Welcome to the Creative Pen podcast. I'm Joanna Penn, thriller author and creative entrepreneur,

bringing you interviews, inspiration and information on writing, publishing options and marketing ideas for your book.

You can find the episode show notes, your free author blueprint and lots more information at

TheCreativepen.com. And that's Penn with a double N. And here's the show.

Hello, creatives. I'm Joanna Penn. And this is episode number 527 of the podcast, and it is Sunday the 17th of January 2021 as I record this.

In today's show, I'm talking about co-writing with artificial intelligence tools,

with Yudin Jaya Widjiratni, a Sri Lankan author who co-wrote his novel, The Salvage Crew,

with a number of AI tools, including GPT2.

And he was able to cut down his writing time by several months, talks about it in a joyous manner,

and got a book deal with the traditional publisher.

And the audiobook is narrated by Nathan Fillion from Firefly and Castle fame.

And if you know Nathan Filly and you'll be like,

ooh, exciting as I did. So Yuda talks about how he co-created the book and how we can think of

co-writing with these tools, co-creating with these tools, rather than the idea of AI taking our jobs.

So this is a fascinating conversation. Of course,

there are plenty of challenges with technology, but he talks about it being incredibly freeing

to co-write this way. And it was a joyous three months. I never had writer's block,

and it sped up the creative process once the tools were written anyway, and of course we'll talk about all

that. We also consider the question, what does it mean for art if art can be automated and

humans can't perceive the difference? So again, we have, you know, I'm jolly about this,

I'm upbeat about this and Yudda is, has a lot of deep knowledge that I don't have. So

some of my questions hopefully will be like your questions. Since Yuda wrote the salvage crew,

...