AUTHORS: I want intelligence about how you use AI. Can you answer any of these questions? (Authors only.) Comment below. Or if you’re shy, email me at josh @ bernoff.com Looking forward to hearing about your innovation.
It’s natural to use technology tools to make writing more efficient. Nobody is suggesting going back to typewriters and Wite-Out or looking up spellings in a paper dictionary. But now that we have AI, it’s tempting to outsource large amounts of the work in nonfiction writing to AI tools. This is a mistake for several…
Can you block AI companies from training models on your books? Probably not. Even if Ingram pretends to help you. How AI companies train models on books AI companies love books. They’re high-quality content, perfect for model training. The simplest way for an AI company to get illicit access to a book is to break…
I was appalled to see Google’s recent ad for its AI photo and video creation capabilities. Picture this. You are the marketing manager for Google Gemini and you have a generous advertising budget. Gemini includes the incredible photo and video creation tools Veo and Nano Banana, which make it possible to synthesize all manner visual…
AI companies have trained their large language models on copyrighted books. Was this legal? And if not, what can you, a book’s author, do about it? Can you get paid? This post should answer your questions. Is it legal to train a large language model on a copyrighted book? At this point, the legal cases…
Bear with me: I’m about to tie mathematical logic to artificial intelligence. (I promise, no actual mathematical knowledge will be required.) In 1931 the brilliant mathematician Kurt Gödel pointed the apparatus of mathematics at itself. He was able to prove that in any mathematical system powerful enough to do simple arithmetic, there would always be…
I do developmental editing. That means I edit text for everything from meaning and connotation to rhetorical consistency to subject-verb agreement. Obviously (he wrote arrogantly) that requires judgment, and cannot be replaced by a machine. But what about copy editors (or as they are known in the UK, subeditors)? Copy editors check text for spelling…
This is my father’s slide rule. For those unfamiliar with this vintage computing instrument, a slide rule was how scientists, engineers, and technicians did mathematical calculations for much of the twentieth century. You’d carefully align the sliding middle portion with outer frame and read the result off the scales, using the cursor (which was a…
Career advice for the pre-AI era looked like this: Work as creatively and productively as you can. Solve not just the problem put in front of you but the broader problems it reveals. Learn to use the most modern tools that can help you do your work. Carefully check your work; assume there are errors,…