Introduction - Lynn Marie Sager
This edition of AI, Software, and Wetware features an audio interview with Lynn Marie Sager, a 🇺🇸 USA-based retired actress, teacher, lifelong world traveler, and the author of 5 books plus the newsletter Navigating a Whackadoodle World. We discuss:
How she uses and constrains AI chat tools as editor support for dysgraphia when writing her books and newsletter
Why she prefers Strunk and White’s Elements of Style to tools like Grammarly
Using ChatGPT to help her with the governor persona for the Persuasion guidepost of her book
How she (writer) and her sister (artist) differ in their views of AI tools for writing and for creating images
Pre-AI theft of her work (writing and acting) for unethical purposes
Drawing with words and why one of her ebooks on the 14 guideposts is free
and more. Check it out, and let us know what you think!
This post is part of our AI6P interview series on “AI, Software, and Wetware”. Our guests share their experiences with using AI, and how they feel about AI using their data and works.
This interview is available as an audio recording (embedded here in the post, and later in our AI6P external podcasts). This post includes the full, human-edited transcript. (If it doesn’t fit in your email client, click HERE to read the whole post online.)
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 and “AI Fundamentals #01: What is Artificial Intelligence?” for reference.
Interview - Lynn Marie Sager
Karen: I am delighted to welcome Lynn Marie Sager from Hawaii as my guest today on “AI, Software, and Wetware”. Lynn, thank you so much for joining me on this interview! Please tell us about yourself, who you are, and what you do.
Lynn: I am a retired teacher, writer, actress, a bit of a world traveler. And as you say, I’ve come back home to where I grew up, Hawaii. These days I’m primarily looking after my 95-year-old father, who is still pretty chipper. I haven’t done my acting in quite a while, mostly because here in Hawaii, it’s limited what I can do. And I’m used to being paid, and there’s not much paid here unless you’re Hawaiian, which I’m not. So I’ve been focusing on my writing, and that’s where I really get my creative juices these days.
Karen: Living in Oahu must be wonderful. You said you grew up there, right?
Lynn: Yeah, basically, the only reason I left was for the acting, because again, it was very limited. So I spent about two years in New York. I did some acting there. I spent a number of years in Portland, Oregon where all the fun’s happening now. And that is a fantastic place for the creative. I ended up doing plays constantly. Got my first movie job there. I was working for an improvisational company for a while that toured the world with the Department of Defense, so I got a chance to go all over the place.
And then finally when my brother got ill, I moved down to LA and gave that a try. And I’ve got to say, not good for actors. When he finally passed, I came home, and now I take care of my dad and write. I do a lot of writing.
Karen: Caregiving can be really demanding. I’m impressed that you’re able to get so much writing done in spite of all that. But it’s good that he’s still active.
Lynn: Yeah, for somebody who’s 95, he’s actually in pretty good shape. So it’s mostly taking him to the doctor, making sure he has the right pills. And he’s from that generation where he does not know how to turn on the laundry. He’s just never had to learn those things. So taking care of those kinds of things for him. Those are the kinds of ways we show our love these days.
Karen: Very true. You’ve got an impressive background. A lot of different things. Portland is very nice. My late husband lived in Portland for a long time. And he really loved it there for creative people. His sister did pottery there.
Lynn: Oh, nice.
Karen: Yeah. And had a farm, so – very cool.
Lynn: Got a great spirit up there.
Karen: Yeah. You mentioned that you’ve written some books?
Lynn: Yes. Most of them, they’re kind of hard to categorize. I suppose you could call them self-help, but they are not traditional — and I really hate that term — self-help.
But I taught for many years when I was in LA. I taught many different kinds of leadership courses and professional sales, all kinds of things. I’ve developed a way of framing that’s challenging. I call them my guideposts, 14 Guideposts. I mentioned earlier that I have been published traditionally. I’ve also self-published and now I’m writing on Substack. My very first book, which was actually published, was A River Worth Riding: Fourteen Rules for Navigating Life.
And then, I didn’t think I had another book in me, to be honest. I thought, well, this is my guide to life. But I knew it needed to be updated at some point, and that’s when I decided, hang on: what if a retired self-help worker or author got accosted by the very principles that she taught and said, “Hey, why didn’t you follow your own stupid advice?”, you know, and kind of let them yell at me and say, “You’ve been getting me wrong here.” And it turned into a really wonderful book called Navigating Life through Turbulent Tides. I was writing it right as the pandemic was coming out. So it was kind of an interesting segue there.
And that’s led me into my Substack now, which is essentially: I allow these principles to give the message. So that it’s not like, “Hello there, I’m here to tell you.” I’m letting these concepts speak. I’ve been getting really great feedback, five stars and all kinds of fun stuff, so I’m pretty proud of them.
