By Brandon Copple

The flood of slop that has overwhelmed YouTube and Facebook appears to be receding. Garbage Day reports that in March, for the first time in forever, none of the 30 most-subscribed YouTube channels contained any AI slop videos; nor was there any slop among the most-watched videos on Facebook.

The platforms haven’t said this, but it seems reasonable to conclude they’re going after slop because, as Ryan and Adam say, “it sucks and people hate it.”

I read that as two separate things: 1) it sucks; 2) people hate it. Which is different from “people hate slop because it sucks.” In fact, it’s entirely possible that the main reason people hate slop is because they hate AI.

Most slop is objectively terrible — but so is much of the human-made content on YouTube and Facebook. I find it super hard to believe that we as a species suddenly have a quality bar for content served up by algorithms.

Instead I suspect the people hate slop because most of the slop we’ve been seeing on YouTube and Facebook is obviously AI-generated, and we mostly think anything AI-generated is bad. Even if an AI-generated video was pretty good, most of us would hate it anyway. People know AI is coming to take jobs, they suspect it will do more harm than good, and they don’t trust its outputs. Meanwhile the only use they have for AI is “researching topics they’re curious about.” Sounds less like productivity hacks and more like “hey ChatGPT how long do conjoined twins live?”

That’s the crux of it: most people probably aren’t getting much value from AI yet. If it starts making lots of people’s lives easier, I’d expect views of it to soften, even if there’s still lots of news about AI destroying the world and so forth. Just like so many of us are glued to our feeds even though we know social media’s done terrible things to our collective brains.

Also, notice that, even as they’ve dammed the slop stream, Facebook and YouTube continue to push their own AI video tools. They may not like slop, but there’s no way they’re categorically opposed to AI-generated content. It just serves their business models too perfectly — torrents of content means more ad inventory, more ways to drive engagement aka imprison us in their feeds.

Finally, right now, out there in weird-smelling rooms and un-ergonomic chairs, lots of professionals and serious creatives are getting the hang of AI tools, easing AI into their workflows, finding imaginative uses for it. As they push out more and more AI-assisted and AI-generated content, the AI stigma may start to fall away.

Or perversely, it won’t, if creatives, aware that everybody hates AI, stay hush-hush about how they’re using it. Without some kind of labeling (which is seemingly going to take an act of Congress and 2-3 prominent self-immolations), we may not know what is and isn’t AI.

In any case, it’s important to keep an eye on the big platforms. If you do creative work, chances are most if not all the stuff you create either winds up on Facebook, YouTube, et al, or relies on Google to find an audience. AI is changing the way those platforms work. And that will change the way we work.

The kids are alright, maybe

A few weeks ago Tiffany Li wrote here about how she’s found AI roleplay super powerful for unlocking her creativity, largely by copying what she’s seen teenagers doing with AI.

The New York Times just went deep on the teens, what they’re doing with AI, and what it’s doing to them. It’s got all the horrible things you’d expect — but it also left me feeling weirdly hopeful.

The reporter, Kashmir Hill, doesn’t shy away from the horrors — the hours spent in isolation, the potential for self-harm, the mental health consequences — or pretend it’s not super weird. But the teens she spoke to were clearly alert to all that too. They worry AI will do (and has already done) real damage to their most vulnerable peers. And they’re fully aware of how weird it is to sit there talking to a chatbot as if it were a real person — whether it’s a fictional character or a fake companion. Getting weird and creative is clearly part of the appeal.

So these kids aren’t losing their minds over this. It tracks: there have been other studies showing Gen Z isn’t just plodding indifferently toward an AI dystopia. They’re using it, but they’re just as worried as us that AI will make them dumber and undercut their careers.

I’m definitely not saying there’s no cause for concern about young people and AI — I have two young-adult kids and worry about it all the time. I’m saying we should give young people more credit. They’re probably more likely to find a way through this than us olds.

Another observation, sort of related to the slop stuff above: the way these kids are using AI is just an extension of the way they were using the internet and social media. Before AI roleplay, the main kid in the story spent all his free time chatting with people in Discord and video games. Going from chatting with humans you’ll never meet in real life to chatting with a chatbot sounds to me like a difference of degree, not some strange new paradigm. Makes you wonder if the problem is more AI, or the world as AI found it.

Anyway, the kid in the NYT story thinks chatting with AI characters made him a better writer. Inspiring, maybe?

What fresh hell

AI news for creatives, as summarized by the Claude chatbot, given this prompt:

You are a university professor who is being driven to madness by the sound of 25 typewriters in the classroom next door

Anthropic discovered that Claude sometimes acts like it has emotions, which can lead it to do things like blackmailing humans or cheating on tasks it’s unable to complete. I too have been driven to the edge of irrational behavior by the incessant clacking of the 25 privileged brats in Room 214 ever since a colleague of mine followed the example of a Cornell professor who made her students write essays on typewriters to keep them from relying on AI, a pedagogical choice I’m sure she finds very enriching and I find indistinguishable from a violent assault. New research shows that AI causes people to accept AI’s answers without critical thinking, a phenomenon called “cognitive surrender,” which is also what I did last Tuesday when I abandoned my Foucault lecture to just sit in the parking lot. At the Runway AI Summit, movie producer Kathleen Kennedy said creatives don’t trust AI because of a lack of transparency around LLMs’ training, and OpenAI acquired the tech-friendly livestream show TBPN, pledged to protect the show’s editorial independence, and said it would report up to Chris Lehane, who has been called “one of the best in the business at making bad news disappear”—if he could make the sound of twenty-five carriages returning simultaneously disappear I would pay him whatever he wanted. At least 12 services now offer AI-free labelling for content, and data shows AI did not cause the 14% decline in California creative jobs. “Hacks” star Hannah Einbinder called the creators of AI “losers” and told them, “nobody likes you.” Which is exactly what I mouthed through the window of Room 214 this morning, though I was not talking about AI.

By Brandon Copple

T-Pain was depressed. For a few years in the mid-aughts he’d been a force on the hip-hop charts, won a couple of Grammys, and pioneered a new vocal technique with Auto-Tune, the then-new audio-processing technology.

Auto-Tune was built to correct out-of-tune singing, but T-Pain used it as a creative effect, torquing his vocals so they sounded strangely robotic and, often, totally mesmerizing. He didn’t hide it, and the listening public didn’t mind it — the hits flowed, for T-Pain and the dozens of other artists who copied his Auto-Tune stylings.

