Recent surveys verify what you probably have already guessed, that there are profound divides between writers who use AI and writers who downright refuse. But interestingly, these surveys have also shown that around 60% of writers do use AI tools of some kind.

So, when you’re creating a software program for writers, you have some choices to make. Do you alienate your anti-AI users or your pro-AI users?

Or do you try to find a compromise that works for the greatest number of people?

One of my favorite tools that I use in my fiction writing is Plottr, which I introduced to y’all back in Episode 74. It’s a program that lets you visualize your story from beginning to end and keep your notes on characters, themes, settings, and other plot elements all in one central place.

When I interviewed Plottr’s education outreach lead back in 2023, I had bought the basic program for myself, which is a tool that you download and use offline. I've used it for at least three different writing projects, and it's helped make my process much more streamlined.

So when the folks from Plottr reached out to me to chat about new developments, I was excited. However, when I looked into it and saw that they had a new tool that used AI, I got very uncomfortable. I’m way more on the skeptical side of this issue, and I was scared to see another program I used get gobbled up by AI features.

But then I got curious, because I noticed that it was being implemented in a different way that we see in products like Google Gemini or Microsoft Copilot (or, if you listened to my last episode ProWritingAid). The difference is that instead of forcing AI features on Plottr users, they offered a choice where users could stick to the completely AI-free Plottr program, or buy the AI-powered Storysnap either on its own or as an add-on. 

Seriously, it’d be nice if more companies would do that instead of making you jump through hoops to opt out.

No matter my own feelings, I can understand how that statistic poses a dilemma for software companies that don’t want to go out of business. Plottr seems to be trying to create a solution that gives both groups what they want, and I wanted to know more about how that choice was made and where those lines were drawn. When I interviewed Plottr’s founder Cameron Sutter about the way they’re trying to employ ethical AI use, I learned that a lot of careful thought was put into how to deploy AI in a way that avoids using stolen works and doesn’t write users’ stories for them.

I’m not here to sell you Storysnap, but I did make space in this interview to talk about it (even though, as you’ll hear, I struggle to pronounce it correctly). To keep it simple: Storysnap helps series writers create a personal story bible, so they can easily maintain continuity throughout each book. Cameron does a good job explaining how they’ve attempted to address issues about privacy and what measures they’ve taken to keep the AI from training on users’ work.

Hey, welcome to the hybrid pub Scout podcast helping you

navigate the publishing landscape. I'm Emily Einolander,

and I explore resources and services so authors can be

successful and safe as they pursue publishing.

One of my favorite tools that I use in my fiction writing is

plotter which I introduced to everybody back in episode 74

it's a program that lets you visualize your story from

beginning to end and keep your notes on characters, themes,

settings and other plot elements all in one central place.

When I interviewed plotters, education and outreach lead back

in 2023

I had bought the basic program for myself, which is a tool that

you download and use offline. I've used it for at least three

different writing projects, and it's helped make my process much

more streamlined. So when the folks from plotter reached out

to me to chat about new developments, I was excited.

However, when I looked into it and saw that they had a new tool

that used AI, I got very uncomfortable. I'm way more on

the skeptical side of this issue, and I was scared to see

another program I used and loved get gobbled up by AI features.

But then I got curious, because I noticed that it was being

implemented in a different way that we see in products like

Google Gemini or Microsoft copilot, or if you listened to

my last episode, pro writing aid, the difference is that

instead of forcing AI features on plotter users, they offered a

choice where users could stick to the completely AI free

plotter program, or by the AI powered story snap, either on

its own or as an add on. Seriously, it'd be nice if more

companies would do that, instead of making you jump through hoops

to opt out. Recent surveys verify what you probably have

already guessed, that there are profound divisions between

writers who use AI and writers who downright refuse. But

interestingly, these surveys have also shown that around 60%

of writers do use AI tools of some kind, no matter my own

feelings. I can understand how that statistic poses a dilemma

for software companies that don't want to go out of

business. Plotter seems to be trying to create a solution that

gives both groups what they want. And I wanted to know more

about how that choice was being made and where those lines were

drawn. When I interviewed plotters founder Cameron Sutter

about the way they're trying to employ ethical AI use, I learned

that a lot of careful thought was put into how to deploy AI in

a way that avoids using stolen works and doesn't write user

stories for them. I'm not here to sell you story snap, but I

did make space in this interview to talk about it, even though,

as you'll hear, I struggle to pronounce it correctly, to keep

it simple, story snap helps series writers create a personal

story bible so they can easily maintain continuity throughout

each book. Cameron does a good job explaining how they've

attempted to address issues about privacy and what measures

they've taken to keep the AI from training on users' work.

