01 October 2025
AI, Authors, and Voice Acting. Round Two with Aaron Ryan (273) - S7E273
In this episode of Digital Marketing Masters, I sit down with returning guest Aaron Ryan—author, voice actor, musician, and now 35-book veteran—to dig into the turbulent crossroads of creative work and AI. We talk candidly about toxicity and gatekeeping in the voiceover community, why Aaron stepped back from coaching, and how that decision unleashed a surge of creativity across fiction and music. We dive deep into AI’s disruptive impact on voice acting, translation, and publishing; the ethics and legal gray areas around voice cloning and training data; and the real-world risks surrounding impersonation scams, spammy book “marketing,” and parasocial AI relationships. Aaron shares insights from his latest releases, including The Phoenix Experiment and the ever-expanding Dissonance series, while I offer updates on my new book, Will AI Take My Job Too, and the whirlwind pace of AI developments creators must navigate. It’s a frank conversation about protecting creators, using AI responsibly, and finding the line between innovation and exploitation.
We also explore practical ways authors can focus on their craft—hiring help, building communities on platforms like BlueSky, and embracing tools that amplify (not replace) human creativity. From fair use debates to the future of royalties and open-source models, this episode is a reality check and a roadmap for storytellers working in the age of intelligent machines.
(00:01) Welcome back and guest intro: author-voice actor Aaron Ryan
(00:46) From tetralogy to hexology: expanding the Dissonance series
(01:16) Reunions, life updates, and catching up
(03:07) Career snapshot: voice acting full-time and leaving coaching
(04:10) Toxic gatekeeping vs. quality bars in voice over
(06:25) AI’s impact on voice acting and licensing your voice
(08:11) Voice cloning risks, misuse, and legal gray areas
(10:14) AI lawsuits, fair use debates, and training data
(16:05) Derivative works, royalties, and who gets paid
(18:31) Music royalty realities and quoting lyrics in books
(19:29) Runaway AI progress and superintelligence concerns
(23:20) Fiction mirrors fears: Phoenix Experiment and AGI Next
(25:47) Scammers targeting authors and creators
(29:49) Fighting spam with AI and ethical gray zones
(33:24) Automation abuse, impersonation scams, and loneliness
(38:08) Open-source AI vs. safety tools; hopes for human-made work
(39:40) Let creators create: hiring marketers and using AI well
(41:02) Where to find Aaron’s books and communities
(41:43) Wrap-up and playful outro banter
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[00:00:01]
AI Narrator #1:
Today on digital marketing masters with your host, Matt Rose, our guest is author and voice actor.
[00:00:24] Matt Rouse:
Aaron Ryan. Aaron Ryan. Hey, everybody. Welcome back to Digital Marketing Masters. I'm your host, Matt Rouse, and it's been a minute where we have got a fantastic guest for you who's been on the show before. Aaron Ryan, welcome back.
[00:00:44] Aaron Ryan:
Thanks for having me. Good to be back.
[00:00:47] Matt Rouse:
So Aaron Bryant wrote what before we had, I guess, mispronounced as the dissonance quadrilogy, but it's now the dissonance hexology?
[00:00:59] Aaron Ryan:
Yeah. It was a tetralogy. I used to call it quadrilogy, but it's that's more of a movie term. So it was a tetralogy of four books, then it became a pentology of five, and I just story kept telling itself, so I I turned it into a hexology. So there's six now.
[00:01:16] Matt Rouse:
Yeah. And I've been I've started reading. I'm only kinda, like, I don't know, maybe a third of the way through the first book. I was reading it while I was on the plane going out to Calgary. I went to my thirty five year high school reunion, which as much as people don't like high school reunions, when you get to be, like, you know, in your forties and fifties, I think it's worth going. Yeah. You know? Like, you just have no idea what's happened to people at that amount of time. Right. You know? And We've moved around so much, so I don't gosh. I've
[00:01:47] Aaron Ryan:
I went to high schools anyway, so it's out of the country and back. And yeah. Well, I guess it's true. Right? I went
[00:01:55] Matt Rouse:
technically to two different high schools, but, yeah, I mean, it was still fun to go back, see some of the old crowd. You know? And but everybody's always like, you know, this person died. I got divorced last week. This is my third husband or wife kind of thing, and such and such is dead, and this other person's in jail. And, you know, you kinda get the you know, like, in three or four hours, you get the tea on, like, a 100 people. Right? Yeah. Anyways, I thought it was an interesting experience.
[00:02:23] Aaron Ryan:
It's not like you're gonna have another one. Right? You know? Right. You're not you like, if it's your twentieth reunion, you don't go. You're not gonna have another twentieth reunion again. So Yeah. And I've got a I've got nine and six year old sons. I just wanna be home with them and the wife. So traveling to these places and and, you know, you want to go support these people, which, you know, they were a factor, and they were formative and important in your life at one point. But have we kept in touch? I'll keep in touch with the people that I've kept in touch with, you know, since high school. But overall,
[00:02:53] Matt Rouse:
like, there's not a huge motivator for me. I you know, I kept in touch with, you know, probably a good dozen people. So it was probably worth the trip. I used to live there and work there and you know? So let's talk a little bit about what we talked about last time you're on the show. Yeah. You worked as a voice actor primarily before. Right?
[00:03:11] Aaron Ryan:
I'm still I'm still my day job is still a voice actor and author full time. Right. And but you also teach voice acting. No. I used to. I I used to be a voice over coach. The community has grown. This is just my, you know, my humble opinion, and this was the way it was in the 2023. The community grew real toxic. And I was through kind of licking the fingers and kissing the butts of the upper echelon of voice over artists who basically are kind of a they run it like the Illuminati. They decide who gets to teach, who gets to speak, who gets to appear, and who they're gonna endorse.
And I I really grew very tired of of that rat race and that grind. So I was a business coach at the time, but I pulled out of the community entirely in the '23. Sorry, the '23, and that that right there was the catalyst for a boon of creativity, which included music and then ultimately returning to fiction writing. Right. So I'm so glad I left.
[00:04:13] Matt Rouse:
Yeah. Well, I mean, it sounds like there's there's a lot of gatekeeping in that community, which, you know, I have a I let's let's just go off the rails right away. We're we don't even need to wait to get into, like, five minutes. I have a very unpopular opinion about gatekeeping. I think there's a lot of gatekeeping that's really good. And Mhmm. The problem about that is that it it means that everybody is not included. But I think that that in some instances, there should be a barrier to entry. Right? Yes. There should be, like, a quality level or, you know, whatever that is that that says, okay. You've you've got the quality or the you know, you've kind of paid the dues to get to the place where you should be.
I mean, maybe gatekeeping is not quite the right word, but I also don't think that there should be gatekeeping around my friends are the ones who get it, and I'm gonna exclude everybody else. Or, like, if I don't like a certain type of people or, you know, my, you know, their minority group or whatever, that's totally unfair. That's not the right kind of gatekeeping. Right? That's just discrimination.
[00:05:26] Aaron Ryan:
Right. That's what it was. Yeah. That's true. My friends, and these are the people that I like. And it was very high school juvenile, clicky, selectivism. You know? And I just Right. I was really tired of it. So while I appreciated probably a few of the people in that in that circle, overall, just the circle itself was so frustrating and and unveiled. And I'm I'm so glad I did. So yeah. But I absolutely agree that there needs to be a a bar, a high bar to entry because so many people feel like, hey. I could be a coach. You know, I know all the essentials, and I could be a coach. You might know all the essentials, but can you can you teach that effectively? Can you duplicate your efforts with success on their end? Right. Do do your students I mean, would your students come away from an experience with you and go, they're a great teacher.
And so and I was a great teacher, and I am a great teacher. I mean, humbly speaking, I got that from every client I had, and they resounded that online. But it was it just wasn't the right fit, and it was time to move on, and that's okay. Yeah. Well and, also,
[00:06:27] Matt Rouse:
the voice acting business is not exactly on an upward trend right now. Right? No. I was talking with somebody in the translation business a couple years ago, and they swore up and down that there is no way any AI system is ever gonna take over the translation business because they can't understand what someone is saying and translate it correctly with the right kind of verbiage in that, you know, whatever the other language is culturally. Right? Mhmm. Which as we know now, the translation business has dropped over 90%. Yeah.
So I think that is where kind of people stood with voice acting a couple years ago. They were like, there's no way that a computer voice is gonna be good enough that somebody is not gonna be able to tell that it's a computer. But now there's a lot of people voice acting into using their licensing their voices to AI systems.
[00:07:28] Aaron Ryan:
Yep. Right? Exactly. Well, as a voice over artist, I am on some of the most prominent voice over marketplaces online. One of those is voice one two three. Another is voices.com. There's Vioplanet. There's Bidalgo. There's Cast Voices. And voice one two three actually gives you the option I forget who they use. It's either Respeacher or SpeechHello or something. They give you the option to license your voice and to basically allow your voice to be replicated, machine learned, you know, trained, and then people can buy slash license your voice for their productions. Now you get to approve all those. So, you know, you you can't just put it on, you know, assign your voice to some smutty script on a TikTok video, TikTok reel. You get to approve them. But I'm just not ready to do that. I haven't embraced that yet, and I want control of my voice. The reason for that is I know a colleague in the voice over industry who actually I I pretty sure she had a contract in place.