Karen: Yeah. Yes. You’ve been very successful with your books in different formats and I know a lot of our audience members are writers. That’s what Substack people mostly do.
Lynn: Exactly.
Karen: And a lot of them do write books. So I think it’s interesting to hear about your experiences with that. I’d love to hear about how you use AI in the course of writing your books, or if you use it, and what things you do and don’t use it for, and how well it works for you … things like that.
Lynn: First and foremost, I do not let it write for me. And every time it tries to write for me, I yell at it and tell it to please stop. I primarily use ChatGPT. I have also tried Claude, but after a while they want you to pay. It’s free, so I use it. For a long time I avoided it because I was like, I don’t need it to do writing for me. But I was listening to a talk show and a gentleman came on and made a really important point. He talked about how when computers were first coming out, some people just refused to work with them at all, like, “No, they’re taking over”. But that was a huge mistake because they’re here, they’re going to stay and you better learn the tool. And it got me realizing, “Yeah, I really should know about something before I start criticizing something.”
So that’s when I gave it a try and I was like, “This is kind of cool. But you have to train it. You have to tell it what you want.” And I’ve decided it is a terrible writer because it takes all of the humor out, all of the nuances out. It always wants to be concise and it wants to tighten it up. And it ends up just losing everything that’s charming and human. What I do use it for is: I have dysgraphia. As a writer, it can be very embarrassing, especially if you are publishing on something like Substack where you don’t have another editor come in. So that helps an awful lot to catch those little typos. I don’t know if your people are familiar with dysgraphia at all?
Karen: Very likely some of them aren’t. Can you tell us a little bit about that and how that impacts your writing?
Lynn: Most people are are familiar with dyslexia. Dysgraphia is kind of similar to dyslexia. There’s actually three forms: dyslexia, dysgraphia, dyscalcula. And dyscalcula is where you have trouble with math concepts; dysgraphia, obviously with comprehension and reading concepts. But dysgraphia is kind of unique in that it doesn’t make it hard for you to read. In fact, you can read beautifully and it doesn’t really impact your writing. But it impacts your proofreading because you can’t see the mistakes. So you’re reading along and it might say, “John run into the theater”, but your brain reads it and it sees the ‘s’, even though the ‘s’ is not there. Does that make sense?
Karen: Mm-hmm.
Lynn: So you just don’t spot your mistakes. It’s really bad for a writer and a teacher if they can’t spell. So ever since I started using ChatGPT, I use it all the time to final proofread. And even then, it doesn’t always catch everything, but it does a much better job than any other tool I’ve had in catching that.
I also use it for research, particularly if it’s technical things. I remember I was having some trouble with my phone and I said, “This is what’s happening in my phone. This is the brand, blah, blah, blah.” It helped me diagnose it, and so I didn’t have to get on with customer service, that kind of thing. It’s actually really good at diagnosing little problems like that.
I do use it for brainstorming. I find it particularly useful because I’ll try and explain something to it, and I find that in my explanation, I often solve my own problem, you know? And I’ll be like, “Oh, I just figured it out. Never mind.” But it is useful just to kind of toss ideas around. Sometimes it’ll catch things that I miss. But again, I hate what it does when it tries to write for me. I just abysmally hate it. But it’s a good brainstormer.
And then I do use it for research. I think the reason why we first got together is I had sent you an article that I had written where I actually got the thing to admit that it was biased. And I was pretty amazed by that conversation and I wanted to share it. But it was a conversation that I had had with ChatGPT about, “Do you realize you’re biased?” Right? And it admitted it was biased and also said yes, and it’s purposely been programmed that way. So it’s going to be there. I will still use it for research, but I’m very aware of that bias and try to mitigate it however I can. That was my long answer to your question.
Karen: It’s a great answer, and we’ll include a link to that article with this point in the written interview so that people can go off and read it, because it was really an interesting article.
You said a lot of things there that I want to come back on. You mentioned proofreading. I’m wondering, when you were writing your books, did you have a professional editor always working with you? Whether it was self-published or professionally published, was there always an editor in the loop?
Lynn: Yes, until I started doing it on Substack. I always had somebody helping me proofread. But like I said, when you actually go to my Substack — which is by the way, Lynn Marie Sager and it’s called Navigating a Whackadoodle World, and ‘whackadoodle’ is ‘whacky’, not ‘wacked’ — if you go to it and you see my very early stuff, you’ll see what I mean. Because I look at it now and I sometimes run it through the ChatGPT and okay, those are some embarrassing typos. Yeah. But I also have an article there where I explain, and every so often, I would send it out to my subscribers saying, “Remember I have dysgraphia. This is what it means. It’s what it is. We are going to get over it.” But I haven’t had to share that anytime soon. Anyway.
