00:00:07
Speaker 1: You know, before I was prepping for this show, I was in a bookstore, a large conglomerate bookstore chain, having my coffee, looking through news about the future, and I'm thinking to myself, how is artificial intelligence going to literally rewrite how authors, how artists, how all of these creative economies interact with themselves and with the technology. We've dabbled on that in the music industry. Here on this program today, we're going to do it with the book industry. Hello Future, It's me keV. This is a dispatch from the digital frontier. The planet is Earth, the year is twenty twenty six, and my guest today is Tim Bouche. He's an author. He's really been on the front lines of this. You and technology have written about one hundred and twenty books in like a very short period of time because you've been harnessing artificial intelligence. I'm not here to say whether I think that's right or wrong. I'm just fascinated by this trend and how and your take because you were really an early adopter in embracing and owning the fact that you're using AI. First of all, how did you get into that lane? And let's go from there.
00:01:11
Speaker 2: Yeah, well, I've been working in technology for about about ten years, working for platforms and doing like operations and policy and content moderation and things like this. So I've got just in the habit of always kind of trying out whatever the new wave of technology is to kind of see how it works and how it's going to impact different things, you know, for social media or you know, different contexts. So that's really just been a habit of mine. And I have kind of ongoing work that I've done world building, like sort of fantasy sci fi universes that when I go and do those experiments, I just kind of plug in my own details of these worlds that I built and use that as the base and then kind of take that from there and see what I can do with a new thing. And I guess it really started probably three and a half four years ago when the AI tools started getting better. They started reaching the point where there was like I don't want to say perfectly production ready quality outputs, but get getting closer and closer. And I kind of liked that early wave because it was still kind of low quality. You know, you got kind of like low budget results sometimes that were incorrect or not what you expected, but in a kind of a cool way. So I've always trying to kind of try to incorporate that into my work of like what is the state of the art, you know, and is that good quality? Is that medium quality? Is that bad quality? Because I've already seen like people looking back at you know, how the original Dolly from Open Ai produced things, and people are kind of already nostalgic for that wave of stuff. So I've done that with books. I did one hundred and twenty five books in a year, and I did the same thing at the end of last year, kind of the same approach with suno AI, which is a music creation thing, and I did forty full length albums in a month, just to see like what is the process, what is the workflow, what is the quality that you can get? And is it good enough? Is it interesting? Is it threatening to human creatives? Or is it something that's going to open up new pathways?
00:03:07
Speaker 1: Okay, So even like two weeks ago on the New York Times there's an article headlined the new fabio is Claude. The romance industry, always at the vanguard of technological change, is rapidly adapting to AI. Not everyone is on board. So I mean, folks, you don't have to be a rocket scientist or a technologist to understand the dynamics. Some people are arguing this is great, This is an efficiency thing for the book industry. It allows for more creation, more content, more products. Other folks say, hey, wait a minute, we got to protect the authors. It's just a bunch of AI slop. Tim When you're writing the books with AI, it's incredible your output because you know, that's a lot of folks think that AI is going to help boost production and output. But is more, always more? Is writing one hundred and twenty five books in a year as good as writing that one best seller that you put yourself away in.
00:03:58
Speaker 2: And I mean, if I could write that one best seller, you know I I would happily do that, Like, just give me the template and all. I'm happy to do that. But you know, I think that the thing that's interesting to me about the technology is all of these questions is the fact that it's not nailed down, is the fact that it's controversial, and that there are all these pluses and minuses about it. You know, I don't fall into either camp. I fall into both camps, you know, Like I think there are things about it that are really bad and kind of abhorrent about how it works or the results that you get. And then there are things about it that are just like too fascinating for me to turn away from as an artist, you know, Like I've looked a lot at art history, especially over the last let's say, like two hundred and fifty years since kind of like just before Impressionism, and it's always been the same thing. Like every time there's a new technological thing that comes along, it changes how the arts work, It changes what is exception, it changes what you know, what is the vanguard, what is interesting, And every time there's a new vanguard, it's like people don't like it, you know, they say like, oh, this shouldn't be in our in our academy exhibit, or this shouldn't be in our traditional method of you know, presenting things or whatever. And it's happened again and again, you know, with photography, with digital art, and so I don't see this as being any different than any of any of those stages. And for me as an artist, I would much rather be someone who has like deeply, deeply engaged with the technology and firsthand seeing what's good and bad about it instead of being somebody sitting on the sidelines and just being It gets to this I don't know, and I don't want to know.