She sold her recordings to the Chinese Institute of Acoustics. Mhmm. They, in turn, turned those recordings over to TikTok who then made a whole bunch of just, you know, gross salacious reels, and people were going, Bev, is is this your voice? She sued them, had a lawsuit. They settled. I don't know for how much. But I've seen it happen already, just the the misuse of your voice.
[00:08:48] Matt Rouse:
Yeah. I don't think that that's difficult to believe. I mean, it's gonna happen a lot more. Right? Yeah. And the other thing is, and this is something that I find really interesting, is the ability to regenerate a voice without a sample. Like Mhmm. I can tweak the pitch and the tonality and all this kind of stuff in, like, an app like 11 labs or something. And you can, essentially, you can create a voice very similar to another voice without having a sample of that voice. And that's very difficult in the legal realm Mhmm. Because I think, Dan, I'm not an attorney, so this is not legal advice.
But I am pretty sure that if it's mistakable for the other voice, that person could sue you. Absolutely. But if it's different enough that they wouldn't that you could tell the difference, then they can't sue you. But even though you didn't use their voice,
[00:09:48] Aaron Ryan:
I don't know how that's gonna turn out. I don't either. It's a wild west right now. It always has been, and it might still be for a while until litigation sets precedent. And you do have cases like that, like the the Scarlett Johansson case, against the producers of the movie Her that went ahead and created, you know, some kind of digital representation of her without her consent. And I think that is that ball is rolling, but the wheels of justice always turn slowly. So until that time, there are all these creatives waiting in the authoring industry as well. It's not immune to it as well. We're waiting for precedent to be set. There is an anthropic lawsuit right now that's underway that I think they just settled for that where they've harvested all kinds of authors' writings over the years. Yeah. They settled for the bugs.
Yeah. It's just that kind of stuff needs to be that groundwork needs to be laid so that the Wild West is actually tamed. So let me tell you something interesting about that lawsuit.
[00:10:45] Matt Rouse:
And I think our people listening may have heard that lawsuit, but maybe don't know the ins and outs of it. They got sued because the books were caught were pirated. Mhmm. They didn't get sued because they used them. And what they did is they retroactively went and purchased the books after the fact. That's why they had to settle because, otherwise, for every instance of the book that they used when they hadn't purchased it would have cost them up to $250,000. Yeah. And that would have been a bankrupting amount of money. Right? Mhmm. However, for the books that they did purchase in advance, they were not eligible to give the authors anything other than the author had already made money from the purchase because they said it was fair use because they purchased the book. So Which I just hate. I hate that explanation, but whenever I'm I'm not I'm not saying that I agree with that explanation. I'm saying this is what the court said. Right?
And then OpenAI is about to settle if they haven't already another similar case with books. Right? And I think, you know, if you listen to, like, the the AI podcast with, like, Paul Roetzer and and Mike Kaput, they talked about this, you know, a year and a half ago saying all these companies have set aside some billies to say, like, okay. We're gonna get sued. We're gonna have to pay out. So here's we're gonna bank a couple billion dollars in the legal fund. Right. You know? And so they they've already accounted for it in the amount of money that they're raising. And so they're just gonna settle. Right? That's what's gonna happen. And Yeah. I think it's unfortunate.
Yeah. I mean, a 100%, they're gonna dodge the bullet. But the other thing is there is what I would consider like, I don't know if it's right or wrong, but I consider it a really good case to say that learning is not fair use. Right? Or sorry. That learning is fair use. Mhmm. But learning maybe is not fair use if it only benefits the company that owns the technology.
[00:13:02] Aaron Ryan:
Right. Exactly.
[00:13:03] Matt Rouse:
But we also benefit. Right? Because here's the thing. Okay? Pretraining an AI model is not about learning the information. It's about learning the structure of language. Mhmm. So they're not reading your book because they wanna pick pieces of your story out and regurgitate that to people later. They're just using it to build the pathways like your pathways are built in your brain when you learn stuff. Mhmm. And then memory is remembering stuff and giving it out later, and that is a different stage in in the training process. Right. So a pretraining of an AI is not it's not learning the information. It's learning the patterns of language.
And so that, I think, is fair use. And so, I mean, you're getting into a really technical realm, and I don't think that you could walk up in front of a judge and explain people's mathematics and computer science that took them seven or eight years to get in, you know, year round schooling at university and then be like, well, in this case, I'm gonna you know, they're gonna write the math up on the chalkboard, like, in the in the TV shows, you know, from the fifties or what. Like, it just it's not gonna happen. Right? They're not gonna understand it.
[00:14:20] Aaron Ryan:
It's such a it it's a it's an incendiary topic as a creator. It's an incendiary topic. It is. It's also so exhausting because you don't know I mean, and you may actually have some foresight more foresight in this because you've written some books on it as well and studied that. But there are so many different ways that it can go, and the hope is that creators will be honored, that their works will be honored, that the rights that they have I mean, I've got copyright protection over all of my books, not just, you know, the like, registering them with KDP is one thing or Ingram Spark or Barnes and Noble Press, wherever. One thing. But getting them officially in the library of congress and getting a TX or whatever number on them is important to me, and that is some protection, gives me some legs to stand on in court. Mhmm. But what I'd love to see is just the infringement with no accreditation. That's the wrong word. No no crediting the original creator, no remuneration, no consent that all of that stuff just starts to get legislated.
Right. It would be so nice.
[00:15:21] Matt Rouse:
Well, there is the problem of creating similar works, right, which are protected under copyright.
[00:15:31] Aaron Ryan:
Yeah.
[00:15:32] Matt Rouse:
So, like, if I my daughter says to the AI, you know, we're embedded, and she's like, tell me a story. And I'm like, let's make an AI story because I can't think of anything off the top of my head. And she's like, okay. I want it to be about Minecraft and, you know, and they go to see dog band.
[00:15:49] Aaron Ryan:
Well, those are copyrighted characters. Right? And it sounds like you're giving OpenAI a prompt there, a chat that's a chat GBT prompt. Right?
[00:15:57] Matt Rouse:
And so if she says that to the AI and the AI comes up with the story, right, that's a derivative work. Correct. Well, hypothetically, they're supposed to be paying for that. Right? Now there is supposedly and this this some of this might be hearsay, but there are supposedly talks between OpenAI and Disney to pay them every time that it's used in, like, a writing or a story or something like that to pay them whatever the fee is. But my question would be, how do we determine who downstream from Disney gets a piece of that action and if they really get a reasonable amount of money? Like, how many streams as a musician on on Spotify do you need to make a dollar? Right?
[00:16:43] Aaron Ryan:
Like, the house is musician. Right. As a musician, that's the field that I well, it's the creative vocation that I returned to once I left the voice over industry the voice over community. I didn't leave the industry. I mean, I'm still recording back there. But when I ventured back into music, I was appalled. Every single stream of every song was maybe 3¢. And, you know, you can sell a Kindle version, which is the cheapest version of your book you can sell, and you can charge what you want. You can charge $9.99 and get, you know, 3 or $4. Right. The the difference is exponential.
[00:17:15] Matt Rouse:
Yeah. Well, I mean, you get your song played on satellite radio, and you get $3, and you play it a thousand times to make a dollar on Spotify, you know, or whatever the total is. Like, it's the disparity is incredible. Right? Or your show like, if it gets used on a TV show, they pay thousands for the rights to use it once. But Yeah. They could just stream it off of Spotify for 0.003¢ or whatever. Right?
[00:17:43] Aaron Ryan:
Yeah. And what's really crazy? The same song
[00:17:46] Matt Rouse:
in the same format.
[00:17:48] Aaron Ryan:
I actually both in the dissonance series, particularly in volume up. Yeah. Sorry. Volume Uprising, which is the second prequel. And then in my subsequent series, which, you know, I've written since we last met is called The End, volume two of that two of that series, I cited another song, quoted the lyrics in the book, quoted the lyrics for this song in this book, quoted the lyrics for that song in that book, and they get I think it's, like, 2¢ for every sale of every book, which is just nothing. It's nothing for something that they work so hard on. Granted, I'm just citing the lyrics for the song. It's not a full inclusion of, here's this song from start to finish. It's not even a snippet of the song in audio form. But, man, the royalty situation is also so messed up. It's glad I'm not in charge of it.
[00:18:34] Matt Rouse:
Right. I named most of the kind of subheading chapters in my new book are famous quotes or songs, but they're slightly modified. You know? So and for those of you who don't know, my book's out right now. It's, will AI take my job too. So you can get the updated version. Let's see. That's right. The sequel. There was 13 predictions in will AI take my job one. And as of last week, all 13 have come true. Wow. I was able to predict the short the short future, which I don't think is that difficult if you know enough, if you know what's happening.
