The Future of Writing: AI and Human Collaboration wth Dan Curran

Brent Peterson (00:01.774)
Welcome to this episode of Uncharted Entrepreneurship brought to you by EO Minnesota and the EO Rally happening May 8th, 2025. I have Dan Curran here. Curran, sorry. From Chapters IO, Dan, go ahead, do an introduction for yourself. Tell us your day-to-day role and one of your passions.

Dan Curran (00:24.796)
Yeah, thank you for having me again, Dan Curran, EO St. Louis, previous EO member, but I live in right here in the middle of the country. I am the co-founder of chapters.io and we are focused as removing the stress and democratizing book publishing and manuscript writing. We worked in stealth mode in 2023 and in 2024 launched.

in January and have had just a year of exceeding expectations, a few bumps, but really, really enjoying re-imagining publishing. And I believe you asked me another question, but I'll let you repeat that if you want.

Brent Peterson (01:06.237)
What a passion in life. Do you have any passions that you have outside of your work?

Dan Curran (01:11.088)
Well, I grew up in Oklahoma and we would crawl our way to local ponds and rivers to fish. So that's kind of one hobby. But I have a lot of children, a lot of adult age children. So my hobby is, and I hope it continues to grow, is to travel the country and the world where they live in the next five years. So.

And then I love helping people public write their book and tell their stories. So I've got a wonderful life, wonderful wife and, and I love my company. yeah, I'm very busy.

Brent Peterson (01:48.046)
That's great. Yeah, I'm doing grandparent duty as my current passion as a new grandparent. I'm very much enjoying that and learning or going to a new chapter in my life. It's hard to believe I'm 28 years old. Dan, Dan, before we get started, you have volunteered to be part of the Free Joke Project. And I'm going to tell you a joke. Just give me a

Dan Curran (01:54.543)
Nice.

Dan Curran (02:05.978)
Yeah, it got started early.

Brent Peterson (02:16.952)
Give me a rating one through five. No negative ratings, please. And like always, the jokes are ginormously funny. So here we go. My horse will only come out of her stable after dark. She's becoming a nightmare.

Dan Curran (02:38.364)
I'm going to give you three grades, five for effort. I'll give you 4.5 for wittiness. And I'll give you a four for just sophomoric joke. know, so a good joke, you know, no one's going to be offended. No one's going to be offended with that joke. They'll probably pause for a second because it's got a bit of wit in it. So good job.

Brent Peterson (02:56.635)
All right.

Brent Peterson (03:04.716)
Yeah, thinking jokes, that's what I specialize in. All right, so tell us, you told me a little bit about your background in the green room, but why don't you just fill people in on your background and how you came into chapters. Tell us your first chapter.

Dan Curran (03:07.259)
Yeah.

Dan Curran (03:17.754)
Serial, yeah, exactly. So serial entrepreneur, came out of school, had my first job, kind of only job, and then started a company always in marketing space. And I again, live in St. Louis, so we had Anheuser-Busch, Enterprise, Renacar. So there were a lot of big brands at that time, still some here. I slowly went to my passion of writing. So,

any industry has niches, mine has always been around content, blogs, white papers, social media. were, you know, I'm old enough that we were one of the first really to leverage YouTube back in the day and viral, you know, kind of some of the early viral videos of that time. And then got to more geeky type work, more dense type content. So B2B content, technology companies, healthcare, bioscience. So really editorial excellence and

thought leadership and I've been doing that for 15 plus years. In November 30th or 20th, forgot the date, of 2023, something called OpenAI launched something called ChatGBT. I had a couple of hundred writers, that company I had at the time, writers and about a dozen editors. And I didn't know what the impact would be, but I thought it would be something.

I just immediately did what good entrepreneurs do. We just re-imagined the space. just leveraged the chaos to build something, you know, what I think is really special. So we ran towards AI and believe it or not, it had very little do with actual writing fictitious or synthetic content. We used it to find gaps, to help organize, to use transcripts in a more powerful way. So we created chapters of

based on this evolution of AI and certainly trying to capture people's stories in a manuscript format.