Karen: Yeah. Yeah. One thing that’s funny, you know, even people that don’t have dysgraphia often will find that the best way to catch your typos is to publish something!
Lynn: Yes. And then you suddenly see it. Absolutely.
Karen: Yeah.
Lynn: Funny, because I used to teach proofreading — I can proofread. I just can’t see it. It used to be a joke in my classes. I would try and write something on the board, and I would not be able to spell it. So then I’d try another word and I couldn’t spell it. And then finally my students would laugh and I’d be like, “Well, it is what it is”.
Karen: Yeah, yeah, yeah. One thing I do like about Substack is, once you press the publish button, it’s already gone out in email. But for anyone that reads it online later, especially if you get new subscribers, you can actually go back and edit and fix typos and mistakes that you find. So I’ve done that more than a few times.
Lynn: I do it all the time. Even with what I’m able to do now with proofread to get help on.
Karen: Yeah. So I’m curious, when you write your Substack articles, do you mostly work in the Substack editor? Or do you write offline in some sort of a word processor, and then paste it in? What’s your process like?
Lynn: Before I started using ChatGPT, I would do it in Open Office. I prefer Open Office. I try and get things free whenever I can.
Karen: Sure!
Lynn: I used to teach. I used to help people get mouse certified. These days, have you noticed there’s a rental? There’s kind of a rental culture these days. You can’t buy the program, you’ve got to pay monthly.
Karen: I hate that, personally.
Lynn: Yeah. It irritates me. My first computer, the very first one I bought was a Windows 3.0.1. That sucker lasted me 15 years. I swear to God. I gave it to somebody and they kept using it. The only reason I had the upgrade is because the software required it of me. Everything now is upgrade, upgrade, upgrade, upgrade. And I’m like, “No, I’m happy with what I’ve got.”
So to get back to your question, I now use Open Office. I find it’s quite good, totally free, does pretty much everything you can get off of Word and all of the Microsoft stuff. So I would do a lot of it there. And I do like working offline, because here in Hawaii, we get electricity going off all the time. So you can still work even if you’re not able to go online.
But I have to admit, since using ChatGPT, switching back and forth, back and forth, is just frustrating. So I do tend more these days to use the Substack and write directly into the post, more and more.
Karen: Yeah. The reason I’m wondering is there is actually a browser plugin for Grammarly.
Lynn: I don’t like it.
Karen: Yeah, I’ve tried it myself. I didn’t know if you had tried it as well.
Lynn: No. I find I disagree with a lot of its grammar, strangely enough.
Karen: I do too!
Lynn: I used to teach this stuff and believe me, that’s not good. One of my favorite books is Strunk and White’s Elements of Style.
Karen: Oh, I bought that ages ago, when I was in college.
Lynn: Oh, I love that book, yeah. It is a silly book to love, but I do, I love it. And it’s gotten me to a point where every time somebody says, “utilize it”, it’s like the chalkboard thing for me. It’s like, “Why don’t you just say ‘use’? Why must we ‘utilize’?” And that’s because of Strunk and White. Anyway.
Karen: Yeah, a lot of really solid basic advice there. And it’s something that is hard to remember. But for a while I was working in a corporate research environment and writing these very technical papers. So I got used to writing with longer sentences and bigger words. And then when I came to Substack, about two years ago, I said, “Okay, I probably need to change my target grade level that I write for.”
Lynn: Yeah.
Karen: So I used a readability analysis tool to help shift my profile from like 12th grade level down to about 9th, I think is where I usually land now. It was a very deliberate thing.
Lynn: I was just going to add, in LA I was teaching at one of the community colleges, their creative writing. And I had these very specific tools that I would use. I’m amazed at how often — I’d go into it, but I don’t want to bore your audience — but it was things like: your subject should be true nouns, and your predicate should be active. And if you do that, your writing becomes clear right away. I find it amusing that both ChatGPT and Grammarly, and most of the others, they don’t follow those rules. They start sentences “It is”, and you’re like, “What does the ‘it’ mean?” You know? And it’s just little things like that. Kind of, no, we’re not going there.
Karen: Yeah. It’s funny you point that out as an example, the use of the indefinite. I catch it in my own writing. Sometimes when I’m reading back through, it’s like, “it, it, it” – what?
And the She Writes AI Community – we’re pulling together a book with 25 chapters from different authors who are writing on Substack about AI. I’m trying to do the editing. I’m not a professional editor, but I’ve done a lot of words in my years. And that’s one of the things that I tried to notice when someone says “it”, which it?, and making sure that it’s clear.
Lynn: To make clear, yeah. Or can you just use that word and it’ll work? Little things.
Karen: I appreciate you sharing all those stories. I think you and I both have some experience back in the very early days of computers.