Personally, I'm probably still going to stick to using plotter

on its own happily and wholeheartedly, but take a

listen and decide for yourself where you draw your line. Who

knows you might not even make it past Cameron in my discussion

about pizza toppings, but I hope you do. Here's the interview.

Cameron Sutter, welcome to the program. Thank you for joining

me today, Emily, thanks for having me. I'm really excited to

be here. You excited to be here. Awesome. I have a very important

icebreaker question first, because I was watching the

interview you did, I think, with draft to digital, and I saw that

you got a pineapple in your background there. So my

important question is, what are your thoughts on pineapple on

pizza? Oh, boy.

This is a safe space. We'll see, we'll see, see what your

audience thinks. No, so I enjoy pineapple on pizza,

but it's not my favorite.

So I wouldn't root for it necessarily, but I like it.

Okay? You wouldn't choose it as your like top contender in the

like bracket. Okay? Definitely not. No. I mean, I love

pineapple on pizza, so that's, that's why I asked, because I

know that it's controversial topic, and I don't know why,

because I think it's great. I know I know Same here. I love

pineapples, though pineapples is probably my favorite fruit. I

love it. Yeah, yeah. I mean, I, I never liked it when I was a

kid, until I like went.

To Hawaii and had fresh pineapple. And it was like, this

is a completely different game. This is like, a game changer.

Oh, I bet, yeah. I don't know if we had pineapple when I was in

Hawaii, I imagine, though, but I'd never had it fresh before.

I'd only had, like, in the can or on pizza. And I was always

kind of like, this is gross, but, yeah, nothing like a fresh

also with the show psych, how they had a pineapple in every

episode. It's one of the reasons I love them, too. I didn't know

that. I actually grew up in Santa Barbara County, and so,

yeah, all I really knew about that show was like, they did not

film it in Santa Barbara, and it just doesn't look like Santa

Barbara at all. It's like, we don't have trees like that.

No, yeah, but they hit a pineapple, or a reference to

pineapple in some form in every episode. And just this cool

thing. My kids, when do I watch it? We're like, Oh, there's the

pineapple. Got

it fun little easter egg thing. Yeah, it's cool. It's cool,

awesome. Well, now you you could have an episode at your house if

you needed to, like,

like, several, yeah, our house actually, this is probably going

further than you wanted to, but when we bought it, it actually

had some pineapple statues. So there's these small, maybe two

foot tall pineapple statues right outside the front door,

and then there's a pineapple fountain in the back that

doesn't work. And

then there was pineapples on the wall paper and stuff like that.

So it was like the lady that made it said that pineapples are

a symbol of hospitality, and so she wanted to feel like her

house was hospital hospitable. Yeah, yeah. I love that. That is

really interesting. I'm glad I asked.

All right, so let's talk about plotter. Because I talked to

Troy a couple of years ago in 2023 and I bought the product,

the offline version. So didn't get the community thing. Just

got the product. I've used it a ton.

Actually, I'm pretty sure, like I wrote, I had the most

organized, most, like, smooth running, book writing project I

ever had, when I really took the time to sit down for a couple

days and, like, plot everything out, get the pictures from the

character references that I wanted to use. And then now I'm

just like, oh, I want to use that again. And then looking at

the website, I'm just like, maybe I should have done the

subscription model, because it looks like there's a lot of cool

new stuff.

There is a lot of new cool stuff, but you should be able to

get that if you bought the

lifetime. Yeah, okay,

well, we can talk about that part. We can figure that out,

but you should be able to get all that new cool stuff. So,

okay, yeah, but I didn't even know I wanted it until

yesterday, and I was just like, oh, this is a lot. This is a lot

more than, like, I knew. So, yeah, good job.

