How can co-creating with AI tools enhance your writing process — and make it more fun? Shane Neeley talks about his AI-augmented writing and visual art creations. This futurist show is sponsored by my Patrons at Patreon.com/thecreativepenn. If you find it useful and you don't want to support every month, you could Buy Me A Coffee (as I drink a lot of it!). Shane Neeley is a data scientist and software engineer. He's also the author of AI Art – Poetry and Stone Age Code: From Monkey Business to AI. 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 * Shane's background in bioengineering and programming* How co-creating with AI is fun and brings a different spark to creativity* The co-creation process with AI writing and image tools* Tips for prompt engineering and how to change your mindset around AI* Why it's important to make art with technology* AI-augmented creativity and how we can work with AI tools You can find Shane Neeley at ShaneNeeley.com and on Twitter @chimpsarehungry Transcript of Interview with Shane Neeley Joanna: Shane Neeley is a data scientist and software engineer. He's also the author of AI Art – Poetry and Stone Age Code: From Monkey Business to AI. Welcome, Shane. Shane: Hey, Joanna. So happy to be here. Joanna: I'm excited to talk to you. So, first up, tell us a bit about how you went from lab scientist to programmer and then author. How does your biological background help you to understand AI? Shane: I worked in laboratories after my undergrad for several years, as one does, looking for stem cells in monkey knee cartilage, engineering new viruses to inject into monkeys, various radioactive things and inhaling formaldehyde, and all of that. I eventually thought, ‘Yuck. I don't want to do this anymore.' I joined a lab that had a lot of data, because they were doing genetic sequencing, and the boss was using an old programming language from the '90s in some scripts, and I was able to upgrade some of his scripts into some more modern Python programs. He was super happy with that, so he had me, instead of doing all the monkey procedures and virus work, he had me sit down and program, and help the lab out with that. So that's how I got started and found out being a coder was a much more preferable job for me. And I've been doing AI writing in the last year, and it's been amazing. It's been, for an engineer biologist like myself, during the pandemic, pretty much exactly when it started was when I had some extra time to become more creative. But I wanted to use the angle of my skills as a programmer in order to do that. And in my day job right now, I'm at a cancer research search engine. We rank the various documents for clinical trials and publications on cancer treatments. And so we have millions of documents of language. We built a search engine so that we could rank the most relevant ones for a patient,