Discussing Amazon's New AI Disclosure

Hello, Happy Tuesday, Happy September. Today is going to be a shorter live stream because I have an in person session that I have to be at at 3 o'. Clock. So we'll be keeping it short. But there's been some really big developments as far as kdp, Amazon, AI that we absolutely must talk about today. So we're going to dive into that shortly. While we give folks a moment to join, do say hello. Tony Jacobson has said hello first, so welcome my friend. And while we're waiting as well let you know that Saturday we have our Deep Dive. It is happening at 10:00am Pacific Standard Time, so 1:00pm Eastern for you folks on Saturday and you can Register@Book launchers.com deep dive and we are going to be talking about book marketing strategy, the goals you have and how that should play into your strategy and the tactics and the things you should be measuring. Because we are celebrating the upcoming launch of Self Promote and Succeed, which is the follow up book to Self Publish and Succeed. So Self Promote and Succeed is now available on pre sale and you can grab your copy. But on Saturday I will officially be pre launch rolling it out if you will and sharing some incentives and all that fun stuff. And most of you already know that because many of you are already part of my beloved book army. So thank you for your support. And I'm doing a few things differently with this book launch. One part because my schedule has been really full and also because I want to test a few things. So as many of you may know, I use Self Publish and Succeed to test some things for our clients. I'm doing the same thing with Self Promote and Succeed. So I'm cooking a few things over here. So I'll be sharing a little bit of that at the Deep Dive and then more in October. But I'm excited for that. So book launchers.com forward/deep dive. So welcome Jeremiah. Welcome Rob. Great to see you. Darla and Michael all right, so so I announced those two things. Today's topic, we're going to dive right in because as I said at the beginning, I am a little shorter on time for this live than normal just because of an in person meeting that I have today. And so the big news, most of you probably already followed it, but KDP has rolled out the requirement that you disclose whether AI was used in generating your book. And this isn't that surprising because Kickstarter did it a little while ago. I suspect we're going to see this from everyone really soon. And the the big thing that people are you Know, there's. There's always drama whenever you use the word AI. There's the people that I will never. And then there's the people that. How dare they. So I am very much, you know, kind of. I don't know if pragmatic is the way a practical, I think, is a good way to phrase how I approach all of these things. We have been using AI at Book Launchers all year and we use it for ideation primarily. And then on the marketing side, we use it to generate first draft copy of things like speaker topics, media kit copy, sometimes book descriptions, author bios, but then it's heavily edited. So it is something we use. It's great. It's great for book title, chapter title, brainstorming, all of those things. So we love it for all of those things. So we use it a lot at Book Launchers. We even have a person on our team who is dedicated to AI usage prompt engineering. All of those pieces for everyone on the team. I am not anti AI in any stretch, but I can tell you it writes bad books. It writes really bad books. And so we also are in the process of reworking a few books that have been written by AI exclusively or even, you know, in part. And it's funny because when you read some of the copy, you know, there's certain words that only AI uses that humans don't seem to use. Journey is one of those words that I swear, you know, the AI ChatGPT just uses Journey and Odyssey and those kind of words so much more than any human writer I've ever known would ever use. So all that's to say, let me just show you what's happening behind the scenes. So you, you know, I showed my team this today and it felt like everybody just kind of calmed down to see what this actually looks like. What's going to happen is if you go to KDP and you need to edit any of your existing books or you're uploading something new, you are required to disclose whether it was AI generated. So I'm just going to pop over there right now and show you what that looks like. And I'm just looking at the comments over here. Chanita has joined in, so. Hello. Jeremiah says it repeats a lot of words. Yeah, it, it does not have a. It should have a very large vocabulary, but it doesn't seem to. All right, so I'm going to switch to that layout and then I am going to present and go to a screen share. And it always tells me that it would be better with two monitors Which Angela has. But I don't have two monitors. One of these days I will try and get two monitors, but okay, so kdp, here we go. This is what I want to share and that might be too small for you. Let me try this version. There we go. That should be a