At least that much more money coming in. Yeah,

there's a lot of new cool stuff and even more coming so we're

really excited about what's up. What's coming up. Yeah, can you,

other than story snap, which we will talk about soon, can you

sort of talk about, like, the way that plotter may have

changed a little bit over the past couple years, or even,

like, longer than that, if you want to talk about some

milestones and, like, cool stuff that's happened recently. Yeah,

sounds good, man, over the last couple years, I'm trying to

think there's been so many changes, but of course, none of

them are coming to mind. How that happens better, offline

mode. Act. Structure is one thing we did, but one of the

most recent things that is the biggest thing is the family tree

feature, where you can now visualize your character

relationships in a way you never could before. You can have love

triangles, military organizations or just a normal

family or

lost lovers or twins that you

didn't know about, those kind of things you know that you can

just visualize in a really easy way. So that's pretty cool.

Yeah, and I bet, probably important for some people to

keep a secret if there's, like, identity stuff going on, yes,

like a little behind the scenes there, if somebody wants to hold

it back, that's cool. So it sounds like that makes it so

plotter is

especially good for people writing series. I don't want to

rehash what I talked about last time too much, but like, what

would you say the ideal user of plotter is, and has that changed

since you started?

Yes, it has changed. And so originally, it was definitely a

hardcore plotter, or maybe not hardcore, but somebody that

definitely leans more towards the architect or the plotter

type of writer. And as it's grown, we've realized more and

more how it's super valuable in every stage of the writing

process. And so it's become, and this might sound a little trite,

but it's become any writer I think can be really valuable,

and I I can explain that, but for the people that lean more

towards the pantser or they don't have a plan when they

start writing, having the series Bible aspect.

Where you have all your details for book, 2345, already in

there, so that you don't have to remember what was that one

person's eye color, or, you know, those kinds of things, is

just game changing, and a lot of them don't have that

that organization, especially because they're just pantsing

it. But those that take the time to do it

are very much rewarded in the next in this books down, down

the road in the series. And then on top of that, being able to,

so if you're a pantser, being able to go back after the first

draft and edit it within plotter,

and just visually, being able to rearrange things and move them

around, and think through a high level of your story, not the

prose necessarily of your story, but high level, what your your

theme is, what you're trying to say with the story and and how's

the pacing, and how's where the plot holes and things even for a

pants are, I think that is really valuable. So, yeah, I,

like I said, a little trite, but I think every writer can find a

lot of value in every stage of their process. Yeah, did I see?

And this might be, this may have been just like a story snap

feature that I'm not sure the difference of, but I saw like a

toggle from plotter to pantser mode in,

hmm,

in one of the demos you were doing, interesting.

Oh, I think I know what you probably saw. So I made a demo

file where I map out your process in a plotter file,

though. So it's like a visual way to see, this is when you use

your writing tool. This is when you use plotter this is when you

story snap, and so forth. And I had a drop down

to switch between, if you're a plotter, you do it this way, if

you're a pants or you do it this way. And so that's probably what

you saw. Oh, okay, so it was a demo mode thing. Okay, cool. I

just saw that, and I thought it was interesting. But I do love

that it is available for because sometimes I'll be in the middle

of doing something that I think I can pants, and then I'll,

like, have to bring stuff into plotter and be like, actually,

this was a bad idea myself, organized.

It's, I've kind of, I kind of do both things a lot of the time,

as I'll get kind of, like, bored with plotting, and then I'll

just start writing, and then I'm like, no, no, no, no. We need to

go back and reorient ourselves. Let me open up plotter. Well,

yeah, I'm certainly somewhere in the middle. I don't, I'm not a

hardcore plotter, even though I made a tool called plotter,

but I, I definitely don't. I pants a lot of my book, and it's

more like I kind of plot maybe a couple scenes ahead of where I

am, but seeing further ahead to that is hard for me. So yeah,

I'm definitely going back and forth of My style and things

like that. I was definitely trying to, like, write something

off the cuff, and it's the second book in a series, and

then I was just like, oh, wait, I can put them all next to each

other and make this a lot easier on myself. So I actually decided

to extend a deadline for myself, because I was like, I just want

to take, like, a day and sit here and, like, plot everything

out like I did with the other one. I should have done this

from the start. It's great, yeah, yeah, but have no fear if

you if you, if you don't feel like doing that, if you're not a

plotter, then story snap actually is going to be a real

big help for Pantsers, which we'll get into in a little bit.

But yeah, yeah, why don't? Why don't you kind of give an

overview of what stories Hold on?