Lynn: Yes, yes. My first computer was a Zorba. It had a little itty bitty 6-inch screen, and it glowed green, so way back in time.
Karen: Yeah, that is cool. I’ve never known anyone who had a Zorba. Most people that I knew that had home computers had Commodores or TRS-80s.
Lynn: I should take that back. My first computer was that Windows 3.0.1. It was my dad’s computer. It was way back then.
Karen: Wow. Yeah.
Lynn: And he taught me on it. That’s where I first learned ‘computer’. So I really understand how it speaks, if that makes sense.
Karen: Did you write software for it back then? Did you do any programming?
Lynn: No, I didn’t really. I know a little bit of it, so I can adjust and stuff, but I’m not fluent by any means.
Karen: What you were describing about how you were using ChatGPT and you start to explain something to it, and then in the process of explaining it, you figure it out. That’s actually a known good software debugging technique. They call it the rubber duck method. They tell the developer, “Explain your problem to the rubber duck”. And by the time they get through it, they go, “Okay, never mind”. Because they figured it out.
Lynn: Yeah. Yep. Yeah, it works.
Karen: And that’s one thing that’s funny, if you look at all the prompting techniques, a lot of it comes down to, “Well, you need to be really clear about writing your specification for what you want it to do.” That clarity that you have to achieve — to be able to get it to give you what you want — if you did that, you could probably write it yourself more directly with that clarity, without even using the tool.
Lynn: A lot of times you do. You’re like, “Oh, now I know what I want to say. I can say it now.” Yeah, absolutely.
Karen: Yeah. I think that’s a really interesting dynamic that we’re seeing.
Lynn: I did use it very interestingly once that that worked out brilliantly, that your audience might find interesting. In my book, my character meets up with these actual guideposts that teach her. And one of the guideposts is Persuasion. And it teaches the process of how one persuades. And in the story, she’s had this meeting with the governor and it did not go well. And she messed up totally because she forgot the whole process. And so when she meets up with Persuasion — he’s a fisherman, obviously, because you know, persuasion with the fish hook, use the right bait — he has her do the whole thing, and he’s playing the governor.
So I would write what the student was asking and how the student was responding. And then I’d be like, “I have no idea how the governor would respond.” So I went to ChatGPT and I went, “How would the governor respond to this?” And it came back with this stuff. And I’m like, “Oh, wow, that’s so good. Because it wasn’t me.” ChatGPT was going online and getting talking points that actually came from the governor. And I was able to interweave it with my own writing, and it actually worked out really nicely.
So that was one of those times where I did an experiment and that worked really well. But I have found, you really have to know where you’re trying to lead, because otherwise it’s going to go off on some kind of weird tangent. It’s really stupid. It really is. It does not get subtlety at all. And it always just immediately goes right to what it thinks you want to hear. And it’s very annoying sometimes. But obviously I use it because there are things it’s pretty good at doing.
Karen: Yep. To your point about humor and irony or sarcasm or any of these subtle subtleties, it’s somewhat like learning a new language. If you’ve learned any foreign languages, you know it takes a long time to be fluent enough to be able to express those concepts. So it seems like the LLMs have the same trouble. They haven’t learned that yet, even though they’ve been trained on billions of conversations.
Lynn: Yeah, The Onion did a whole series where they were actually making fun of the fact that it has no sense of humor. They were having some good fun, that it doesn’t get the joke. It wants to go right to the punchline. It doesn’t set it up. It can write. It can’t explore it. It knows how to put a sentence together, but that’s about it. You know? That’s it.
Karen: A lot of people have expressed those thoughts, that it’s what constitutes the creative human part that resonates with people that would read our writing. And the tools are probably getting better because as we’re all using them, we’re collectively teaching it more about what good writing looks like. And so eventually they will improve.
The other thing that’s really interesting is that people’s writing, even when they’re not using the tool, is somewhat shifting to match more like the way that the tools are writing. And that’s kind of sad.
Lynn: Well, and I refuse to do it, because it’s always, “I think you need to break this down and that’s too long a set paragraph”. I’m like, “You know what, if my readers don’t want to read a long paragraph, they probably aren’t my readers in the first place.” You know? It always wants you to shorten it in little bites and I’m like, “Why? Why are we doing that?” Is what I’m saying clear? Because I don’t need concise.
It always promises, “Oh, I’m sorry, I’ll never do that again”, but it always defaults back. One of the things I have done and it’s kind of worked okay: it has a brief memory and you can train it. And I have two modes.
I will put something in and I say “Editor Eye”. And I’ve told it what I mean by editor. It means: Look at it like an editor would look at it. Is this ready to publish? Do you see anything that needs to be looked at? Is there something missing? I want you to look at this as though you are my editor, you’re my publisher. And I also have something called dysgraphia, which essentially means I’m proofreading now; don’t you dare make me tweak anything. I just look for the mistakes.
