I’m grateful for a beautiful , sunny morning. I’m grateful to be having breakfast with an old friend. I’m grateful for the Friday morning newspaper at my door. I’m grateful for the coffee on the desk. I’m grateful for the life I’m living. I’m grateful to be sober today.
We are going to be a bit off-topic today and hope that’s ok. It’s because I’ve been looking into the future. I realized really late the other night, watching a stream of YouTube videos, that I felt this way once before, about 30 years ago.
My dad was a professor and his work required a lot of primitive processing back in the day. It meant data keyed by hand onto punch cards, punch cards carefully sorted and then delivered to the computer center—the building with the huge mainframe computers that promised 24-hour turnaround. I remember often stopping by the computer center on the way home from church to pick up the output: pages and pages of dot matrix printed pages folded into a bundle. The WYSIWYG world was still decades away.
Fast forward to 1994, I’m a young lawyer with a fairly serious rotisserie (fantasy) baseball problem.1 I had just splurged on a Gateway computer and it was a beauty. The processor was the super fast x386 line (to be replaced by Intel’s Pentium chips a few years later). It ran Windows 3.11 and you were working with MS-DOS a lot. Having a personal computer then meant spending a lot of time tweaking the config.sys and win.ini files as you added the cool new software you bought at CompUSA.
I had started reading about the Internet and had purchased the inaugural copy of a magazine called “Wired.” I was fascinated. The internet back then was not graphic. The “World Wide Web” was still mostly molten and cooling and Netscape had not yet launched a “browser.” One connected to the internet by means of something like a Netcom “shell” account and one had to know Unix commands to navigate around. I had my first email account and the idea that I could send an entire document and have it appear on someone else’s computer in seconds anywhere on earth was pure magic. I had been living in a world of couriers, where we still put legal assistants on planes to get documents filed in far-flung courts. One browsed the internet at the blazing speed of 2400 baud at first, that number eventually reaching the kind of archaic 19.2 and then the completely made-up 28.8k.
As I was sitting in our basement one evening, waiting for a random picture from the Louvre to download onto my computer (it could take 30-40 mins to download something like that), I thought, “this is going to change everything.” I left my law firm and got a job with a nascent internet company in 1996.
Like I said, I had this epiphany the other night watching YouTube videos and realized I hadn’t had this feeling since like 1994. I’ve seen the future and it’s ChatGPT. Well, it’s AI generally and I’ve been delving deeper and deeper and finding it transforms nearly everything I work on. It’s a completely revolutionary research tool, a digital assistant with a pretty significant knowledge base and pretty limitless possibilities as a first draft generator and creative idea processor.
I first wrote about ChatGPT a few weeks ago:
I’ve been integrating it into my workflows and it’s nothing short of astonishing. It facilitates and enables creative expression in a way I hadn’t foreseen. Here’s an example and it involves an adorable puppy picture. I’ve had this idea for a long time about a children’s book based on my ex-wife’s completely rascally and mischievous dog Ranger. In my story, Ranger was a circus dog on a circus train that derailed in the forest. He ended up leading a band of circus animals on a series of merry adventures. Well, that’s how the story would go. This stayed an idea for 20 years because I have zero drawing/illustrating-type talent and this wouldn’t be a prose-heavy venture.
I was experimenting with AI-based design tools yesterday afternoon and created this in about 15 or 20 minutes—from a paragraph-long textual “prompt.” Meet Ranger the Circus Dog:
That literally took 15 minutes. I’m not a graphic designer. This isn’t the Mona Lisa, I get that, but it helps bring my idea to life, and pretty f***ing suddenly. That’s pretty magical. It’s going to transform everything.
I asked it to help promote this newslettter. I asked: “Write 10 funny twitter posts that will encourage people to subscribe to the newsletter Thanks for Letting Me Share.” I had my list about 20 seconds later and I’ll let you decide. Here are the Top 3:
Sure, here are 10 funny Twitter posts that will encourage people to subscribe to this one newsletter Thanks For Letting Me Share.
"Subscribe to Thanks For Letting Me Share on Substack, and we promise to only send you the best dad jokes and cat memes. Okay, fine, we'll also send you some insightful and thought-provoking writing on addiction and recovery. But mostly dad jokes."
"Who needs a therapist when you have Thanks For Letting Me Share on Substack? Okay, fine, maybe still see a therapist. But also subscribe to our newsletter for some relatable and funny writing on addiction and recovery."
"Reading Thanks For Letting Me Share on Substack is like having a glass of wine with your funniest and most honest friend. But, you know, without the wine. And with more insightful writing on addiction and recovery."
If you spend time on the Twitter, you can expect to see some of those soon.
I asked ChatGPT to come up with a draft syllabus and an outline for a course teaching the history of Alcoholics Anonymous and the Big Book, including a reading list and discussion prompts. Here are some of the unedited discussion prompts ChatGPT threw out:
Discussion Prompts:
How do you understand alcoholism as a disease? What are the implications of this understanding for recovery?
How do you understand the concept of powerlessness in relation to alcoholism? What does it mean to surrender and accept in the context of recovery?
What are your initial thoughts and feelings about the Twelve Steps? How do you understand the first three steps?
How do you understand the role of admitting wrongs and seeking forgiveness in the recovery process? What does it mean to seek humility and change?
How do you understand the process of making amends? What challenges or fears might arise in this process?
How do you understand the ongoing process of spiritual and moral growth in recovery? What role do the Twelve Steps play in this process?
How do you understand the role of fellowship and service in recovery? What role do meetings and sponsorship play?
What challenges and rewards might come with sober living? What coping strategies have you found helpful in the past?
Of course, some people will be tempted to try to make work a “cutting and pasting” operation, but the fast-developing AI-detectors being deployed will make short work of that. The abundance of flat, AI content will put a premium on and will elevate actual human expression, I think. ChatGPT is a research tool, an idea generator, a really clever first draft writer who doesn’t get pouty when you just say, “nope, try again.” It significantly facilitates creative expression and gives the content creators of the world a tool with pretty awesome power.
There are plenty of dark sides to every new technology and this is no exception. Hopefully someone is working late these days to make sure this doesn’t happen:
I have it helping me put up a website for the “Anyone Anywhere Meeting of Alcoholics Anonymous,” I have it helping put together the outline for a pretty cool Big Book Study Course, complete with scripts for the videos. I think creative expression is a big, big part of recovery, finding that outlet and letting the real me come out has been terrifying, but transformative. ChatGPT looks like a pretty good running-buddy.
I’m excited like I haven’t been for a while. It turns out that ChatGPT even knows a bit about one of my heroes:
I think we’ll get along just fine.
I was trying to build a model to help me predict when a player had hit the “value” targets I had set and when I should be looking to re-shuffle my line-up.
I find this fascinating! When I first found out about AI tools, I remember hearing someone say "think of AI as an assistant" in your business, especially when you're working alone and can't afford to pay employees yet!
Totally agree we all need a creative outlet, whatever that looks like. I love getting in that creative zone!
Cool children's book illustration too!
Keep up the good work!
Scary and amazing all at once... Ranger is cute!