Why don't you give us an overview of what story snap

actually is? Yeah, sounds good. And I actually always trip over

that word. I say story Yeah, I always that's, that's, yeah,

yeah, of course. Now I'm not going to mix it up, but I always

trip over that word, so don't feel bad at all. So story snap

is a separate tool that we've made that

it's just a website. It's not something you download, and it

has a couple really awesome features, and it does use AI,

and I know we're going to get into that AI conversation, but

what it does is it either builds a book Bible for you, so it

takes your finished manuscript and pulls out all the details of

a character world, building your outline, and puts it into a

plotter file for you. So that's one thing, and then the second

thing is a virtual beta reader team, where it'll give you five

AI personalities that'll read through your book, and in five

minutes, it'll give you detailed feedback, instead of that, you

know, waiting for your best friend maybe for four months to

read it and then say it's great and that's it, or to correct

your grammar, when Really you want

not that level of detail, you know? Yeah, you're like, I'm

gonna rewrite this anyway, right? Yeah, this draft doesn't

matter. Don't correct my grammar.

I genuinely joined a writing group because my my wonderful

online friends that I write with are just so into gassing me up

that sometimes I'm just like, I need someone who's meaner to me.

Yeah, be real with me. Don't tell me it's great. I mean, I

need someone to tell me it's great. So, like, I'm not telling

them to stop. I'm just like, I also need people who aren't

gonna just tell me, Oh, gotcha,

yeah, just use like, chat GPT four, if you want everyone to

tell you you're great, right? I.

Yeah,

exactly a little AI ribbon there.

So just because, like, I know a lot of my listeners, and, like,

I'm pretty much a skeptic myself, like, are very hesitant

about using anything with AI. So can you sort of talk about,

like, the what went into developing stories, snory Step,

that's a new one.

Went into developing that and plotter and you took an

interesting turn, like made a choice that a lot of other

people didn't make, and probably users wish they would, where you

gave people the option of using one or the other or using both

together. So people who use platter can still use it without

any AI involvement if they want. So can you talk about how like

that came to be and where those distinctions lie? Yeah,

definitely, that is a really good just

place to start really good question with people, because it

is still, I'll be honest, I'm definitely skeptical too about

the the impacts it's going to have on society, and whether or

not for a person individually, it's a good thing, and is it

going to make You maybe less,

maybe take away your desire to work hard at the writing so you

get better at the right. Like, there's just so many things. And

so I am on board with all those people that are worried about it

and the energy concerns, and, you know, all those kinds of

things. Like, there are so many, I feel like it's just kind of

being pushed on us. And like, that's the way the world is. You

got to live with it. And it's like, well, maybe we don't want

this, you know, but there is no way to put it back in the box,

right? So, at least not for me, you know, if I was maybe

somebody more, way more wealthy and more powerful than maybe I

could, but I can't. So, so we're trying to take the tact of what

is valuable for writers, that is, actually,

it still puts them in the driver's seat, but does things

for them that is so much that would be a lot of busy work that

they that they shouldn't have to do, that doesn't really impact

necessarily. That isn't the writing itself. So it's like

supporting the writing, but is not the writing

and and on top of that, we're also trying to be very careful

about not letting AI train on your work, because that's

another big concern. Ai stealing people's work, you know, and it

feels, it sucks to feel like they're getting value out of

your stuff and you're not getting anything for it. And so

the way that we've done this is, it's a bit technical, but our

servers are talking to chat, GPT and Gemini and those, all those

models. And when you do a server to server like that through what

they call an API,

it's in their terms and conditions that they're not

allowed to train on on that work. So,

and, you know, we that's their word. It's in, it's in their

terms and conditions. So hopefully we can trust that, you

know, hopefully, yeah, but we're doing it as safe as we can so

that they're not able to train and also, we're not ever sending

your manuscript file to their servers. So we're never

uploading it to them. It's not stored on their servers, is

never in their hands. It's, it's only on our servers. And then

lastly, we don't, we don't have our own AI. We're not nearly big

enough to have our own AI model, and so we're not training our

own thing with your work. So there's, there's no training,

and we're not, we're trying to keep it out of their hands as

much as possible, and it's never uploaded to their servers. So

there's a bit longer. We're trying to be as careful as we

can with it pretty bare bones there it sounds like,

it sort of sounds like when you use Gemini and you're like,

looking for something within your own files, and it doesn't

necessarily bring in, like, how much, I guess, like, outside

influence from other things on the internet are coming through

with that API use. Like, is it, is it the same as, like, going

to chat GPT and asking for a bunch of random information, or

is it just more like, I'm taking your stuff and I'm organizing

your stuff and responding to it in a very like, contained sort

of way, yeah, yeah, that's how it is. So it's, we're not using

any of the models that are allowed to or we're not giving

them permission to go search on the web. First of all, because

that is something in the API you have to enable, and we're not

enabling that. And then second of all,

the way we're prompting it is very much, stay on task. Do not

pull from anything besides this book, and sometimes still, the

darn AI hallucinates things. You know, that's just how it works.