It just saves me a lot of time to be able to go, I’m putting this in Editor Eye only, and then I paste it in. And I tend to not waste my time so much saying, “I told you not to write for me.” You know, that kind of thing. So that’s been a little technique that I’ve been using that has actually helped quite a bit.
Karen: That’s a really good tip.
Lynn: Yeah. But I also find it funny sometimes because, I mean, I will see an irony and I’ll be like, “Do you see that? No, you don’t see that irony, do you? You don’t see what I’m seeing, do you?” So sometimes I play with it, just because, you know, I’ve got a weird sense of humor!
Karen: Yeah, there’s a lot of different ways that people can use it and are using it. And it feels like, especially for writing, there’s so much controversy about that, and on Substack about pros and cons and ways to use it effectively without losing your voice, you know. That’s an important thing.
Lynn: Yeah, you just have to hold the line and let it know that. I tell it flat out “You suck at writing. Don’t write for me.” It doesn’t have an ego. It doesn’t care. And I think the key is knowing how to use it ethically. If you’re going to use its wording, credit it; say this was written by AI. And don’t pretend that it wasn’t. I noticed on yours, you specifically say you don’t like things written with AI.
Karen: Well, I don’t write with AI myself. The ability to express my own thoughts and ideas, that’s a big part of it. But another part of it is that I look for ethically trained and developed tools to use, and there aren’t very many of them yet. A few are emerging, but there really aren’t very many. I found one that’s built in Switzerland. It was ethically trained on authorized, credited, compensated sources. And so I’ve been using that one and not ChatGPT. And now with the ChatGPT ads coming in?
Lynn: What’s it called?
Karen: It’s called Apertus, the Latin word for open.
Lynn: I’d like to check it out.
Karen: It’s public open source. They trained it on, I think, over a thousand languages and 40% of them are not English [variants].
Lynn: Oh, nice.
Karen: They’re really trying to address some of the bias concerns, as well as just making sure that they aren’t using stolen books or other contents.
Lynn: Nice.
Karen: Do you know if any of your books have been stolen for use? Have you checked LibGen or anything like that?
Lynn: Yeah, they have been actually. Especially early on. These days, I put my copyright on everything. Most people ignore it, obviously. Yeah, it was really disheartening to discover how it was being used, because these are your babies, right? This is what I’ve created and I’ve put a lot of care into choosing my words. Because I use them to teach and I want to make sure that people are understanding what I’m trying to teach. I think I’m more of a philosopher than a self-help expert, to be honest. Anyway, so I would look up my name just to find out, you know, what are people saying about me these days? And then I would find these articles that had my name attached. They said I had written them and I even recognized some of the language, but it wasn’t what I had written. I think what they had done is they’d copied it, and then changed just enough so that it would bypass any “this is stolen material” kind of thing. And also just enough to make me sound like a total moron.
Karen: Oh geez.
Lynn: You know? That was the part that really bothered me. If you’re going to steal my stuff and mess it up, don’t put my name on it. That really drives me crazy. So if anybody out there ever reads my work and you’re like, “That doesn’t make sense”, it’s probably because it was ripped off.
So, yeah, I’ve had that happen. And it’s disheartening, but unfortunately there’s no way to trace it back to who did it. For all I know, this was done in some obscure country by some person sitting in a coffee shop somewhere. So you can’t really trace it back. So you can’t stop it. There’s no accountability for it these days.
And that’s one of the things I would like to see more of. I really like what Denmark is doing, and that’s where they are giving people the copyright of their own image, and of their words, and things like that, so it’s automatic. So that you can’t just put somebody’s face on it and make them say something they don’t mean. Or steal their image and — because I’ve also had that happen, where they steal my image, and suddenly I am on websites that I don’t want to be on. It can be very disheartening, because you wonder what it does to your reputation.
Karen: Can you say a little more about that? Your image, was this from back when you were an actress?
Lynn: Yeah. I did a scene in End of Days with Gabriel Byrne. It’s a love scene. Although it was handled very tastefully in the movie, I ended up being on all these soft porn sites with actresses who have done scenes like this. And in the thing, you don’t see a darn thing, you know? But you end up getting your name on these sites. And again, there’s nothing you can do. There’s nothing the movie companies do. So for quite some time there, I would put my name in and the first 3, 4, 5 pages of the searches was me in “nude pictures of stars” kind of thing.
Karen: Oh geez.
Lynn: And it took a long time for that to finally get buried. And now when you put my name in, you’re likely to see: there’s my movie credit, there’s my book credit, there’s my Amazon, there’s my Goodreads, there’s my Substack. But it took a long time to get those. And I’m sure they’re still there, but now they’re buried so deep down, although I’m sure some people are still finding them. It is what it is. But again, there’s not much you can do. To be able to trace back and find out who’s doing it and hold them accountable, it costs more than you’d ever get in doing that. So, until there’s accountability attached, I don’t know what we can do.