much better version for all of you to see. So what you are seeing there is my KDP screen. And so this is just my. I just picked my book, the new brand use. I'm inside of the Kindle Direct publishing platform. And as you scroll down, you'll see all this. So it's kind of in the middle, you know, it's not at the top, it's not at the bottom. And so you see this AI generated content. Amazon is collecting information about the use of artificial intelligence AI tools in creating content. And then it gives you a definition right here. So what is AI generated content? It is text, images or translations created by artificial intelligence based tools. And you agree to adhere to the KDP content guidelines as part of the terms and conditions of your participation in the self publication and distribution program. So if you click no, nothing happens. If you click yes, you see this dropdown come up and it's got texts, images and translations. And so underneath text you see some sections with minimal or no editing, some sections with extensive editing, entire work with minimal or no editing, and entire work with extensive editing. At this point, there are no repercussions for checking any one of these boxes. This is a data play like Amazon is. They already have their own AI systems. They're collecting information. That said, there is a world where I can see, you know, shadow banning of the book or you know, shadow banning is just when it doesn't show up on searches, it's still there. You can upload it. I could also see in the future, if you do not disclose it and they run it through their systems and they deem it to be something that was generated by AI and you haven't disclosed it. That can be one of the reasons they can use to ban or block your accounts. So there's two sides to this, right? There's the side that's going, hooray, they're doing this to get rid of the scammers. And then there's the other side of it that's going, oh my gosh, like they already are banning and blocking books and accounts from legitimate authors. What else? You know, is this just going to make it worse? And I think it's both. I think it is, you know, this is just going to increase and we've already seen some issues behind the scenes with some books at Ingram that are getting flagged and held up that would never have been flagged and held up before. And they've said, oh, that's a glitch. So it kind of makes us wonder. And we know for a fact this one book was not created with AI but we understand why a system may think it is. And so. But the glitch happened. They never disclosed us any other information other than, oh, it was a glitch, and, you know, manually pushed it through after a lot of persistence. But the other side is great. They're going to crack down on the scammers. And yes, to a point, I think they're going to use some of this to help with that. And some of this will cause problems for more legitimate authors. At the end of the day, I think the best policy is always honesty. Don't try to pull one over on them, because if you do that, your account can get banned and you won't get another one. But essentially, you know, I would say if you are doing this. Oh, sorry, I just saw something flash on the screen. Let me just look to make sure everything is okay. Hold on. Yep. Okay, cool. So it does look like everything is okay. It just something. Something flashed. I don't see any issues. Okay. So anyway, what I was saying is if you want this to be a really good book and you are using ChatGPT or Jasper or any of these systems, dibly create, which I will do a video on in a couple of weeks, new tool. I am loving it. Maybe you'd use them. Whatever it is, whatever it is, I hope your choice is some sections with extensive editing or if you've created the entire work with someone and some editing. Because otherwise it's not going to be a hashtag. No boring book. All right, so that's the text part, the images, one or a few generated images with minimal or no editing, one or a few with extensive editing, many, so forth. You're getting the picture here. Translations, same thing. And then, so sorry. The other part I wanted to note. So if you do say some sections, it asks you what tools you used to create this. So one distinction I want to make is generated versus assisted. Generated is you go in and you go, hey, Chatty. That's what we call chatgpt in our office. So, hey, Chatty, can you write me a chapter for a book on how to not kill plants? This chapter will be all about watering practices. I need to know how often to water certain kinds of plants, why my plants Always die. I'm staring at my plant that is dying in front of me, which is why I chose that topic and have it produce that. And so you would write chatgpt in here. And so that's, that's generating because you're, you're getting it to write it for you versus okay, listen, chatty, I'm going to write a book on, you know, how to turn my brown killer thumb into a green thumb. Can you produce an outline and give me suggested topics for each chapter? That's assistance. Taking your content, running it through