But we're finding

that it's pretty rare with story snap, because we're keeping it

very on task of only stuff from this book

and, yeah, just kind of summarizing and organizing.

And what's in your manuscript, and not, not even generating new

things for you. So we're not in the generation of like ideas or

anything like that. That's not what story snap does, okay? And

it's not reconfiguring it necessarily. If that makes

sense, like, no, that does make sense, yeah. It's not creating

something new, yeah, yeah, yeah, okay, that's, that's less. Would

that still be called generative or no? Well, I mean, we are

generating text from it, but it's not,

you know that it's, it's all a summary, I guess, of your book.

It's not like you did, yeah, it's not like, Oh, here's your

book back. And, you know, we had a few paragraphs or something

like that. Isn't like that.

I will say it was nice to, like, watch the demo where, like, you

took that file and it just like created, like, out of the I

watched, where you took the Great Gatsby and you had them,

like, plotted out. And it just was so satisfying to look at

just a done plotter file, right? How awesome would that be, or

how awesome it is because I'm playing with it, that I can just

upload my manuscript and, boom, there's a plotter file done for

me. You know? I don't have to worry about doing all the work

for it. It sounds like it's probably a better tool for

someone who's already written a book, though, like, right? Yeah,

it's, it's not for mid process. It's definitely for when you're

done. And the book Bible, part of it is meant for you've

already got either a first draft or a final draft, depending on

how your process goes. If you're a pantser and you want to do it

on the first draft, so that you have implodder and you can move

things around. That makes sense. But if you're looking for, I

want a series Bible. So that book 234, I don't have to go

reread my book to know what happened in it. Then, yeah, then

you want to do the final draft, and then the virtual BETA

readers that that you could do after one chapter if you wanted

to. But it's really set up in chunks of a book. You know,

I did. I also saw there's like, are they plugins, or they're

called snaps, or different programs people can use for it,

yeah, add ons or snaps, yeah, yeah. Why is it called Snap? Is

it because everything, like, snaps into place? So it was

meant to be an idea that it's speed the in the snap of a

finger, you know? So that story snap

and but then somebody else did say that same thing, like, oh,

everything snaps into place. I'm like, Oh, yeah. I didn't even

think about that. There you go. Yeah. Okay, cool, yeah, more

than one application,

yeah. So then there's, like, a very there are several ways to

use the programs together or separately or with community or

just like, on your own

subscription or whatever. Can you kind of like go over the

different like ways someone can use these things and pay for

them? Yeah? Yeah,

yeah. The difficulty with adding new cool things is that makes it

more complicated. So let me try and make that more simple,

especially when you let people choose, right? Which is

something we're always trying to do, like let you choose and be

in control of it, but then it makes it way more complicated.

So we kind of shoot ourselves in the foot sometimes,

but we're trying.

So, yeah, so there's the lowest tier. Is just called plotter,

and it is, everything is on your computer, stored as files on

your computer and and that's that's basically it. Then

there's plotter Pro, which is everything is stored in the

cloud on our database and our servers, and we back it up for

you, and it can sync between devices, and you can collaborate

with other writers. So real time, you can watch them moving

pieces of the plotter file around and and things like that.

So, so that's really cool, but it's not for everybody. It's if

you,

if you want it like a cloud backup, or if you want to be

able to collaborate with somebody, then it's valuable.

But if, if you don't care about that, there's no point, and you

can just get the normal plotter and then so the next tier up is

plotter Pro Plus community, which is everything in plotter

Pro Plus there is this online, private, friendly community,

which is not a Facebook community. It's based on mighty

networks, and it's just a private community that you can

make whatever you want of it. You can organize accountability

groups in there. Sometimes there's live events in there,

and sometimes it's just for chatting with writers. It's

really what you want to make out of it. And it comes with our

educational vault, so we have a bunch of educational videos in

there, and it has this cool AI feature where you can ask a

question about, like,

how do I make a sagging middle better or whatever? And then it

will give you exact minutes of videos in the educational vault

to watch. Instead of having to watch a 45 minute educational

video, just watch that minute and learn that one thing. So

that is really cool.

