AI for skeptics
What does AI really “know?” Skepticism and truth The principles for searching out truth have not changed because of AI: AI plain-English prompts and AI-generated responses are easy to consume. Don’t swallow them whole.
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Not dead yet; lean book launch; Wikipedia AI ban: Newsletter 1 April 2026
Newsletter 145. Why, even in your sixties, standing still means going backwards. Plus, journalists draw the line on AI, why your family doesn’t love your memoir, three people to follow, three books to read, and one place to draw your own line against AI encroachment. Conserve or create? In the heart of our careers, we…
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Charlene Li and Katia Walsh demonstrate the right way to build a book with AI help
Charlene Li and Katia Walsh’s Winning with AI: The 90-Day Blueprint for Success, just published this week, is a fascinating case study in how authors can use AI to create better books. While Charlene and Katia are more sophisticated with AI than the average author, they didn’t use AI to write prose. They used it…
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“Winning with AI” is a standout corporate strategy book
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…
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Authors: How do you make money with AI?
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.
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Don’t use AI for the most human parts of writing
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…
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Ingram lets publishers opt out of sales to AI companies. Too bad that won’t work.
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…
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Google Gemini creates Mr. Fuzzy, a shameful primer on AI fakery
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…
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Answers to your questions about AI book theft and copyright compensation
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…