As far as the writing goes, I have no fear that ChatGPT is going to take the job of writers anytime soon. It’s just not good enough at it. I think it may take the jobs of proofreaders. It might take the jobs of technical writers, because it’s pretty good at writing out directions and things like that. But writer-writers? It can’t tell a joke. Until it can tell a joke.
Karen: I’m guessing that this stealing of your image and having it repurposed, this happened before generative AI broke on the scene, that humans were already doing this?
Lynn: Yeah.
Karen: AI certainly makes it easier — all those deepfake tools that have no controls to keep people from doing unethical things with it. But this probably started with humans just doing it beforehand to try to make a buck.
Lynn: Exactly. Yeah. And that just goes to show, it’s not the tool doing it, it’s the people doing it. And they just use the tool unethically and it’s a new tool. And the legal remedies have not caught up yet. The next leg will be how can we ensure that this is used ethically.
Another thing that’s really ticking me off these days is I’ve actually seen ads to students where it’s like, “We can get you that great, great term paper. You don’t have to read the book.” You know? And I’m like, “Oh, no, no, no, do not get one of those papers.” Or there was one like – oh God – it was basically saying, “We know how to fool the tools your teacher’s using to catch it.” So they’re really playing to that. And that’s just wrong.
Karen: Yeah. Yeah, I’ve interviewed some students, from high school to college to medical school and such. And most of them have said that they avoid it, because they know that it can’t be trusted to necessarily explain things accurately to them. And if they don’t already know enough about it, they don’t know enough to ask and challenge it.
Lynn: Yeah.
Karen: For whether it’s telling you something that’s accurate or not. Others say, “You know, my goal, I’m here to learn. I don’t want to not learn, so I refuse to use it.” And that’s maybe a little extreme. But on the one hand, “everybody is using it”. We were saying we have to accept that it’s here and we have to know enough about it to be able to use it ethically. But I’ve seen a lot of pushback from students. Of course, I’m probably not talking to the ones who are doing things like using it to write their term papers for them!
Lynn: Yeah. I think a lot of ‘em probably feel like we do, where it’s like, “You know what, no, I don’t want you to do this for me. You can help me out a little bit.” But it makes things up. It has this tendency, it wants to please so much that if it can’t find something, it will make it up. And if it can’t find a connection, it’ll just assume it. So you can’t trust it for that kind of thing. As you say, you have to have read the book if you’re going to catch it and know that it’s getting it right. And it will never be original. It could write a fantastic little term paper in Romeo and Juliet and it’s going to sound like every other term paper ever turned in for Romeo and Juliet, instead of your take on it. But again, it’s going to be up to the humans to decide how we’re going to use it ethically, because I don’t see the companies doing it anytime soon.
Karen: Exactly. One of the few levers that we have is consumer pressure — not to buy, not to pay for the tools that are exploiting people or that don’t behave ethically or don’t put in proper guardrails to keep people from misusing them so badly. There are going to be some things that the tools couldn’t stop, even if they tried. But there are some obvious things, like the deepfakes, the non-consensual imagery.
Lynn: Yeah.
Karen: We should not be tolerating that and definitely not supporting it in any way.
Lynn: Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. And I think companies, like the social media companies that don’t put a foot down — that let you report it and it gets taken down immediately — then those are companies you should not be using. Because the only thing we have really as a method of protest is purchasing power, using power. Our attention, where we place our attention these days, that’s where the money is. And so, you know.
Karen: Yeah, exactly. You mentioned acting and we’ve mentioned the deepfakes. As someone who was a professional actress, I’m wondering how you feel about — I don’t know if you’ve heard about what they call Tilly Norwood. It’s this AI-generated, and I’ll put actress in air quotes. I just read that the company that created Tilly Norwood is planning to create 40 more AI actors, again in quotes. And they may be using movies that you even performed in for training the AIs that are generating these, or lots of other movies.
Lynn: Yeah.
Karen: Or the studios that control the rights might not even be getting compensated, never mind them actually compensating you or anyone who was in the movies.
Lynn: That’s kind of why we went on strike recently, the number of reasons why SAG AFTRA has been going on strike recently. And I absolutely support the unions that are saying, “Hey, don’t do this.” There was a point where, the last strike — or maybe it was the strike before that, because there’s been quite a few of them all having to do with copyrights for problems faced by AI — but there was this one thing where they were going to get all the extras, every time you go in for an extra job. And being an extra is a good paying gig. I know a lot of people in LA, that’s what they do: they do extra work and it’s a good job. But everyone who went in was going to get scanned, the idea being, eventually we don’t need extras, we can just scan ‘em in. There was a big, big pushback on that. No, no, we’re not going to just let you scan us and then use our image forever. We get paid one time and then that’s it? I think I’ve made my opinion on that very clear.