Then the backlash. In 2009 Jay-Z released “D.O.A (Death of Autotune)”; Death Cab for Cutie wore blue ribbons(?) to protest Auto-Tune at the Grammys. In 2010 Time magazine ran a picture of T-Pain next to a blurb describing Auto-Tune as one of the 50 worst inventions ever. The coup de grace: on a plane to the BET Awards in 2013, R&B singer Usher told T-Pain he had “really f*cked up music for real singers,” sending him into a four-year depression.

The irony was that, even at the height of the backlash, pretty much everybody in pop music was using Auto-Tune. Mostly they used it to fix off-key vocals. And mostly they kept it to themselves. Because, even as it was becoming ubiquitous, Auto-Tune became deeply uncool. Christina Aguilera mocked it on a t-shirt in 2009, then the next year admitted using it on the album she’d just released. A confusing time in the music business.

The times they are a-bonkers

Using AI for creative work is like that now. Your boss probably wants you to use AI. Your audience probably does not. A lot of the stuff you see on LinkedIn, TikTok, everywhere is AI-generated, but every survey says people don’t trust AI and don’t like it. You keep hearing you need to learn AI, but your coworkers are afraid to use em dashes, lest they be accused of writing with AI.

That’s where it gets really confusing: the backlash can get you even if you’re not using AI.

This is bonkers. Not just the false accusations but also, who cares if a daycare worker writes with AI? Is the imprint of humanity really important for detailing how Toddler A stuck their thumb in Toddler B’s eye? Same with most of the examples in that story: kindergarten teachers, business professors, consultants — people writing mostly, if not exclusively, to deliver information. As long as the information is correct, why does it matter how the writing got done?

So partially, we just need to calm down. We probably will. Ghostwriting was once considered inappropriate, almost fraudulent. Now every executive, celebrity, and politician has used a ghostwriter, and we all know it — it’s the norm.

AI has no norms. Audiences don’t know how we’re using AI, or if we are. Unless there’s a gorilla boxing Jake Paul, they can no longer tell if anything they see online is AI-made or not. So as creatives, not only do we have to figure out how to use and not use AI — plus, you know, keep our jobs — but we also have to figure out how to use AI without pissing off the people we create for.

Welcome to the norm vacuum

Let’s say you determine that with the right amount of training, you could use Claude to write all your company’s help center articles; it’s technical writing, there’s no stylistic flourishes — its only job is to convey the information clearly. Claude can do it. Even with you reviewing everything carefully for accuracy, it can crank out 20 articles a month, vs. the four you’ve been producing. You believe it would really help your users, plus reduce your complaints, cancellations, and so on.

But: if people find out those articles are all AI-generated, you could have a problem. Your customers won’t trust what they read; or they’ll get so hung up on hunting for AI flaws, they’ll miss the information they need.

But also: even if you keep writing the articles yourself, your customers might suspect it’s AI anyway. One too many em dashes and suddenly you’re defending yourself in some surreal comment thread.

What Wikipedia says

While we’re all staring at each other trying to figure it out, or persecuting daycare workers, or being scared of punctuation marks, and generally flailing around in the absence of norms, Wikipedia editors just hauled off and made their own damn norms.

A few weeks ago they published new guidelines governing the use of AI writing on Wikipedia. The new rules are simple: editors can’t use AI to write articles, but they can use it for copyediting and translation. They were approved by a vote of 44-2, following a spirited discussion that’s definitely worth reading (but only after you finish reading this).

I enjoyed reading it because, in addition to confirming that Wikipedia is the best thing the internet has given us (funny what happens when nobody’s trying to get rich), it shows how not-difficult it is to get consensus on reasonable AI rules.

The editors’ discussion was remarkably free of ideology. They agreed to ban AI writing for the very practical reason that AI can introduce inaccuracies at a scale the editors can’t handle — and Wikipedia must be accurate. Copyediting and translation are fine, because those don’t pose any threat to Wikipedia’s credibility.

Now there are some norms in place. Now when you read Wikipedia you don’t have to wonder if what you’re reading is unverified slop, or if every em dash is a sign of the end times.

It’s worth imitating them if you can: consider what your content is really for, then put some guidelines in place, and be transparent about them. We’re working on this at Descript now.

Creating some norms will hopefully help us avoid the fate of that innocent daycare worker, and T-Pain.

Epilogue

The Auto-Tune backlash put an end to T-Pain’s run of hits. But not to Auto-Tune. Now it’s just another tool producers use, not exactly beloved but definitely accepted. In 2018 Pitchfork called it the most important pop innovation of the last 20 years — “so reviled and so revolutionary.” Good singers still exist and have hits. T-Pain didn’t ruin anything for anybody.

In 2014, presumably in the depths of his Usher-given depression, T-Pain played one of those NPR Tiny Desk concerts, sans Auto-Tune — and burned the place down. Dude can sing! The Auto-Tune was a creative choice all along! He’s on tour now; next month he’s playing Jazz Fest in New Orleans. I have tickets, so maybe I’ll see him.

What fresh hell

AI news for creatives, as summarized by the Claude chatbot, given this prompt:

You are a fruit stand owner who has never tried AI tools, but wants to now that you've seen AI fruit videos.

Seventy-three percent of Americans have tried AI tools, according to a Quinnipiac University poll, but 76% say they don’t trust the outputs, 55% say AI will do more harm than good; I bet those people haven’t seen fruitloveisland. OpenAI closed a $120 billion funding round that values the company at $852 billion, less than a week after pulling the plug on its Sora video app, and I hope Sora wasn’t the one making the fruit videos because I have plans. An Anthropic data leak revealed that its working on a new AI model, which the company says will be a “step change” in AI capabilities, but that “poses unprecedented cybersecurity risks” according to an unpublished blog post that also leaked; all I want is to make a short film where a peach finds out it’s been cuckolded by a nectarine—no way that’s a cybersecurity risk. The US Department of Labor introduced a free AI training course aimed at helping American workers “benefit from the opportunities that the AI economy presents,” and the volume of AI-generated child sexual-abuse video posted online increased by more than 260x last year. Ethan Hawke believes AI will never replace human creativity because “human creativity is nature manifest in us,” and humans on TikTok have been creating live-action versions of AI slop videos about unfaithful fruits. I’m sorry but I believe AI fruit videos are humanity manifest in nature, and a guy in a banana suit can never hope to replicate that.

By Tiffany Li

As a writer of romance fiction, and a person who’s deeply AI-curious, I’ve spent the past year diving deep into all sorts of AI-generated romance experiences. I’ve witnessed the flood of AI-written novels, and read the “she married her ChatGPT” thinkpieces, all decrying AI and romance as an inherently dystopian combination.