prowritingaid and saying rephrase this sentence. That is assistance. So that's a pretty important distinction they're making. And you don't have to disclose assistance, you have to disclose generation. So that's the big news. And it is effective immediately. They rolled it out and made it a requirement. And so the big thing is you have to disclose this. You, you have to feed their big data machine. And you know, at this point, I don't foresee it being like a situation where they're like, you used AI and they ban you. That doesn't make sense to me given, you know, what Amazon is doing. They're already in the AI game. But I do see there, you know, there will, it's a data collection on their side and there could be ramifications. There will be ramifications if you do not disclose and you have used it. I can, I can almost guarantee that. Of course there probably will be ramifications even if you haven't used it, but you run it through the, an AI checker and it comes through as not human, you know, which can happen occasionally, doesn't happen very often. We run everything through AI checkers and, and, and plagiarism checkers. And so we've got a pretty good grasp on what things sound like when they go through those, those checkers. But. All right, let's see your questions, what you guys are talking about. Lois, I'm so glad you caught the live as well. It's great to see you here. Jeremiah Stonecastle, always a pleasure. It probably has a large vocabulary, talking about chatty or ChatGPT or AI, but when it comes to creative writing, it's weak on finding synonyms. It is lazy. I swear it is. Yes. It takes an odyssey into a one path, into a one path journey. Sorry, bad joke. Okay, Efren, thank you. Oh, and by the way, Efren, congratulations on your print book launch today. And St. John Butler also just finally caught the live. So that's great. So great. To have you here is the paraphrase app assisted? Yes, that's assisted. Anything that is taking what you've already done, I guess. So if you want to think about it, is who's the originator of the content? If you're the originator and then you're using AI to spruce it up, you're the originator. So that's assisted. If you use the AI to start it, like you get Mid Journey, you go to Mid Journey or Canva and you get it to start with an image and then you edit the image and that is generated by AI. If you create the image and I don't actually know how to do this, but you upload it to Mid Journey and you go, make this look pretty. Add a, add a blue, blue flower to my hand. And it does that. That's AI assisted. That's not AI generated. So hopefully that makes sense to you. It's an important distinction. And then you will use, you know, type in the tools in there as well. Ramifications. Everyone says ramifications. Like prison. No, but you know, for an author, especially authors who haven't gone wide, the ramification could be that you are unable to publish books on Amazon and create any new accounts. And so, you know, that can be a pretty big ramification. But if you watch my video that I posted on Friday with KDP vs. Ingramspark, part of my discussion there, answering Joanne's questions, was really to highlight the fact that I am not a fan of giving Amazon full control over everything. And in fact, one of the things that I'm doing with this upcoming book launch is I'm not going to put my audiobook on ACX off right away. I think I will eventually. But to start with, I'm not going to put it on acx. I'm. I'm going to distribute it in a variety of different ways and primarily use it for lead generation. So I am going to do something that, you know, a lot of people normally wouldn't do. But I think you'll be able to get my audiobook for free in a couple of ways and it will just be for lead generation as far as, you know, getting. Giving me your email, email address and you can get self promote and succeed in audio format. We'll see how that works out. I have a few things I want to test and then eventually I probably will upload it for sale on acx. But Amazon has a lot of power and control and, and I think that it's important to make sure that you have other options because should Amazon decide to turn your account off or terminate your book or not publish it. You want to make sure that that doesn't shut you down completely as an author. So always be building your platform, your newsletter list so that you've got points to your audience. And of course I recommend going wide so that Amazon is not your only source of distribution. Okay. Is that video? Yes, that video is available to watch. Michael and welcome. Angela can post it here and then if you're watching the replay, I will get the link and put it in the description after the fact as well. And Bill, this is an interesting suggestion. Bill. Bill said maybe KDP will create an entire section of AI generated books. That is possible. I think the world where I see that as being potentially valid is. Well, I mean, honestly it's possible they could just create an entire section. There's a lot of authors that are using it, so I would be