AI is my jetpack

I live to produce content. I’m not particularly good at it but I’ve done it for so long that to do it is second nature. I’m like a session musician in Detroit circa 1962. Set me up in front of a mic and give me some sides and I can lay down a rhythm guitar track that will please 95% of humanity.

But, like that rhythm guitarist, I only have two hands, two eyes, and one brain. To right this wrong, back in the 1960s, session musicians would double-track their work to make the sound fuller. Lou Reed’s “Walk on the Wild Side” famously features an upright bass and electric bass played by the same person who did it simply because he wanted to be paid twice for the same session. That worked for a good long while until we learned to generate sound out of digital files and could create infinite variations on a theme.

As a writer, I’m facing what that session musician faced. To be more efficient I used to have to farm out content to other people. Now, thanks to AI, I don’t.

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I’ve just started running an AI writing workshop for enterprise customers. It’s a two-hour session that will show you the tools I use to do my job these days. Please email joanna@typewriter.plus if you’d like your group to take part.

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But AI isn’t a panacea. AI couldn’t write this Substack post. It can’t connect jetpacks to Detroit to Lou Reed to my own lived experience. But, if I’m writing about cryptocurrency or psychedelics, or computer hardware, AI works swimmingly. It works so well that I am working on a product that could replace me circa 2004 when I was writing 28 posts a day for Gizmodo. Each of these posts was a piece of aggregated content that was as approximately interesting as a three-note riff on a bass guitar but, when strung together, helped grow the future of media and destroyed the magazine and newspaper industry. Not bad for a 29-year-old punk whose only skill was the ability to operate the Internet and a keyboard. But, with a few lines of code, I’ve been able to replace 99% of my old job.

That’s scary.