My friend Dave Carroll has done it again. He’s a fantastic musician, international speaker, hot-selling children’s book author, and all-around nice Canadian. But if you know him, it’s probably because of the irresistible 28-million view YouTube video “United Breaks Guitars.” United Airlines really regrets breaking Dave’s guitar and suffering decades of humiliation in return. Dave…
Call it Claude’s paradox. The best writers write better with AI help. The rest write worse. It’s not that mysterious, actually. If you give me some quality lumber, a power saw, a nail gun, and sandpaper and ask me to make a piece of furniture, I’ll produce something crappy, rickety, and ugly. I have no…
As your editing and ghostwriting career grows, you may find yourself working with senior executives, CEOs, celebrities, or other rich and powerful people. This can be intimidating. But it doesn’t have to be, if you keep a few principles in mind. The key thing to remember is that although this is an asymmetric relationship, it’s…
Most of what you read about writers using AI has a bias. It’s filled with writers who like to shout about what they think. Social media algorithms reward the shouting, and you get one of two impressions, depending on your friends: Everyone is using AI for everything, or AI is going to cause the downfall…
Starting today, you can participate in the “AI and the Writing Profession” survey. This survey is a joint project of Gotham Ghostwriters and Bernoff.com. Dan Gerstein, the CEO of Gotham Ghostwriters, proposed this project to me and I enthusiastically agreed to become his partner in it. The web is filled with all manner of opinions…
I’ve closely tracked the impact of technology on media for more than 30 years now. The impact of AI is of a completely different character. It is orders of magnitude faster. It moves so quickly that you cannot talk about it as if it were one trend — it is 100 trends wrapped up in…
Tesla’s board is giving Elon Musk $29 billion (a record compensation for a CEO) to “keep him focused” on Tesla. I have questions:
AI is an average writer. It creates clear but boring prose. Average writers aren’t very good teachers or editors. So here’s how I see it. If you are an excellent writer, you can use AI to do better research, draft ideas, test out different ways of writing, and get feedback. You can then use your…
You probably heard about the Delta Air Lines plane that crashed in Toronto, landing upside-down on the tarmac. Amazingly, due to the swift actions of the crew, all 76 passengers survived. (Since this was in Canada, I immediately worried that the long-suffering guitar-carrying Canadian musician Dave Carroll must have been on that plane, but apparently…