Joerg
Thanks a lot for joining this podcast. So today we have Zack Pearson, the author of the novel Secret Agent CEO. Zack, maybe you can introduce yourself.
Zack
So, yeah, my name is Zack Pearson and I started using AI because the first book I ever actually wrote took 13 years to write. I granted that I became unmotivated throughout that time, so that’s part of why it took so long. But I also wrote some of that when I was in high school and I’m still working on some of it now. I noticed that writing with AI does help speed up that process a lot faster. However, some people think that AI is taking the heart away from writing and all that, which I totally get. Some people understand that it might seem like that, but if you use AI in the right way, it can help tremendously with suggestions and making sure the book actually sounds good.
Joerg
So, the book in question here, Secret Agent CEO, was that a book you had in your drawer for the past 13 years, or was that a book you started when the AI became available?
Zack
That was a book I started when the AI became available. The first book that I wrote, and like I said I’m still working on it—I’ve had to change the name a little bit—but it was called The Dragon’s Heir. Essentially, what that one is about is my character finds a sword in his basement when he was rummaging through some boxes and sees it behind the brick wall. His mother comes down and warns him not to touch the handle. He does, and as soon as he touches it, he finds out he’s half human and half dragon from his mother, goes to a dragon sanctuary, and finds out about an entirely different world he never knew about.
Joerg
So, this book you started, or the books you started pre-AI. Are there any books in your opinion where you say you are not going to spoil them with AI, so you keep those separate because they are so sacred or valuable to you? Or are you now, let’s say, bit by bit taking the long-term projects and looking to finish them all?
Zack
So, the first book that I did write, I put a few images that I used ChatGPT to generate for that book. Specifically at the beginning of the book, there’s a dragon-themed portal that I wrote above the picture to start the story. But I’m hoping that if somebody does buy the book, they don’t think of that as AI because I do use the AI to direct it. Not as much anymore, but I’m still using Gemini for suggestions. Everything that I write now is in my own words.
Joerg
So you actually made a step back. You had this book out, Secret Agent CEO, which I find personally very good actually. It has something new in the way it is written in the style, and then you basically did an author reveal in a Facebook group, and within 24 hours you got 20 bad reviews on Amazon, and then you revoked the book. Was that for you then the reason that you said, “Okay, I use AI less”? Or was it that you were not successful with the results?
Zack
Essentially, yeah. It’s basically because, like I said, AI does help make things a lot better in some cases, but when it comes to writing books, a lot of people, if you let the AI do the entire legwork, then yeah, people are going to notice that right away. Unfortunately, I don’t know how to delete reviews on Amazon Marketplace, but I get people’s frustrations. They think that using AI for the change… I mean, historically looking at everything that we’ve ever accomplished, like say with cars, people were scared to accept change when they changed from horse and buggy to the new Model T Ford and so on. Now AI is the new change that is happening, and people are scared about what it could mean, so they’re lashing out at people that use it.
Joerg
So why is that? You don’t want to be lashed out at, or you don’t want to be in the center of the storm? Or you felt genuinely that the result was below your expectations?
Zack
It’s mostly the fact that I have a lot of ideas for stories that I want to write, it’s just I don’t have a whole lot of time to do it. And like I said, AI does help with that aspect where it can speed up the process. But some people don’t view it the same way I do because if I don’t write these ideas down while I’m thinking about them, I will forget them just like that. Honestly, some of the ideas that I have, I don’t know if you’ve noticed with Hollywood movies nowadays, it’s either sequels or remakes. I personally would love to see one of my ideas being turned into a movie and being made into something that everyone can enjoy.
Joerg
And you felt that AI was hindering you. You felt that people calling you out for using AI would not be an enabler to communicate what you really can do, and to get many of your ideas implemented, but you felt that it was a showstopper?
Zack
Pretty much. It can be viewed as a shortcut, and honestly, I’m not saying AI is bad. I will never say that. It’s just the way that some people use it. Like in my case, yes, I did use AI to do all the legwork while I just directed it. But the way I’m using it now, I am giving it segments of the new book that I’m working on and allowing it to give me suggestions, but everything I write is in my own words. So that way, if and when I do publish this new book, I’m hoping that people will understand that AI was a part of the process, but not entirely. Like, I was the one that did all the legwork.
Joerg
When we look back on this book Secret Agent CEO, can you reveal how you created that? Because you told me once it was created on a mobile phone. Did you create it at night when you had only a phone present, or you own only a phone? How did it come that it was more a mobile-first thing?
Zack
So, yeah, I did use my phone. I use that for a lot of things. Like when I’m at work—which unfortunately is where most of my ideas come from, and I do work at a hospital—when I’m running parts, sometimes I get ideas out of the blue. This idea came because everybody loves James Bond, they love Tony Stark, and I thought, “Okay, well what if I mixed something like this together?” Because people have loved James Bond since the first movie came out. I thought, what if I can make a story that mixes both those aspects and create a new story, because when would be the last time you’d ever suspect a CEO of a multi-trillion-dollar tech company to be a secret agent for MI6?