Brent Peterson (05:22.854)
yeah, that's, mean, I think that's very interesting and how disruptive chat GPT was at the time, especially for writers. and people tend to look at it as only generative, but I think the analytical properties within it are more powerful than just the generative properties. And I think you mentioned, transcripts. I'm able to generate a fantastic blog post from these interviews.

And it's really been, I hate to say the word game changer because that's an AI word now, but talk a little bit about how that has led you to be maybe more productive and allow your writers to have some more freedom.

Dan Curran (06:09.05)
Yes. So as I mentioned with my previous company, Geeky Dense technical content over the last decade. So we were always transcribing. So every few years there would be an inflection point with the transcription services, right? They just got better and better with AI. They started getting contextually better organizing. And so if you use Otter or Fireflies or any of these tools,

not perfect by any means, but it would organize it. So that's chapters. what Otter and all those other companies have done is train their models to be able to synthesize the content, the actual words being spoken and organize them in some form or fashion. We have done that too, in the context of nonfiction books, nonfiction being how to or memoirs or big idea type books. So as we

You know, as I went through that process, I just learned a lot about interviewing people. Number one, I learned a lot about editorial excellence. You know, for interviewing a scientist or an ex subject matter expert, it's their word. So you can't change that. That's what you're doing. But AI can help organize and what AI does really better than every human or most humans is gap analysis. What what's missing? Where was their overlap?

Where was their inconsistency? So it's again, to use all these overused term, it's a great co-pilot or assistant to help the editor. So we've just taken that evolution over 10 years and just are kind of trying to go where the puck is going as far as the interaction of AI and humans, but it's still, you know, the words are still the humans words. It's just got AI as a great cheerleader and helper.

Brent Peterson (07:59.81)
Yeah, I was just at Shop Talk, which is a conference in Chicago this year. And I made sure I recorded every one of my conversations. And I was able then to run that through Whisper, running on my local machine, and then give me a great just summary of what happened. And I actually made a blog post this morning or a LinkedIn post about my journey through Shop Talk. So I think you're right. It's such an important tool.

Tell us a little bit more about the voice part of it and how I think that's somewhat unique. It's not unique in the industry, but I think the way you're applying it is unique.

Dan Curran (08:39.74)
So I'll commingle, are you talking about voice and tone? Is that what you're, are you talking about the?

Brent Peterson (08:43.875)
Yeah, well, I think just getting instead of having somebody sit down and write a book or your your I think what you're saying is that they some of that is coming from their transcribed words that they're actually saying and they're recording it and then you're coming back and helping to write a book based on that.

Dan Curran (09:01.582)
Yes, absolutely. So that is one of our differentiation, you know, areas of differentiation, so to speak. So a lot of us are not born with the ability to write 50,000 word novels, but that doesn't mean we're not wise and have wisdom and life experiences and a unique perspective. So what if you could speak it or give shorthand writing and what if we chapters

transcribed that voice recording and organized it. So that's what we have done. And again, to go back to my previous company, what we learned is that the scientists at a biopharma company were very bright, but a lot of them just didn't, you know, they might be technical writers for, for academia, but they weren't, you know, writing a blogs or white papers. weren't, they were taking too long. So we would just record and transcribe. that's, you know, that's no, that's,

You know, nothing earth shattering there. It makes sense. Let's, let's transcribe it. But what if we did it for, you know, all these wonderful entrepreneurs that have really garnered a lot of wisdom and want to share that wisdom in the world, but they're busy building their company. They know nothing about publishing. They know nothing about, you know, Amazon or eBooks or audio books. They're just busy building wealth and building their companies. And so our value proposition was to go to them saying, Hey, let's interview you.

And instead of taking nine months or two years or spending $100,000 with a ghostwriter, let us record you, synthesize that, your actual words, but also attach you to a human editor. And so that's what we do. with our company, the editor is there as kind of the adult in the room to really collaborate with the would-be author. But again, to answer your question, yes, we are taking voice transcripts, interviews.

and just removing that stress of writing a book.

Brent Peterson (10:58.658)
Yeah, the stress of having to write. I mean, I think I follow some writers that say, you know, they try to write a thousand words a day. First thing they do is get up and write some words. So you're saying we should speak a thousand words a day and record it.

