Paul W. Downs

I want to talk to you about AI, too, which is obviously a huge and very fraught topic for us, for our audience.

You know, it's been top of mind for me recently.

We just closed our next print issue and package, which is all about AI and work.

And one of the pieces, truth stranger than fiction, applies very well here.

It's from an underemployed

I hope she doesn't mind me saying that she describes herself as underemployed, an underemployed Hollywood writer who's now making ends meet by doing gig work, training LLMs.

And it's like her and a bunch of her friends.

And they're just like running from slack to slack, trying to like get gigs, training LLMs.

It's very, very bleak.

It's a very bleak story about not only artificial intelligence and how it's made, how it's trained, how these models come to be, but also about the entertainment industry and sort of what is going on with employment prospects for people.

I'm curious about how you're seeing AI affect your world right now.

It's okay.

I hear you and I understand.

And, you know, I think what's been interesting for me when I have sort of tried using ChachiBT, I can feel the atrophy of my own mental cognitive abilities happen so quickly that it's scary and I have to stop.

Like, I don't like it because...

I became a journalist to write, like to be a writer.

And if I no longer write and I become complacent and I let AI write for me, then the idea of writing feels so much harder.

Like writing is already hard.

It can be very hard, but the process is the point.

Like the process is how you get to that end product and you have that feeling of satisfaction and your brain is tired and it was hard and it sucked, but it was satisfying.