Experimenting with AI-assisted writing
Slop for the sloppy times
I'm experimenting with AI-assisted writing, and it's fun. By AI-assisted essays, I don't mean a one-prompt essay where I ask Claude/ChatGPT to write about X. No, that's alphabet vomit. These are essays that I would otherwise write myself, but instead of typing them out, I come up with the idea, outline the structure and the metaphors, and then get these LLMs to write after brainstorming and then fine-tune them.
For the first post, I wrote a rant about how we are too stupid and incompetent to destroy this world. It's an idea that I've been meaning to explore for a long time but couldn't get around to. The core idea of the essay is that we shouldn't be worried about the dystopia that George Orwell imagined in 1984 but the slopocalypse that Mike Judge imagined in the movie Idiocracy.
I've created a separate opt-in section on the newsletter called "Sloppy Times" for this experiment. All the essays I write will be published on "Ooh, that's interesting," and AI-assisted essays will be on "Sloppy Times." You can subscribe to it.
Let me know what you think.
Slouching Toward Idiocracy
This is an AI-assisted article written for The Sloppy Times, a publication dedicated to chronicling the absurd spectacle of 21st-century civilization's undramatic unraveling. Through sardonic commentary and unflinching analysis, we examine the peculiar theater of institutional decay, diminishing standards, and breathtaking mediocrity that characterizes…
I've published some good writing on AI - for instance in today's substack.
And here's my first collaboration with AI.
https://nicholasgruen.substack.com/p/the-empty-content-of-our-characters
I wouldn't have bothered without AI. It was a pretty straightforward idea, but writing it up properly would have taken a day. With ChatGPT it took about 3 or 4 hours.