Joerg
So what tools did you use, if I may ask? Did you use ChatGPT, or Gemini, or were you using completely different tooling?
Zack
Yeah, so I originally started the first book, Secret Agent CEO, on ChatGPT, and then some of the majority of them, yes, I did use ChatGPT. I used Groq for one of them, I think. So…
Joerg
That’s actually quite interesting, because when you route with AI, or when you let AI write your text, you have certain artifacts in there which essentially are almost not in your book. You have other characteristics—it’s very kinetic and it’s very direct, you never lose anything to describe the atmosphere. Did you do anything special to direct it in a way to leave out typical AI artifacts, or did it just come out like this?
Zack
It basically just came out like that. Like I said, I would write in the prompt what I would want for each chapter, and then I would go in and basically copy and paste into Google Docs, and from there just work on that. Occasionally I would change some of the details, but most of the time it was just me copying and pasting. I know that sometimes people don’t view others that use that method as real authors because they feel it cheats the system and isn’t real writing, but… to each their own.
Joerg
So, no matter if it’s real writing or not, when you looked at your result yourself, did you like it? Did you sit down and actually say, “I really, really like this”? If you really liked it, why did you change your opinion about that?
Zack
It’s not that I don’t like it. I do like the writing that I had generated with those apps. I still have the documents on my Google Docs, it’s just I don’t want to publish them because I want to be able to sell books. Like the spark of imagination, the way that some authors did for me. For myself, I grew into reading and writing through books written by Rick Riordan, who has written the Percy Jackson series, The Kane Chronicles, and Magnus Chase, as well as some other books. So in a way, I kind of wanted to be like him and write books that people would really enjoy. I figured, “Okay, well maybe I can create my own worlds and start writing for myself.”
Joerg
If tomorrow the public consent changes… if tomorrow everyone feels AI is actually a mandatory part, or big publishers would reveal that they are also using AI but didn’t disclose it until now. Would that be for you sort of a trigger to have AI play again a bigger part in your work, or is it safe for you that whatever now in the public happens, the attitude of the public consent is, “I go on now the way I decided to go on now”?
Zack
I definitely think I’m not saying I’m not going to use AI, but I will essentially step back from using it entirely. Using it more as a tool than, I guess some people could say, like a crutch. Because I know a lot of people, they view AI as… essentially, some people think that using AI doesn’t make you an actual author, even if it’s just in the slightest. But when it comes to other things, they get so riled up over people using AI to write books, and yet they don’t get riled up over characters in movies such as Ultron or Vision from Marvel comics, because those are AI characters. And yet people don’t get mad about that.
Joerg
So when we go back to this book Secret Agent CEO, what surprised me is that there are actually quite some new themes in there where I think that’s hardly invented by an AI. When your book drops in, this person Zack delivered some sort of academic achievement, he comes from a conference and he had some sort of speech about a quantum thing. Academic accreditation or academic recognition… is that something you put in? Is that something you are looking for in your own life? Are you doing some sort of PhD and you are hunting down that academic accreditation, or where does that scene come from?
Zack
So, when I was writing the story, I think that’s part of what ChatGPT generated. But I do like the fact that it is in the story because the way I wrote my character into the story, he is the CEO of a multi-trillion-dollar tech company, but he does understand coming from nothing. Because in the backstory for the company, he literally built it from the ground up, and as soon as he got a contract with Lockheed Martin to start working on the F-22 Raptor, that’s where it all began. After that, then business really took off and he was able to get more contracts with the military, NASA, you name it. He was able to get his hands on contracts with them and hire more people and reach out to the community to help them. So in a way, the character of Zack Pearson does understand that sometimes you do need a second chance when it comes to employment, especially right now. And I did work into the story that he hires people that need that second chance and is able to get their feet on the ground essentially.
Joerg
So you actually have three things. You have academic validation, you have a moral or ethics theme where Zack acts responsible, reliable, and intellectually superior. And then you have this anxiety of corporate enemies—it seems to be that his antagonists are not scared of any geographic enemies, but they are scared of corporate enemies. Those are three clusters I recognized that are different than in the typical Tony Stark movie. Did they all come from you, or did you say, “Make this person Zack be afraid of the Russians,” and then ChatGPT came back and said, “This is not a good idea, make him afraid of corporate layoffs”?