00:05:31
Speaker 1: It gets to this question of can artists use technology? I mean, and what is a paint brush but a form of technology? I tend to lean way more on the side of embrace the technology, use inject art into technology. I think that's a positive. It kind of feels like if a painter were to say that a camera were a bad thing, and we consider.
00:05:52
Speaker 2: Fill right, and that happened throughout history.
00:05:54
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, And so I love that existential question. I think for me and even with me, music right, I mean, and everyone has these conversations with themselves with music. You know, if I ask my parents, you know, Frank Sinatra as a musician, but Frank Sinatra at one point was a pop artist, and you know, but they wouldn't consider the you know, the kids, the gen zs these days, who are who are releasing whatever songs they're they're releasing on the TikTok or whatever. But uh, I do find it interesting and and so I what I love about what you said is that you're world building. You know, I folks who are listening to this program. I haven't really spoken about it much, but I'm developing a play on the West Coast and it's been taking me more than two years. It's it's called The Man in the Red Hat. It's fictional, but it's definitely inspired by my time as a journalist. And what I love about theater is that that, to me, represents the original immersive experience and you're you've got people in a room. It's communal. And what I'm excited about, and I'd love your thoughts on this, tim is how technology might be deployed creatively in the future for storytelling to continue to bring about community. And you're starting to see it with Cosm, which is a company that does immersive sports viewing with immersive screens. You're seeing it with the Sphere in Las Vegas, when we embrace the technology instead of an intuitively resisting it. This is why I'm very curious for your thoughts. Where do you think this is all headed in the next decade and beyond for specifically the book industry.
00:07:29
Speaker 2: Well, I mean I first of all, I worked in professional theater for five or six years, so that resonates with me on a lot of levels. Of this kind of immersive thing, but also like thinking about real people in a real space, you know. But before coming back to that thought, I was reading a book recently. It was about like relationships and stuff. I found myself while reading that book wishing that I could like enter the details of what's going on in my life and then have the book get kind of like rewritten on the fly to focus and what's my thing. So I think that's kind of where I expect in general, the direction will go. Is that is that the ability to really personalize and customize whatever your experience is for you. But while you do that and make it for you, that could become alienating, you know, like because you're something becomes so customized to you, it could risk that, you know, you no longer have a communal experience of music because you know, I made in my last year, I made like eight hundred and twenty songs in a month, you know, but I'm the only person that's ever listened to all of those songs, you know, and like, so it's there's something there.
00:08:34
Speaker 1: It could be isolated.
00:08:35
Speaker 2: Yeah, and we're seeing this with kids.
00:08:37
Speaker 1: In the screen time. I mean, when you when you just live your life online, and I want to come back to something for the self help market, for the self help industry, it actually could create new communities in terms if what you're if what you're engaging with in the self help book is actually then directing you into that face to face person to person that I just had to meet the future moment, folks, where the self help industry, Bouchet as our guest, who is really out front in terms of embracing artificial intelligence to write books and to be an author? The self help industry is one thing. What about like the mystery thriller, because you could just choose your own adventure when I was a kid back in the old NAELM thirty six. Okay, but when I was a kid, it would be you know, I remember those books where it would be choose your own adventure. I love those books. You know, if this character does this, or you know, go turn to this page, or if this character does acer to that page. I would imagine that with artificial intelligence to choose your own adventure, storytelling capabilities must you must think about that.