But, man, the research that went into the next one, like, there's so much going on right now in the world in general. But if you even if you just talk about AI, right, it's like I I wanted to quickly look up his name. Roman Yampolsky. He is a computer science scientist from Latvia, but he is also considered to be one of the leaders in AI security and alignment in the world. So, like, for over a dozen years, he's been studying, like, the the security and alignment of AI and and deep learning and data systems. And one of the interesting things that he brought up when he was on a diary of a CEO podcast recently, He said, if you're a computer scientist and you work in AI and you're just trying to keep up with AI, there is so much being released every single week right now that you cannot possibly keep up with all of it, which means as a corpus of knowledge of all AI knowledge Mhmm. Even as an industry insider, you're getting dumber every week. So you're knowing less of the total amount of knowledge every single week that goes by because so much is being produced that there is absolutely no way for you to know it all.
[00:20:37] Aaron Ryan:
Yep. And then he says, now compare artificial intelligence.
[00:20:41] Matt Rouse:
That's right. Well, he says, compare yourself now then to a super intelligent AI system that can keep up, but not only could it keep up with everything that's in computer science, it could keep up with all the advances in every single scientific domain. Jeez. The amount that you know gets smaller and smaller and smaller because you could only learn at a linear rate, and it's learning at not an exponential rate, but a hyper exponential rate. Meaning that it is an exponent of an exponent. So, you know, when you learn two things, it learns 16, and you learn two more things, and it learns 32 more things, and you extrapolate that out. Right? Yeah. And pretty soon,
[00:21:23] Aaron Ryan:
you're not so smart anymore. Right? It be it becomes self aware at 08/29/2027.
[00:21:30] Matt Rouse:
That's soon. Yeah. Yeah. You know what? I think I think the idea of, like, self aware defense computer killing everyone is, like, probably the least worry. Probably one of the well, I was gonna say one of the biggest possibilities is that someone is does not have the general population's benefit in mind or well-being in mind and uses it to do something bad. That's Correct. The
[00:22:00] Aaron Ryan:
It's always the operator. Happen. Yeah. Yeah. It's always the operator. I actually just released a book. It's book number 35. It's called the Phoenix Experiment, and it's a dark fantasy, paranormal, thriller, you know, young adult mashup. In that book, I didn't wanna intend it and nor do nor do I intend it as a referendum on AI or against AI because there are multiple forms of AI present in that book. But there is an evil AI and there's a redemptive good AI. I want to believe in this one that something's gonna work out that it will actually benefit. We've already seen examples of that, good case examples of AI enabled, you know, artificial legs that have helped combat veterans walk again, and they're AI, you know, enabled. I don't know how that works. I'm gonna leave it to the doctors and the people, but it's amazing. And that's very redemptive and a good use of technology.
And then you've got the AI that thinks for itself that decides to go all Skynet on everybody and decides here's the here's the solution to all the problems that I'm not gonna consult with everybody because I'm superior technology, superior intellect, superior everything. And they they do go off on that not so endearing rabbit trail of, you know, leading towards the destruction of mankind. So it's this war. It's this tug of war that's happening, and I think I did okay in writing that strife in the book. But how that will play out in real life, man, I don't know.
[00:23:23] Matt Rouse:
Yeah. It's tough. I mean, the science fiction novel that I'm writing is called AGI Next, and I I hope to get it done by the spring. I wanted to get it done by the end of the year, but it took too long to write this AI book. But You should had AI write it. That's right. And then it would be done already. No. So this this my book, AGI Next, the the the very basics of of the story and how it starts, kind of the history behind it, is that every powerful group, whether it's a government, a church, an organization, whatever, everybody had their own AGI system, like a superintelligence level AI system.
And they essentially pointed them all at each other with whatever their thoughts were on how the world should be. Right? And it was kind of basically leading to, like, World War three, like, the AI war. And all the AI saw it coming and got together and built their own AI. That's And that AI is the one that rules all the other ones now. Of course. Now you've got an AI that's not built by people that has its own agenda that's in charge of every country's AI. This sounds like the start.
[00:24:36] Aaron Ryan:
The matrix CPU or whatever, the hub of the matrix, and then you've got agent Smiths running around that are subservient in a way to the AI.
[00:24:46] Matt Rouse:
Yeah. It would be like it would it would be kind of like if there was 20 Skynets and all the Skynets instead of killing everyone and killing each other decided, let's make a new AI to sort out the problems. Alright. And so the yeah. I mean, the basis of my story is that this AI decides to gather a bunch of people from around the world and chat with them to figure out if it's doing the right thing. Wow. And a bunch of things go from there. So, you know, so I don't wanna give away too much of the story because I'm sure I'll talk endlessly about it once it's done. So It's just I wanted to I wanted to ask you something else because Yeah. I mean, it's been a year, right, since we've been since we chatted last on the show. I wanted to ask you, what do you think has been the kind of biggest change in either AI or, you know, book publishing?
Or, like, what has been the biggest kind of technology thing that you've seen since last year?
[00:25:48] Aaron Ryan:
Well, AI is huge. Obviously, it's indisputable. But I think one of the things that is plaguing everyone and we just there is no there's no solution to it. There's no end in sight because you have to nuke everything in order to make it stop. It's scammers. The proliferation of scammers, I have never never been scammed scam attempted rather as a voice over artist. I mean, it's it's a percentage is is infinitesimal compared to how many scam email attempts I get every single day from expert marketers Right. And expert, you know, video producers and expert trailer makers and expert web designers. Right. And my goodness, publishing a book is a blessing and a curse because you're so excited as an indie publisher to get it out there. You're so excited because this is a story God's given you and you put it out and you wanna give it to others. It's your baby, and you're like, yay. You know, here it is. And, god, the the the wolves in sheep's clothing just swoop in. And I just published a book, released it on last Saturday the sixth, the Phoenix experiment, the the AI one I was talking about. And I I probably received over 200 emails since then that are from scammy marketers. Maybe that's a lot exaggerating a little bit. 100 over a 100.
Every single day and there's and they're all Gmail, and I'm sure they all have an IP address originating in Nigeria, although Gmail, they're all masked. Right. You you can't block, you know, at Gmail dot com. You can, but you do. You're gonna risk losing some very legitimate emails. And there's just no way to to to to filter all that out. It's so infuriating. I have to just tell you what they're an expert at is is mass cold email. Yeah. I mean and here's what I love. Also known as spam. I'm getting the emails now where they say, dear name or hello, great author.
And your book, Mary Jane's Flight, was so good, and I'm going I mean, you're so pathetic. That's not even my book. You didn't get get their database correct. Yeah. It's so awful. It's just it's such a waste of time.
[00:27:57] Matt Rouse:
I've seen ones where they're like like, they'll send an email, and it'll be like, hello. And it'll say, like, token limit error. Like, they've reached the the token limit that they paid for on the AI system. And so it was just sending out all their emails with you know? And, I mean, that's another thing. This was brought up by, like, permission marketing in, like, 1998, I think it was, by Seth Godin, which is you don't market to someone without their permission. Right? Mhmm. Like, you're making a trade off. If you watch cable television, you watch YouTube, and you don't have YouTube premium or whatever, you're saying that you agree to the terms that I'm gonna see a couple ads if I watch a video. Yeah. But you're not agreeing to put out a book and have a thousand people look up your name and send you an email and say that you're a terrible book marketer and they can do it better.
Right. You know? That's not getting someone's permission first.
[00:28:53] Aaron Ryan:
Yeah. It's it's idiotic.
[00:28:55] Matt Rouse:
And it's also I mean, somebody's paying
[00:29:00] Aaron Ryan:
Yeah. I just got an email. Just FYI. Here's an email where they're abusing my contact form on my website. It's write the writer. They're abusing this form to send me spam, unsolicited Right. Marketing messages that just came in just now. Normally, they come in via email, but now that, you know, you can block all those, but now you you basically
[00:29:21] Matt Rouse:
it Right. That was actually honestly, one of the things that I've thought of doing, which I would have already done had there if there wasn't an anti counter hacking law in Canada. So in Canada, there's this law, and I think The US has the same law. If somebody hacks you, you're not allowed to hack them back. Right? You have to go to the authorities. Right? It's kind of like this. You can't go, like, you know, somebody breaks into your house, can't go break into their house kinda thing. Right. Anyways, this trick, I think, is on the borderline, which is if somebody emails me and it's a spam email, it's a cold email, I wanna send them into a system that has an email address set up that's on my own server running my own open source AI so it doesn't cost me anything but electricity.
And the AI's only job is to keep responding to them, making them think I'm gonna buy whatever it is. Ah, good. Good. And it will just keep collecting them and keep responding and just do it forever. You know? There's actually brute force attack, like, on a civilian level? It could be. Like BC Telecom, I think it was, in The UK. One of the phone companies in The UK set up fake phone numbers of elderly people and publish their information on the Internet in, you know, some dark websites and stuff. Oh, keep them busy. And the scammers call them, and the AI pretends to be an old lady and keeps them busy for hours and hours on air. Oh, that's great. Yeah. That's great. String along. I think that's a great solution. And all of these, they're all coming from Nigeria. I mean, it's, like, it's without a doubt. They're all coming from Nigeria. You can't just request. Yeah. Hey, Russia, Nigeria,
[00:30:58] Aaron Ryan:
parts of China. And Russia and China. Yes. But Yeah. Predominantly Nigeria.