Karen: Yeah. Yeah. I hope they’re at least going to be transparent enough to identify if it’s an AI — ‘performance’, I’ll say, not performer — a performance.
Lynn: Yeah, yeah.
Karen: So that people can choose whether to avoid it or watch it or not, because I personally would be very much inclined to say, “No, we’re not watching that.” There’s this one YouTube channel, a Julia McCoy, giving some advice about current events. And I pointed out to my husband, “You know, that’s AI-generated video. Why would you even waste your eyes on it?” Because it’s just AI-generated, you know?
Lynn: Yeah.
Karen: Listening to it, maybe, but why would you watch that?
Lynn: Yeah. The other thing that really drives me crazy is all the commercials now where you can just tell it’s an AI voice. It’s AI-generated. And it’s like, I didn’t believe it when the actor was pretending they were an expert. Do you really think I’m going to believe that AI is an expert? Luckily you can still usually tell. There’s just something about it that, you know, no human being would actually talk that way. But they’re getting better and better all the time.
Again, what do we do about it? I know with the acting, it’s the unions, and so I am a very strong supporter of SAG and AFTRA and the theatrical union. And I think that’s one way that we rein them in is having the big stars, the big name stars’ support, is what gives it the power. Because if you want to have so-and-so in your movie, you have to follow a set contract, which means you have to do all of these things. So working together, using our voice together, using our buying power together. And also letting our local politicians know, “Hey, we need to put some regulation in here.” Because it is wrong to suddenly wake up one morning and see that you’re online pitching a product that there’s no way you would pitch it. It’s ethically wrong to put words into my mouth that I would never speak. I think those are the tools we’re going to have to use to fix it — that and our own knowledge.
Karen: Yeah, great points, yeah. I think you’ve covered a lot of the stories that we wanted to cover. One thing I’m wondering: you’ve mentioned using ChatGPT and AI tools for a writing assistant and editor proofreader. Have you ever tried any of the tools that generate images, music, videos, anything like that?
Lynn: I have to admit that I have occasionally used it to create an image to go with my stories. It’s funny because my sister is a gifted artist, and she uses it to write for her. And I’m a pretty good writer, and I use it to draw for me, but very seldom. For example, in one of my chapters, she gets a card. It’s a graduation card. I knew what I wanted it to say. So I basically said, “Could you create a child-like card that says this, that has this, blah, blah?” And it gave me a card. It said what I wanted, and I was like, “Thank you. Okay.” And I can plug that in. And then, when you put it in, you say “Image created by ChatGPT”, you know? You credit it.
Karen: Yeah.
Lynn: Yeah. So I think that’s okay. But the funny thing is, my sister, she would never do that. It’s funny: what I say about what it does to my writing and how terrible it is, she says the same thing about her art. She’s like, “It doesn’t know how to do it. It’s okay — just, it looks like everything else. It’s terrible.” So it’s funny, you know. We each know our own little niche and so it can help us as a tool. But as all tools, you got to know how to handle ‘em, right? So yeah, I have used it occasionally, but it’s not something I do very often, nor do I intend to do it. I’m actually pretty good at creating my own graphics online.
Karen: Do you use something like Canva or one of those kind of tools?
Lynn: Oh, I really hate Canva. What can I say? I use Open Office Draw. I keep it simple.
Karen: Okay.
Lynn: It works. It gives me what I need. I learned when you still could do the little pixel dots, you know? I remember I did a flyer for an event that I was a part of, and I actually went in and I drew it, dot by dot by dot by dot, in the little pixel. You can’t do that anymore. But at the time, you could tweak things like that, and I kind of miss that. You can’t get into the guts anymore. They’ve got the guts so buried. I kind of miss when you could actually get in there and poke around and know what you were looking at.
Karen: Yeah. I’ve done some things with very simple graphics, for some of the illustrations that I’ve had in my book, I just draw it in PowerPoint and put in a couple of icons. I found sources for icons and for simple images, royalty free — Creative Commons license, you know, and allowed to be used for commercial purposes. And so I’ve been collecting lists of sources of images. Because one thing with Substack is it seems like posts that have a post image always do better. Sometimes it takes a little time to find one, but I’ve never used an AI tool to generate one for me yet.
Lynn: Yeah. There are two times I’ve actually used them and I liked them. And both of them were in my book, the one I have online currently, and people can go and read it. And that’s because I wanted her to receive these letters. So they’re essentially letters and I just had certain images that I wanted on those letters.