surprised if that's the only place they show up. But I think there could be a world where that is a category or there's a flag for that. I don't know. Like I said, all I can say with certainty is Amazon is collecting information, they're collecting data and they have the power over us authors to require us to share our data. So. And Jeremiah says chatty is a nightmare for a horror writer. When I asked it to create a synopsis, everything winds up as a violation of it in LA la Land term law, law, land terms and policy. Yes, there's a lot of things and we're not going to dive down the copyright train or any of those things, but there's a lot of things to be mindful of. You know, as a, as a company, we're not, we're using, we're using AI heavily. However, we're not generating manuscripts with AI. We are using humans, writers, writing coaches, our authors to generate the material that goes into the manuscript. But we are getting some authors submitting manuscripts that they created using AI. So there's, you know, we're definitely paying close attention to all these pieces. The other piece of news which I wanted to touch on, it happened know, quite a few weeks ago, the announcement, but I just wanted to make sure that you all know about it because if you are Already published on IngramSpark, they are changing your minimum wholesale requirement. And so this means that come, I believe it's October 30th, you have to make sure that all your books are set to have a minimum wholesale requirement or wholesale rate of 40%. So previously their minimum was 35%. They have found that their retail distribution channels are not happy with that and they're getting delisted. So in order to protect the integrity of their catalog, they're raising the minimum to 40%. Now, we've talked a lot about wholesale discount here before. I'm not going to go down that rabbit hole too deeply. Angela, There is a video on the wholesale discounts that you can share here for anybody who is unfamiliar with this. But really the only point I really want to focus on today is is that if you haven't already, make a note in your calendar that you need to go into your IngramSpark account and make sure that your book is set to a minimum of 40%. If you are in pursuit or have physical bookstore distribution, you will have to set that at 55%. So to sell online to Barnes and Noble or chapters or, you know, any of the indie bookstores, having a 40% discount is enough. But if you want that physical bookstore distribution, they won't order unless it's 55%. If you're a book launchers author, we've already been doing it at 40% because we are Ingram person has told us a little while ago they were seeing some issues with this. So it's not surprising to us that they've made it a mandatory change. Some people are screaming that it's them grabbing money, but their 15% hasn't changed. It's this is going to the retailers. This is to protect the integrity of their catalog. Okay, let's do some prizes and then I'll have about 10 minutes for questions before I have to scoot on off for the day. But I do hope all of you will be there on Saturday for the deep dive. We're going to go into one of my favorite topics. Oh and by the way, there was some breaking news that I was hoping to be able to share with you today. I got the inside scoop on it from Dale Roberts over at Self Publishing with Dale and but as far as I know, the, the news hasn't broke out yet today. So on Saturday we'll talk about that too because I'm pretty sure it will be out it per se. It also pertains to Amazon, but it's not something Amazon has necessarily done. It's kind of some discoveries that have been made. So Saturday, if you don't, if you don't, if you don't tune in, you'll be able to catch the replay for this deep dive because I will be posting it to YouTube a week later. But book launchers.com deep dive to register for the Saturday session, because we'll be talking book marketing, all things book marketing for you, for everyone. Nonfiction fiction is. Welcome to join. But this is really going to be about nonfiction. We're going to talk about. Okay, I want to be a speaker. I want to be a consultant. I want to sell books. I want to be a thought leader. We're going to talk about those goals and kind of reverse engineer it so that you're using the right strategies and the right tactics to get there and you're measuring the right things, because that's essentially what Self promote and succeed is all about. So we'll break that down and talk about that in detail together on Saturday at the deep dive. All right. Surprises. Let me see if I can make this work. One moment, and I will bring up my screen where I have the random name picker all ready to go for you. There it is. Okay, so. So let me. So every Tuesday and Friday, for those of you who haven't been here before, we. Every Tuesday and Friday, when a new video comes out, and if you're watching the replay today, it counts, we enter you in to win some hashtag noboringbooksswag. And on Saturday, by the way, I didn't even mention this Saturday we're celebrating 50,000 