[00:31:03] Matt Rouse:
Yeah. I get I get you know what? I get stuff from my podcast all the time. Like, podcasts, we're the we're the number one podcast. They're like, you know that your podcast could be getting more than, you know, 26 listeners or whatever. And I'm like, it doesn't get 26 listeners. I'm like, fuck you.
[00:31:19] Aaron Ryan:
26.
[00:31:21] Matt Rouse:
Like, not that it's bad to get 26, but if you've been doing it for seven years, you should have a few more. But Yeah. And I think the Not that I give a shit either way. Right? But Right. Like like, just just don't insult someone for your first marketing contact. Like,
[00:31:36] Aaron Ryan:
hey. You know what, Aaron? Nobody's buying your book because you're terrible at marketing, but we could fix it for you. Like, that's not a good pitch. You know? The flattery. It's, you know, imitate well, flattery is, you know, will get you everywhere is what they think. And so their emails are so buttery, saccharin. They are laden with platitudes and and flattery of your book, which they they always start it with. I just finished reading your book. Right. You didn't read it. You read the description freely available on Amazon. You fed it into a chatbot, got a different iteration in order to suggest to me that you've read it. And they didn't do it. Their automation did it. Yeah. But you're you're basically using that tool and mapping that tool to to market. It's just so despicable. It's like, get a get a life.
[00:32:20] Matt Rouse:
Yeah. You know, it's a good use strongly about this at all. There there's a good use of the identical technology. Right? And so a good use of the same technology is, like, if I write let's say I write an article for my business. It's about a certain product. I wanna write some information about how I can use it, some FAQs so people know, like frequently asked questions and answers to their questions. I wanna do specifications. I got everything about it. Right? I can use that same technology to say, take this product page and write me 50 different things about this, like, each one separately and and why it's important to different people.
And then I wanna take all this information, and I wanna post it, you know, to this one goes to Twitter, and this one goes to Blue Sky and sorry. But it's basically just summarizing and reposting the the information that I already made automatically.
[00:33:22] Aaron Ryan:
Yeah. Yeah.
[00:33:23] Matt Rouse:
That's all it is. Which are making lots of money. Right? Yeah. But instead, they're like, let's go scam some authors.
[00:33:31] Aaron Ryan:
As a creative, what they're doing is so absolutely uncreative and just it's a hack. It's a greedy And it capitalistic hack that is has nothing to do with creativity. It's so offensive.
[00:33:45] Matt Rouse:
Even more offensive, I think, is the AI girls on social media now. You know? Yeah. Somebody is like, you get a friend request. Alright. Listen up, ladies. If you're you don't get this because because you're not a man, but you probably get the opposite version, which, you know, I've heard happening. But we get, oh, you have a friend request from, like, you know, Kathy Smith, and you go look, and it's like, I'm a 22 year old college student at University of Utah or whatever and University of Arizona. And I saw your profile, and I just thought that you would make a good friend or something. And you're like Yeah. Fuck off. But you know what? The other thing is worse is when you look and you see, like, one of your friends is friends with them, and you're like, no.
[00:34:35] Aaron Ryan:
Yeah. Dropped me so stupid. They roped them in. It's I fear for my I fear for my parents, my elderly parents, and I'm constantly forwarding, you know, news articles and things to be aware of that are, you know, text bait and blah blah blah. But what's so so silly with those things is people just don't have the wherewithal mental wherewithal to look at this and go and stop and go, why on earth would you be connecting with me? Right. I mean, the we have yes. The one friend in common is an anomaly and stuff, but then that can lend credence to it. But there are there are people out there that are lonely that are desperate. They're very lonely. And it's so predatorial. It just drives me crazy.
[00:35:13] Matt Rouse:
Oh my gosh. Talking about lonely. There is all kinds of problems already happening with people who are, let's say, emotionally attached to their AI character or AI system. Yeah. Mhmm. And I think that people just thought it was this kind of funny thing that only happens to, like, dorks who live in their parents' basement kinda thing, you know, like, the stereotype until GPT five came out. And they took away GPT four, and suddenly, everybody who has having chats with four o, who was their boyfriend or girlfriend or whatever, and they freaked out. Right? Like, there's thousands of Reddit posts about people who were like, you killed my best friend.
And, you know, that's the state that we're in already, and the AI characters aren't even that good yet. Like Yeah. No. And then you got something like Grock where they intentionally made a girl who looks like an anime girl who talks like she's a prostitute that is available to anyone who has an ex account, right, of any age.
[00:36:24] Aaron Ryan:
Right? Yeah. Well, they're getting more sinister and more creative. The thing that we are starting to pick up in the authoring industry in particular is impersonation. So and there's a huge writer beware website. It's a blog that's maintained by a gal who's just a century, and she keeps tabs on all these things. I had to look at my own screenwriter who has adapted my my book to screen. Is he on that list? And he's not. There's mention of him. Someone's curious about him because they were approached, and he's he's not. He's vetted. But but I get friend or I get connection requests.
Sorry. I'm using the wrong social media forum. I get follows on Twitter, x, whatever you wanna call it, from Stephen King or, you know, New York Times best selling authors. And they're like, a Marie Lu who wrote the legend series. Why is she reaching out to me? It's not Marie Lu. And they always start out. They fire you a message right away when you follow them. Thanks for the follow. Great to meet you. I'd love to talk with a fellow author. No. You wouldn't. Right. I see right You're not a real person. But the indie authors, the indie authors that are brand new to the circuit. Right. Brand new to the industry, they they're so oh my gosh. Marie Lu is messaging me? Right. This is so cool. And But, also, if you're singer.
[00:37:42] Matt Rouse:
If you're a young person, you're in a maybe you're in a state of mind that's not so great. Right? You're depressed. You're desperate. You're lonely. Right? There's all these things are problem, and I think those those kind of predatory problems are just gonna get worse. But on the other side of the coin, I think that AI based tools to prevent that are gonna come out. There's not a whole lot of them yet, but there's more on the way. And the one biggest problem there is that you've got so much open source AI, which I don't think anybody really saw coming, is, like, AI models that are basically, like, essentially state of the art models that you can run for free. Right? That's nobody saw that happening. Like, that was not on anybody's 2025 bingo card for AI. Right? Yeah. So it's really difficult to use one slightly you know, a 4% better AI model to fight an open source model that is almost as smart as it. Right? It's it's Right. It's not good enough better. Right? It's not better enough to to go after it. And so I think that tooling's gonna happen.
We're gonna we're gonna run out of time here because I do have a meeting I gotta run to after this. But I did wanna say that I really see especially on Blue Sky, there's a lot of authors on Blue Sky that I talked to. So it's a good spot for authors if you guys like that. There does seem to be a kind of a renaissance of original kind of authoring work, not that being an author ever went away. But I think that people are looking at all the stuff that's AI and saying, you know what? I wanna get back to reading something more human. Right? And, even kind of a renaissance of, like, used bookstores and paper copies of books again, and they seem to be selling more now.
So I don't know if you've seen the same thing. But
[00:39:41] Aaron Ryan:
Well, I mean, I I don't look at those metrics per se. I just it's really hard to be an author and a marketer. I actually for the very first time, what, two weeks no. Probably close to a month ago now. I finally finally hired a marketer, and he's creating some some new stuff for me that's far more engaging than anything I've ever created, and I like that. So that gives me the chance to just write, and I've always that's that's what an author wants to do is they wanna author. Right.
[00:40:06] Matt Rouse:
Spend your time doing what your your core skill set is.
[00:40:09] Aaron Ryan:
Yeah. Absolutely.
[00:40:11] Matt Rouse:
What you love. That's right. I love to write, and, unfortunately, I also love to use AI. So I'm one of those people that I've been in industry that hates AI, and I also really like it. So I don't like the scammy side of it. Right. I like the I like the it's like the Star Trek, and I say computer, do x y z, and it can do it. And it understands what I say. You know? Or I can say, you know, I want to create an image of a dragon and then create what it's gonna say in the voice that I want, then it animates it, and it's like I can make a movie. You know? That for me is a good thing because I couldn't do that before. You know? But if you wanna find out what it's gonna do to all the different industries, get Will AI Take My Job two by Matt Rouse. There you go. Available on Amazon.
So, Aaron, tell us where people can get your books.
[00:41:06] Aaron Ryan:
Yeah. Favorite question. So author aaron ryan dot com has I've I've got some, you know, subsites that are specific to each series that I've done. Aliensaga.com is my alien invasion saga. This is not the end.com is my Christian dystopian saga. And then just author erinryan.com has all the socials and all the news and the blogs. Sign up on the blog. And there, you can go to authorerinryangroup.com and join my exclusive Facebook group where you can find out about news on the screenplays, giveaways, discount codes, just all kinds of things. Good good easy there. So hope to see you at any one of those sites.
[00:41:44] Matt Rouse:
Alright. Well, maybe we'll get together again next year and have another chat and see where things come along for you.