00:09:38
Speaker 2: Right, I Mean that's a little bit what my books are. So like my books, they all take place on the same kind of like multiverse. But from book to book the details change, you know, like sometimes even within a book because of the way that AI works, like the a I would forget the name of a character, or would forget the gender of a character, or it wouldn't invent different random stuff. But then within hallucination, it's of AI. But I try to incorporate that as a as a feature, not a bug, you know. But then from each book, when you hit a certain point that there's another book that already exists about that topic, you know, there's a link out to that, and it becomes kind of like a chooser own adventure, or I think of it as like an open world, you know, like in video games where there's kind of like all these different side quests you can go on and you just choose what you want to do. There's not even necessarily a central organizing story, you know, this just like that's what's there. You explore, you check out stuff. So I think it's it's going to be the same AI influenced media, you know. And like what I've done is like every time I thought of a new topic to kind of flesh out in my world building, I would just go I would often start with like, Okay, I go into the LM and I say, like, here are x y Z details about my world. Let's do an Encyclopedia entry that kind of like grounds the narrative about you know, these details, and then just see what it comes up with. And then from there. A lot of times I would take and I would have it do kind of like very short narrative slices like slice of life vignettes kind of that take place within that context. And like I said, between book to book, like the details change. And I think that's part of what's interesting about it these technologies for now is because they're so inconsistent and because they're so hallucinatory, there's something kind of magic about that. If you accept that that that could be a feature. You know, like in literature, we have this concept of the unreliable narrator, which has existed for thousands of years. You know, it's like someone who's telling you a story that you can't really necessarily believe everything they say, but from what they're saying you can kind of like tease out something. So that's kind of how I.
00:11:38
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's called cable news, keep going.
00:11:42
Speaker 2: Yeah, it exists everywhere.
00:11:43
Speaker 1: It does exist everywhere I also think of the user experience, like the user experience that I'm chasing when I pick up a book and read it is calmness, is escapism, is taking my mind off of things. I inherently understand as a human being that my eyes scanning the pages of a story will lead to hopefully a rewiring of my brain for the positive. And I remember when like e readers came out, people openly had conversations, Oh, do you prefer the print holding the book or the or the tablet. I actually prefer actually holding a book, but you know some people don't. Obviously I can read on the tablet now, but I still like the idea of holding a page. Plus, if you take it to the pool and it drops, you're not out a couple hundred bucks. But I wonder if, with the advent of artificial intelligence, as it becomes more evolved, if the user experience in a book is not like the The only influence that we've seen thus far is really twofold one is the intellectual property, world building capabilities, and development, which I love what you're saying about, like a psyclopedia. Encyclopedia that was it. But then secondly, it's just the sheer number of output increase that you can create. So I'm curious about even that, like how you are thinking through all of that in the next twenty thirty forty years. Yeah.
00:13:11
Speaker 2: Well, I did think a lot early on about like, is there a way that within a text, you know, whether it's an electronic text or a printed text, that we could easily and clearly differentiate who is the speaker, who is the source? You know, like in a play, a written play, we can attribute things to a narrator or characters. But when we have texts that are hybrid, where it's like a human writer plus AI, Like, what would be an easy or effective way to delineate when the AI is speaking as the writer and when the human is and kind of the dance between the two. I never found a simple way to execute it.
00:13:46
Speaker 1: Yeah, well, because I don't think the technology is there yet. And what's so fascinating about theater or any script for that matter, is that the playwright or the screenplay writer is, by design just create the parameters for world building in the future, and so a director is charged with creating that vision. But I think what's fascinating about that industry is I kind of like the idea of different directors being able to interpret a story with their own experiences like that is what inherently makes storytelling communal. Even when you go see a movie that's a remake, you don't necessarily want to see the same movie. I like when there's different twists put on it, or different periods of time interpret one story very differently than you know another period of time has done. And I think the audience likes that, and there's limits, and it's it inherently makes it more artistic. So I think that's really interesting that you're saying that. Where did you do theater?
00:14:44
Speaker 2: Mostly in Baltimore, a little in Montreal, a little in Cape cod but Baltimore and Washington, mostly Washington, DC, mostly.
00:14:51
Speaker 1: What theaters in DC.
00:14:53
Speaker 2: I worked a little bit at the Shakespeare Theater in Dalla Hispanic Theater in Baltimore, a lot at the every Man Theater Center Stage, and then a bunch of Montreal at Centaur and what Seagulls Center and some of the places.
00:15:07
Speaker 1: Very cool. All right, Well, listen, if people want to check out your books, where should they go?
00:15:11
Speaker 2: They could go to Lostbooks. Dot ca A is the kind of the headquarters of my little publishing thing, and then from there you can click through and it will take you to the ebooks are where most of the AI stuff is amazing.