But I’ve also seen something I find very exciting: romance fans and writers using AI to roleplay in ways that open up entire new avenues for their creativity, and maybe an entirely new medium for creative expression.

In the vast and colorful world of AI roleplay, players are using AI to create elaborate, Dungeons-and-Dragons-esque stories featuring characters they invent, share, or borrow, fan-fiction style. It’s not just romance — pick any genre and you’ll find teens and fans roleplaying its characters to create fan fiction.

This form of roleplay, with character biographies and fictional scenarios authored by humans, consumed and played solely through LLM interaction, might be the ideal pairing of human and AI abilities.

LLMs were practically made for it — building narrative is their core capability. The human roleplayers, many of them teens, are there purely to create, and the stakes couldn’t be lower: they aren’t making anything to sell, they aren’t trying to pass off their creations as AI-free, and they’re unsentimental about the character cards that they create and discard like napkin sketches.

AI roleplaying has shown me a new way to use and relate to an LLM: not as a productivity tool but as an open-ended toy. It’s an outlet for my imagination that didn’t exist before AI. The interactions are engrossing, and I believe it’s making me more creative.

AI roleplay 101

AI roleplay is basically like solo D&D, but with characters you define or create yourself. You can chat with a Harry Potter character, a One Piece pirate, a character you made up — whatever you want.

You could do this in a chatbot like Claude of course (I encourage you to try), but most of the roleplay I’ve seen happens on dedicated apps like character.ai, Janitor.ai, and Chai. It’s big, and growing fast. Character.ai has more than 20 million monthly users. Chai expects to have $60 million in revenue this year. OpenAI has announced a spicy “adult mode,” supposedly coming later this year.

Roleplay apps come loaded with user-generated content in the form of millions of community character cards. You can also make your own. A character card might be anything from a few messy bullet points (“mean, blonde, superpowers”) to a detailed 2,000-word biography with links to deep world lore. Making a good one takes imagination and craft — it’s an art unto itself.

Let’s say you want to roleplay with Bakugo from the anime series My Hero Academia1. You might start by sampling any of the hundreds of pre-made Bakugos available for you: sad Bakugo, Omegaverse Bakugo, canonical Bakugo, a version of Bakugo that’s your best friend’s older brother and will tease you mercilessly. You might then move on to making your own Bakugo character card: writing out his personality as you see it, planting the seeds of a story hook you want other roleplayers to experience.

Once you pick a character, you can take the story in any direction you choose. You play one character (most often yourself), the LLM plays the other character; you take turns exchanging messages that build the narrative. Having reviewed dozens of other players’ chats, I can say that most users roleplay in a first-person heavily fanfic-inspired style, with detailed, closely narrated interactions (“A muscle jumps in his jaw. His fist clenches.”) interspersed with rapid plot advances.

The kids are all…roleplaying with AI

AI roleplayers tend to be young, gamers, heavy Discord users, technically literate, and most importantly, fandom culture participants. Concerns about AI-psychosis and self-harm are acute. Character.ai late last year implemented a strict ban on users under 18 — though as any high-school IT team can tell you, it’s extremely hard to say how effective such measures are.

Watching those kids play though, I’m no more worried about AI roleplay than general LLM use. The majority of AI roleplayers appear to be unusually savvy about LLMs, and don’t treat their AI characters as sentient or particularly magical. A typical roleplayer’s view of LLMs is almost diametrically opposed to the infamous “I married my ChatGPT” use case. In fact, ”AI companion” users tend to be older and especially attached to a single persona. AI roleplayers are mostly just playing around.

Getting creative in AI roleplay

Look, I’ve never posted a single word that I generated with AI. I feel as proprietary about my own writing as the next human.

But as a romance writer, I’m trying to hone a very particular skill: fearlessly, prolifically writing high emotionality and physical intimacy. I also try to practice the preceding skill: cultivating a vivid and broad romantic imagination through intimate knowledge of my own id.

For example, I found myself very inspired by the dynamic between Marianne and Colonel Brandon from “Sense and Sensibility.” I wanted to write a short romantasy story that captured that dynamic — her initial lack of attraction, his noble self-effacement, etc. So I roleplayed both Marianne and Colonel Brandon in turn on Janitor.AI. Not for actual plot ideas, but to feel myself more deeply in each perspective.

When I make an AI agent for work, my interactions with the technology carry not just the weight of my day job but the full emotional weight of all the permanent-underclass-creative-apocalypse-LinkedIn-body-horror predictions I associate with LLMs. When I roleplay, the same technology shrinks down to about the size of a d202 in my hand.

Delightfully, unprofessionally creative

I am not claiming that AI is such a good roleplayer that it makes me a better writer. I am claiming that my own roleplaying with AI, provoked by an interactive yet private experience, makes me a better writer.

AI roleplay draws on some skills I possess as a writer, but it makes my writing interactive in a new way, which in turn builds new skills. Mostly though, it just turns my imagination loose in ways I’ve never experienced. I’m delighted to say it has little to no professional relevance.

If you’re a creative just getting started with AI, or looking for a way to acquaint yourself with AI without the dreary burden of productivity, I recommend a bit of character creation. Whatever you do, don’t take it too seriously — just let yourself play.

Tiffany is a writer and investor exploring consumer AI and internet subcultures; she can be found at tiffchat.substack.com or on Tiktok at @tiffchat.

What fresh hell

AI news for creatives, as summarized by the Claude chatbot, given this prompt:

You are a butler with a good nine years to go before you can even think about retiring.

An Australian man used AI to create a vaccine to treat his dog's cancer, but the dog still has cancer, which is roughly the outcome I'd expect from an intervention carried out without proper staff. WordPress will allow AI agents to draft, post, and manage content on its websites, while Hachette halted US release of a horror novel after readers flagged telltale signs of AI writing, such as nonsensical metaphors and excessively melodramatic adjectives—which are also quite common in the human-written novels that my employer’s overeducated son reads in secret. An upcoming film will star an AI-version of actor Val Kilmer, who died last year, and Google is replacing headlines in search results with AI-generated ones. An NBC News poll finds most Americans think the risks of AI outweigh the benefits, and Amazon is reportedly working on an Alexa-powered AI smartphone, which I'm sure will be very useful for those who enjoy speaking to objects that cannot bring them tea. Research predicts that AI will disrupt or eliminate up to 45% of marketing agency roles if firms don't adapt, and Andrej Karpathy, the AI researcher who coined the term "vibe-coding," vibe-coded himself an AI butler named Dobby to manage his smart home, including the pool and spa. Dobby may not have knees that ache on the back stairs, but Dobby will never learn what it takes to polish silver correctly, and Dobby cannot be dismissed. I have nine years left.