Dan Curran (11:12.092)
I'm, yeah, well, what I'm saying is I wrote a book during COVID. I found it amazing, very cathartic, but I found it that thousand words a day was hard. You know, I'm just not that disciplined, I guess, or my brain would be somewhere else. And having the ghostwriter model in theory is great. It's like you really need some help, you know, to get your words in a story arc that

really resonate. Well, AI can help with that and an editor can help with that. But instead of spending nine months or two years on your own or six months or nine months with a ghostwriter, we're accelerating that process. it's the cake. Our cake recipe is a little bit of everything that we've talked about and we've packaged it again. Our number one goal is just to remove stress. So if someone wants to record in sprints, if they want to record all at once, we're very flexible. But

We just want to make it super easy to be able to democratize and really get more people to participate. There's a lot of gatekeepers. If any of your listeners know traditional publishing is very arduous and it's got a lot of heartburn. And so we felt, you know, if we can solve that problem and reduce that stress and get more books out there, all the better.

Brent Peterson (12:36.872)
I think that there's always this pull and push with creativity and some people think AI makes you less creative and personally I think it can make you more creative if you use it the right way. What is your view on the creativity part of AI?

Dan Curran (12:56.71)
Well, we're just asking questions and recording, transcribing and organizing. So I a hundred percent agree with you. It makes you more creative. I think it's also a lot more ethical than I don't think I know than a ghostwriter, you know, for some reason they're getting a hall pass here and, I use, we, you know, we use kind of hybrid ghostwriter, you know, editors who are do ghostwriters, but our editors love it because it's

more authentic, it's your words. It's faster and they're, seem to be having a lot more fun. So I don't really have, you know, plagiarism or anything that's not accurate in our vocabulary because this is your words. just helping organize it.

Brent Peterson (13:45.502)
I know that, a lot of people start with AI and go and then edit it. What is your view? And I think your model is a little different than what people think of traditional gen AI now, or you're you ask it to give you an outline. What is your, what is your thoughts on getting outlines or ideas from AI rather than giving AI your ideas? And then you have it kind of flesh them out and then having an editor go at it.

I guess I'm trying to get at where should we start? Should we start with AI and a blank piece of paper or should we start with an outline and give it to AI and then have it help us?

Dan Curran (14:26.864)
Well, I think even to take a step back, I think we'd all agree on a couple of things. One, we're still in the horse and buggy era of AI. Probably the technology or definitely the technology is ahead of us humans. If, as they say, if they never created another version of AI, you know, moving forward, we still have years to catch up with what they've created now. So we're all just kind of poking the edges and getting used to it.

And I, know, a lot of really smart, ethical, wonderful people use AI all the time and they're all using it to brainstorm and, and come up with great ideas. And by no means are they depending on it exclusively to be all, you know, you know, accurate all the time or to be a replica of what's inside their brain, but it's just a wonderful assistant. So obviously I'm in the camp of.

You know, being a good person, honest, don't lie, don't plagiarize, but use the heck out of AI if it makes your life easier. So it's just a tool that I think we should all use. if, I think there's a bit of snobbery in the, in the, in the publishing business that somehow the people that get to the finish line on writing a book are somehow the smartest people in the world. And I don't know about you, but the

My mentors and peers that are around me, my neighbor, relatives that I think are brilliant don't have books because they just have never, they've been kind of kept out of it. And so I think AI is a liberator for those people.

Brent Peterson (16:03.758)
Well, I think in the past, and I'm going to say even five or six years ago, it was a very expensive proposition too, unless you wanted to try to do it all on your own. even then it was very difficult to navigate all those waters and then find a publisher. And if you're going to self-publish, I think that electronic publishing has certainly helped us bring down costs in terms of getting something out and live. But that whole process is very complicated.

And tell us a little bit about how you've made the process easier in terms of how you present it or how an author can help or how an author can give you the material and how you organize that for them.

Dan Curran (16:53.756)
Yeah, so we definitely try to locate authors who are or would be authors that are already in a consideration set. They've thought about this to some extent that they want to, but they look at and to describe to your audience, and I'm sure you know this, there's a variety of ways to publish a book, really three buckets. One is self-publishing and you can Google it or go online.

