A transparent look at how AI copilots were used to accelerate the creation of The Shadow Balance book, podcast and website.
Every aspect of this work was accelerated by AI
None of this content would be available without the advances in AI that have occurred in the past few years.
Here’s how AI accelerated this work:
- Image creation. Midjourney created all the images that you see on this website, the podcast covers and the pages of the book. I iterated through hundreds of prompts to find the haunting style you see.
- Floral selection. Google’s Gemini was my assistant in finding and evaluating different types of flowers to use. I finally settled on the Pitcher Plant – a beautiful flower that attracts and digests small mamals.
- Website Hosting and Configuration. Gemini supported me with the selection of infrastructure, content management platform and configuration that this website is hosted on.
- Music. The music you hear in the podcast was created by Suno under their commercial license. I iterated through several options before landing on one that I thought was lighthearted enough to bridge the very serious (and sometimes dry) topics
- Podcast Script Creation. Gemini supported me by creating the first draft of the introduction and bridging elements that tie the podcast scripts together. These are the written elements that were least edited by me.
- Topic Selection. Gemini and Microsoft Copilot and I worked together to create the list of 100 topics that would be useful for me to learn about. I was careful to ensure that external resources existed to guide my knowledge and understanding.
- Topic Content. To arrive at the content for each topic, I first provided Gemini with the structure that I wanted and asked it for three different perspectives on presenting the information. Once I was satisifed with the high level content of each of the three sections of my topic, I began writing.
- Proofreading. While the initial drafts were manually reviewed and edited by me, Microsoft Copilot did the final proofread and actually found many small errors that I missed.
- Self-publishing. Gemini supported me in providing the instructions and options for all aspects of self-publishing my book, including how to get an account at Library and Archives Canada, how to structure my copyright page, how to protect the copyright of the podcasts and many other small details that I would never have known about as a first time publisher.
The Result of AI Accelerated Work
I’m happy with the level of quality of this work. I hope I found a balance between moving quickly to bring you this information and ensuring the quality and facts are well aligned.
With that said, I definitely made some choices that negatively impacted the professionalism of the content, most specifically in the podcasts. It would have been easy to have a professional sounding AI voice narrate the script I wrote. Instead, I chose to record the audio in a pillow-fort in my office. The result is a massively imperfect recording that is absolutely really me.
Who’s Responsible?
Me. If there’s errors or information missing, that’s on me.
And with that said, I’ll remind my kind audience that I’ve done this work to raise visibility of costs and risks and barriers to adopting AI, not as professional advice. Each individual application context is unique and there are people closer to you and your organizations who are better suited to advise on how to manage these costs, risks and barriers.
Support this Work
You can purchase the book on Amazon:
You can listen to the podcasts for free through Patreon, Apple Podcasts or YouTube Music: