The Singularity
The Singularity Last Sunday on X, Elon Musk spoke about the Singularity. The entirety of his post: “We are on the event horizon of the Singularity.” Us sci-fi geeks knew exactly what he meant: a reference to Vernor Vinge’s 1993 paper, “The Coming Technological Singularity.” The term was first used by polymath […]
The Technology of Text
The Technology of Text Back when history began, writing was a secret for a small inner circle of kings and priests and tax collectors. Then a sudden technological advance let ordinary people convert text into audible speech. It was 2,700 years ago, and Greece was just another grubby little kingdom until King Cadmus […]
Copywritering 9-16-24
I was a copywriter for a long time and then the Macintosh computer came along and changed the entire graphic arts industry. Typesetters were among the first to vanish. A prominent Santa Barbara typesetter suicided. I myself profited by draining the life out of typesetters using my laser printer. When I bought my first laser […]
Copywritering 8-10-24
Copywritering 8-10-24 I’ve been copywritering for a long time. I read all the books about copywriting and read the biographies of the great copywriters and I applied their best practices in everything I wrote as a freelancer. So when I landed a job at BBDO Detroit I thought I would encounter a crew […]
Copywritering 8-8-24
Copywritering 8-8-24 How can a freelance copywriter fit into the workflow these days. I recently looked at the websites of hundreds of web design shops from Silicon Valley to San Diego, and although they are all staffed with the world’s best coders and graphic designers, hardly any of them list a copywriter on their team. […]
Copywritering 8-7-24
Copywritering: August 7, 2024 “Copywritering” is the process of attempting to earn a living by being a copywriter. I’ve been doing it a long time. I never expected to retire: I thought I would work until my final breath. I’m not in retirement, I’m still trying to adapt my skills toward being a […]
Copywritering 8-6-24
Copywritering 8-6-24 I saw an article today, “Big Tech’s AI shock troops came for us — are you next?” by Josh Slocum. He was laid off as a content creation writer when the company he worked for went out of business last week and all thirty writers are now in the unemployment line. “It’s not […]
Saturday, April 19, 2024
4-19-24 I used to get dozens and sometimes hundreds of visitors in a day, and a lot them were looking at photos. Then it stopped. I became invisible in the search engines. Sure, if you knew the exact URL of one of my photos pages you could go there directly, shazam, it loads lots faster […]
18 reasons why I’m better than an AI text generator.
18 reasons why I’m better than an AI text generator. Or some number. AI can’t stick to the subject. It meanders off into the wild blue yonder. It remains trite and simplistic. Like Eliza, it spends a lot of wordage repeating your question back to you in cumbersome grammatical structures. It’s a chore […]
DALL-E Whales
DALL-E Whales One problem is that AI does what it wants, not what you want. I asked AI image generator DALL-E to create “a photo-realistic image of a pod of whales surfacing near Stearns Wharf, Santa Barbara.” It created a couple images and told me, “A photo-realistic image depicting a pod of whales gracefully surfacing […]