subscribers over here at YouTube. So Saturday, we have a ton of T shirts we're gonna give away. We're also going to give away copies of Self, promote and sorry, Self publish and succeed. We're not giving away Self, promote and succeed yet. Self publish and Succeed. We've got two hats remaining. These beauties right here. This is absolutely my favorite hat in the whole wide world now. I wear it all the time. And our journals are oh, so self journals. And our mug, which I have to replace the mug that I once had in my office because somebody stole it. So, yeah, Saturday, lots of prizes. But today you can choose from the mug the journal Self publish and succeed. And that's your swag choices for today. Self Pub with Andy. Congratulations for, and thank you for commenting the day a video was released. Email angelaeamooklaunchers.com and let her know what swag you have that needs updating and refreshed. And she'll get that over to you and make sure you give her your address as well. All right, my second prize winner. Where are you? Where's my button? Here it is. And Rachel Robertson. I think she's probably due for an updated swag as well. So congratulations, Rachel, and thank you for commenting the day a video was released as well. All right. Tony says he's rocking my hat. Love it. Yeah, it's a great hat. I'm really happy with how those turned out. And these T shirts that were given away on Saturday, a few of you have won them, but any Game of Thrones fans will appreciate it. And even if you're not a Game of Thrones fans, the. The shirt says I, I drink coffee, write books, and know things, which is kind of a play on Tyrion Lannister from Game of Thrones, who says, I drink wine, read books, and know things. So I. I love these T shirts. And of course, they're. All of our T shirts are soft and comfy, and you will definitely want to wear it when you get a T shirt. So. So that's happening Saturday. You can get lots of prizes. But Rachel and Andy, congratulations and thank you. And for today, Angela, let's go ahead and pick. Pick a couple prizes for today. So the first one, just randomly pick. Let's see, it's the 12th go from Toni. Tony said, hello. First go. 12 down from Tony. And that is our first winner. And they can win a prize as well. And then let's see a skill testing question. Oh, no, I was gonna say launch day, but I think I asked that one last time. I don't know. I'll have to think about the skill testing question. Give me a second. Okay. And Efren said, I'll send you a new mug. I have inventory in California. Effort's been collecting mugs. It's okay. I think I still have a couple in my garage. And if not, Angela has the storage too. But anybody wants to win a mug, Efren Effort has mugs. That's awesome. Okay, so Angela said it's her favorite T shirt of all the book launchers T shirts. Michael, Angela will drop the link in here again if she hasn't already. And questions. If there's any questions, let me know. I have about eight minutes before I have to leave. So, Darla, congratulations. You are the 12th comment of today. So same thing. You can get a copy of Self promote and Succeed, our OSO Soft journal or our mug. And you just need to email Angela at TeamokLaunchers with your mailing address and what you would like and. And then any questions, I am happy to answer them right now. There's your link for Saturday for those of you who want to join me on Saturday. Like I said, this is one of those rare deep dives where I will be posting a replay. About a week later, we'll post the replay, but because it's the 50,000 subscriber celebration. It's a big one. And because I'll be Talking about the October 3 release of Self Promote and Succeed. And so it's part of my launch plan to release this out there as well. And there's only one question Susan says or Suzanne. What if you use ChatGPT for your sample dedication and then edit it? That is still a section that has been written by, generated by AI and it has been extensively edited, so that's where it would fall. So it would be like it says, some sections extensively edited. That would be what you would check off for that. And then Tony says, just to clarify, I'm feeding Chatty with transcriptions from audios that I recorded, then I'm doing extensive editing. So I do not. You do have to disclose that. I would say so. Tony said, I'm feeding Chatty with transcriptions from audios that I recorded, then I'm doing extensive editing on those. So I do not have to disclose that. I'm going to rethink that. So the original material, it originated from you. You're running it through Chatty to improve it. You're not asking Chatty to contribute anything to it. So it's just take this material, edit it and then putting it in. I think that's okay because the, it's. The origination is how the generation. So the original content, origin, where does that original content come from? And that original content is your audio. So I think it's okay. But that's a really like, really good example, Tony, of, Of. Of where there could be gray area. But my, my understanding as you read through it, I'll read