Yeah,

so I'll pause there before I get into the story, snap piece of

it. But Did I, did I make anything confusing? Or is that?

No, no, I'm I'm curious about, like, the community that you

have there, and like how they've influenced, like what you do as

a company, and maybe how robust it is because, because, for me,

I'm used to kind of going to a website and it's just like, buy

the thing. But, you know, I every video I watch there's,

like, a bunch of videos, and there's a lot of people

commenting on them, and it's just seems like a very sort of

communal area for for people to talk about their writing and

making it better.

Yeah, so we honestly are still kind of developing that and

figuring out what we want to do with that. It's kind of a choose

your own adventure thing. For a time we were doing these, like

set events and stuff, and that just it wasn't sustainable for

the size of team that we have for now,

but, but right now, we're not doing a lot with it, to be

honest, and it's, it's really people kind of get together in

groups and do what they want. There's accountability groups in

there and things. But, yeah, we're still trying to figure

that out and what it means for us and as a company and stuff.

Can you find real life BETA readers there? You could

actually, that's a really good that's a really good use case.

Let me write that one now. There you go. Yeah, thank you. It's

like, if you don't want to use the AI, here are some people who

might be interested. Yeah, that's an awesome idea.

Cool, yeah, because we're definitely not trying to get rid

of real life BETA readers with this beta reader feature.

Yeah,

yeah. Also, I just know that there's always sort of people

who are shy about that sort of thing, and if there's already a

built in community like that's, that's always nice to have,

yeah, yeah, that's a great idea, actually. Thank you. So you,

you're welcome. You're going to talk more about the story snap

aspect, yeah,

yeah. So story snap is a totally separate thing, and partly we've

done that because of separating the AI thing. So plotter has no

AI in it. I should have mentioned that earlier, and

story snap does, but it's separate, and it will create

plotter files, but you have to download them and open them

within plotter. So it's not like it even connects to your plotter

and puts it in there, or anything like that, which we may

want to do in the future, but for now, just to keep them

completely separate, it does not do that,

but it's also not locking you into plotter. You can do so when

you create a book Bible, you can download it in a Word file, and

it has all the same stuff organized as best as we can in a

Word file. And so, so you could just use word you don't need to

use plotter at all. But there is that it does work really nicely

together, because it'll create a plotter file for you, and

plotters a much more visual, searchable way to look at it

than than word and and then the second thing is the virtual BETA

readers thing, and you can do that right on the story snap

website. You'll download anything from there. And that

one is a pay per use thing. There's no subscription, there's

no commitment. It's just, if you want to run one book through it,

go for it, and that's it. Or if you want to do one beta reader

read, then that's it. And it's a it's a credit system. So credits

are depend on how many you buy at once. They're $12 a credit,

or they goes down to $9 a credit. I believe, if you buy,

buy it in groups, but the beta reader thing is one credit, so

it's just $12 for a beta read.

And then the book Bible is just five credits, so 50 bucks

essentially for

for a book Bible. Okay, yeah, that's unique. Yeah, yeah. And

we've always heard that people hate subscriptions as we want to

stay away from that, and it's just a pay for what you need it.

There's no commitment. That's what we're going for. And

hopefully that doesn't make it more confusing in the process.

Well, I think that at this point, with the way that

technology is is changing, that there's probably a lot of value

in people being able to make their own decisions in that

area. Sounds like it might be a little inconvenient for y'all,

but I know that there's some people who like Under no

circumstances, no matter how many assurances there are, will

want to have aI touching their work. So like to have plotter by

itself without that is is probably a good choice for that

community of writers. Yeah, yeah, that's what we felt, too,

yeah. And then they can, like, if they do get it, they don't

have to be scared that you're gonna add it in later, like, you

know Microsoft did.

Yeah, we have no plans to add AI to plotter. All right, awesome,

cool, yeah. And actually, just to clarify that a little bit,

originally, I

think it was the beginning of last year, yeah, the beginning

of last year, I think we did announce, hey, we're exploring

AI and plotter and

be, be ready, because we've got some ideas. And what came out of

that?

