Become a Creator today!Start creating today - Share your story with the world!
Start for free
00:00:00
00:00:01
I'm Cowriting a Book with AI – This is My Process
0 Plays2 seconds ago
In this AI marketing podcast, Dan Sanchez dives into the fascinating process of cowriting a book with AI, sharing his journey of crafting a comprehensive book on the 5 types of AI marketing. Dan addresses the challenges and skepticism surrounding AI-authored content and details his method for combining his own insights with AI-generated text to create a book that is both informative and compelling. He illuminates the tools he’s using, such as ChatGPT and Google Notebook LM, and emphasizes the importance of feeding AI with quality raw material and iterative collaboration. Listen to this episode if you're curious about how AI can enhance your writing projects and provide innovative assistance in content creation.
Resources Mentioned:
- AI Business Society by Social Media Examiner: https://www.socialmediaexaminer.com/aisociety/
- Google Notebook LM: https://notebooklm.google.com
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/digitalmarketingdan
Timestamps:
00:00 AI-book collaborations; quality concerns persist.
06:24 Organized research supports arguments and enhances understanding.
08:27 Defining AI marketing's five types aids understanding.
10:57 Collaborated with AI to organize book chapters.
15:58 ChatGPT asks detailed questions for compelling storytelling.
19:43 AI enhances book writing as a collaborative tool.
22:22 Publishing book on Amazon and podcast, free access.
Recommended
Transcript
AI Co-authorship: The Future of Books
00:00:00
Speaker
In 10 years, nearly every book written will have been co-written with AI. I say that because I'm currently co-writing my first book on the five types of AI marketing with AI, and I thought I'd share with you a bit of the process that I'm using in order to create this book. So before I dive into the process, let's talk about the elephant in the room. Can you actually make a good book with AI? Can it even be a book worth reading at all, even by my my wife or my mother?
00:00:29
Speaker
And let's talk about that because I think that's the big thing on the table because everybody's seeing social or AI content on social everywhere and it's just it's just not good. In fact, we know that there's tools out there that can write a whole book for you, 60,000 words, and they're complete garbage. I've even ordered one of these books before because there's such a lack of good information on AI and marketing out there that I ordered one that I kind of knew was co-written with AI and it it was it was it was a trash book. It was almost all written by AI and there was very little substance in it. There was a lot of words, but I learned almost nothing from the book. In fact, I earn i learned nothing from the book except for that AI can't write good books. So what makes this different? Well, let me tell you, those tools that can write books just based on a single prompt or just the title of the book can only pull from what AI knows about a topic.
00:01:21
Speaker
But we all know that we can use content or previous content or even stories that we feed it in order to get AI to write something for us. that's remarkably good. And that's the process that I wanted to uncover here with writing this book.
The Role of AI in Personal Learning
00:01:36
Speaker
The other thing I wanted to cover was why write a book and why write it with AI in general? The real reason why I'm writing the book is to just farther solidify my own learning. Like sometimes we all know like if you teach to teach something is really to have mastered it. I don't, I'm not really writing this book, expecting it to be read by many. In fact, I'm writing this book more for myself. in order to force myself to think through the topic thoroughly, in order to give enough preview, enough context, enough of an introduction, then and and actually think through each category of these five types of marketing that I'm going to be teaching in this book to really understand them fully.
00:02:14
Speaker
By forcing myself to actually write a certain amount of words about it, it's forcing me to dig deeper and better wrestle better understand the concept and wrestle with it so that I can more authoritatively speak to it. The other advantage of having written a book is it's easier to pass on what I know to others. If somebody else wants to go deeper into it, I could be like, here, here's the book, here, here's the manual I wrote on this here. Here's the thing, if you want more, and there it is. And it also is a way for AI to better understand me, who I am, why I'm doing what I'm doing, and for me to be able to even take this one book and repurpose it into other pieces of content down the road.
00:02:48
Speaker
It's already been so beneficial for me to have the first three chapters of this book done because I can give it to AI and AI better understands my story and my perspective and my viewpoints on AI and how I've gotten into it.
00:03:01
Speaker
It's been remarkable for other projects like rewriting my about page on the website or other web copy or a social post that I've already created based on the couple of first chapters of this book alone. So having a full book, I can only imagine the the massive benefit of having a body of work to go off of and to train AI in the now and in the future. So that's why I'm writing this book. It's more for me. It's more for myself.