00:15:25
Speaker 1: Well, thank you so much Tim Bouchet for showing up to Hello Future. Thank you and have a great tomorrow today, thanks you too,
Speaker 1: You know, before I was prepping for this show, I was in a bookstore, a large conglomerate bookstore chain, having my coffee, looking through news about the future, and I'm thinking to myself, how is artificial intelligence going to literally rewrite how authors, how artists, how all of these creative economies interact with themselves and with the technology. We've dabbled on that in the music industry. Here on this program today, we're going to do it with the book industry. Hello Future, It's me keV. This is a dispatch from the digital frontier. The planet is Earth, the year is twenty twenty six, and my guest today is Tim Bouche. He's an author. He's really been on the front lines of this. You and technology have written about one hundred and twenty books in like a very short period of time because you've been harnessing artificial intelligence. I'm not here to say whether I think that's right or wrong. I'm just fascinated by this trend and how and your take because you were really an early adopter in embracing and owning the fact that you're using AI. First of all, how did you get into that lane? And let's go from there.
00:01:11
Speaker 2: Yeah, well, I've been working in technology for about about ten years, working for platforms and doing like operations and policy and content moderation and things like this. So I've got just in the habit of always kind of trying out whatever the new wave of technology is to kind of see how it works and how it's going to impact different things, you know, for social media or you know, different contexts. So that's really just been a habit of mine. And I have kind of ongoing work that I've done world building, like sort of fantasy sci fi universes that when I go and do those experiments, I just kind of plug in my own details of these worlds that I built and use that as the base and then kind of take that from there and see what I can do with a new thing. And I guess it really started probably three and a half four years ago when the AI tools started getting better. They started reaching the point where there was like I don't want to say perfectly production ready quality outputs, but get getting closer and closer. And I kind of liked that early wave because it was still kind of low quality. You know, you got kind of like low budget results sometimes that were incorrect or not what you expected, but in a kind of a cool way. So I've always trying to kind of try to incorporate that into my work of like what is the state of the art, you know, and is that good quality? Is that medium quality? Is that bad quality? Because I've already seen like people looking back at you know, how the original Dolly from Open Ai produced things, and people are kind of already nostalgic for that wave of stuff. So I've done that with books. I did one hundred and twenty five books in a year, and I did the same thing at the end of last year, kind of the same approach with suno AI, which is a music creation thing, and I did forty full length albums in a month, just to see like what is the process, what is the workflow, what is the quality that you can get? And is it good enough? Is it interesting? Is it threatening to human creatives? Or is it something that's going to open up new pathways?
00:03:07
Speaker 1: Okay, So even like two weeks ago on the New York Times there's an article headlined the new fabio is Claude. The romance industry, always at the vanguard of technological change, is rapidly adapting to AI. Not everyone is on board. So I mean, folks, you don't have to be a rocket scientist or a technologist to understand the dynamics. Some people are arguing this is great, This is an efficiency thing for the book industry. It allows for more creation, more content, more products. Other folks say, hey, wait a minute, we got to protect the authors. It's just a bunch of AI slop. Tim When you're writing the books with AI, it's incredible your output because you know, that's a lot of folks think that AI is going to help boost production and output. But is more, always more? Is writing one hundred and twenty five books in a year as good as writing that one best seller that you put yourself away in.
00:03:58
Speaker 2: And I mean, if I could write that one best seller, you know I I would happily do that, Like, just give me the template and all. I'm happy to do that. But you know, I think that the thing that's interesting to me about the technology is all of these questions is the fact that it's not nailed down, is the fact that it's controversial, and that there are all these pluses and minuses about it. You know, I don't fall into either camp. I fall into both camps, you know, Like I think there are things about it that are really bad and kind of abhorrent about how it works or the results that you get. And then there are things about it that are just like too fascinating for me to turn away from as an artist, you know, Like I've looked a lot at art history, especially over the last let's say, like two hundred and fifty years since kind of like just before Impressionism, and it's always been the same thing. Like every time there's a new technological thing that comes along, it changes how the arts work, It changes what is exception, it changes what you know, what is the vanguard, what is interesting, And every time there's a new vanguard, it's like people don't like it, you know, they say like, oh, this shouldn't be in our in our academy exhibit, or this shouldn't be in our traditional method of you know, presenting things or whatever. And it's happened again and again, you know, with photography, with digital art, and so I don't see this as being any different than any of any of those stages. And for me as an artist, I would much rather be someone who has like deeply, deeply engaged with the technology and firsthand seeing what's good and bad about it instead of being somebody sitting on the sidelines and just being It gets to this I don't know, and I don't want to know.
