You may have noticed – or really you haven’t, because nobody reads blogs anymore – but I haven’t been writing so much. That’s not quite true: I’ve been writing more than ever, in many ways. What I have not been doing is taking things from the conceptual level to the completed level, or from the draft to the finished post.
The current state of AI in my life has been an incredible gift, but also an incredible tax. Over the last months, beginning first with just ChatGPT, but then, as I discovered image generation, and Claude, and Gemini, and the Whisper transcription model, and Pipedream, and other ways of automating workflows, and then, just in the last few weeks, Claude Code and the Gemini command line interface, I’ve suddenly become a complete geek, spending just about every waking minute pursuing quixotic projects that range from building apps, to automating the downloading of porn, to analyzing data in my personal and professional life – data regarding my weight, regarding my finances, my sleep.
Basically, I have a profusion of projects in a profusion of places, and the challenge simply of keeping track of them all, never mind completing them, or polishing them, has overwhelmed me. As a result, the volume of drafts sitting in my folder, on my blog, waiting to be finalized, is larger than it’s ever been. And this at a time when I’m becoming increasingly convinced that the internet is about to disappear, or at least the internet as we know it. Or maybe, that it already has!
It’s been years since there even was really a blogosphere, and in the last few years, first Medium, and then Substack, seem mostly to have taken over what used to be the province of blogs. I haven’t adjusted, relying on people finding me, and coming to me, rather than, as with Medium or Substack, my pushing my content to them. I haven’t adjusted, mostly because I don’t care that much. I mean, I loved having a committed audience back in the day, and I would welcome one today, both for reasons of narcissistic gratification, and because it might help me get laid, but it’s manifestly clear that I don’t want it enough to invest much energy in.
At some point, I set up a Substack account, and even went so far as, I think, to begin to research their terms of service, to learn what I do, how what I do might interact with them. But I don’t recall what I learned, and I never went any further. I just can’t really be bothered. And this gets at one of the more, for me at least, challenging aspects of the current moment.
As artificial intelligence multiplies, exponentiates the quantity of material on the internet, of slop, the quality stuff of the sort that I put out becomes harder and harder to find, at least in the old-fashioned ways. And, and this is the part that’s kind of hardest for me, I am becoming enamored by the idea of producing ever-increasing volumes of work. There’s always the fantasy that AI or technology will somehow reduce the amount of work we do, but that’s never been true. What technology does is enable us to work better, more efficiently, but rarely less.
So as I begin to leverage quad-code, and the Gemini command-line interface, and ChatGPT’s codecs, into my workflow, into my writing, I find myself producing ever more. Not to say that what I’m producing is better, and it’s leaving me, at least thus far, unresolved as to what to do with the output I’m producing.
For the most part, I don’t use these tools to write, exactly. Even at their best, the best they can do is a not-particularly-convincing simulacrum of my voice. And I suppose you might be convinced by it, but I’m mostly mortified by it. So if I ever post it, I only do it with the big caveat that this is AI-generated slop. And I’ll give you some of that in the coming days, I imagine.
No, the real problem for me is mortality. The sense that while increasingly my capacity to generate output approaches infinite, my time, my ability to process that output, to refine it, to deploy it, is actually woefully limited. I’ve only got so many hours in a day, so many days in a week, and so many weeks remaining in my life. I find myself craving a solid afternoon in which I can just corral all the stuff I’ve been producing in recent weeks.
Maybe, maybe, I’ll take that afternoon and some of my stuff will find its way to this blog.
Maybe.
