Category: Contentions
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Contentions: Long live typing
Author Luke Burgis puts forward the question, is typing dead? Luke had tried a new AI voice dictation app. From a text generation perspective, both language learning models and voice dictation seem more efficient. I did the same a few years ago, which I covered for Forge here. An excerpt: In dictating this piece, I…
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Fan non-fiction
Fan non-fiction is a book, article, or text about real facts, people and events, conveyed through the characters, stories, and lore of a particular novel, film, etc. It’s a great way to get someone interested in learning about a topic that would’ve otherwise bored them immensely. Elvia Wilk writes, “First I point—then, you notice my…
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A deliverable is just an artifact
Project deliverables—a final draft, an app in production, a strategy or plan, etc.—are great. They’re not easy to make, and they only exist because a person or group of people gave a ton of emotional energy to breathe life into them. We focus on the project deliverable because we can see and touch it. We’ve…
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Contentions: What A.I. will not disrupt in marketing, editing, and writing
Some friends of mine have recently asked me, “What do you think of A.I.’s implications for your field of work?” I work professionally in marketing, editing, and writing. I also wrote a book, and I write every day at my blog. My initial response was to discuss the difference between text generation and writing, though…
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Fictional brands
The fictional brands archive is one of the most intriguing directories I’ve come across in a long time. Merchandise from these fictional brands have occasionally made their way into the physical world, which is always fun.
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Contentions: They’re asking ChatGPT first
A good friend of mine was waiting for a branding plan from an agency. A few days before the agency was sending it over, and presumably presenting it, he prompted ChatGPT: “What does a good branding plan look like?” If the marketing agency came up with the same plan, he figured he probably wouldn’t need…
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Text generation
It used to be that typing was the only way to generate original text. By extension, you needed to actually know what you wanted to say before you could generate the text. Typing itself isn’t hard; the process of coming up with what you want to say, and then actually saying it, is the challenge.…
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Beef and A24
I just watched Beef this weekend, and it was really great. As much as I appreciate film and culture, I’m also well aware of how easy the experts make it seem to develop an opinion. For now, my eloquent, brilliant, opinion goes as far as this: it was really great. I greatly despise horror and…
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Abundance of comfort
I recently came across Derek Thompson’s piece, “A Simple Plan to Solve All of America’s Problems,” in which he describes a worthy objective: An abundance agenda needs a target. What should we make more of? One answer that I’ve given you is: essential goods and services where productivity rates are declining. But that’s a bit…
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Contentions: Even release notes are an opportunity
Nobody thinks to write fun release notes. It’s all, “Bug fixes and improvements/enhancements.” Until the team at Slack did it. When you delight people often enough—like Slack does with its writing—you develop a brand that people enjoy spending time with. You learn to say it your way, and nobody can be better than you at…