Newsletter 144. Why writers must embrace “less is more,” and what to do about it. Plus, how Shy Girl was outed as AI-generated, why AI illiterates will be unemployable, three people to follow and three books to read. Shorter I don’t know what’s wrong with what you wrote. But I know how to fix it….
Today is the publication date for Charlene Li and Katia Walsh’s Winning with AI: The 90-Day Blueprint for Success. These authors, both old friends of mine, have solved the unsolvable problem: how can you write a book on corporate strategy for AI, a transformational technology, when it’s changing so fast? This is not an AI…
The publisher Hachette cancelled its planned US publication of Mia Ballard’s previously self-published horror novel Shy Girl because it said parts of it were apparently written with AI. Ballard denies it. This has resulted in the usual round of finger pointing between authors, editors, and publishers. For an intelligent perspective on the whole affair, read…
Perfectionist tendencies are often the writer’s biggest obstacle. In the last few days I’ve met a memoirist who was stuck polishing her first chapter over and over and a thought leadership author who kept backing up and revising his primary model idea based on feedback from whomever he spoke with last. These writers seem intent…
Newsletter 143. The three ways to shore up your idea leadership in the age of AI. Plus, LLMs’ fatal flaw as writers, Wiley’s true business, three people to follow, three books to read, and one step to control your persona. Owning your identity in the age of AI Authors and other thought leaders, your identity…
We are human beings, not training data. We are not raw material for the AI slop machine. We create. We write, we speak, we think, we publish. Our creativity is central to who we are. It is not free fuel for your models. We alone control what we create. We can do with it as…
People who work tend to drift into work they tolerate. They miss the chance to deliberately expand the parts of work that they love. Do an audit at least once a year of what parts of your work you find rewarding. That way, you can continue to shift your work in the directions that will…
If you hijacked the names and content of experts to boost your own product and then realized that perhaps you’d made a mistake, how would you apologize? Here’s what Shishir Mehrotra, CEO of Grammarly parent company Superhuman, posted on LinkedIn, once he realized that his product impersonating experts without their permission was a mistake: Back…
I give away a lot. Free expert advice. At Forrester, we charged for content and advice. I found that constraining. I’d rather just give it away and help people. You might think that if you give things away, you lose control over them. Certainly, I can’t stop people from stealing what I give away. But…