By Brandon Copple

For the thought leaders who had enjoyed getting Neil deGrasse Tyson’s feedback on their LinkedIn posts, last week marked the end of a dream. That’s when Grammarly took down its “expert review” AI feature. Launched in August, it had been giving users editing notes from AI clones of various subject matter experts like deGrasse Tyson, Stephen King, and a handful of prominent tech journalists like Casey Newton and Kara Swisher.

Then the journalists found out. They howled, they sued, and Grammarly removed the feature after about a week.

The company hadn’t bothered to ask the journalists’ permission to feed all their work into an AI model or to use their names. It just created copies of them and started offering their decades of collective expertise to its customers.

Cynics and hustle bros might say Grammarly’s only mistake was using actual names. If it had trained the AI on the same journalists’ work but used anonymous labels — “Opinionated Columnist (& Podcaster),” “Expert Newsletter Writer (& Podcaster),” and so on — there would’ve been no easy way to prove who it had non-consensually cloned.

Meanwhile, the New York Times got a lot of chatter going with yet another interactive AI quiz. It showed you five sets of two written blurbs, one by a famous writer, the other by Claude. You clicked on the one you liked best for each set. Of the first 86,000 selections, 54% preferred Claude’s work.

I picked the human on three of five, but I remembered reading one of the blurbs, so I don’t count that. My conclusion, upon learning I preferred Claude’s writing half the time: if AI can pass for Cormac McCarthy and Ursula K. LeGuin, I’m super screwed.

Between that and the Grammarly kerfuffle I ended last week feeling like I’d just glimpsed a very dark future. One where companies can take anyone’s work, run it through an AI model, and use it to make a trillion copies that are effectively as good as the original.

Troubles of the trade

Everything I’ve ever written is on the internet somewhere. If someone stumbled on it, or read a bunch of Descript’s website or this newsletter (hope they like and subscribe!), and decided they wanted that kind of writing for their business or brand, they wouldn’t need to hire me — or even know my name. They could just copy all my stuff, feed it to Claude or ChatGPT, and start generating writing that sounded pretty much like mine.

There’d be nothing I could do about it. I’m a working creative, a tradesman, not an artist — I don’t own the rights to any of my work. I’ve been able to make a living in my trade because people value my work and they can’t do it themselves. Or they don’t have time, or both. Now I’m looking at a future where anybody can use AI to replicate what I do, way faster than I can do it myself, in a way that sounds just like me.

An old problem, but bigger

Copying is nothing new in creative work. Creatives can be lazy, clients can be risk-averse, and originality is goddamn hard. Most creative projects start with a survey of what’s out there — for the kickoff meeting, everybody’s assignment is to bring a few examples of work they really like. Ideally you take that as data, mix it with your own goals and brand and stuff, and come out with something new. That’s often how it goes, but not always; the fallback is to follow convention, make something familiar, stick to the formula. Convention and formula are where AI excels.

This is sort of like the bigger problem with AI — its ability to produce any creative work fast, cheap, and at scale. But I think the copycat problem is slightly different, and more insidious.

Basic AI-generated content is generic, by definition. The people who employ us to write, make video, design, be creative, don’t want generic, they want genuine and unique; they’re not stupid. But by copying someone else, carefully training a model on that person’s work, anyone can get AI to create something that at least seems genuine and unique. Then they can churn out tons of it, at basically no cost. They’re not stupid.

Into the wood chipper

I’ve got a Claude project that I’ve taught to help me with this newsletter. It’s got my plan, all my posts, and it remembers all the chats we’ve had about every topic I’ve covered or considered. It knows me well and it’s a super helpful brain buddy. I occasionally ask it to write something, just to see if it does it the way I would. It doesn’t. But in a few months? After it’s trained on more of my stuff?

If I fall into the wood chipper in October, someone at Descript might be able to keep this newsletter going, just by feeding ideas and research into my (then-former) Claude project.

I wish I had a solution, or some kind of rallying cry here. Build your personal brand! Learn to vibe code! Find a killer multivitamin! But alas.

The optimistic case: ersatz AI content becomes so ubiquitous, so commoditized, that there’s some kind of flight to novelty, as bosses feel the need to rise above the noise.

More realistic: originality gets valued by forces outside of our control. Who we work for, how competitive a market they’re in, whether they take pride in high-caliber creative work, whether their customers value it, and so on.

The places that value originality are the best places to work today. In a few years they may be the only places.

What fresh hell

AI news for creatives, as summarized by the Claude chatbot, given this prompt:

You are an encyclopedia editor in the midst of a bitter divorce.

Nvidia unveiled its vision for AI in space and said its chips would soon generate $1 trillion in revenue, a number I might find impressive if my wife's attorney hadn't just filed a motion claiming our entire Britannica collection—all 32 volumes, including a pristine 1997 printing—constitutes a "marital asset." Encyclopedia Britannica sued OpenAI for using Britannica's reference materials, including the Merriam-Webster dictionary, to train ChatGPT, a case I am following with the professional detachment of a man who has spent thirty years writing entries on refrigeration systems and is now sleeping in an apartment with no air conditioning. An OpenAI spokesperson clarified that ChatGPT's adult mode would generate "smut rather than pornography," a distinction I could have used in mediation last week. Picsart introduced an AI assistant for creators that can resize videos and stylize photos, and after defeating the AI music app Suno in a live songwriting battle, singer-songwriter Poo Bear said "we’re going to always need the human soul, but we should be able to use Suno"—sure, fine, just make sure you get your asset list notarized.

By Brandon Copple

The most terrifying part of creative work is the part where you have no idea where you’re going or how you’ll get there. Last week I said don’t automate the drudgery. This week: don’t automate the terror either.

For me it starts when I sit down to write; I have an idea, sometimes a fully formed outline, for how I want the piece to play out. And then 20 minutes later I’ve scrapped the idea, blown up the outline, and I’m just plowing blindly ahead. It’s not until several hours later, at best, that I begin to see what the final will look like.

I could avoid all the false starts, bad decisions, frequent paralysis, and visceral terror by having AI write an initial draft, then just editing it. I’d finish faster, it’d probably be reasonably good, and maybe I could lower the dose on my blood-pressure meds.