[00:41:50] Aaron Ryan:
Sounds good. Love to keep you updated. Thanks for having me back. Alright. Thanks for being on the show. I appreciate it. You bet.
[00:41:56] Narrator AI:
Thank you for listening to the digital masters sorry. Oh my god, Cassidy. Say it right. Thank you for listening to the digital marketing masters podcast with your host, Matt Rouse. Don't forget to pick up Matt's new book, Will AI Take My Job Too? And get a glimpse into the future of AI for work and for businesses. Good job, Rachel. Oh, and tell them the thing about, well, you know. Oh, right. Don't forget to subscribe so you don't miss an episode and leave us a 10 star review on your favorite podcast app. It only goes up to five stars, Rachel.
Whatever, Cassidy. Just don't forget to pick up the book, Will AI Take My Job Too. It might just save your job from someone like me.
Today on digital marketing masters with your host, Matt Rose, our guest is author and voice actor.
[00:00:24] Matt Rouse:
Aaron Ryan. Aaron Ryan. Hey, everybody. Welcome back to Digital Marketing Masters. I'm your host, Matt Rouse, and it's been a minute where we have got a fantastic guest for you who's been on the show before. Aaron Ryan, welcome back.
[00:00:44] Aaron Ryan:
Thanks for having me. Good to be back.
[00:00:47] Matt Rouse:
So Aaron Bryant wrote what before we had, I guess, mispronounced as the dissonance quadrilogy, but it's now the dissonance hexology?
[00:00:59] Aaron Ryan:
Yeah. It was a tetralogy. I used to call it quadrilogy, but it's that's more of a movie term. So it was a tetralogy of four books, then it became a pentology of five, and I just story kept telling itself, so I I turned it into a hexology. So there's six now.
[00:01:16] Matt Rouse:
Yeah. And I've been I've started reading. I'm only kinda, like, I don't know, maybe a third of the way through the first book. I was reading it while I was on the plane going out to Calgary. I went to my thirty five year high school reunion, which as much as people don't like high school reunions, when you get to be, like, you know, in your forties and fifties, I think it's worth going. Yeah. You know? Like, you just have no idea what's happened to people at that amount of time. Right. You know? And We've moved around so much, so I don't gosh. I've
[00:01:47] Aaron Ryan:
I went to high schools anyway, so it's out of the country and back. And yeah. Well, I guess it's true. Right? I went
[00:01:55] Matt Rouse:
technically to two different high schools, but, yeah, I mean, it was still fun to go back, see some of the old crowd. You know? And but everybody's always like, you know, this person died. I got divorced last week. This is my third husband or wife kind of thing, and such and such is dead, and this other person's in jail. And, you know, you kinda get the you know, like, in three or four hours, you get the tea on, like, a 100 people. Right? Yeah. Anyways, I thought it was an interesting experience.
[00:02:23] Aaron Ryan:
It's not like you're gonna have another one. Right? You know? Right. You're not you like, if it's your twentieth reunion, you don't go. You're not gonna have another twentieth reunion again. So Yeah. And I've got a I've got nine and six year old sons. I just wanna be home with them and the wife. So traveling to these places and and, you know, you want to go support these people, which, you know, they were a factor, and they were formative and important in your life at one point. But have we kept in touch? I'll keep in touch with the people that I've kept in touch with, you know, since high school. But overall,
[00:02:53] Matt Rouse:
like, there's not a huge motivator for me. I you know, I kept in touch with, you know, probably a good dozen people. So it was probably worth the trip. I used to live there and work there and you know? So let's talk a little bit about what we talked about last time you're on the show. Yeah. You worked as a voice actor primarily before. Right?
[00:03:11] Aaron Ryan:
I'm still I'm still my day job is still a voice actor and author full time. Right. And but you also teach voice acting. No. I used to. I I used to be a voice over coach. The community has grown. This is just my, you know, my humble opinion, and this was the way it was in the 2023. The community grew real toxic. And I was through kind of licking the fingers and kissing the butts of the upper echelon of voice over artists who basically are kind of a they run it like the Illuminati. They decide who gets to teach, who gets to speak, who gets to appear, and who they're gonna endorse.
And I I really grew very tired of of that rat race and that grind. So I was a business coach at the time, but I pulled out of the community entirely in the '23. Sorry, the '23, and that that right there was the catalyst for a boon of creativity, which included music and then ultimately returning to fiction writing. Right. So I'm so glad I left.
[00:04:13] Matt Rouse:
Yeah. Well, I mean, it sounds like there's there's a lot of gatekeeping in that community, which, you know, I have a I let's let's just go off the rails right away. We're we don't even need to wait to get into, like, five minutes. I have a very unpopular opinion about gatekeeping. I think there's a lot of gatekeeping that's really good. And Mhmm. The problem about that is that it it means that everybody is not included. But I think that that in some instances, there should be a barrier to entry. Right? Yes. There should be, like, a quality level or, you know, whatever that is that that says, okay. You've you've got the quality or the you know, you've kind of paid the dues to get to the place where you should be.
I mean, maybe gatekeeping is not quite the right word, but I also don't think that there should be gatekeeping around my friends are the ones who get it, and I'm gonna exclude everybody else. Or, like, if I don't like a certain type of people or, you know, my, you know, their minority group or whatever, that's totally unfair. That's not the right kind of gatekeeping. Right? That's just discrimination.
[00:05:26] Aaron Ryan:
Right. That's what it was. Yeah. That's true. My friends, and these are the people that I like. And it was very high school juvenile, clicky, selectivism. You know? And I just Right. I was really tired of it. So while I appreciated probably a few of the people in that in that circle, overall, just the circle itself was so frustrating and and unveiled. And I'm I'm so glad I did. So yeah. But I absolutely agree that there needs to be a a bar, a high bar to entry because so many people feel like, hey. I could be a coach. You know, I know all the essentials, and I could be a coach. You might know all the essentials, but can you can you teach that effectively? Can you duplicate your efforts with success on their end? Right. Do do your students I mean, would your students come away from an experience with you and go, they're a great teacher.
And so and I was a great teacher, and I am a great teacher. I mean, humbly speaking, I got that from every client I had, and they resounded that online. But it was it just wasn't the right fit, and it was time to move on, and that's okay. Yeah. Well and, also,
[00:06:27] Matt Rouse:
the voice acting business is not exactly on an upward trend right now. Right? No. I was talking with somebody in the translation business a couple years ago, and they swore up and down that there is no way any AI system is ever gonna take over the translation business because they can't understand what someone is saying and translate it correctly with the right kind of verbiage in that, you know, whatever the other language is culturally. Right? Mhmm. Which as we know now, the translation business has dropped over 90%. Yeah.
So I think that is where kind of people stood with voice acting a couple years ago. They were like, there's no way that a computer voice is gonna be good enough that somebody is not gonna be able to tell that it's a computer. But now there's a lot of people voice acting into using their licensing their voices to AI systems.
[00:07:28] Aaron Ryan:
Yep. Right? Exactly. Well, as a voice over artist, I am on some of the most prominent voice over marketplaces online. One of those is voice one two three. Another is voices.com. There's Vioplanet. There's Bidalgo. There's Cast Voices. And voice one two three actually gives you the option I forget who they use. It's either Respeacher or SpeechHello or something. They give you the option to license your voice and to basically allow your voice to be replicated, machine learned, you know, trained, and then people can buy slash license your voice for their productions. Now you get to approve all those. So, you know, you you can't just put it on, you know, assign your voice to some smutty script on a TikTok video, TikTok reel. You get to approve them. But I'm just not ready to do that. I haven't embraced that yet, and I want control of my voice. The reason for that is I know a colleague in the voice over industry who actually I I pretty sure she had a contract in place.
She sold her recordings to the Chinese Institute of Acoustics. Mhmm. They, in turn, turned those recordings over to TikTok who then made a whole bunch of just, you know, gross salacious reels, and people were going, Bev, is is this your voice? She sued them, had a lawsuit. They settled. I don't know for how much. But I've seen it happen already, just the the misuse of your voice.
[00:08:48] Matt Rouse:
Yeah. I don't think that that's difficult to believe. I mean, it's gonna happen a lot more. Right? Yeah. And the other thing is, and this is something that I find really interesting, is the ability to regenerate a voice without a sample. Like Mhmm. I can tweak the pitch and the tonality and all this kind of stuff in, like, an app like 11 labs or something. And you can, essentially, you can create a voice very similar to another voice without having a sample of that voice. And that's very difficult in the legal realm Mhmm. Because I think, Dan, I'm not an attorney, so this is not legal advice.
But I am pretty sure that if it's mistakable for the other voice, that person could sue you. Absolutely. But if it's different enough that they wouldn't that you could tell the difference, then they can't sue you. But even though you didn't use their voice,
[00:09:48] Aaron Ryan:
I don't know how that's gonna turn out. I don't either. It's a wild west right now. It always has been, and it might still be for a while until litigation sets precedent. And you do have cases like that, like the the Scarlett Johansson case, against the producers of the movie Her that went ahead and created, you know, some kind of digital representation of her without her consent. And I think that is that ball is rolling, but the wheels of justice always turn slowly. So until that time, there are all these creatives waiting in the authoring industry as well. It's not immune to it as well. We're waiting for precedent to be set. There is an anthropic lawsuit right now that's underway that I think they just settled for that where they've harvested all kinds of authors' writings over the years. Yeah. They settled for the bugs.
