Mind Readings: Authenticity, AI, and Showing Your Work

Are you showing your work? Part of the question, part of the challenge in the modern era of generative AI with authenticity, and this is true of just the modern era in general, but AI has made this substantially more challenging. Is that you don't know whether something is authentic or not? And by authentic, we mean I mean you know who made it. So if uh you have a book, right?

And the name on the book says Christopher Penn, did Christopher Penn actually write that book or not? Authenticity would be defined as basic truth. Like, yes, what's what's on the box in the labels uh is what's actually true. So you open up a a box that's labeled apples, and inside the box is actually apples. It that would be authentic within this particular context.

And we could have a whole other discussion about authenticity another time, but let's let's go from there. Um, in a chat I was having with Robert Rose over on LinkedIn, I I saw this incredibly bad ad. Uh I got my inbox. Uh the company was advertising a bundle of 500,000 books, 500,000 books that uh they're all electronic that you can buy on pretty much every subject imaginable. And then when you look at the the terms of service for what you can do with these, it's like uh you can you can do pretty much anything you want.

It's so uh on the it says you know, 500,000 books in more than 500 genres, millionaire theory, retail stuff, healthy eating, develop emotional intelligence, the psychological self-defense strategy, uh, so much of the stuff. And in the fine print, it says uh all books come in widely used formats compatible with smartphones, tablets, PCs, uh, lifetime access to a diverse collection of books. You have the freedom to set your own prices and keep 100% of the profits. You can edit the content and the covers of the books. Claim authorship.

Translate, merge, divide, format, and record as audiobooks, even print them as physical books. That's crazy. Claim authorship. So if you were to buy this this magical package, which by the way is $47 US, um, if you were to buy this steaming hot pile of garbage for $47, according to the licensing terms, you could slap your name on them and immediately go publish them, sell them on Amazon, right? Uh, you could, and it would be you know, the marriage master by Christopher Penn, the workout encyclopedia by Christopher Penn, uh, social media marketing mastery, 10 minute keto diets and so on and so forth.

It's like, okay. Now, if I were to do that, and I'm not going to, but if I were to do that, would that tarnish my brand? Yes, of course, because you can be pretty sure the books are not going to be super high quality. But if you didn't have a brand to begin with, or you didn't care about reputation, or uh maybe you had an anonymous side hustle, you could absolutely programmatically push these uh to Amazon Kindle Direct or any other book selling outfit. And if you made it, you know, a dollar per book title with 500,000 of them, that that's not small money.

So in a case like that, when it comes to authenticity, how do you know that a work is actually from the author? I mean, it's pretty clear. Like, if you see a book that was purportedly by Christopher Penn that's like the 10 minute keto diet, it's not me. I can guarantee it. I did not buy that, and I know nothing about uh uh that particular topic.

But for people who are creating content, creators, uh like I'm working on my next book with the help of AI. But for people who are creators, how do you how do you know, how do you prove to your audience that you actually are the author? If you're a member of the audience, how would you know that a book is actually by the author that says it was? Um there's a pretty straightforward answer. The answer is show your work.

As you produce your next thing, whether it's a book, a publication, a workshop, a white paper, whatever, document your process in public. Show the transcripts, show the napkin drawing, show the whiteboards so that when someone goes to say, like, is this actually written by you? You can say, Yes, it's written by me, and I and I got the receipts. I've got I can prove that I did the thing because I have the raw materials. So, for example, I am in the midst of working on uh my uh private social media book, and in the car this morning on my drive, I had my microphone attached wirelessly to my phone, and I have you can see here on my screen, I've got all this stuff that I've was was sort of yelling out loud to the air.

So I can show based on this these contents, like, yeah, when you read this text in my book, you will know it's from me. Because there's an audit trail. There's an audit trail of me making the raw materials, the the transcripts, the napkin drawings, the whiteboards, and you can prove that you did it from beginning to end. And yes, there's there's sort of two perspectives in the audience, right? There's the audience that cares only if the content is helpful to for them, which is everyone, to be clear.

Everyone cares if the content is helpful to them. But there will be there's a subset of that audience that does care very much about whether it's authentic, whether it was made by that person with the capabilities of generative AI, with the capabilities of uh online marketplaces where you can buy 500,000 books for 47. Having those public records, you doing the work in public will be the proof that people need to know that something really is by you. And so if that's something that your audience cares about, the easiest way to prove authenticity is to do your work in public, let everyone see the process. Um, you don't have to give away all your secrets, right?

I mean, I'm showing off a raw transcript, it's not anything super special here, but by doing so, you will help, you will help your audience and you'll provide the audit trail. The audit trail is useful for one other thing, too. In the age of AI, anyone can download a book, a podcast, a speech, or whatever, and use AI to rewrite it in their with their voice. It's technologically possible, even if it's ethically not a good idea, and possibly legally wrong, like legally ill well, illegal. Um, when it comes to if that happens to you and you've got a lawyer up, having those receipts of like, hey, here's me working on my book seven months ago, and you know, showing off the transcripts in public, those receipts are gonna come in handy.

So you're probably gonna want to have them uh have that audit trail, even if you don't make a big deal publicizing, like, hey, I'm I'm working on my book tonight. Having that audit trail will will make your lawyers happy. Let's put it that way. That's gonna do it for this episode. Thanks for tuning in.

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