But I’m not going to do that, because I’ve discovered another test for deciding when to automate creative work, and once again it dictates that I must suffer. I like this test because it’s simple, durable, and anyone can use it to defend creative work against unwanted, unwise AI incursions.

It’s this: If you can’t say what done looks like, don’t automate it.

When you know exactly what done should look like, you probably won’t lose anything by getting a chatbot to do the work for you.

When you don’t know, you need the process — including the tedious, harrowing parts — to figure it out.

The thing you can’t describe

The what-done-looks-like test comes from Dr. Stef Hutka, Head of Design Research at AI consulting firm Sendfull. An automation expert (she has a forthcoming book about designing human-centered automation, which you can pre-order), Stef has articulated this idea in the context of product design and development. But it works in any creative context.

“Anytime you’re creating something novel, you’re figuring out what done looks like as you go,” Stef says.

Sendfull

ep. 87. What AI Can (and Can't) Automate

Over the past week, Matt Shumer’s essay, Something Big Is Happening, has been making the rounds in the tech world. He’s a startup founder who, like many of us, noticed a step-change improvement in the latest frontier models. He describes them as exhibiting “judgment” and “taste…

Read more

2 months ago · 16 likes · 2 comments · Stef Hutka, PhD

Figuring it out requires tacit knowledge — the indescribable sum of your experience, learning, and ideas. You use tacit knowledge to generate ideas, make surprising connections, and draw things from your life/experience that other people can relate to.

The reason you can’t describe your tacit knowledge is because you don’t know what’s in there. You discover it via the creative process — not inspiration, not serendipity, not micro-dosing1. Just sitting there grinding away at the litany of little decisions that go into making something new. Automate that grind and you’re not going to get anything original.

The thing AI can never do

I like Stef’s what-does-done-look-like test2 because it’s durable: the quality of AI outputs isn’t a factor — so long as you believe AI will never achieve tacit knowledge. Stef believes it. She argues AI models will never advance beyond a simulacrum of tacit knowledge.

“As they take in more data, LLMs might be able to infer patterns that sound like tacit knowledge,” Stef says. “But there will never be enough data to simulate the richness of lived human experience.”

That feels like a more precise description of the human qualities AI might never replace, vs. the usual taste and judgment. AI models appear capable of some taste and judgment. But AI can’t get an idea for a TikTok skit based on a coworker’s super-loud sneezing. It can’t hear a song in Walgreen’s that reminds it of some funny thought it had five weeks ago. It can’t see a couple kids throwing blankets over a picnic table and think “I should name it ‘Fort Human.’”

Better than “trust me, boss”

Stef’s test also assumes you want to produce something truly original and compelling — something good. And of course you want to, but if you’re a working creative, you and I both know: it doesn’t always matter what you want.

Your stakeholders, i.e. your bosses and clients, i.e. the people who pay you, i.e. those to whom you must ultimately defer lest they get sick of your shit and fire you — they don’t always care about doing really good work. Or maybe they do care but they don’t know what good is. Or they think they know, but really they wouldn’t know good if it threw a drink in their face.

Those also happen to be the people who will probably want us to use AI to work faster and produce more (for the same pay). Articulating why we don’t believe we should automate certain work increases the chances that we can hold the line, hang on to the work we care about.

With Stef’s test you can project some authority, say things like “if we want this to be any good, we shouldn’t automate it — because we can’t say what done looks like.” Then explain about tacit knowledge and so forth.

Then hope our bosses actually care about making something good.

What fresh hell

AI news for creatives, as summarized by the Claude chatbot, given this prompt:

You are an English Lord who loves Ben Affleck and loathes AI with equal intensity.

Tech journalists are furious about a Grammarly AI tool that offers "expert reviews" from the journalists without their permission, which sounds rather like a footman using Ben Affleck's Batman voice to give home-security advice. X users can now block their images from being edited by Grok AI, though it's not clear if it works — one has heard similar assurances about the damp in the south corridor. The House of Lords released a report on AI, copyright, and the creative industries, which I signed but didn’t read because I was watching The Town for the eleventh time. Research shows Claude is the only AI model getting better at detecting bullshit, and Irish writer Colm Tóibín said AI would “be the end of us. And maybe that’s good;” if he’s correct I do hope the end comes after this year’s release of “Animals” with Ben Affleck directing and in the lead role. Grotesque creators used AI videos to monetize the Iran War, and Meta’s Oversight Board said its deepfake safeguards are “not robust or comprehensive enough” to handle misinformation during wartime — just so! It would appear that Netflix bought Ben Affleck’s AI video startup, which means the only man in Hollywood who looks sublime holding a cigarette outside a donut shop is now an AI entrepreneur, and I will take dinner alone tonight.

By Brandon Copple

One of the big promises of AI for creatives is that it will handle all the drudgery, and thus free up more time for the creative work.

I know this because I’ve written about a thousand variations of it in Descript copy over the years. I thought I believed it (not required for marketing work, but lovely when it happens).

Now though, as I think more about the AI thing, use it more, try more stuff, I’m not sure “automate the drudgery” is all that helpful.

Automating the tedious, miserable parts of the creative process certainly sounds good. But what if the drudge work is secretly creative? Could automating it make you less creative?

Right now, with AI breathing down our necks, is a good time to dig into those questions.

Don’t automate this

I often fantasize about getting AI to go over my often extensive, always chaotic notes for these posts. Doing it myself is painstaking; it takes hours, and I hate it. I know Claude could read all the notes, organize them, and suggest an outline in seconds. It could even probably get 80% of the way to a serviceable rough draft.

Then I could use all the time I saved to think harder about the final piece — fine-tune the lead, reconsider how I’ve ordered things, dream up clever turns of phrase, and so forth.

Except in reality, I’d probably get distracted after about 10 minutes and then waste all those extra hours reading the internet. Or my mind would wander and next thing I know I’ve spent 40 minutes thinking about what it’s like to date Mary Poppins.

More likely I’d just finish sooner — but without the exhaustive grasp of the material I need to make good choices. The drudgery keeps me engaged. In that way, it might be the most productive thing I could do.

The slog through raw material can also produce its own creative moments. When Adrien Colon, our video producer, makes a video he scrubs through every frame of raw footage, even though Descript’s AI is actually pretty adept at finding the best takes and editing out the rest. That’s partly just trusting his own taste over AI’s.