00:05:31
Speaker 1: It gets to this question of can artists use technology? I mean, and what is a paint brush but a form of technology? I tend to lean way more on the side of embrace the technology, use inject art into technology. I think that's a positive. It kind of feels like if a painter were to say that a camera were a bad thing, and we consider.
00:05:52
Speaker 2: Fill right, and that happened throughout history.
00:05:54
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, And so I love that existential question. I think for me and even with me, music right, I mean, and everyone has these conversations with themselves with music. You know, if I ask my parents, you know, Frank Sinatra as a musician, but Frank Sinatra at one point was a pop artist, and you know, but they wouldn't consider the you know, the kids, the gen zs these days, who are who are releasing whatever songs they're they're releasing on the TikTok or whatever. But uh, I do find it interesting and and so I what I love about what you said is that you're world building. You know, I folks who are listening to this program. I haven't really spoken about it much, but I'm developing a play on the West Coast and it's been taking me more than two years. It's it's called The Man in the Red Hat. It's fictional, but it's definitely inspired by my time as a journalist. And what I love about theater is that that, to me, represents the original immersive experience and you're you've got people in a room. It's communal. And what I'm excited about, and I'd love your thoughts on this, tim is how technology might be deployed creatively in the future for storytelling to continue to bring about community. And you're starting to see it with Cosm, which is a company that does immersive sports viewing with immersive screens. You're seeing it with the Sphere in Las Vegas, when we embrace the technology instead of an intuitively resisting it. This is why I'm very curious for your thoughts. Where do you think this is all headed in the next decade and beyond for specifically the book industry.
00:07:29
Speaker 2: Well, I mean I first of all, I worked in professional theater for five or six years, so that resonates with me on a lot of levels. Of this kind of immersive thing, but also like thinking about real people in a real space, you know. But before coming back to that thought, I was reading a book recently. It was about like relationships and stuff. I found myself while reading that book wishing that I could like enter the details of what's going on in my life and then have the book get kind of like rewritten on the fly to focus and what's my thing. So I think that's kind of where I expect in general, the direction will go. Is that is that the ability to really personalize and customize whatever your experience is for you. But while you do that and make it for you, that could become alienating, you know, like because you're something becomes so customized to you, it could risk that, you know, you no longer have a communal experience of music because you know, I made in my last year, I made like eight hundred and twenty songs in a month, you know, but I'm the only person that's ever listened to all of those songs, you know, and like, so it's there's something there.
00:08:34
Speaker 1: It could be isolated.
00:08:35
Speaker 2: Yeah, and we're seeing this with kids.
00:08:37
Speaker 1: In the screen time. I mean, when you when you just live your life online, and I want to come back to something for the self help market, for the self help industry, it actually could create new communities in terms if what you're if what you're engaging with in the self help book is actually then directing you into that face to face person to person that I just had to meet the future moment, folks, where the self help industry, Bouchet as our guest, who is really out front in terms of embracing artificial intelligence to write books and to be an author? The self help industry is one thing. What about like the mystery thriller, because you could just choose your own adventure when I was a kid back in the old NAELM thirty six. Okay, but when I was a kid, it would be you know, I remember those books where it would be choose your own adventure. I love those books. You know, if this character does this, or you know, go turn to this page, or if this character does acer to that page. I would imagine that with artificial intelligence to choose your own adventure, storytelling capabilities must you must think about that.