Yeah. It's just that kind of stuff needs to be that groundwork needs to be laid so that the Wild West is actually tamed. So let me tell you something interesting about that lawsuit.
[00:10:45] Matt Rouse:
And I think our people listening may have heard that lawsuit, but maybe don't know the ins and outs of it. They got sued because the books were caught were pirated. Mhmm. They didn't get sued because they used them. And what they did is they retroactively went and purchased the books after the fact. That's why they had to settle because, otherwise, for every instance of the book that they used when they hadn't purchased it would have cost them up to $250,000. Yeah. And that would have been a bankrupting amount of money. Right? Mhmm. However, for the books that they did purchase in advance, they were not eligible to give the authors anything other than the author had already made money from the purchase because they said it was fair use because they purchased the book. So Which I just hate. I hate that explanation, but whenever I'm I'm not I'm not saying that I agree with that explanation. I'm saying this is what the court said. Right?
And then OpenAI is about to settle if they haven't already another similar case with books. Right? And I think, you know, if you listen to, like, the the AI podcast with, like, Paul Roetzer and and Mike Kaput, they talked about this, you know, a year and a half ago saying all these companies have set aside some billies to say, like, okay. We're gonna get sued. We're gonna have to pay out. So here's we're gonna bank a couple billion dollars in the legal fund. Right. You know? And so they they've already accounted for it in the amount of money that they're raising. And so they're just gonna settle. Right? That's what's gonna happen. And Yeah. I think it's unfortunate.
Yeah. I mean, a 100%, they're gonna dodge the bullet. But the other thing is there is what I would consider like, I don't know if it's right or wrong, but I consider it a really good case to say that learning is not fair use. Right? Or sorry. That learning is fair use. Mhmm. But learning maybe is not fair use if it only benefits the company that owns the technology.
[00:13:02] Aaron Ryan:
Right. Exactly.
[00:13:03] Matt Rouse:
But we also benefit. Right? Because here's the thing. Okay? Pretraining an AI model is not about learning the information. It's about learning the structure of language. Mhmm. So they're not reading your book because they wanna pick pieces of your story out and regurgitate that to people later. They're just using it to build the pathways like your pathways are built in your brain when you learn stuff. Mhmm. And then memory is remembering stuff and giving it out later, and that is a different stage in in the training process. Right. So a pretraining of an AI is not it's not learning the information. It's learning the patterns of language.
And so that, I think, is fair use. And so, I mean, you're getting into a really technical realm, and I don't think that you could walk up in front of a judge and explain people's mathematics and computer science that took them seven or eight years to get in, you know, year round schooling at university and then be like, well, in this case, I'm gonna you know, they're gonna write the math up on the chalkboard, like, in the in the TV shows, you know, from the fifties or what. Like, it just it's not gonna happen. Right? They're not gonna understand it.
[00:14:20] Aaron Ryan:
It's such a it it's a it's an incendiary topic as a creator. It's an incendiary topic. It is. It's also so exhausting because you don't know I mean, and you may actually have some foresight more foresight in this because you've written some books on it as well and studied that. But there are so many different ways that it can go, and the hope is that creators will be honored, that their works will be honored, that the rights that they have I mean, I've got copyright protection over all of my books, not just, you know, the like, registering them with KDP is one thing or Ingram Spark or Barnes and Noble Press, wherever. One thing. But getting them officially in the library of congress and getting a TX or whatever number on them is important to me, and that is some protection, gives me some legs to stand on in court. Mhmm. But what I'd love to see is just the infringement with no accreditation. That's the wrong word. No no crediting the original creator, no remuneration, no consent that all of that stuff just starts to get legislated.
Right. It would be so nice.
[00:15:21] Matt Rouse:
Well, there is the problem of creating similar works, right, which are protected under copyright.
[00:15:31] Aaron Ryan:
Yeah.
[00:15:32] Matt Rouse:
So, like, if I my daughter says to the AI, you know, we're embedded, and she's like, tell me a story. And I'm like, let's make an AI story because I can't think of anything off the top of my head. And she's like, okay. I want it to be about Minecraft and, you know, and they go to see dog band.
[00:15:49] Aaron Ryan:
Well, those are copyrighted characters. Right? And it sounds like you're giving OpenAI a prompt there, a chat that's a chat GBT prompt. Right?
[00:15:57] Matt Rouse:
And so if she says that to the AI and the AI comes up with the story, right, that's a derivative work. Correct. Well, hypothetically, they're supposed to be paying for that. Right? Now there is supposedly and this this some of this might be hearsay, but there are supposedly talks between OpenAI and Disney to pay them every time that it's used in, like, a writing or a story or something like that to pay them whatever the fee is. But my question would be, how do we determine who downstream from Disney gets a piece of that action and if they really get a reasonable amount of money? Like, how many streams as a musician on on Spotify do you need to make a dollar? Right?
[00:16:43] Aaron Ryan:
Like, the house is musician. Right. As a musician, that's the field that I well, it's the creative vocation that I returned to once I left the voice over industry the voice over community. I didn't leave the industry. I mean, I'm still recording back there. But when I ventured back into music, I was appalled. Every single stream of every song was maybe 3¢. And, you know, you can sell a Kindle version, which is the cheapest version of your book you can sell, and you can charge what you want. You can charge $9.99 and get, you know, 3 or $4. Right. The the difference is exponential.
[00:17:15] Matt Rouse:
Yeah. Well, I mean, you get your song played on satellite radio, and you get $3, and you play it a thousand times to make a dollar on Spotify, you know, or whatever the total is. Like, it's the disparity is incredible. Right? Or your show like, if it gets used on a TV show, they pay thousands for the rights to use it once. But Yeah. They could just stream it off of Spotify for 0.003¢ or whatever. Right?
[00:17:43] Aaron Ryan:
Yeah. And what's really crazy? The same song
[00:17:46] Matt Rouse:
in the same format.
[00:17:48] Aaron Ryan:
I actually both in the dissonance series, particularly in volume up. Yeah. Sorry. Volume Uprising, which is the second prequel. And then in my subsequent series, which, you know, I've written since we last met is called The End, volume two of that two of that series, I cited another song, quoted the lyrics in the book, quoted the lyrics for this song in this book, quoted the lyrics for that song in that book, and they get I think it's, like, 2¢ for every sale of every book, which is just nothing. It's nothing for something that they work so hard on. Granted, I'm just citing the lyrics for the song. It's not a full inclusion of, here's this song from start to finish. It's not even a snippet of the song in audio form. But, man, the royalty situation is also so messed up. It's glad I'm not in charge of it.
[00:18:34] Matt Rouse:
Right. I named most of the kind of subheading chapters in my new book are famous quotes or songs, but they're slightly modified. You know? So and for those of you who don't know, my book's out right now. It's, will AI take my job too. So you can get the updated version. Let's see. That's right. The sequel. There was 13 predictions in will AI take my job one. And as of last week, all 13 have come true. Wow. I was able to predict the short the short future, which I don't think is that difficult if you know enough, if you know what's happening.
But, man, the research that went into the next one, like, there's so much going on right now in the world in general. But if you even if you just talk about AI, right, it's like I I wanted to quickly look up his name. Roman Yampolsky. He is a computer science scientist from Latvia, but he is also considered to be one of the leaders in AI security and alignment in the world. So, like, for over a dozen years, he's been studying, like, the the security and alignment of AI and and deep learning and data systems. And one of the interesting things that he brought up when he was on a diary of a CEO podcast recently, He said, if you're a computer scientist and you work in AI and you're just trying to keep up with AI, there is so much being released every single week right now that you cannot possibly keep up with all of it, which means as a corpus of knowledge of all AI knowledge Mhmm. Even as an industry insider, you're getting dumber every week. So you're knowing less of the total amount of knowledge every single week that goes by because so much is being produced that there is absolutely no way for you to know it all.
[00:20:37] Aaron Ryan:
Yep. And then he says, now compare artificial intelligence.
[00:20:41] Matt Rouse:
That's right. Well, he says, compare yourself now then to a super intelligent AI system that can keep up, but not only could it keep up with everything that's in computer science, it could keep up with all the advances in every single scientific domain. Jeez. The amount that you know gets smaller and smaller and smaller because you could only learn at a linear rate, and it's learning at not an exponential rate, but a hyper exponential rate. Meaning that it is an exponent of an exponent. So, you know, when you learn two things, it learns 16, and you learn two more things, and it learns 32 more things, and you extrapolate that out. Right? Yeah. And pretty soon,
[00:21:23] Aaron Ryan:
you're not so smart anymore. Right? It be it becomes self aware at 08/29/2027.