00:03:26
Speaker
I'm also hoping to get in a rep because I think there will be future books that I write. And this first one, it'll probably just be okay. Hopefully it gets to a C level so that when I write future books that are even more important, I can get to a B and then to an A level as I learn to co-write with AI. And even as AI gets better and understanding who I am and what I want to put out into the world. So with that said, let's dive into some of the process that I'm using to co-write a book with AI.
Tools for Organizing Writing Projects
00:03:53
Speaker
So let's talk tools first. The first one is chat GPT because that's my main AI tool of choice. And the tool I'm using within chat GPT is called projects. Yes. If you haven't started using projects, I highly recommend it. It has become my favorite part of chat GPT.
00:04:10
Speaker
And just a quick overview, the reason the thing that makes Chet projects particularly powerful is because it's just like a custom GPT in that you can add project files to it or documents for it to go off of and instructions in order to guide it so you don't have to re-prompt it with the same basic URX trying to do Y with some basic instructions. But it actually contains all the different conversations you have related to this project and remembers the conversations you've had it before.
00:04:36
Speaker
So you can go from one chat to a new chat and it actually remembers the conversation from the last chat. That's really helpful when you're writing a book and like what I'm doing is actually separating out each chapter into its own chat session. It's really helpful when it can remember what happened in chapter one when we're writing chapter two and then chapter three, it becomes paramount in order to form a more cohesive book.
00:04:59
Speaker
I actually did a full breakdown of chat GPT projects in a paid community called the AI Business Society over at Social Media Examiner. So I'll drop a link to that in the description. I'm actually dropping more and more in-depth tutorials in that paid business AI Business Society now. So if you want to go check that out and see my teachings on those, I'm going to be doing less of those here. And the things I'll be covering in this podcast will be more here's what I made and frameworks from now on. But so if you want to learn more about projects, go over to the AI Business Society and check that out.
00:05:33
Speaker
The other tool I'm using is Google Notebook LM. This has been a fantastic tool because what you can do is pull a ton of raw material and then actually use it to actually synthesize it down or to find all the different elements that you need, pull them in to actually pull them into something like a book project.
00:05:51
Speaker
Google Notebook LM is really cool as a like a chat bot, like chat GPT, but it doesn't hallucinate nearly as much because it only pulls from the documents that ah ah you give it. And that's powerful because I love that chat GPT can fill in the gaps for me, but that also means when it comes to hard facts and data that it can hallucinate sometimes. So you have to watch carefully for the things that it pulls in in order to fill in the details that you didn't give it.
00:06:15
Speaker
With note Google Notebook LM, it does that far less because it's dependent on the information that you give it. You can see even on my screen here, and for everybody following along visually, you can see this, but if you're following in the audio players, just know that I'll be specifying what I'm seeing in detail so that you can get 95% of what I'm talking about even if you're only listening.
00:06:35
Speaker
On the left hand side, I have all the documents that I've bought pulled into this. i Every book needs some raw material, some research, some case studies, some stories in order to fill out the chapters and provide proper evidence to support your arguments, your logic, and your thinking.
00:06:53
Speaker
In this case, I went and found a number of different research reports as well as just a mountain of case studies produced by some of the top leading AI companies because they're incentivized to pull out the best case studies of how well their tool is being used. So I went and found all the case studies from Google and anthropic and open AI as raw materials in order to mine for the types of case studies and stories that I needed to support some of the arguments.
00:07:17
Speaker
So, I've loaded them all onto the left side. You can see there's chat in the middle of which many times I've gone in and asked for case studies on X or on Y or on Z you know in order to understand what people are saying about how the capabilities of AI are helping their business that I'm using to provide stories for the book.
00:07:35
Speaker
Most people know Google Notebook LM for its ability to give the audio overviews, which I could actually create a podcast out of all these different ah ah sources, but that's not why I'm here. I'm here because um'm it's a good way to actually mine and pull the data that you need out of a huge variety of resources from YouTube videos, documents, research reports. I've used this many times for other projects, but it's particularly helpful for a book project when you need certain stories and data pulled.
Defining AI Marketing: A Taxonomy Approach
00:08:03
Speaker
So back to chatgpt. The way I started this book is with a simple idea. It was first a podcast episode. In fact, that episode and the transcript of it is loaded in the project files. It was an episode just called the five types of AI marketing. And it was a podcast episode that I did where I kind of broke down the idea and I learned more and more that the idea was a really useful one.
00:08:24
Speaker
Because as we enter into ah ah an age where we're using the term AI marketing more and more, it's very helpful to have a clear definition of what AI marketing is and the different categories of it. Because it actually gives us a way to talk about it, analyze it, discuss it, and improve it. If you don't understand a topic and the areas that it covers, it becomes much harder to innovate in it.
00:08:48
Speaker
There's a reason why in zoology you have all these different classifications of animals and sub classifications and sub sub classifications in order to better understand the animal kingdom in order to build distinctions between them so that you can better handle them in groups and analyze what's going on. It's the same thing with every different topic. Every topic has its own taxonomy so that you can better understand it and build upon what's been done. So that's what I'm trying to accomplish in this book, mostly just for myself. I want to better understand these things and wrestle with it and put it out in front of others and have other people kick it and test it. and There will probably be a part two to this book because I put this out and a few smart people tell me, hey, there's not five types. There's actually six. I've wrestled with it a lot. I've already previewed this idea with others, so I'm pretty sure there's only five. But we'll see in the future.
00:09:35
Speaker
So that's the beginning. You have to start with an idea. My idea is just simply breaking down the definition and the five types of AI marketing. The next thing I did was just organize the book into
Structuring the Book with AI Assistance
00:09:47
Speaker
chapters. You have to start flushing out the idea as far as how you want to organize all the different chapters. And I just did that in an Apple Notes document, created a bulleted list.
00:09:57
Speaker
and sub-bullets for every single chapter so I know how each chapter would play out into different sections. So before I even entered AI, I had already done the work of thinking through the idea, how I would organize the idea, and how I would present the idea in the book. And that's when I actually came into the first conversation with AI with all that thinking already done.
00:10:17
Speaker
yeah I'm going to open up the first conversation in chat GPT where I've actually loaded in that outline. It was a rough outline from Apple Notes and just said, hey, here's my current working outline below. Can you help me flesh it out a bit? And of course, I'd already preloaded the instructions of this project with the goal of the project, what I was trying to accomplish, and my writing style so that it could write more like me.
00:10:39
Speaker
So chat GPT did a fantastic job of actually flushing it out. some Some with pieces that I was like, oh yeah, that makes sense. And probably some pieces where I had to go back and collaborate with it in order to hone it into what I had ah ah a vision for. Because obviously chat GPT will just take it and run with it. And sometimes it runs in the right direction. Sometimes it doesn't. I went back and forth with it for a very long conversation trying to get the outline right trying to add to it fill it in in certain parts and really wrestle with it on how to even organize chapters i went to how do i build sections or do i just build beefy chapters for each type and i wrestled with how to organize it what types of things to put in their case studies frameworks how to apply it there was all these different conversations that i've had with chat gpt and just the outlining
00:11:25
Speaker
section right here in order to understand what my what the journey would look like what would I'd have to fill in with it afterwards but after a long conversation we ended up settling on how to best organize the chapters and the different parts of each chapter within it in order to start off on what became chapter one the problem of overwhelm Now if you're skeptical, I promise, like most of this book, almost all of this book is actually me speaking and AI just organizing it.
00:11:56
Speaker
I am not the best writer. I'm certainly not. I'm okay at writing LinkedIn posts and explaining things, even teaching things in a so short blog post. But when it comes to fleshing out a story for an opening of a chapter, I just don't have the right the ability to craft the written word and way to really craft a compelling story. ChatGPT is much better than me at doing it. I'm sure Claude's even better than ChatGPT.
00:12:19
Speaker
But for the most part, I found chatgpt to write pretty compelling stories if you give it enough direction and raw material to work from. So let's look a little bit at how I'm doing this with chatgpt. For each chapter in chatgpt, for the conversation, I'm opening up with the goal. It's like, hey, let's write the first chapter that we will cover the problem, my story and what's next.
00:12:39
Speaker
and I kind of give it an overview of what that chapter is going to break down. It actually flushes out the chapter into a more thorough outline. Once we go back and forth on and agree on that outline, I actually started breaking down the first section. I think about every single chapter as a module or a section within the chapter. And since chatgpt can really only write about a thousand to two thousand words at a time-ish,
00:13:02
Speaker
yeah even even less. It's probably more like 700 to about 1200 words in one shot. You have to think about how to work with it in order to get each shot correct. Now for a lot of you writers out there, it would just be easier for you to write the thousand words than to do all the work that I'm doing with chat GPT in order to write it. Because I promise I'm putting a lot of work into every single little section in order to get it right so that it's not having to rely on its own memory and its own understanding of how a topic works and can just literally regurgitate what I've already given it in a style that I wanted to write it in. So what I do is actually preload it with all the information. I can tell the story about how I got into AI marketing and even my backstory about how my experience is relevant to it.
00:13:47
Speaker
I just give it in a very boring way right like we can all recount the things that have happened But it takes a certain amount of creativeness and finesse in order to turn it into a compelling story so I actually gave it a first pass of What should be in this chapter and a little bit of my story you can see I'm actually like putting it all in here I think it even started. I think this is a a blog post. I wrote on the topic and I then go ahead and just, I use the dictation tool a lot when working with AI. There's a fun little ah ah on my Apple apple keyboard called F5 and it has a little picture of a microphone and I often just tap it here. I'll do it right here. I'll just go tap it. Oh, and then for some reason it does not want to work right now.
00:14:29
Speaker
For whatever reason, it's not working, but if you go usually when I tap that key, a little the ding sounds and you can start talking and it just starts dictating whatever the heck you're saying. It's probably because I'm recording. I went and dictated the full story. I then asked it, what are some things that we can do? It says, some of this is my primary story I would like to start with. It actually outlined my story. And I then asked it.
00:14:52
Speaker
What are pieces of the story that are missing? What are details that you need to know in order to make this story more compelling? I also gave it an example of an opening story of one of my favorite business books from Tim Ferriss. I took a screenshot of his first ah one of his opening chapters and it's where he starts off because he's got a really profound story to tell, right?
00:15:12
Speaker
this really exciting story and I like I really like the style of how this one's how this one is opened up Can we use the same similar style to what Tim Ferriss? Can you I took a picture of it uploaded it tell it to analyze it and then asked it to use a similar way of how Tim Ferriss opens up in the action of his story and chat GPT understood it and Wrote an outline of what what the details of how this story opens up for Tim Ferriss so that he could apply it to me I also then asked it gave it more story details Oh, and here, ChatGPT actually asked me those questions, the details it needed in order to make a more compelling story. It was asking me, like, what did the room look like at the Infusionsoft conference? Was there a particular image, sound, or smell that stood out? How did you feel standing there? Why did this conference feel so important to you? Was it validation, knowledge, or the spark of a bigger vision? Do you have moments of self-doubt early in your career, like feeling out of depth while figuring out AdWords, landing pages, or automation?
00:16:08
Speaker
How did that push you through? You can see it's asking me questions, not just about what happened, but about what's going on inside me, in details about the story in order to paint a more vivid picture of what was going on at some of the key some of the key points in my career that make this story more intriguing and interesting, and for people to put themselves in my shoes during this story so they can better understand my perspective. If you think about it,
00:16:35
Speaker
That's a lot like how a ghostwriter would work in crafting a book. A ghostwriter is going to get the initial draft of the story and then ask for more details in order to fill in the gaps but to get the the raw material again they need in order to work with the subject matter expert to write a compelling story, a compelling book.
00:16:55
Speaker
And that's what chatgpt is doing here, but you have to ask it and prompt it in order to look for those things. It will otherwise just go ahead and take whatever you've given it and run with it. But if you ask it, hey, what are some things that are missing? Chatgpt does a fantastic job of understanding what it was given, what is needed, and then taking what's left.
00:17:13
Speaker
I then went and dictated all the details. I just went question by question and answered it, dictating it and be like, I would repeat the question and then answer it to the fullest ability that I could and then move to the next question, repeat the question and then answer it to the fullest ability I could. You could see it's one big long paragraph as I dictated the whole thing out.
00:17:31
Speaker
and then Chachibiti said, this is an incredible detail and paints ah ah a vivid picture of your journey and insights. Here's a plan to craft an opening story inspired by Tim Ferriss's style infused with your voice and details and with the strong narrative arc that sets up the chapter's theme. It then goes and sets a very strong outline I looked at it, said that it I think I filled it in with some more detail here, even more, and then it crafted the opening story. And the opening story sounds like this. The room roared. Thousands of marketers packed the immaculate ballroom of a luxury resort in Scottsdale, Arizona. Bold branding adorned the massive stage where three finalists stood under the blinding spotlights, each pitching their campaigns to win the coveted title of Ultimate Marketer.