00:09:38
Speaker 2: Right, I Mean that's a little bit what my books are. So like my books, they all take place on the same kind of like multiverse. But from book to book the details change, you know, like sometimes even within a book because of the way that AI works, like the a I would forget the name of a character, or would forget the gender of a character, or it wouldn't invent different random stuff. But then within hallucination, it's of AI. But I try to incorporate that as a as a feature, not a bug, you know. But then from each book, when you hit a certain point that there's another book that already exists about that topic, you know, there's a link out to that, and it becomes kind of like a chooser own adventure, or I think of it as like an open world, you know, like in video games where there's kind of like all these different side quests you can go on and you just choose what you want to do. There's not even necessarily a central organizing story, you know, this just like that's what's there. You explore, you check out stuff. So I think it's it's going to be the same AI influenced media, you know. And like what I've done is like every time I thought of a new topic to kind of flesh out in my world building, I would just go I would often start with like, Okay, I go into the LM and I say, like, here are x y Z details about my world. Let's do an Encyclopedia entry that kind of like grounds the narrative about you know, these details, and then just see what it comes up with. And then from there. A lot of times I would take and I would have it do kind of like very short narrative slices like slice of life vignettes kind of that take place within that context. And like I said, between book to book, like the details change. And I think that's part of what's interesting about it these technologies for now is because they're so inconsistent and because they're so hallucinatory, there's something kind of magic about that. If you accept that that that could be a feature. You know, like in literature, we have this concept of the unreliable narrator, which has existed for thousands of years. You know, it's like someone who's telling you a story that you can't really necessarily believe everything they say, but from what they're saying you can kind of like tease out something. So that's kind of how I.
00:11:38
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's called cable news, keep going.
00:11:42
Speaker 2: Yeah, it exists everywhere.
00:11:43
Speaker 1: It does exist everywhere I also think of the user experience, like the user experience that I'm chasing when I pick up a book and read it is calmness, is escapism, is taking my mind off of things. I inherently understand as a human being that my eyes scanning the pages of a story will lead to hopefully a rewiring of my brain for the positive. And I remember when like e readers came out, people openly had conversations, Oh, do you prefer the print holding the book or the or the tablet. I actually prefer actually holding a book, but you know some people don't. Obviously I can read on the tablet now, but I still like the idea of holding a page. Plus, if you take it to the pool and it drops, you're not out a couple hundred bucks. But I wonder if, with the advent of artificial intelligence, as it becomes more evolved, if the user experience in a book is not like the The only influence that we've seen thus far is really twofold one is the intellectual property, world building capabilities, and development, which I love what you're saying about, like a psyclopedia. Encyclopedia that was it. But then secondly, it's just the sheer number of output increase that you can create. So I'm curious about even that, like how you are thinking through all of that in the next twenty thirty forty years. Yeah.
00:13:11
Speaker 2: Well, I did think a lot early on about like, is there a way that within a text, you know, whether it's an electronic text or a printed text, that we could easily and clearly differentiate who is the speaker, who is the source? You know, like in a play, a written play, we can attribute things to a narrator or characters. But when we have texts that are hybrid, where it's like a human writer plus AI, Like, what would be an easy or effective way to delineate when the AI is speaking as the writer and when the human is and kind of the dance between the two. I never found a simple way to execute it.
00:13:46
Speaker 1: Yeah, well, because I don't think the technology is there yet. And what's so fascinating about theater or any script for that matter, is that the playwright or the screenplay writer is, by design just create the parameters for world building in the future, and so a director is charged with creating that vision. But I think what's fascinating about that industry is I kind of like the idea of different directors being able to interpret a story with their own experiences like that is what inherently makes storytelling communal. Even when you go see a movie that's a remake, you don't necessarily want to see the same movie. I like when there's different twists put on it, or different periods of time interpret one story very differently than you know another period of time has done. And I think the audience likes that, and there's limits, and it's it inherently makes it more artistic. So I think that's really interesting that you're saying that. Where did you do theater?
00:14:44
Speaker 2: Mostly in Baltimore, a little in Montreal, a little in Cape cod but Baltimore and Washington, mostly Washington, DC, mostly.
00:14:51
Speaker 1: What theaters in DC.
00:14:53
Speaker 2: I worked a little bit at the Shakespeare Theater in Dalla Hispanic Theater in Baltimore, a lot at the every Man Theater Center Stage, and then a bunch of Montreal at Centaur and what Seagulls Center and some of the places.
00:15:07
Speaker 1: Very cool. All right, Well, listen, if people want to check out your books, where should they go?
00:15:11
Speaker 2: They could go to Lostbooks. Dot ca A is the kind of the headquarters of my little publishing thing, and then from there you can click through and it will take you to the ebooks are where most of the AI stuff is amazing.
00:15:25
Speaker 1: Well, thank you so much Tim Bouchet for showing up to Hello Future. Thank you and have a great tomorrow today, thanks you too,