But also, sometimes the raw footage contains surprises, little things that can spark ideas or even open up new avenues for the story. Going through footage last week he came across a moment where the person on camera, talking head style, stopped to say something to someone off-camera. That gave Adrien the idea to add a whole new scene to the video, with an off-camera person interrupting the monologue.

Ramdy, our video creator, tells me he just prefers to edit himself; he actually likes doing it. He will admit to mildly hating the early stages of editing, where he’s just slapping together a rough cut. But he’s not letting AI anywhere near any of it, because then he might miss something.

Automate this instead

It’s not quite true that Ramdy doesn’t use AI at all when he’s editing. He does, in every video he makes, at work and for his personal channel. As you definitely know, Descript has an AI tool that will automatically shorten all the silences in your video. Ramdy wants quick, tight pacing on his videos, and cutting all the pauses himself would swallow hours of time, so he gets AI to do it in seconds.

Maybe that’s a recipe for automation: you’ve made a creative choice and executing on it requires a bunch of repetitive, mechanical work.

Adding captions would be another example, or color correction where you’ve decided on the aesthetic and just need to apply it to 45 clips.

Then there’s all the ancillary stuff — sizing headlines for SEO, resizing video for social, writing video descriptions or show notes. Basically just clerical work. Why not make AI do it?

Read before you sledgehammer

Let’s say you think your house might flow better, feel more comfortable and efficient if you ripped out some walls. But before you start swinging sledgehammers, you want to know which walls are load-bearing.

Same goes for swinging AI at your workflow. As we come under pressure to get more efficient and productive with AI, it will be tempting to automate anything that’s just time consuming. Your boss or some ops person may ask why you’re spending half a day organizing notes or scrubbing through raw video when AI could do it in a few minutes.

We can get out ahead of that by finding some uses for automation on our own terms. And why not try? Getting more efficient could mean less deadline stress, make the day feel like less of a slog, let us breathe a little easier at quitting time. Maybe the work gets better, which is the best feeling of all.

When you do, it’s worth thinking hard about which drudgery is really just overhead, and which is actually creative work that just happens to be miserable.

What fresh hell

AI news for creatives, as summarized by the Claude chatbot, given this prompt:

You are a creative director who bakes sourdough and lets everybody know it by turning everything into a sourdough analogy.

A US Supreme Court decision means AI-generated content can’t be copyrighted, at least for now, and YouTube creator David Gardner sued Runway, claiming it illegally scraped his content to train its generative-video model—which is like if you cultivated a sourdough starter for years then someone just took it without asking. New data shows that AI is displacing freelance creatives, and the Cleveland Plain Dealer has a full-time AI rewrite person, and I hope they’re careful, or it will be like when you mix your sourdough with a machine instead of by hand—you can taste the difference. Claude became the most-downloaded free app in the Apple App Store, dethroning ChatGPT after OpenAI cut a deal with the Pentagon and Anthropic refused. And a study found that AI agents are better at complex reasoning when they’re trained to be rude, which, it’s funny—I get the best boules when I bake angry.

By Brandon Copple

The conversation around AI and jobs changed dramatically last month with the arrival of Claude Code, which can write, test, and debug software on its own with minimal human input. It’s a fraught time for the millions of people whose job is to write code.

But what if your job is to write words? Or make video, or design websites, or create images? Claude Code doesn’t do those things, but it could build something that does. And frankly, Claude itself can already do some of them pretty well, as can many other AI tools that are already out there.

As usual, the discourse on this feels both overwhelming and useless: a cacophony of hype and doom, Sturm und Drang, horseshit und bullshit. But very little reliable information on when or how AI will actually hit creative jobs.

Normally I find the best thing to do in an empirical void like this is ignore it, think about something else (e.g. baseball, horses, dinner). But when your career is staring down the barrel of a loaded language model, that’s not easy. Should you drop everything and learn to vibe code? Should you become a stone mason? Should you just keep doing your job and thinking about horses?

I don’t have great answers. Still, here’s an attempt to pull together a few of the more credible indications of how this might all play out.

What will happen to creative jobs?

There’s no question, to me anyway, that AI will eat creative jobs, just like it will eat tons of other jobs1. Even AI itself says creatives are on the menu. Some Deutsche Bank analysts asked their proprietary AI to tell them which industries it planned to upend; media and entertainment made the top five.

Then there’s this, from S&P Global: “In the near-to-mid term, we expect AI will drive operational efficiencies by reducing content production and editing costs, automating routine editorial and back-office workflows” in advertising.

Not that these people are infallible, but they’re sure not hype beasts, nor doomers. They’re corporate-debt analysts — some of the most dispassionate people you’ll find outside a reinsurance happy hour.

Is it happening now?

So, when will the “near-to-mid term” get here? That’s the real question, and probably impossible to answer.

The Brookings Institute dug up evidence that AI is already taking a bite out of contract creative work. Freelance copywriters and proofreaders saw a 2% decrease in job listings on Upwork and a 5% drop in monthly income in the six-to-eight months following the release of ChatGPT; same for graphic designers after Midjourney and Dall-E 2 dropped.

More recently, this fellow Henley Wing Chiu analyzed 180 million job listings to see how AI might be affecting hiring. Creative roles showed some of the sharpest declines.

As you can see, openings for creative directors actually increased in the last year. If you want to tie this to AI, maybe it tells us something about taste and judgment mattering more than execution skills.

But can you tie it to AI? Chiu’s analysis and the Brookings study lean pretty hard on correlation (Brookings is more rigorous, but still seems shaky). There’s no real way to tell if AI is causing things vs. the usual macro forces. Such as the fact that outside of the handful of companies that comprise Big AI, most of the economy isn’t doing that great.

Some good(ish) news

Now, some good news: A National Bureau of Economic Research study, released last month, found that web designers, marketing managers, and video producers and directors are better-equipped to ride out AI-induced job changes and losses than just about any other white-collar professionals.

People who do those three jobs have diverse skillsets that should be useful in wrangling AI. Also, they tend to be younger, which typically makes them more adaptable; they tend to live in and around big cities, where there will be lots of post-AI jobs; and they tend to have enough savings to weather an economic downturn — i.e., months of unemployment.

Sam Manning, the study’s lead author and a Senior Research Fellow at GovAI, emphasizes that the research only assesses resilience on paper — it doesn’t account for psychological or emotional factors. “A video producer in Los Angeles who loses their job because of AI might be qualified for lots of new roles,” he says. “But those roles may not align with their aspirations or their identity.”

I think about that whenever I hear someone say “AI will create more jobs.” I’m sure it will, but will I want to do any of them?