Zack
Yeah, that is kind of what ChatGPT said. Essentially, I’ve noticed that with other AIs too, that if you approach certain things about certain subjects like that, it will say “I’m unable to reply to that” or something like that. So I did have to change a few details and make his enemy basically a rogue enemy faction or something. The whole story behind it is essentially kind of like Tony Stark too, where he does have people in his own company that when they get hired, all they see is the dollar signs, they don’t see the community as a whole. That’s why in the story, Zack does fire basically his entire board of directors because some of them were involved in illegal activities such as money laundering and were involved with people in the black market, mercenaries… basically all the dark things that you don’t want to talk about in front of certain people. When he does find out about that, he fires them and makes sure that they are put away in prison for a very long time by giving the proper authorities all the information that he has on them. Because the AIs that he does have working for him, such as Athena, she makes sure to watch everything and record everything just in case if something does come up, that they have the evidence to back it up with.
Joerg
So, if I understand it correctly, if you had written that yourself, you would have built more friction in. It would look different because you would not need to circumvent the safety guidelines, or political guardrails, or something that an AI may have.
The CEO, he actually always stays cool. No matter what happens, he always stays extremely cool. Is that a trait you also have, or is it just the AI created a character that is absolutely cool in every aspect simply because of political guardrails or the way AIs write books?
Zack
So I think part of it is with the AI that ChatGPT generated my character that way. But also part of it is that since he runs this company that’s basically a global phenomenon, he has to make sure that he appears that way so that if he is seen out in public, say running a meeting or doing an event, that people don’t see the bad side of him or see him act out irrationally or anything like that. Usually, if that happens, then people will start bashing him online because that usually does happen in real-world politics and things with businesses, from what I understand.
Joerg
So if I understand correctly, if you are now writing the next thriller, the enemy would not be corporate layoffs and corporate anxieties, but the enemy would be somewhere in Russia maybe?
Zack
So, for the book that I am writing, I did put one of the locations that the characters go to in Iran, because I did use Tehran as one of the cities that they go to, and they are flying in an F-14, an F-35, and an F-4 Phantom. But as for the Secret Agent CEO versus the new story that I’m working on, I know that things are tense when it comes to certain aspects of, specifically over in Afghanistan and Iraq, I know that we still have troops over there, so I have to be somewhat careful when it comes to writing certain combat sequences or essentially what some people might consider top-secret information. I only write into the story what I actually know, which is essentially public knowledge. You can pretty much go on Google and Google F-35 stats or F-14 stats, because the two aircraft, one of them has been retired since 2006, however, one of the F-14s has been in use in Iran since that day.
Joerg
Okay. So you give AI now in the new book a much more supportive role, maybe to research background or geography. While in the past you have been writing 13 years on one book, are you not concerned that if you give AI a much smaller role, that you are not seeing this new book published for the next 13 years either?
Zack
I am hoping to finish this one by the end of the year. I gave myself at least 10 years to finish it to go through editing and writing different parts of the story if I need to. I know that with certain publishers they’re going to ask a lot more than… like if you go with Amazon, it is free to publish, however, you have to be the one to promote the book. And that’s probably the route I’m going to go with, because I know that if I do go with a different publisher, that it’s going to take a lot longer to get that done and a lot more money spent. Unfortunately, not all of us can afford to hire an editor, a publisher, and a bunch of other people to actually help you get that book published. Which again, is also where AI does come into play. I know sometimes it can take out those jobs and make it a little bit easier, but some people view that as, again, cheating the system in a way.
Joerg
So, have you set yourself writing goals, in the sense that you are doing 1,000 characters per day or 1,000 words per day? Or how are you structuring this if you are writing it manually?
Zack
So I do try to make sure each paragraph isn’t too long and the chapters aren’t too long. Usually, like right now I think the longest chapter is about five or six pages long, so I want to make sure it’s not too long so that way the reader doesn’t get bored with the story. I also want to make sure that when I’m writing the story, I don’t make the action too heavy, and I also don’t make the drama too heavy, and I want to make sure I put a mix of both in there. So it keeps the reader interested, and then give it where I could ease out on the action just a little bit and ease into a smoother area of the story where some of the characters have a little bit of a breathing period where they’re just focusing on family and spending time with each other, and then shifting back into that action sequence later on in the book.
Joerg
Have you ever thought to release parts of it as they get ready, for example on Royal Road?
Zack
I think that could work, like just releasing certain chapters as a sneak peek. But as far as releasing the entire book, I think honestly I would rather do it in just chapters so that way it gives them an idea, “Okay, this is what the story is about, I like what I see, and I would like to read more, maybe I can buy the book when he publishes it.”
Joerg
Okay, thank you very much Zack, and we are looking forward to your future books.
Zack
I look forward to having people buy the books because I do want to publish books not for the money—I mean yes, it is helpful that I get people to buy my books, but like I said, I want people to be inspired and have that spark of imagination ignite within them when they read the books.
Joerg
Thanks for visiting.
Zack
Thank you.