And it's just you doing a DIY. Another one is a hybrid publishing where you write a check and they will help you with a ghostwriter and help you market and publish, you know, upload to Amazon, cetera. And then there's the traditional publishers, the, the random house and Penguin. generally you go through an agent and. know, very, if you look at their reported numbers, they're very flat lining. It's not a growth industry. It's kind of like the old record.

companies and so forth. they're, they're kind of old school, I guess a lot of people would say. So a lot of people go that middle route. They go hybrid publishing, they get some help, but they're writing the book themselves, usually with a ghostwriter. So that entire process is just, you know, talk, it's an overused term right now, but a word salad. mean, just even me saying it, it's exhausting. And I think the great thing about AI in the next five or 10 years that I will be able, we will all be able to

not say all those words and be able to say, yes, I can write my words, share them and publish them. And in the capitalist market will take care of the rest. If a million people read it or your kids read it, at least it will be out there in perpetuity. Right now, it's just like 1950s as far as I'm concerned. You know, it just looks very, you know, archaic. So I think if it's not us, there's going to be a lot of other people coming in to make this.

you know, much more frictionless experience. Cause if you think about it with like 23 and me, if you do that, you can have your DNA, you charted and so forth. But if I wanted to find out how my father who passed away thought about life, politics, religion, et cetera. Well, I don't, I don't have any record of him doing it, but with AI and recording and transcribing and it always getting better and better, we can now start.

Dan Curran (19:17.808)
capturing these and that's where the name of our company comes from chapters of your life.

Brent Peterson (19:23.624)
one of the things that I've heard objections to is, the quality of content that AI delivers. I, and I, I guess I'm speaking mainly to it coming up with content for you, not transcribing the process of editing that content, no matter who writes it. If it's a ghost writer, if it's that person, or if you're hiring a, a third party content creator, that, that actual editing part of it.

still takes about the same amount of time. Is there a difference between where you're getting the content from and how then after you get the content you have to do something with it?

Dan Curran (20:05.178)
Yeah, that's excellent. So I love editors and there's an old Seth Godin quote to brand marketer, to brands to fire, fire your brand manager, hire an editor. And it's kind of a metaphor, so to speak. Even more now, an editor is, editor is just there. As I mentioned, kind of an adult in the room with story development to capture some magic. You know, we've had many authors that kind of, you know, kind of held back. They weren't as transparent. And when

when they were recording, when they were being asked questions with our system with chapters, on a weekly basis, they're meeting with the editor. So the editor is still critically involved and so important with the story arc and also finding that magic of what might be in someone's memoir or story or life lessons that they wanna share with the rest of the world. So I would say that

I, I wouldn't trust, you know, AI does a lot of great things. Writing content just by itself is like number 50 out of 50 for me on the list. It sometimes does it creep, know, it's kind of creepy how good it is, but it'll probably get better. But having an editor there to collaborate with is so important. And a lot of high net worth people are just very successful people or people with just great stories we're working with right now do get, imposter syndrome towards end, even if they have a great resume.

And that editor kind of helps them kind of from a psychological level to kind of keep sharing.

Brent Peterson (21:41.006)
I know that the technology has increased, how the models work have been increasing and how well they do, and they continue to grow, which also changes the output. And again, I guess this comes to the genitor part of the AI. Do you see that shift in the quality or the ability of the AI tool to do what you want it to do, getting better and better, where you have less of that?

redundancy and or less of the hallucinations, let's say, because it's going to hallucinate no matter what. Is it getting are you seeing that technology getting better over time?

Dan Curran (22:20.024)
Yeah, absolutely. It's getting much better, but absolutely it still hallucinates. again, that's the human aspect of it is very, very important. It's only gotten better. I don't want to romanticize or glamorize it too much beyond that because truly it's, it's, got to have both parts, the human involved in, and the machine. So it's just, again, uses all the terms we're using are co-pilot assistant. It's just an accelerant.