Was story snap, and we decided to separate it. And so

there's no plans to put AI in plotter anymore. And so if you

go back and read our blog and like, hey, but you said you were

going to add AI to plotter, yeah, we explored that idea. And

we had some, like, generative things. You could create a

character and stuff, but we just overall felt like the better

step right now was just to do the story, snap things and keep

it separate, and no AI and plotter. So that's the plan for

now. Was there, Ed and I can cut this out if you need me to, but

was there a little bit of panic in the comments? Is that the

implication there?

You know, we did get a little bit, but not nearly as much as I

expected, to be honest. And you don't have to cut it. I was

expecting a lot of just panic, and we got very little. So I

don't know what that means, but, but, yeah, we there were people

that said, you know, I'm done using plotter. You know, you

even said that there's gonna be use the word AI, I'm done. I'm

out. But wasn't nearly as bad as we thought. Okay, yeah, I think

it's important that even if authors who have, like, no

intention of ever using it, like knowing what's going on and how

it works, I think is really important, because we don't know

where this is going. And,

yeah, no kidding, no kidding, who knows what these tech

companies will do next. How often do you use Potter for

yourself? I know you're probably pretty busy working on the

actual program, but yeah, so unfortunately, I don't write

nearly as much as I used to, because now I'm running the

company making a tool for writers to write,

but for all my writing, I use it very heavily, and I've also

found it really, really useful for lots of things in the

business. So like, my roadmap for my plan of features in

plotter and story snap is visualized in plotter. We're

starting to put like, our marketing plan in plotter. I

have yearly goals in plotter. Some of the team members, their

family calendar is on plotter. So they're like, there's all

these uses where our YouTube videos plan is on we visualize

in plotter and stuff like that. So it's been really cool,

because not just for our writing, which we do use

heavily,

but just in all these other ways, it's like this is a great

tool for that. So cool, yeah, I mean, as someone who has, like,

notes, and you know, some of my notes are in obsidian, and some

of them are in my notes app, and some of them are in Google Docs,

like just the idea of being able to organize diverse sets of

information. Like, you know, here's a quote I like, but also

here's some character information, but also here's,

like a PLOT BUNNY. Like, it's, it's nice that plotter kind of

has all of those spaces and you can toggle between them pretty

nicely. Like, oh, notes, characters, settings, just

random stuff. And I thought it was interesting that, I thought

it was interesting that, like, story snaps, plotter files, were

able to draw out those more nuanced things, like, you know,

a completely different line for a different character arc, or

just like, here's a here's a notable part of this story.

We're just gonna stick it in a note here, like that. That was

really interesting to me. It's cool, right? Yeah, yeah, seeing

it visualize like that, with a different line for each

character. The first time I saw that, I was like, I stopped

everything, like, Hey guys, check this out. This is so cool.

It worked. This is so awesome. Yeah? And then just pulling out,

like, magic systems, or recognizing whatever is in the

book, and then being able to detail all those things, like

technologies, cultures, religion, you know, all those

things it was. It's pretty cool with, have you ever had a

hallucination where, like, the the AI was, like, this is a

symbol for for some major plot theme in your book that was just

completely bonkers, like, I can just

see that happening. It's like doing literary analysis on a

Galaxy brain level.

One of the add ons does look at like those, those kinds of

things. But no, I don't think anything like that would like

you described has happened. That would be kind of cool. My

daughter did a book. Yeah, there you go my daughter, she sent,

she published her first book this year, which is really

exciting. And when she sent it through story snap, there was

these. So there's these four cultures in her book, and one of

them

is only known by what everybody else says about them, and it's

just wrong, but, and that's what story snap pulled out. It said

this culture is this in this way. And she's like, that's not

true, but that's how it's said in the whole book. And so that

would make sense, but in my mind, it's this way, and they're

just misunderstood. And so those kind of things are valuable, and

it's hard to even pull those out, because story snap can't

say you meant to do this, but this is what actually showed up

on the page. It's just like, you Yeah, yeah. No kidding. That

would be a little scary, but so that you as the writers still

have to be in the driver's seat and say, okay, story snap pulled

this out, and the AI thought it was this, but that's not true.

And so I know there's a disconnect. Do I want that

disconnect, or do I want to close that gap, you know? And so

you still have to be in the driver's seat.

