I have a half-finished novel, a Creative Writing degree and have therefore read a lot about writing. This is known as procrasti-learning. So, borrowing from George Orwell's essay "Why I Write", I thought I'd chip in on the AI writing debate. Hence, my punny title. This comes in the week where Anthropic announced that they are "watermarking" the text that Claude generates. This is their response to the transparency requirements in the EU AI Act. Essentially, the watermark is using a non-random...
11 days ago • 4 min read
Dear Reader, "Where am I getting screwed?" that's the question entrepreneur Mark Cuban asks his large language model. I heard him say it in conversation with Allie Miller on a webinar this week. And it's the question behind one thing that really excites me from a consumer perspective about the potential of agentic AI: as a tool to combat the bureaucracy of every day life. No more negotiating labyrinth-like complaints processes, no more attempting to cancel Amazon Prime that you never really...
18 days ago • 2 min read
Dear Reader, I already feel smug as I write this, as the pizza dough for our dinner is proving in the kitchen. And the thing about this pizza dough is that it seems wrong at every single stage. Or if I'm being melodramatic. Every. Single. Stage. And if I'd been making it solo for the first time, maybe it might have taken a one-way trip to the bin, rather than ending up in the oven. *Trigger warning* I'm going to speak fondly about the COVID lockdown years. Yes, I know that on so many levels...
25 days ago • 2 min read
Dear Reader, Reading Tom's nephew's school report reminded me of this gem. The P.E. section of my school report in Year 9 Helen is trying hard to overcome her coordination difficulties in tennis. I'm sure Miss Brown has no idea that I can still remember this comment from a school report eons ago. It reminds me of the fits of laughter from my Mum when she showed me. I love thinking about my Mum. She was a total legend. But also let's appreciate the storytelling contained in that one sentence....
about 1 month ago • 1 min read
One p or two “Philip with one l and one p,” my Dad said when we were filling in a form. “Two ps,” I said. “One p.” “No, two. One at the beginning and one at the end.” “Oh yeah.” Dad was trained on a BSc and a PhD and he still hallucinates. He laughed and accused me of being a smart arse. Nobody walks away from that thinking Dad’s lost his marbles. Trust in a person was never “never wrong.” Trust in a tool shouldn’t be either. Compared to what Every time someone tells me AI isn’t accurate...
about 1 month ago • 3 min read
From nothing to built, in two hours Yesterday I ran a clinic session for business owners to help them build what in marketing terms is known as a lead magnet but what the rest of us would call an online quiz. They built fully functional web pages in two hours from literally nothing, from never having used Claude Code. It was forking amazing. And loads of fun. How I imagine going to Build-a-Bear Workshop might be, if I'd ever been. Except the output's more functional. Give Claude hands Claude...
about 2 months ago • 2 min read
I'm a Tamagotchi I've got a thing attached to my arm giving me moment-by-moment readings of my blood glucose. It's like having a Tamagotchi, except the Tamagotchi is me. If you missed this in the 90s, a Tamagotchi was a digital pet you had to keep alive for as many days as you could, tending to it day and night. I'm now the pet. On the one hand I'm loving being a little bit bionic and pretending I'm a biohacker. On the other, I'm sceptical. Is it going to tell me anything I don't already...
about 2 months ago • 2 min read
Hi Reader, Confession time: I’m one of those w*nkers who’s built an AI agent chief of staff. A whole digital workforce, actually. Seven of them. Named after fictional detectives. And eight weeks in, I’m in two minds about whether to turn the whole thing off. Is it giving me a productivity gain? Dunno. But there have been benefits, just not in the form I expected. Why I built it I’m a small business owner. I’d rather spend my time doing interesting work with fun people i.e. clients. But...
2 months ago • 4 min read
Hi Reader, In 2022, before any of this was fashionable, Andy Burnham said something that caught my eye. “Technology for technology’s sake doesn’t change lives.” He was right. And as the prime minister in waiting, he is about to get the chance to act on it from Number 10. Here my hot take (we are in a UK heatwave after all) for the incoming Prime Minister. The job is not to win the AI race. It is not to publish another strategy, stand up another institute, or be photographed next to a...
2 months ago • 6 min read