But other than that, my main source for images is Unsplash, which is the actual photographs of people. And as long as you credit them, they’re happy to let you use them. So that’s what I do. I also go to Wikimedia online, and look for their public domain stuff. I use that quite a bit. I love going and getting old paintings and things like that, and incorporate them. So I’ll use that. But I’m a writer, so I draw with words, is what I do.
Karen: Oh, that’s a neat way to phrase it, yeah — thank you. I think you’ve pretty much answered all the questions about what you’re looking for with the accountability with the public company. So I really appreciate you making the time for this interview.
Lynn: No problem.
Karen: Is there anything else that you would like to share with our audience? Or anything I didn’t ask you that you were sort of hoping I would ask you?
Lynn: No. I do want to just ask, if people are interested in my writing, that they go – actually, maybe I could give you a link to my book?
Karen: Sure. Absolutely.
Lynn: It is called When the Guides Became Mine. And again, let’s just say that it’s kind of a philosophy, fable, real-life guide. And it takes this everyday unnamed student on a journey, teaching her about life. And you actually get to meet these, I believe, quite charming characters that take her through it. I’ve put it out there for free. I’m not charging because sometimes you just want to share it and you want people to know it’s out there. So it’s called When the Guides Became Mine: 14 Encounters on the Way to Wisdom. And you can find it at substack.com, LynnMarieSager under the little heading A Gift.
Karen: That sounds great! I’ll definitely have to go in and check that out. And we’ll include a link to that in the interview as well, so I appreciate that.
I’m curious, have you turned on any paid option on your Substack at all, like, to accept voluntary donations or tips from people?
Lynn: I do. I also am an online coach. I guess I didn’t mention that, did I? If you actually want to take lessons with me, I will charge for that. So there is the option to become a paid subscriber, and if you do, you have access to Catching Less Currents, which is 14-week intensive lessons online with me as your private coach.
Karen: And that sounds very cool.
Lynn: Yeah. Let’s just say that there are certain things that my age once picked up, and I was teaching out of other people’s books for a long time. Things like success and leadership. And my students would always tell me, “You know, you make it so much easier to understand”. And you know how when you teach something, you learn more about it?
Karen: Yes, absolutely.
Lynn: Yeah. And so that’s what inspired my first book. And the more I teach it, the more I understand it. And so it’s something that I want to share, and if it resonates, get it out there.
Karen: Right. Well, thank you so much! Yeah, I hope people will check out your Substack and look for your gift, and hopefully sign up for your online course. It sounds really interesting. Hopefully you’ll get some more people that are interested, people that you can help. I get the sense that really your underlying goal is not so much to make money from it, just to be able to help people.
Lynn: Yeah. I mean it, I’m retired, so it’s not like I’ve got to make a whole lot of money. But at the same time, people tend to take things more seriously if what you put in, you get back, you know? You can’t just give it all away for free. Sometimes people have to work for it.
Karen: Yep. I published my first book in September, and it’s about ethical AI and how people can protect themselves. And I really wanted to keep it affordable, because $10 is a lot more money to some people than it is to others.
Lynn: Yeah.
Karen: So I priced the ebook initially at 99 cents. I don’t want the money to be a barrier for anybody, just as an intro price to get it out there. And one of my former colleagues said, “You know, I don’t think people respect it as much or value it as much if you’re only charging 99 cents for it. They think there’s not very much in there.”
Lynn: Yeah.
Karen: So I did end up raising the price a little bit, just to the $4.99 ‘cup of coffee’, to kind of offset that, because I don’t want to give the wrong impression. My husband told me I should be charging a lot more for my books. I really want it to be accessible to people, so that’s motivating me more. But I don’t want to undercut it either. Pricing is hard.
Lynn: What inspired me to put it out as a gift is, it was Christmas and I was like, you know what? I can wait. I can get this published, I can do it the traditional way, but I just want to share it. I want people to read it. So why do I want to put up that barrier? And if they enjoy it, and if it resonates, well then yeah, come be a student. Study with me. Let’s get to know each other. But in the meantime, I hope you enjoy it. I hope maybe you get something from it.
Karen: I will definitely go check out your free gift.
Lynn: Well, thank you.
Karen: I appreciate you offering it!
Lynn: I appreciate being here. And I appreciate your work as well. I think you’re doing some very important work as well.
Karen: Thanks so much for making time for the interview!
Lynn: Thank you.
Interview References and Links
Lynn Marie Sager on LinkedIn
Lynn Marie Sager on Bluesky
Lynn Marie Sager author page on Amazon
Lynn Marie Sager on Substack (Navigating a Whackadoodle World)
Catching Life’s Currents: A 14-week Guideposts Journey
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This post is part of our AI6P interview series on “AI, Software, and Wetware”. It showcases how real people around the world are using their wetware (brains and human intelligence) with AI-based software tools, or are being affected by AI.
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