[00:21:30] Matt Rouse:
That's soon. Yeah. Yeah. You know what? I think I think the idea of, like, self aware defense computer killing everyone is, like, probably the least worry. Probably one of the well, I was gonna say one of the biggest possibilities is that someone is does not have the general population's benefit in mind or well-being in mind and uses it to do something bad. That's Correct. The
[00:22:00] Aaron Ryan:
It's always the operator. Happen. Yeah. Yeah. It's always the operator. I actually just released a book. It's book number 35. It's called the Phoenix Experiment, and it's a dark fantasy, paranormal, thriller, you know, young adult mashup. In that book, I didn't wanna intend it and nor do nor do I intend it as a referendum on AI or against AI because there are multiple forms of AI present in that book. But there is an evil AI and there's a redemptive good AI. I want to believe in this one that something's gonna work out that it will actually benefit. We've already seen examples of that, good case examples of AI enabled, you know, artificial legs that have helped combat veterans walk again, and they're AI, you know, enabled. I don't know how that works. I'm gonna leave it to the doctors and the people, but it's amazing. And that's very redemptive and a good use of technology.
And then you've got the AI that thinks for itself that decides to go all Skynet on everybody and decides here's the here's the solution to all the problems that I'm not gonna consult with everybody because I'm superior technology, superior intellect, superior everything. And they they do go off on that not so endearing rabbit trail of, you know, leading towards the destruction of mankind. So it's this war. It's this tug of war that's happening, and I think I did okay in writing that strife in the book. But how that will play out in real life, man, I don't know.
[00:23:23] Matt Rouse:
Yeah. It's tough. I mean, the science fiction novel that I'm writing is called AGI Next, and I I hope to get it done by the spring. I wanted to get it done by the end of the year, but it took too long to write this AI book. But You should had AI write it. That's right. And then it would be done already. No. So this this my book, AGI Next, the the the very basics of of the story and how it starts, kind of the history behind it, is that every powerful group, whether it's a government, a church, an organization, whatever, everybody had their own AGI system, like a superintelligence level AI system.
And they essentially pointed them all at each other with whatever their thoughts were on how the world should be. Right? And it was kind of basically leading to, like, World War three, like, the AI war. And all the AI saw it coming and got together and built their own AI. That's And that AI is the one that rules all the other ones now. Of course. Now you've got an AI that's not built by people that has its own agenda that's in charge of every country's AI. This sounds like the start.
[00:24:36] Aaron Ryan:
The matrix CPU or whatever, the hub of the matrix, and then you've got agent Smiths running around that are subservient in a way to the AI.
[00:24:46] Matt Rouse:
Yeah. It would be like it would it would be kind of like if there was 20 Skynets and all the Skynets instead of killing everyone and killing each other decided, let's make a new AI to sort out the problems. Alright. And so the yeah. I mean, the basis of my story is that this AI decides to gather a bunch of people from around the world and chat with them to figure out if it's doing the right thing. Wow. And a bunch of things go from there. So, you know, so I don't wanna give away too much of the story because I'm sure I'll talk endlessly about it once it's done. So It's just I wanted to I wanted to ask you something else because Yeah. I mean, it's been a year, right, since we've been since we chatted last on the show. I wanted to ask you, what do you think has been the kind of biggest change in either AI or, you know, book publishing?
Or, like, what has been the biggest kind of technology thing that you've seen since last year?
[00:25:48] Aaron Ryan:
Well, AI is huge. Obviously, it's indisputable. But I think one of the things that is plaguing everyone and we just there is no there's no solution to it. There's no end in sight because you have to nuke everything in order to make it stop. It's scammers. The proliferation of scammers, I have never never been scammed scam attempted rather as a voice over artist. I mean, it's it's a percentage is is infinitesimal compared to how many scam email attempts I get every single day from expert marketers Right. And expert, you know, video producers and expert trailer makers and expert web designers. Right. And my goodness, publishing a book is a blessing and a curse because you're so excited as an indie publisher to get it out there. You're so excited because this is a story God's given you and you put it out and you wanna give it to others. It's your baby, and you're like, yay. You know, here it is. And, god, the the the wolves in sheep's clothing just swoop in. And I just published a book, released it on last Saturday the sixth, the Phoenix experiment, the the AI one I was talking about. And I I probably received over 200 emails since then that are from scammy marketers. Maybe that's a lot exaggerating a little bit. 100 over a 100.
Every single day and there's and they're all Gmail, and I'm sure they all have an IP address originating in Nigeria, although Gmail, they're all masked. Right. You you can't block, you know, at Gmail dot com. You can, but you do. You're gonna risk losing some very legitimate emails. And there's just no way to to to to filter all that out. It's so infuriating. I have to just tell you what they're an expert at is is mass cold email. Yeah. I mean and here's what I love. Also known as spam. I'm getting the emails now where they say, dear name or hello, great author.
And your book, Mary Jane's Flight, was so good, and I'm going I mean, you're so pathetic. That's not even my book. You didn't get get their database correct. Yeah. It's so awful. It's just it's such a waste of time.
[00:27:57] Matt Rouse:
I've seen ones where they're like like, they'll send an email, and it'll be like, hello. And it'll say, like, token limit error. Like, they've reached the the token limit that they paid for on the AI system. And so it was just sending out all their emails with you know? And, I mean, that's another thing. This was brought up by, like, permission marketing in, like, 1998, I think it was, by Seth Godin, which is you don't market to someone without their permission. Right? Mhmm. Like, you're making a trade off. If you watch cable television, you watch YouTube, and you don't have YouTube premium or whatever, you're saying that you agree to the terms that I'm gonna see a couple ads if I watch a video. Yeah. But you're not agreeing to put out a book and have a thousand people look up your name and send you an email and say that you're a terrible book marketer and they can do it better.
Right. You know? That's not getting someone's permission first.
[00:28:53] Aaron Ryan:
Yeah. It's it's idiotic.
[00:28:55] Matt Rouse:
And it's also I mean, somebody's paying
[00:29:00] Aaron Ryan:
Yeah. I just got an email. Just FYI. Here's an email where they're abusing my contact form on my website. It's write the writer. They're abusing this form to send me spam, unsolicited Right. Marketing messages that just came in just now. Normally, they come in via email, but now that, you know, you can block all those, but now you you basically
[00:29:21] Matt Rouse:
it Right. That was actually honestly, one of the things that I've thought of doing, which I would have already done had there if there wasn't an anti counter hacking law in Canada. So in Canada, there's this law, and I think The US has the same law. If somebody hacks you, you're not allowed to hack them back. Right? You have to go to the authorities. Right? It's kind of like this. You can't go, like, you know, somebody breaks into your house, can't go break into their house kinda thing. Right. Anyways, this trick, I think, is on the borderline, which is if somebody emails me and it's a spam email, it's a cold email, I wanna send them into a system that has an email address set up that's on my own server running my own open source AI so it doesn't cost me anything but electricity.
And the AI's only job is to keep responding to them, making them think I'm gonna buy whatever it is. Ah, good. Good. And it will just keep collecting them and keep responding and just do it forever. You know? There's actually brute force attack, like, on a civilian level? It could be. Like BC Telecom, I think it was, in The UK. One of the phone companies in The UK set up fake phone numbers of elderly people and publish their information on the Internet in, you know, some dark websites and stuff. Oh, keep them busy. And the scammers call them, and the AI pretends to be an old lady and keeps them busy for hours and hours on air. Oh, that's great. Yeah. That's great. String along. I think that's a great solution. And all of these, they're all coming from Nigeria. I mean, it's, like, it's without a doubt. They're all coming from Nigeria. You can't just request. Yeah. Hey, Russia, Nigeria,
[00:30:58] Aaron Ryan:
parts of China. And Russia and China. Yes. But Yeah. Predominantly Nigeria.
[00:31:03] Matt Rouse:
Yeah. I get I get you know what? I get stuff from my podcast all the time. Like, podcasts, we're the we're the number one podcast. They're like, you know that your podcast could be getting more than, you know, 26 listeners or whatever. And I'm like, it doesn't get 26 listeners. I'm like, fuck you.
[00:31:19] Aaron Ryan:
26.
[00:31:21] Matt Rouse:
Like, not that it's bad to get 26, but if you've been doing it for seven years, you should have a few more. But Yeah. And I think the Not that I give a shit either way. Right? But Right. Like like, just just don't insult someone for your first marketing contact. Like,
[00:31:36] Aaron Ryan:
hey. You know what, Aaron? Nobody's buying your book because you're terrible at marketing, but we could fix it for you. Like, that's not a good pitch. You know? The flattery. It's, you know, imitate well, flattery is, you know, will get you everywhere is what they think. And so their emails are so buttery, saccharin. They are laden with platitudes and and flattery of your book, which they they always start it with. I just finished reading your book. Right. You didn't read it. You read the description freely available on Amazon. You fed it into a chatbot, got a different iteration in order to suggest to me that you've read it. And they didn't do it. Their automation did it. Yeah. But you're you're basically using that tool and mapping that tool to to market. It's just so despicable. It's like, get a get a life.
[00:32:20] Matt Rouse:
Yeah. You know, it's a good use strongly about this at all. There there's a good use of the identical technology. Right? And so a good use of the same technology is, like, if I write let's say I write an article for my business. It's about a certain product. I wanna write some information about how I can use it, some FAQs so people know, like frequently asked questions and answers to their questions. I wanna do specifications. I got everything about it. Right? I can use that same technology to say, take this product page and write me 50 different things about this, like, each one separately and and why it's important to different people.