And I think a little bit going back to your last question in the reason why we're not anti ghost rider. If you're an A plus ghost rider, great. You're going to do an amazing job, but we're, if we're the boogeyman, guess we're replacing chapters is the B and C grade level ghost rider. Editors, all the editors we work with, and we try to hire the best we can with all of them have best sellers under their belt.

is it's an again, an accelerant. So we get to that 20, 30, 40,000 words quicker, 50,000 words. It's kind of front loaded because the questions are so good. the, you're being as an author, you're just sharing, you're pouring out, you have your wisdom about finance or about sales or about some trauma you went through. All this is coming out. The machine is helping organize it, not not plagiarizing, just organizing what you said.

And then the editor has something to edit really in two or three weeks from us kicking off. So it's editors like it because they have something to edit. They're not waiting. If they had to wait for a ghost writer, there's many, many months before you get to that point. So we're able to, on the back end, the last couple of months or the last eight weeks of working with us process usually takes about 12 weeks. you can have fun, you know,

and polish it and maybe stumble into some ideas and a random conversation with the editor and author that you wouldn't have. Again, it has nothing to do with AI.

Brent Peterson (24:19.672)
So I know Chapters is first or very close to first to market. What kind of challenges now do you see as the landscape continues to shift moving forward and you're going to overcome those challenges? what do you see as the big challenges coming up?

Dan Curran (24:37.34)
I think we'll continue to see, I guess, naysayers or people that preconceived just look at AI as the chat GPT they use to write Christmas cards or whatever, you in their work and they'll look at it that way. And it is hard to, you know, it takes a few minutes to say, no, we're kind of reverse engineering. We're just transcribing it, finding gaps, organizing, asking questions. So there's a marketplace education.

somewhat answering your question. We're really leaning into being thought leaders ourselves on ethical AI, you know, so, so we want to be, you know, take care of it as well and make sure that people don't cross the line. So you're going to start seeing a lot of white papers and so forth on us. And, I don't know if I'm answering your question the right way, but, maybe it's just the years I've been doing it. I'm really got blinders on to.

what might be challenges because the biggest challenge is people not wanting or not thinking they're worthy enough to share their life story. And I'm telling you, my life has been blessed just by meeting. We have dozens of authors we're working with right now and the stories are amazing. it's people just like you work with or I work with with facades and they look perfect. And then when you really hear their stories, it's amazing. my worry is just not.

getting enough people to get them to tell their stories. So that's what we're focused on, evangelizing.

Brent Peterson (26:08.622)
We talked a little bit about costs in the beginning. And I know the cost of writing it yourself is your time and the cost of a ghostwriter. Geez, I've been hit up by ghostwriters more and more all the time now. And it can be in the tens of 20s, $20,000 to have a book written. How is the cost difference gonna help people as well? Or is there a cost difference?

Dan Curran (26:31.622)
So we are, so now, yeah, yeah, yeah. So, so I'll take my publishing hat off and just put on my entrepreneur hat. So we, we went into the market, think, okay, what's our swim lane? You know, are we going to be premium or are we going to be discount? So we positioned ourselves right now, premium to Uber premium, the best editors, the best customer service, zero friction. You feel like, you know, really you celebrate every inflection point.

working with us or that's our aspiration. And then we want to go downstream after that. You know, so, you know, we, were going to come out as a software, but the software and AI is too crowded and I've already made that mistake in a past life. So we're kind of this hybrid tech service company right now. So we're positioned premium, to push back a little bit on the pricing for a really good ghost rider. that is minimum 40,000, four, four zero.

up to if you're a politician or celebrity, 150 to 200,000. So that's the price range. All the time people are pricing 75,000 all the time. So we're going after that market that really wants excellence, wants an amazing book that really tells the story right. So if 40 to 75,000 is the marker, we're coming in around 20, 25,000, very concierge.

bestselling editor, AI, you know, again, that's just a manuscript and we provide an ebook and some other bells and whistles. But as with everything, the price will continue to come down. And another thing, again, to put my entrepreneur at, I also came out of the gate very vulnerable last year with all of our clients saying, Hey, we're trying to change the world here. There's a lot of R and D experimentation.

you know, do you want to go on this ride with us? So everyone has been wonderful and how we're treating, you know, the process of our latest authors is different than it was three months ago, six months ago, nine months ago, because the space is moving so

Brent Peterson (28:42.816)
From a timing standpoint, I participated in a book. I wrote a chapter in a book last year and we thought it would go much faster than it did. It was a traditional publisher method. Is there an increase in how fast you can get your book done by doing this way?