Yeah, yeah, I like that. I mean, I You probably saw this too, but

there was this study that, like, even if people were using

generative AI and really, like low,

low intensity ways, I guess, not just for brainstorming and notes

and stuff, their actual like performance while they were

writing was lower and their brain activity was lower than if

they just did everything themselves. So that concerned me

a little bit. Yeah, I saw that study. I didn't, I didn't read

the part about the brain activity. That's really

interesting. Holy cow. Yeah, it was just like your brain, the

way that you function is just decreased, even if you're just

using some generative AI. But, yeah, it's, it's not as fun.

That doesn't sound fun to me. It doesn't sound good, right? That

does not sound good. It's like the concept of cognitive

offloading taken to an extreme that I don't think anyone

appreciates. Yeah, yeah. It's like, I thought about this for

years, like our phones have become my brain now, like I

don't have to remember phone numbers and things like that,

and now it's harder to memorize phone numbers because of that,

and so same thing with AI. Probably Same thing's gonna

happen if we're not careful. Yeah, and I find, as I get

older, I'm just like, I've honestly sometimes I'll just

write things on note cards for myself and be like, I actively

want to remember what this is later.

Gonna train my aging brain a little bit.

Yeah,

cool. Do you have anything else that you want to plug like

you've been talking about some books. I don't know.

I am working on a book. I am nowhere near to a point where I

can

even have a projected date yet, so I'm not gonna say anything

about a book, but

there is one really cool thing that that we're working on with

plotter that I'll tease to your audience. There'll be one of the

few that know about this, and depending on when this is

published, I don't think it'll be out yet, but we are building

a

mobile app that where the idea is just to quickly capture your

ideas on the go as a writer, so you get an idea about a scene or

a character or something, and you'd want to capture it,

whether that's a picture because of something that you see in

front of you, or that's you just want to talk into your phone and

record an audio note or just type it out really quick. The

idea is just quickly getting those ideas onto something, and

then later, later you'll be able to organize them in plotter

back on your your desktop. But we're really excited about that.

I'm really excited about that after what I just told you about

my note taking exactly, exactly when you said that, I was like,

Oh, I hope I'm

always just like, I'll put it here and like, I'll make sense

of it later, and then I know I'm losing stuff, right? Exactly. So

that's kind of the idea you're waiting in line. You have an

idea, and I have the Notes app or a piece of paper notebook,

whatever. But this hopefully will put everything in one spot,

and then later I can just put it into my plotter files wherever

it needs to go. So that's the idea. Oh, one thing I will I do

want to talk about, sorry, just real quick, reminded of it. So

in November, starting giving. Tuesday, we are going to try to

gather, I guess, gather money for a charity.

It's called eight to six national and they help youth

writers to write, and helps writing actually increases

literacy, and it's for underprivileged children that it

helps them pull themselves out of that by writing, which I

think is just an awesome idea. They have eight chapters

throughout the country, and so we're going to starting Giving

Tuesday till the end of the year, give a percentage of

everything to them. And then also we're going to have this

website, plot for good.org

where you can donate extra. And it's, it's, we're kind of

piggybacking off of the wicked for good coming out in November.

So plot for good org, and we're hoping to be able to just give

them a big check, you know, and like, here help writers, help

youth writers, and we're going to give plotter licenses to the

kids as well, and and things like that. So, yeah, I just want

to plug that really quick. Yeah, nothing, nothing helps thinking,

like writing honestly, like when I feel like my thoughts are

getting foggy, like writing always helps me. And I think

that bringing that to as many people as possible is going to

be a really useful thing right now.

Oh, yeah, writing just makes you think more deeply, for sure.

Well, thank you so much for talking with me today. This has

been really fun. Yeah, thanks for having me. This has been

really fun, really great. Talking with you.

In the next episode, I plan to talk more about the results of

those AI writer surveys I mentioned, and get a little bit

more into the ethical issues. Anyone exploring major changes

in the publishing industry kind of has to,

I'd like to look into how people try to ethically navigate use of

AI. And I'm not just talking about generative AI, because

that isn't the only kind to the best of their abilities, as well

as people.

Who swear it off completely.

For now, I've included a link in the show notes for a free

plotter, 30 day trial, as well as to the plot for good website

where you can donate to kids writing programs. You can find

both me, Emily Einolander, and hybrid pub scout on LinkedIn, my

website, hybridpubscout.com

or you can find me on blue sky at Emily I know. Or you can

email me emily@hybridpupscout.com

thanks for listening. You.