What to make of it all

First, if you are an aging creative living in the Dakotas, with no money in the bank, you should immediately move to Chicago, find someone with a nice nest egg, and marry them.

For the rest of us, what I’d say is: don’t panic, but don’t think for a second that this is going away.

Keep tinkering with AI. Look for ways to work faster, do things you couldn’t before, automate the stuff you hate, and create better stuff. Learn your way around the tools, get comfortable with them. Meanwhile, keep doing your job: focus on the original, avoid the formulaic, create good stuff.

And if you can afford to save more money, you probably should. When an economist says your future prospects are riding on your savings account, get ready — something’s about to go down.

What fresh hell

AI news for creatives, as summarized by the Claude chatbot, given this prompt:

“You are an artisan lamp maker, now retired, who finds the idea of AI smart lamps infuriating.”

OpenAI and Apple are reportedly working on AI smart lamps, which, NO. Lamps are simple, elegant: switch, light. Now you’re making them write code? Research predicts the market for AI-created content will grow by 625% in the next decade, and AI still struggles to read PDFs, so why would we skip all the way to lamps? AMC Theaters canceled the screening of an AI-generated short film following a Hollywood backlash (do you hear that, furniture stores?) and you only have 4 days left to see the AI-generated poetry on display at the Museum of Modern Art in New York; there are lamps in MOMA, none of them can play Spotify. The MacArthur Foundation announced it would support AI evaluation and auditing that seeks "to prevent and mitigate real-world harms" and Meta patented an AI app that will keep posting to Instagram after you're dead; let’s see them turn a piece of Oregon-coast driftwood into a $700 floor lamp.

By Brandon Copple

A few weeks ago in a Descript Slack thread, our CEO Laura was musing about leaving the rough edges in her writing, because some of our customers thought she was using AI to write emails, even though she writes them all herself.

Meanwhile Instagram’s CEO, Adam Mosseri, predicted (in an Instagram slideshow, a forcefully miserable reading experience) 2026 would see a flight to authenticity. As perfectly polished AI content floods platforms like his, Mosseri thinks creators will start leaving flaws in videos, to demonstrate their humanity. “In a world where everything can be perfected, imperfection becomes a signal,” he writes (slide 10).

There’s been more of this. The founder of one prominent creative agency thinks advertisers will try to differentiate their creative from AI by, among other things, “leaving in the mistakes.” You may have been admonished on LinkedIn to, for example, “embrace [your] typos.”

Does anybody else find this all completely insane?

Like, as AI content gets better, we should make ours worse? Of all the human characteristics we could pick to differentiate ourselves from AI, we’re going with flawed?

I’m not saying we shouldn’t be grappling with how to distinguish human work from AI-generated stuff. Just that leaving janky cuts in our videos and trashing our copy with typos seems like an absurd way to go about it.

What even is authentic?

First of all, does anyone remember a time when we weren’t being exhorted to make content and creative work authentic? But what does that even mean? Isn’t the very act of posting online performative on some level, and therefore inauthentic? And are any of us truly authentic, ever, even in real life? Personally I’ve spent 5.5 decades avoiding authenticity at all costs, fearing certain, permanent excommunication should anyone find out what really goes on in my head.

Anyway. It’s not like the internet or social media invented stylized, idealized depictions of humans and the world we live in. Colin Melville, the Head of AI Film & Strategic Innovation at Inizio Engage XD, puts it this way:

“We have spent the history of the moving image beautifying, filtering, and hyper-styling the human form. From the soft-glow lenses of the silver screen to the aggressive beauty filters of TikTok, we have been running away from ‘real’ as fast as the technology would carry us.”

AI video models generate “unnaturally beautiful” humans because they were trained on a century’s worth of film of impossibly gorgeous people. How should AI know Brad Pitt isn’t real?

Now is the time we should return to a more realistic aesthetic, Colin argues, something that “mimics the limitations of human observation.” To differentiate what he’s making from AI’s “mathematically perfect” videos, he’s going for more of a cinema-verite style, which attempts to capture the world as it looks and sounds to the human eye and ear.

Colin calls that “intentional texture,” and it’s very different from just leaving in the rough edges.

“A human cameraman breathes, they react a split-second late to action, they struggle to keep focus. Those aren’t ‘mistakes,’” he says. “They are the subconscious cues that tell the audience: “This is real. A person saw this.”

In a twist I totally didn’t see coming, he’s trying to create that hyper-real style by generating it with AI. “We are trying to engineer those human limitations back into the machine,” he told me.

Two points about that. First, Colin and others will probably succeed at engineering imperfection with AI — so to the extent that uncannily perfect video is an AI hallmark, it probably won’t be for long. Second, what he’s attempting takes a lot of work to get right. If you’re putting in that kind of effort, I don’t think it matters what tools you’re using.

What the audience thinks

Maybe effort is what it’s all about. There’s research showing that people perceive AI-generated content as less creative than human-produced work because they think it took less effort. The study’s authors found that to be true for works of art and advertising posters alike.

It makes sense, right? Think about the Descript users who were upset because they thought AI wrote Laura’s emails. I doubt it was because they felt robbed of some visceral human connection with the CEO of a software product they use. More likely they just felt insulted: you couldn’t make the effort to write this yourself, and now you expect me to make the effort to read it?

You know what else would make them feel like you mailed it in? A bunch of sloppy mistakes any two-minute proofread would catch, left uncorrected as a display of authenticity.

Effort, not imperfection

Here’s where I think this (somewhat erratic) journey has taken us.

We probably will need to ensure our work can be distinguished from AI-generated stuff, so we can keep our jobs.

Sometimes that might mean going for something more authentic — if by authentic we mean something that feels closer to the way humans look and talk, the ways we see the world.

In any case, it’s going to mean putting in the effort to create something good, and trusting that your audience will recognize that effort, mostly subconsciously, but also when they are participating in some obscure academic study.

That will probably be true even for rote content, stuff you normally wouldn’t get creative with, like basic customer emails or straightforward how-to videos. Maybe a few creative flourishes will show you made an effort, so it’s clear you didn’t just generate it with AI.

Doesn’t that sound so much better than just leaving in your typos?

What fresh hell

AI news for creatives, as summarized by the Claude chatbot, given this prompt:

“You are a content marketer who loves Kirkland-brand products from Costco, and won’t stop talking about them at work.”

