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.
Read more →Category: AI & Craft
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 →Who Owns The Thinking Machine
What would Marx make of AI? The danger is not a machine that plots against us, but who owns the thinking machine and who profits when thinking gets cheaper.
Read more →The Human in the Machine
On Krautrock, Impressionism, and the one thing AI genuinely cannot fake: the specific, private, historically placed human reason to make something new.
Read more →The Right to Learn the Hard Way
When a nine-year-old can't explain evaporation but her homework is immaculate, you have the Norway problem in miniature.
Read more →The Chain of Custody of Words
What happens to writing after it leaves your hands? On prizes, courts, answer engines, and who gets to name the work.
Read more →To Prompt or Not to Prompt
On Katri Manninen, the ALLi AI policy, verbal fingerprints, and why the real question was never 'did you use AI?' but 'did you have anything to say?'
Read more →Of Molotovs and Movable Type
On the new Luddites, the old Luddites, and why the printing press won the argument.
Read more →The Pirate Library in the Machine
The Baldacci lawsuit points to the real question for AI fiction: not whether machines can write, but what they were fed before they opened their mouths.
Read more →When AI Couldn't String a Sentence Together
AI-accelerated fiction is my game, but it started a lot further back than you might think.
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