors Guild - Advocacy - Artificial Intelligence

2. "Fun" with AI