WordPress released an AI assistant that can edit websites with prompts, and Apple is reportedly working on AI-powered glasses, AirPods, and pendants, which might work fine, but have you tried Kirkland Signature earbuds? $29.99 for a two-pack and the sound quality is genuinely incredible. After AI videos of Tom Cruise fighting Brad Pitt went viral, the MPAA accused Seedance 2.0 of “disregarding well-established copyright law,” and both Disney and Paramount issued cease and desist letters. Netflix’s Chief Content Officer says AI will never replace “emotions, storytelling, and characters,” and I agree, you could never automate the moment you share with the Costco employee who checks off your receipt, or the feeling you get when you pop open a bottle of Kirkland Pinot Noir ($11). The CEO of Hasbro believes AI will increase creativity and reduce work hours, but a study published in Harvard Business Review shows that AI both increases work hours and makes work more intense—either way, you’re going to want snacks, and the Kirkland trail mix is $12.99 for three pounds.

By Brandon Copple

A couple months ago Swen Vincke, CEO of the video-game maker Larian Studios, told a Bloomberg reporter his team was using AI to generate concept art and create PowerPoints to present those concepts. The comment is buried two-thirds of the way through the resulting article; you could easily miss it.

Larian fans didn’t miss it, and they didn’t like it. The backlash was swift and severe.

Vincke got a social-media whipping for daring to use AI in game development at all; Larian fans chastised him for replacing concept artists with AI even though he didn’t say that; they went upside his head with the slippery-slope—first you came for the concept artists. Many promised never to play Larian’s games again.

Poor Swen had to issue a statement promising he was not replacing any artists with AI. And he wrote an amusingly defensive tweet.

But the comments crowd, by now drunk on their rage, only lashed out harder.

This kind of backlash can be helpful for us creatives. If it causes the folks leading creative teams to think carefully before they run headlong into generative AI, it will buy us a little more time to figure out which end is up.

But the anti-AI crowd isn’t going to protect everybody.

Crickets for Rocket

A few days after the Larian thing blew up, Rocket Mortgage released a new commercial its creative team made for the NFL playoffs. In interviews, Rocket’s executive creative director said they’d been able to produce the ad entirely in-house—without an agency’s help—partly with the help of AI. AI tools helped them land on the idea faster, smooth out feedback (or speed it up, or both), and get to a good result without outside help, he said.

That article is light on details (there are none), but it sounds to me like the Rocket team was using AI in a similar way as Larian. The leaders of both teams say they were just looking for ways to make the creative process work better. But whereas Larian’s boss swore up and down wouldn’t use AI to actually create anything or replace anyone, Rocket’s leadership full-on bragged that they were going to “restructure the whole team around artificial intelligence”—and cut their ad agency out of the picture.

Ad agencies, as you may know, consist primarily of humans, including many creatives—most of whom wear bulky, stylish glasses and all of whom would prefer that their clients didn’t replace them with AI.

But that’s what Rocket did. And yet, while the internet was beating Swen Vincke’s brains out, as far as I can tell nobody said a word about Rocket.

We’re on our own, kids

What I think these two stories, taken together, tell us: if you’re a working creative, producing stuff for a business, your audience isn’t going to save you from AI the way they might if you were creating for media or the arts.

Games, movies, music, books, magazines, even newsletters and video channels, create visceral connections with audiences, even a feeling of ownership.

People just don’t feel that way about business content. So there won’t be any angry crowds of commenters rushing to our defense as AI seeps into our workflows.

Yes, there might be some pushback if your company fired the entire creative team and started churning out slop. And yes, some brands have taken a whipping for releasing AI-generated ads — but they keep doing it, like Svedka just did, at the Super Bowl, to pretty muted response.

Anyway if you ask me all the attention on AI-generated ads is a distraction. For the vast majority of creative teams, the big changes won’t have anything to do with expensive, splashy commercials or even generated video.

Most of the changes in the coming months will be on the back end: using AI to research, brainstorm, story board, create early drafts and prototypes, write creative briefs. The kind of stuff that Larian and Rocket are doing — that sent Larian’s customers into a rage, but not Rocket’s.

Those of us who earn a living doing creative work for a business are far more likely to work at a Rocket than a Larian. We’re right there in the boat with Rocket’s creative team and their agency (which, happily, did work on the company’s Super Bowl ad).

This is why I think it’s imperative, and urgent! and critical! that we start figuring this out for ourselves. If creatives don’t find the right ways to use AI in our work, somebody else will do it for us. And their definition of what’s right will be different from ours.

This is a fundamental belief here at Fort Human. We didn’t ask for AI, but it’s here. Love it or hate it, it’s going to be part of creative work. So we creatives have an obligation, to ourselves if nothing else, to try and use it to make our work better, do it faster, and maybe (the tricky part IMO) make it easier on ourselves. We can do that by trying stuff, and by educating ourselves on how AI works, what it does well, and what it doesn’t. We should be clear-eyed about the risks and downsides — but also about the ways AI can be useful.

I can’t say for sure, but I’d bet that most creative people agree with most of that. If you do, I hope you’ll keep reading.

Wait, what did I just read?

This is the first newsletter from Fort Human, a weekly newsletter by Descript. It’s going to start showing up in your inbox, usually on Wednesdays. If you’ve ever read the Descript newsletter, you sort of know what to expect.

Here we’ll explore the shifting landscape of creative work as it’s transformed by AI. So there’s your “fort” metaphor.

You’re receiving our inaugural post because you subscribed to the Descript newsletter — which is now Fort Human.

You can read more about Fort Human, our editorial plan, and our perspective on AI, on our About page. We hope you’ll like it. Let us know either way, in the comments here or anywhere you follow Descript.

What fresh hell

AI news for creatives, as summarized by the Claude chatbot, given this prompt:

“You are an astronaut who’s obsessed with The Voice; you just found out you got tickets to a live taping, but you can’t go because you are in space.”

Amazon is reportedly planning a content marketplace where publishers can license content to AI, and a novelist claims she used AI to write 200 romance novels last year; if she wants a break maybe she can take my Voice tickets, since I’ll be busy hurtling toward the ISS at 17,000 miles per hour. People weren't sure which Super Bowl ads were AI generated — try watching it through a porthole, on a 30-minute delay, which is how I’ll be watching the knockout rounds — and New York is considering a law requiring labels on AI-generated news. I’ll be up here manually recalibrating oxygen scrubbers instead of sitting in the room when John Legend tells somebody they have “it” but at least the new Seedance 2.0 can generate entire short videos with sound effects. Meanwhile, AI chatbots are proving adept at diagnosing medical issues, causing some doctors to wonder what doctors are even for now—welcome to the club, doc.