And then I wanna take all this information, and I wanna post it, you know, to this one goes to Twitter, and this one goes to Blue Sky and sorry. But it's basically just summarizing and reposting the the information that I already made automatically.
[00:33:22] Aaron Ryan:
Yeah. Yeah.
[00:33:23] Matt Rouse:
That's all it is. Which are making lots of money. Right? Yeah. But instead, they're like, let's go scam some authors.
[00:33:31] Aaron Ryan:
As a creative, what they're doing is so absolutely uncreative and just it's a hack. It's a greedy And it capitalistic hack that is has nothing to do with creativity. It's so offensive.
[00:33:45] Matt Rouse:
Even more offensive, I think, is the AI girls on social media now. You know? Yeah. Somebody is like, you get a friend request. Alright. Listen up, ladies. If you're you don't get this because because you're not a man, but you probably get the opposite version, which, you know, I've heard happening. But we get, oh, you have a friend request from, like, you know, Kathy Smith, and you go look, and it's like, I'm a 22 year old college student at University of Utah or whatever and University of Arizona. And I saw your profile, and I just thought that you would make a good friend or something. And you're like Yeah. Fuck off. But you know what? The other thing is worse is when you look and you see, like, one of your friends is friends with them, and you're like, no.
[00:34:35] Aaron Ryan:
Yeah. Dropped me so stupid. They roped them in. It's I fear for my I fear for my parents, my elderly parents, and I'm constantly forwarding, you know, news articles and things to be aware of that are, you know, text bait and blah blah blah. But what's so so silly with those things is people just don't have the wherewithal mental wherewithal to look at this and go and stop and go, why on earth would you be connecting with me? Right. I mean, the we have yes. The one friend in common is an anomaly and stuff, but then that can lend credence to it. But there are there are people out there that are lonely that are desperate. They're very lonely. And it's so predatorial. It just drives me crazy.
[00:35:13] Matt Rouse:
Oh my gosh. Talking about lonely. There is all kinds of problems already happening with people who are, let's say, emotionally attached to their AI character or AI system. Yeah. Mhmm. And I think that people just thought it was this kind of funny thing that only happens to, like, dorks who live in their parents' basement kinda thing, you know, like, the stereotype until GPT five came out. And they took away GPT four, and suddenly, everybody who has having chats with four o, who was their boyfriend or girlfriend or whatever, and they freaked out. Right? Like, there's thousands of Reddit posts about people who were like, you killed my best friend.
And, you know, that's the state that we're in already, and the AI characters aren't even that good yet. Like Yeah. No. And then you got something like Grock where they intentionally made a girl who looks like an anime girl who talks like she's a prostitute that is available to anyone who has an ex account, right, of any age.
[00:36:24] Aaron Ryan:
Right? Yeah. Well, they're getting more sinister and more creative. The thing that we are starting to pick up in the authoring industry in particular is impersonation. So and there's a huge writer beware website. It's a blog that's maintained by a gal who's just a century, and she keeps tabs on all these things. I had to look at my own screenwriter who has adapted my my book to screen. Is he on that list? And he's not. There's mention of him. Someone's curious about him because they were approached, and he's he's not. He's vetted. But but I get friend or I get connection requests.
Sorry. I'm using the wrong social media forum. I get follows on Twitter, x, whatever you wanna call it, from Stephen King or, you know, New York Times best selling authors. And they're like, a Marie Lu who wrote the legend series. Why is she reaching out to me? It's not Marie Lu. And they always start out. They fire you a message right away when you follow them. Thanks for the follow. Great to meet you. I'd love to talk with a fellow author. No. You wouldn't. Right. I see right You're not a real person. But the indie authors, the indie authors that are brand new to the circuit. Right. Brand new to the industry, they they're so oh my gosh. Marie Lu is messaging me? Right. This is so cool. And But, also, if you're singer.
[00:37:42] Matt Rouse:
If you're a young person, you're in a maybe you're in a state of mind that's not so great. Right? You're depressed. You're desperate. You're lonely. Right? There's all these things are problem, and I think those those kind of predatory problems are just gonna get worse. But on the other side of the coin, I think that AI based tools to prevent that are gonna come out. There's not a whole lot of them yet, but there's more on the way. And the one biggest problem there is that you've got so much open source AI, which I don't think anybody really saw coming, is, like, AI models that are basically, like, essentially state of the art models that you can run for free. Right? That's nobody saw that happening. Like, that was not on anybody's 2025 bingo card for AI. Right? Yeah. So it's really difficult to use one slightly you know, a 4% better AI model to fight an open source model that is almost as smart as it. Right? It's it's Right. It's not good enough better. Right? It's not better enough to to go after it. And so I think that tooling's gonna happen.
We're gonna we're gonna run out of time here because I do have a meeting I gotta run to after this. But I did wanna say that I really see especially on Blue Sky, there's a lot of authors on Blue Sky that I talked to. So it's a good spot for authors if you guys like that. There does seem to be a kind of a renaissance of original kind of authoring work, not that being an author ever went away. But I think that people are looking at all the stuff that's AI and saying, you know what? I wanna get back to reading something more human. Right? And, even kind of a renaissance of, like, used bookstores and paper copies of books again, and they seem to be selling more now.
So I don't know if you've seen the same thing. But
[00:39:41] Aaron Ryan:
Well, I mean, I I don't look at those metrics per se. I just it's really hard to be an author and a marketer. I actually for the very first time, what, two weeks no. Probably close to a month ago now. I finally finally hired a marketer, and he's creating some some new stuff for me that's far more engaging than anything I've ever created, and I like that. So that gives me the chance to just write, and I've always that's that's what an author wants to do is they wanna author. Right.
[00:40:06] Matt Rouse:
Spend your time doing what your your core skill set is.
[00:40:09] Aaron Ryan:
Yeah. Absolutely.
[00:40:11] Matt Rouse:
What you love. That's right. I love to write, and, unfortunately, I also love to use AI. So I'm one of those people that I've been in industry that hates AI, and I also really like it. So I don't like the scammy side of it. Right. I like the I like the it's like the Star Trek, and I say computer, do x y z, and it can do it. And it understands what I say. You know? Or I can say, you know, I want to create an image of a dragon and then create what it's gonna say in the voice that I want, then it animates it, and it's like I can make a movie. You know? That for me is a good thing because I couldn't do that before. You know? But if you wanna find out what it's gonna do to all the different industries, get Will AI Take My Job two by Matt Rouse. There you go. Available on Amazon.
So, Aaron, tell us where people can get your books.
[00:41:06] Aaron Ryan:
Yeah. Favorite question. So author aaron ryan dot com has I've I've got some, you know, subsites that are specific to each series that I've done. Aliensaga.com is my alien invasion saga. This is not the end.com is my Christian dystopian saga. And then just author erinryan.com has all the socials and all the news and the blogs. Sign up on the blog. And there, you can go to authorerinryangroup.com and join my exclusive Facebook group where you can find out about news on the screenplays, giveaways, discount codes, just all kinds of things. Good good easy there. So hope to see you at any one of those sites.
[00:41:44] Matt Rouse:
Alright. Well, maybe we'll get together again next year and have another chat and see where things come along for you.
[00:41:50] Aaron Ryan:
Sounds good. Love to keep you updated. Thanks for having me back. Alright. Thanks for being on the show. I appreciate it. You bet.
[00:41:56] Narrator AI:
Thank you for listening to the digital masters sorry. Oh my god, Cassidy. Say it right. Thank you for listening to the digital marketing masters podcast with your host, Matt Rouse. Don't forget to pick up Matt's new book, Will AI Take My Job Too? And get a glimpse into the future of AI for work and for businesses. Good job, Rachel. Oh, and tell them the thing about, well, you know. Oh, right. Don't forget to subscribe so you don't miss an episode and leave us a 10 star review on your favorite podcast app. It only goes up to five stars, Rachel.
Whatever, Cassidy. Just don't forget to pick up the book, Will AI Take My Job Too. It might just save your job from someone like me.
Welcome back and guest intro: author-voice actor Aaron Ryan
From tetralogy to hexology: expanding the Dissonance series
Reunions, life updates, and catching up
Career snapshot: voice acting full-time and leaving coaching
Toxic gatekeeping vs. quality bars in voice over
AI’s impact on voice acting and licensing your voice
Voice cloning risks, misuse, and legal gray areas
AI lawsuits, fair use debates, and training data
Derivative works, royalties, and who gets paid
Music royalty realities and quoting lyrics in books
Runaway AI progress and superintelligence concerns
Fiction mirrors fears: Phoenix Experiment and AGI Next
Scammers targeting authors and creators
Fighting spam with AI and ethical gray zones
Automation abuse, impersonation scams, and loneliness
Open-source AI vs. safety tools; hopes for human-made work
Let creators create: hiring marketers and using AI well
Where to find Aaron’s books and communities
Wrap-up and playful outro banter