00:18:16
Speaker
This wasn't just a kind another conference. This was a showcase of possibility. As the crowd cheered and applauded, I sat, captivated, my mind racing. These weren't ordinary campaigns. They were masterpieces. Each finalist presented a marketing system that seemed to defy the limits of what was what I thought was possible. They had turned chaos into clarity, weaving automation, creativity, strategy into something both highly profitable and deeply engaging for their customers.
00:18:44
Speaker
And that was the opening two chapters of what's going to become the opening chapter of this book.
AI as a Writing Collaborator
00:18:50
Speaker
So it wrote something better than what I could have written, because I am not a great storyteller in writing. So I'm i'm more of more of a teacher, more of a learner, experimenter, and a tinker and doer that likes to just report back on what I've learned, like what I'm doing here with writing this book.
00:19:09
Speaker
are many skills I have. Writing stories is not one of them currently, maybe someday. with Chat GPT, I can now co-write this book. It is pulling from my story and my thoughts in order to write each section of the book.
00:19:24
Speaker
And I think this is powerful. I know authors who have written books that are now co-writing with AI now in order to write their second or third book because it's just a smoother process. AI is such a great collaborator when it comes to fleshing out ideas, poking at your ideas, or adding contributions that you never would have thought of to add had you not asked it for some feedback. It's the same thing we do when we work with humans. Why not use AI as something that's always available anytime we need to pull out our phone to jot down an idea or think through something to get feedback or to flush out an idea or to actually start a first draft for us in order to get things done. AI is remarkable at it if you know how to guide it and lead it through the process. Obviously use the canvas feature often when working with chat GPT because I will go back and have ah ah edit a paragraph
00:20:16
Speaker
or I can enter in a new space and ask it just to fill in some more details here based on the story. and So working with projects and canvas together are very powerful features within chat GPT that are making this book writing process much easier. And I won't say this whole thing is made completely seamless. There are many times where I go back and forth and i'll be like, chat GPT, did we go in the wrong direction for this whole chapter? What if we approached it like this?
00:20:41
Speaker
have to be You have to be careful when you do it. That's what I found because chat GPT will be overly agreeable and be like, oh yeah, you should totally do that. Oh yeah, you should totally do that. When you can drive the thing off the rails and actually come back to original drafts that I made because I ended up changing it too much and then finding that the original route that I had was actually the better one.
00:21:00
Speaker
and that maybe some of my new ideas should just be held off for a different publication at a different time. So that is a brief introduction to this book. I will be talking about it on the show. I am still in the process of writing this, but I wanted to showcase it farther along rather than doing a super long mega episode about how I'm doing this by giving you a peek into the process and also previewing and kind of pre-marketing, if you will, building in public or learning here with you out in public.
Making AI Marketing Concepts Accessible
00:21:27
Speaker
what I'm working on so that you can know that I'm writing a book, that it's going to come out hopefully in this first quarter, and I'll be publishing it. But also, i like this first book, again, I'm not expecting it to be a pure work of art, like that it's going to be a revolutionary book. I expect it to be a good book with some really good ideas in it, actionable, and to help solidify the definition around AI and the five types of AI. It's a really simple book. It's it's an idea.
00:21:55
Speaker
put into a book form that I'm going to be using later on and and build on top of. So it's a foundational piece of thinking for me. Which is why even though I'll be putting it out on Amazon and Audible, I will also be publishing each chapter for free on this podcast and putting it out on my own website. So if you want to consume it, it'll be out there for you to consume for free. But if you want to buy it in the book form or download in the Audible store, it'll also be there too.
00:22:21
Speaker
These are all things that I haven't even done before, so I'm looking forward to the process of just figuring out how to get a book in Amazon, how to get a book on Audible, so I could kind of learn that process too. So again, when in the future, I have another idea for the book. I've already gone through the ropes a little bit about how to set it up and check GPT, work through the process, and get it published and distributed.
00:22:39
Speaker
This was kind of vulnerable because, again, I haven't fully worked through this. So let me know if this like early behind-the-scenes look on how I'm thinking through a project, how I'm organizing an AI and utilizing the features in order to accomplish a bigger task or a bigger project is useful to you. Hit me up on LinkedIn. I'm at LinkedIn dot.com slash IN slash digital marketing Dan in order to let me know.
00:23:03
Speaker
And if this episode has been helpful to you, something that is very helpful, if you want to give back to this podcast, an easy thing you can do is to leave a review, either by tapping the thumbs up on the YouTube video and leaving a comment below or on Apple, giving it a rating that you think it deserves and a quick review about how this has been helpful to you.