Are We All John Henries Now?
John Henry beat the steam drill and it killed him. The race with AI is coming for writers too, and the folk ballad has the wrong lesson in it.
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The AI Debate Is Sponsored Content Now
Everyone wants to tell us whether AI is good or bad. The question nobody is paying us to ask is who owns the machinery.
Read more →Is AI Making Us Stupid, or Are We Just Using It Badly?
On Chicago's staff-inclusive AI ban, New York's moratorium, and why keeping students away from the tool might be the bigger risk.
Read more →Painting by Numbers
Publishers are asking novelists to prove where every sentence came from. As it turns out, I already have the receipts.
Read more →The Weathermen Made a Big Mistake. Will we?
Anti-AI feeling is real, rising, and pointed at the wrong target. What the Weathermen's mistake in the 1970s has to teach today's backlash against AI.
Read more →Claude's Watermark Affair
Claude's future models will watermark everything they generate. On SynthID, the EU AI Act's Article 50, and what that means for a writer who leans on AI.
Read more →The Book of Changes
Storytelling predates writing by millennia. As HarperCollins warns of AI copyright risk and deals collapse on suspicion, what happens to authorship next.
Read more →A Week of Out-of-Process Calls
Printer repairs, a swollen tablet battery, and AI-assisted novel rewrites: a week of out-of-process calls, while Chilli Racers patiently waited.
Read more →Age of the AI Police
Substack's new AI detector scored everything I fed it at 100%, which says rather more about the year than the writing.
Read more →AI's Quantum Objectors
The AI sceptic keeps Schrödinger's cat in a box: a machine simultaneously too stupid to draft an email and clever enough to end the world. A novelist replies.
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