It's hard to separate the "AI as gajillion-dollar market darling" conversation from the "AI as internet-ruining slop tsunami" conversation from the "AI as career-swallowing black hole" conversation from the "LLMs as neat and useful tools" conversation. I joined Matt Stauffer, CEO of Tighten, on his new podcast "Pragmatic AI" to talk about each of these, but mostly to explore how AI impacts writing and creative work. We covered a lot: how it's right there in the name that Large Language Models were always going to upend the careers of writers and programmers first; how the uniqueness of your creative process determines the uniqueness of your creative output; why expertise, taste, and curation matter more than ever in the next era of the internet; and why we need more media decentralization with fewer Big Tech chokepoints and gatekeepers. But mostly we talked about AI as a tool, how tools shape us, and the hopes and fears I have that follow from that. I'm a professionally curious person. I'm also a sicko: I *like* the grunt work it takes to understand something and compellingly communicate it. Google Search is functionally useless (a generational own goal), and although I still search daily for ten blue links on UDM14, LLMs are the tools I reach for now when I need to learn faster, follow my curiosity further, and understand more than I need in order to chisel away at the ideas. I would never let an LLM write sentences for me because writing is the residue of my thought process. Plus, I like making sentences. I prefer the way they taste when I make them. And that's the Jordan Keller promise—our recipe hasn't changed in 39 years: 1. Start from your unique domain of expertise, curiosity, tastes, and interests 2. Notice what you notice 3. Ask interesting questions Watch/Listen: https://lnkd.in/gBGNwk_R
AI Impact on Writing and Creativity with Matt Stauffer
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