Dan Curran (29:03.336)
Yes. I mean, we, it's a third less. we're, getting books done down about 12 weeks and a couple of things. Normally to write a book, if you get the publishers or hybrid publishers to tell you it really takes nine months to about 15 months is kind of the other kind of dirty little secret in the business is that half the manuscripts are abandoned, because people get fatigued or frustrated and not as excited. we've, we're kind of bringing a helmet,

velvet hammer to the party early on when we're signing someone up and saying, listen, can you, know, what's word, commit, sorry to this 12 weeks. And if it's 14 weeks, people go on vacations at whatever that's fine. But we're really trying to get people across the finish line within that, within that period, because otherwise.

human nature, people, you know, miss, you know, lot of the people we're dealing with are alpha male females, your peers, mine and EO or YPO, you know, they are tough cookies to commit. So we try to get that done upfront. And then also when they're with the editor, when you're with an editor that's got a dozen bestsellers under their belt, that person has stature, you know, and brings that stature immediately just by listening to their perspective. So

putting kind of two alphas together, both with the same goal seems to really work.

Brent Peterson (30:31.138)
Yeah, I think the timeframe in the book I did was with a whole bunch of authors. So I think it was mainly around editing, but I think you're right. I think that that process in the traditional industry takes such a long time to get through. And so how do you help on them, like after they've published it or when they're ready to publish, how do you help with art and all those other parts that are needed?

Dan Curran (30:59.164)
So we tee it all up to hand off to a publisher or a hybrid publisher. So one thing I didn't tell you, most of our lead flow comes from publishers. So if the supply chain or the customer journey or whatever of an author, it always gets caught up in the manuscript process. It's hard to create a manuscript. So that's what we're trying to make a lot easier. So.

We immediately went out a year ago to all the publishers raising our hand and saying, Hey, this is a better mousetrap to ghostwriters. And I think it's more ethical and just an amazing. so, you know, we've had to prove our, you know, prove our worth, but they are the ones sending us the, the lead flow as we are moving the author through that process. Again, let's say it's 12 weeks. That first four weeks is just brain dumping, excuse my language, vomiting.

from the brain to the computer, you know, just trying to get all their wisdom and thoughts out. But starting about four weeks, the editor starts getting them ready to publish and market. And that to publish and market, as you know, it's the same 50 steps for everyone. It's just how much time and investment, but there's some universal truths. You got to have a book design cover. You have to start building your email list, get people to review it or beta readers. So we provide that as kind of a value add.

Brent Peterson (32:23.694)
Last question. The industry itself has been, or I've heard it been said that there'll be a stamp on books, human written or AI written. Where do you think the hybrid model like you're proposing is gonna fall?

Dan Curran (32:43.216)
That's a great question that kind of goes back to us wanting to write those standards. If you go to Amazon right now, it's very gray. It's you're in two buckets with them. And that's a good place to start because they're the biggest distributor of books. So what are their rules? It's something like this that you have to declare if it's AI written or if it's AI assist. And quite frankly, the AI assist is pretty liberal, in my opinion.

I don't know what happens if you say AI wrote it, they probably would go great and kick you out. AI assist is so nebulous. And if you want my opinion, I think it's to be determined on where this is going. It's easy for us because we're, it's the authentic words of the person. Yes, we offer suggestions and so forth. But as a consumer, I think, I don't know.

Brent Peterson (33:30.083)
Yeah.

Dan Curran (33:37.788)
you think? I think it'll be synthetic content. mean, look at all the content we're reading on LinkedIn and all that. mean, you know, and the AI detectors, that's a whole nother story. That is probability. It's not actual and that technology is what are you going to get AI to go against AI? And it's not very accurate. So I don't know where that's going. I think, you know, I asked someone kind of different, but I, I asked someone a big thought the other day about art. What is art? If AI creates a piece of

art, let's say like a painting or drawing that you love, is that art? You know, so these are questions beyond chapters, but I don't, hopefully I'm young enough to see where this goes.

