AI and You | #156
Keeping things simple (and staying sane)
Desk Notes
(Please excuse the mess…still building dreams) ✨
AI or DIE was the theme at #FixFest (copywriting festival) in London this week. Just looking at what people have been saying online, how they're feeling about all things AI, and what side of the fence they're on.
AI is having a massive impact on the industry. Some clients want you to embrace it, others don’t want you using it at all - it’s hard to know where to position yourself. Leif Kendall at ProCopywriters is working on a ‘Code of Ethics’ for the community.
Fix Fest's official poet-in-residence, Natalie Moores did “the world's first LIVE AI Poetry social experiment.”
The hypothesis was this…. Could generative AI be used to bypass the years it takes for a poet to find their voice and actually go one step further in creating a democratised mass poetic voice from a room of copywriters?
Here's the poem (Humans + Claude):
Not bad, huh? But only because of the specificity and human input from the attendees.
I like to see these collective experiments.
How I’m feeling about AI
I'm excited about the big things it can do for small business—and keen to experiment and learn as much as I can. I see it as a biz growth consultant, something you'd pay good money for.
I like the democratisation of tech—that knowledge is free for all. It's levelling the playing field, and it's mind-blowing that I can potentially compete with a company on a resource level.
I'm keen to learn new skills. I don't want to spend the next 25 years doing the same things. Let’s make new worlds. I want to write about #AIForGood and how it can be used to solve bigger problems.
I've been thinking a lot about how we'll be spending our time if we're not slaves to the laptop, doing the grunt work. How will we live and work? Will we just fill our time with more work? For the same pay? I hope not. I hope we’re out in the world, chatting and connecting.
I'm overwhelmed by how fast things are moving. Keeping up with it all is impossible. I'm not reading the big AI newsletters I've signed up for, as too much information. I need a story and an emotional connection not another tool!
And struggling with the ethical side and the impact it’s having on jobs (especially writing and marketing)—hoovering up all this creative work with no consideration or compensation for the creator.
ALCS has launched #TheWriteShare campaign for a better deal for writers, which includes AI licensing. Some good ideas. Check it out.
For now, I've blocked AI training on my Substack dashboard—that button is off by default. I just did a quick poll on Notes to see what others have done.
What I want to learn:
How to write a structured prompt that sounds like me to get better results.
How to build a custom version of GPT.
How to get AI tools talking to each other (build my AI army!) so I have a support team as a soloist.
I plan to spend an hour or two a day playing around - ONE tool at a time - to work out what's useful for creative and business processes and will document it (for humans!) as I go.
Great advice from Heather Murray, founder of AI For Non-Techies on starting with a problem or goal, not the tool to avoid overwhelm. There are loads of tools (still in beta) that have been built quickly and are glitchy. What you try this week might not be the same next week, i.e. so don’t dismiss things!
What I’m doing:
1 website/training: Joined AI for Non-Techies - recommended by
, a digital copywriter I met at the Substack Virtual Campfire with1 Problem/goal: To find the best AI notetaker (a simple way in, good place to start).
1 database/aggregator: www.theresanaiforthat.com.
1 project: Applied to be a data annotator to get paid to train AI models (curious to see how it works).
1 podcast: The Artificial Intelligence podcast. Paul and Mike do a brilliant job demystifying AI and keeping you up to date.
1 book: Listening to The Coming Wave by Mustafa Suleyman.
1 newsletter: Subscribed to Heather’s. She's got c30K subs already and says she hasn't done much to promote it; such is the interest.
I like Ann Handley's take on it—writing is thinking—this is how I feel when I use AI. It gives you more options and more to think about so doesn’t always save you time. Rabbit holes!
I also like to wander in the wilderness and create something from nothing. It helps you feel connected to it.
Congrats to Labour 🌹 Great messaging.
CHANGE.
CHANGE BEGINS.
It all feels new and exciting, doesn't it? Airport energy. Hard to relax today (Friday).
I'm in Waterstones Café, and the guy sitting opposite me just said, "I shed a tear this morning when I looked at the news.
“14 years of shrivelling and shrinking the nation. People have had enough. They want change."
And great to see Keir’s midlife career shift has paid off - he’s a grafter! We’ll be alright.
Looking forward to seeing what the new government does for writers. AI licensing and a new Freelancer Commissioner would be a great start.
Happy writing!
Nika ✨
Cool Reads
▶️How to nail the interview in all its forms - workshop (replay) with senior journalist Hannah Shewan Stevens [Journo Resources]
▶️Bailey Richardson says farewell - learnings from the last 3 years of building community at Substack [Get Together -
]▶️The Sparkle Summit on August 16. Exploring traditional and non-traditional publishing to celebrate the launch of 'How to Build a World Class Substack' by
+ [Substack x Publishing]▶️Curation: The power of selection in a world of excess by Michael Bhaskar. How successful companies have used curation to power their growth [my Bookshop.org]
▶️Creator Briefing: How to hype yourself and generate buzz. A Q&A with
[]My Internetland
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Love your learning plan. Super smart and doable!
I work for an AI company and consult as a data analyst/data detective. Totally agree it’s impossible to keep up with all the AI tools but solving for the problem will get you there. Have found AI to be an incredible companion to all the researching, data cleaning & analyzing I do.
PS- think you might enjoy my friend Chris Penn’s newsletter on LinkedIn: http://linkedin.com/in/cspenn
Sir Keir ironically owes his success to Mr Farage MP and his news media PR backer (Daily Mail) for getting Tories to either stay home or vote Reform on Thursday! To get a landslide with only one third of the electorate behind you is a nail in the coffin of first past the post! Furthermore, we're currently spending more on the interest repayments for £3 trillion of uk gov debt bonds, £89 billion/year or 7.3% of public spending in 2024-5 (source: https://obr.uk/forecasts-in-depth/tax-by-tax-spend-by-spend/debt-interest-central-government-net/ ) than we're spending on defence, £57 billion/year despite Putin! (source: https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/research-briefings/cbp-8175/ ).
I really don't see how Labour are going to grow the magic money tree of taxation by expanding the public sector or increasing the debt and the % of GDP spend on interest (to flog gov bonds). Also, the last time they had a landslide after repudiating Clause 4, Mr Blair soon went power-crazy and started wars in the Middle East (in Iraq, and then Afghanistan) which increased debt, led to further instability, cost many lives. Previous times (1945-79, off and on) they blew the budget on nationalization and were then held to ransom by the Jack Jones' behind the block trade union backing of Labour, increasing public sector salaries to end strikes, thus driving a spiral of inflation and further strikes, until they had to put up high wage income tax to 83% in 1974, and corporation tax on business to 52%, driving away big private sector employers and their business from the UK! It's just crazy to repeat that experiment again and again, expecting or hoping for a different result. The 1970s result was the cap-in-hand IMF bailout of 1976 (with strings attached to prevent the borrowed money being again flushed down the pan fuelling the wages/inflation spiral), and finally the 1978/9 winter of discontent.
Sir Keir said that to reduce NHS hospital waiting lists, he's going to increase their opening times (evenings, weekends). That's going to increase overtime payments. Most of this problem goes back to Tony Blair twenty years ago, who cut GP working hours contracts to suit their union, and now they get paid over £89 per hour for working office hours. There are loads of ways to cut gov expenditure, all of them deeply unpopular! Good luck to Sir Keir with achieving anything, particularly nationalizing anything, from under the shadow of the UK's £3 trillion (and still growing) national debt!