What Machines Can’t Replace: Why AI Makes Us More Human With Anna McPhee

How can you use AI to research, edit and handle admin and marketing tasks while still writing every single word yourself? How can you double down on being human and reach readers on a personal level? Anna McPhee shares her perspective as a software engineer, author and creative technologist.

In the intro, How to Write, Publish, and Market Short Stories out now.

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Anna McPhee is an author, software engineer, professional speaker, and creative technologist. Her latest book is What Machines Can't Replace: Why AI Makes Us More Human.

You can listen above or on your favorite podcast app or read the notes and links below. Here are the highlights and the full transcript is below.

Show Notes

• Why writing code is creative work, and what it shares with writing books
• How AI changed Anna's job as a software engineer without taking her employment
• The difference between AI assistance and generation
• How to use custom skills for editing reports, research and repeatable tasks
• Why the rise of AI makes us crave slow, imperfect, physical things
• Responding to a negative review by showing up as a human

You can find Anna at Anna.kiwi and her new book at WhatMachinesCantReplace.com.

Transcript of the interview with Anna McPhee

Jo: Anna McPhee is an author, software engineer, professional speaker, and creative technologist. Her latest book is What Machines Can't Replace: Why AI Makes Us More Human. So welcome to the show, Anna.

Anna: Hi, Joanna. Thank you so much for having me.

Jo: Oh, this is going to be a fun conversation. First up—

Tell us a bit more about you and your background in technology, as well as how you got into writing.

Anna: I have been in all of these things my whole life, as long as I can remember. When I was just a little girl, writing was my favourite thing, writing stories. It was the whole reason I went to school, to be honest. I always pictured myself as a writer before anything else.

My dad was a lecturer in software development, so when I was little, he would teach me how to code. So I've always done both, for as long as I can remember, and my mum is an artist. That's been my upbringing, at the intersection of technology and art, and then writing is my own personal passion.

It's naturally flowed throughout my life. I've been in and out of some other careers and chased all the things that have made me feel interested and passionate, but writing has always been there in the background. It's something I do, whether it's been for a hobby or for a profession, so it's always been there.

Jo: But you work in software, right?

Anna: I do. I work in software, which came to me by chance. I set out as a digital nomad about 15 years ago now. I sold everything I owned and started travelling.

The way I thought I was going to fund this was through freelance writing, which I was very optimistic about. We all know now that's a very challenging way to make an income, especially when you don't have a background in it or a portfolio.

I did have this childhood background in software engineering and coding. So I set out to be a writer and travel the world as a writer, and actually what I ended up doing was building websites and writing software, because that's what people would pay me to do. So I fell into both at the same time through this chance I took.

Jo: I think sometimes people think that programming and software development and these more technical fields are not creative. My husband was a programmer for a long time, and essentially programming is a language.

Well, there are lots of languages, but you are creating in a language with computers, right? So is there that much difference?

How do you fix these two things in your mind separately, or are they the same thing?

Anna: They're so related. Many people might put writing into more of an art, and computer development and programming more into a maths or a science, but I just think there's so much creativity in writing code, in how you choose to structure things, in the language you select for something, the way you approach it.

It's very similar to writing a book, I think. I've found a lot of things that are very similar about it, to do with architecture even. When you look at the basics, some people might write a book with no idea where it's going and see where it ends.

It's the same with software. People might go into it and not have a plan. Most people will architect their software, or they'll architect their story in the same way. I think there's a lot of crossover between the two.

Jo: And there's editing, and doing the “does this do what I want it to do?” I think with software perhaps it's more obvious when something doesn't do what you want it to do than with a book.

Anna: Perhaps. Although with AI now, it's becoming a little more vague, because you can think your software's doing what you want it to, but it might not be. It might just look like it is. I think those lines are getting a bit blurrier as technology changes.

There's a lot of things in software development that are very similar to writing. We don't have an editor, but we will have unit tests or code reviews, and maybe the CI tests, and we've got all these structures in place that are very similar to writing.

Jo: I also think what's interesting, and this has been in the last maybe decade really, is that it used to be you would get a job in the old way, but—

Now it seems like your GitHub page, which is almost like your author platform, your programmer platform, can make a real difference in how people find you and your work.

So maybe talk a bit about that, because you have a GitHub page, don't you?

Anna: I do have a GitHub page, and I've spent a lot of time on it, because you can set up your README file and make it a bit like a website, and introduce all of your projects and what you're working on.

Just to combine it a little bit, actually, I use GitHub for my writing. I use it for version control so that I can go back and see the changes that I've made to the things that I'm writing.

Even with my book, I had a copy of it backed up in a private repository on GitHub where I could track changes and never lose a backup. I have so much faith in GitHub that it extends beyond the software I write and into everything I do. I keep a copy backed up in GitHub.

Jo: That's actually quite funny because, coming into AI in the author community, one of the things that's now talked about is how do you prove that yo...