Brent Peterson (34:16.716)
No, that's good. I'm with you. believe that since, I mean, I believe your model, somebody is talking about it. They're using their words to write the book and there's an organizer of those words and there's an editor. I think that's, I mean, that's a perfect use of AI, right? And then I do have to cut, I have...

Dan Curran (34:33.116)
I mean, look at Photoshop. Is the graphic designer not an artist and they use Photoshop? That's, you know, that's, I don't, I didn't hear anybody bitching about it back then, you know.

Brent Peterson (34:45.134)
I'm sure they did. We're not old enough. Although I probably remember Photoshop one, which would have been on floppy disks. do. So last comment I'm going to make is I do have an art project that I've been doing for a year now where I generate, I take the style of a famous painter and I put a Jack Russell terrier into the image. And then I call that some art and you can't copyright it because I make it with mid journey.

Dan Curran (34:46.948)
Yeah. Yeah.

Dan Curran (34:53.382)
Hahaha.

Dan Curran (35:09.448)
Okay. Yeah.

Brent Peterson (35:12.984)
but I have a lot of pushback from people who don't believe it's art and they think it's garbage. my view is if it looks great, well, who cares how it was made, right? Like you said, if it's made in Photoshop, like just because you're having a computer help you to manipulate the images there, is it any different, right? Or if you take a real image and then you put a filter on it, now have you suddenly, I mean, it's all a definition of what AI is. And I think that...

Dan Curran (35:13.126)
Yeah.

Brent Peterson (35:43.03)
manually applying processes with a computer is really doing what AI does. AI just does it faster.

Dan Curran (35:51.066)
Yeah. And I, my lizard brain is also, no, that's a great example, but I also go back to, you know, rap music and, and sampling. There's so much heartburn. I don't hear as much heartburn, you know, now I think because people get paid if they get sampled, you know, some of their music, but you know, they'll always be that, that cloud, you know, people. I, I, I'm glad there's snobs in the business too. You know, there should be some friction, some fight there.

I just, I don't need to worry about it because we're just trying to, I am worried about some faux AI detector somehow busting something and I'm like, I don't know, I'm going to get Thoreau or some other author and throw their book in AI detector and see if it comes out zero because I have a sense it's just not accurate. So we'll see.

Brent Peterson (36:39.15)
Yeah, I'll close with that. do have a friend with an actual writing company. And when AI came out, their clients accused them of using AI because some of the writers are really good and the content looks really good. And it looks too good to have a human, right? What does it mean too good to have a human write it, right? And he said that sometimes they purposely have to just make some mistakes in the writing.

Dan Curran (36:52.837)
Right.

Dan Curran (37:01.83)
Yeah.

Brent Peterson (37:06.114)
which then takes out the idea of an editor, right? I think the whole AI detection thing is never gonna stick. There's no way that we can ever do it, especially running it through a human as an editor. What does that even mean?

Dan Curran (37:08.987)
Yeah.

Dan Curran (37:20.602)
Yeah, I think we just all do our best and try to be transparent, but it's a lot to think about in the coming days, weeks, and months.

Brent Peterson (37:32.002)
Yeah, so Dan, as I close out the podcast to give everybody a chance to do a shameless plug about anything they want, would you like to plug today?

Dan Curran (37:41.456)
Well, of course, my company chapters.io. I'd love these kinds of discussions. So I'm just going to plug. I'll just be a passionately selfish here. I'm going to just plug my company, but more, more than that, just anyone that wants to wrestle with these topics that we talked about today. So you can find me on LinkedIn at, know, Dan Curran chapters, LinkedIn and love to, and my email is dan at chapters.io. And it would be an honor to speak to anyone.

regarding any of the topics we discussed today, just not to sell a book, but just to get their perspective.

Brent Peterson (38:17.966)
Yeah, that's great, Dan. It's been such a great conversation today and I'll make sure I get all those contact details in the show notes. Dan Curran, the co-founder of chapters.io. Thank you so much for being here today.

Dan Curran (38:31.952)
Thank you.