you exactly what it says for generation. It says we define AI generated content as text, image or translation screen created by an AI based tool. If you used an AI based tool to create the actual content, it is considered AI generated, even if you applied substantial edits afterwards. AI assisted. If you created the content yourself and used AI based tools to edit, refine, error check or improve that content, then it's considered AI assisted. So I think you're okay. I think that what you're doing is AI assisted and you don't have to disclose it. Thank you. That was a good example to kind of work through and think through through what qualifies under each bucket. And Michael says, would that be the same for my chapter outline? Your chapter outline is assistance because you're getting ideas from it, but then you're writing the chapter yourself, so it's totally fine. That's how we Use it. That's how our coaches and our writers are using it. We're using it for idea generation. You know, the example Dan, who is our manager of manuscript development, he used, he said, you know, he was writing a book for one of our clients and he was like, give me 10 ideas for what we could talk about related to this subject. And it gave him 10 ideas. And he went back to the author and said, okay, now tell me about this, tell me about this, tell me about this. And so that the ideas of what we could talk about were generated by the AI, but then all the content was actually generated from. From him talking to the author. Janita said, will we get notification for Saturday's video? I believe so. Do you mean when it goes. When you get the replay? When the replay goes live here on YouTube? If you are subscribed and you've got the notifications turned on, then yes, you will get notified. And it'll probably be in our newsletter. So if you're not already subscribed to the biweekly launch letter, you can get on that as well. You just go to here, I'll just type that in right now. Book launchers dot com. You can just go to newsletter and get yourself on that list to make sure that you catch all that stuff. All right, I know I have one more prize to give, so we're gonna have to do something random because I did not prepare a skill testing question in advance. So let's see here. We'll just go with the 23rd person down from the top. So we went from. I don't know if there's enough to go 23rd from the last winner. So let's go 23rd from the top and, and see and see how it goes. See what else is here. And matching birthdays for happiness. Ooh, that's fun. Okay, I'm just waiting for the final prize and if there's any other questions, you can get it in right now. Otherwise, I hope to see you on Saturday. And then October 3rd, self, promote and succeed. You can head on over to Amazon now if you want to grab a copy. But on Saturday, I will announce the incentives for buying 1, 3, and 10 copies. And I gotta tell you, the 10 copy prize, if you will, incentive is pretty darn cool. Any of our clients will be familiar with it, and I think, I think if you aren't familiar with it, you'll be kind of excited to find out what it is. All right, Chanita, you are our 23rd commenter, so thank you so much for being here and for participating, you can choose a copy of Self Promote. Sorry I keep saying it. I told my team, and this is gonna be tricky. Self publish and succeed. The yellow one, where is it? Right there. The yellow one or the Journal or our hashtag no boring books mug. Email Angelaemooklaunchers.com and if you're not in the States, then your choice is the book or the Journal, because anything else costs way more than it's worth to ship and pay duties on and all those fun things. So congratulations. Oh, Rob, just read it last night. Well, fantastic, Rob. Way to go. If you. If you buy Efren's book, I'm pretty sure you won't read it in one night, even if you're a speed reader. I read some of your book, Efren, on the way home. It's such a good book. What is so big? It's gonna be. It's gonna be a journey. I think I'll be talking about reading Efren's book for a while. It's a big one, but I'm very excited for it. And the paper version of Efren's book is out today, too. It's called the Opposite Is True, so you can check that out. And thank you for being here, Efren. And thanks, Rob. I'm excited for your review when it comes out, and thank you so much for reading it. I appreciate it. All right, folks, I hope to see many of you on Saturday, and if not, we'll be back here in two weeks, same time, same place. So I look forward to seeing you then. I think we'll talk about Dibly Create, because I'm really excited about this tool. It is AI, but it's got some really neat features, and it will make AI so much easier to use for authors. But we'll see what else is happening in the publishing world at that time, because it seems like every week there's something to talk about these days. So we'll see what's happening then. But that's what we'll. We'll definitely talk about Dibly Create next week or in two weeks. And I'll hopefully see you here on Saturday as well. All right, bye.