When I posted a virtual writing coach on my site that required a subscription, I got a few serious people trying it out. When I made it free, it became a free-for-all. I wasn’t prepared for what happens when you just allow anyone to chat with your entire corpus of millions of words of insight…
Patrick Stewart made us believe. Now he’s gone. I have been a science fiction fan since I became able to read, raised on Asimov, Heinlein, and Clarke. Star Trek was a natural affinity. It was the first television program to do what science fiction should do: speculate about a future world and how human beings’…
Once upon a time, at least in my misty recollection, candidates thought that losing a political campaign wasn’t the worst thing that could happen. The worst that could happen was their losing their integrity. Now, though, candidates concerned about losing seem ready to try anything. AdImpact estimates that this midterm election cycle will see more…
Newsletter 174. We need more words for slop (slopaganda? thinkfluff?). Plus, writers sue Meta one-by-one, Marissa Mayer asks AI what makes her daughter special, three people to follow, and three books to read. A taxonomy of slop AI-generated slop is undermining our ability to think. It’s easy to create, often fake, and mind-numbingly hard to…
A while back, I found a partner to help me turn my millions of words of blog posts and book chapters about writing and publishing into an answer machine. That partner was Soqratic (yes, I helped come up with the name). The result was a pretty effective little virtual coach you could subscribe to for…
AI makes text easier to write and harder to read. That’s the fundamental issue with using AI to improve your “writing productivity.” Effective writing involves planning, thinking, and originality. If you ask AI to do the writing for you, it eliminates all that planning, thinking, and originality and replaces it with ineffective prose. AI-generated slop…
I’m launching a new joint venture today. It’s called Writing Without Slop. My partner is the renowned writing center expert Jessica Weber Metzenroth, Ph.D. Together, we will build tools and content to help organizations and their workers to write more effectively in the age of AI. This is our manifesto. If you support us, add…
The Author Guild has been diligent and effective in publishing AI recommendations to help authors. Now they’ve created a set of guidelines for policies that publishers should use. This is sorely needed, because, based on my observations from working with many authors, people working at publishers generally have no clear set of guidelines, the guidelines…
Newsletter 173. AI excels at superficial flattery; let’s make compliments human again. Plus, Elizabeth Holmes as a modern-day role model, Tesla/SpaceX merger, three people to follow, and three books to read. Beyond superficial flattery AI has enabled a flood of formulaic and fawning flattery. It’s an AI tell far more dependable than em dashes. And…