Sam Barrett, PhD

Not "don't write with AI." Get your ass in the directorial chair and stay there! The Empty Chair: on slop, three directors, and why the boosters are as wrong as the doomers on AI and writing. marenonnostrum.com/essay-the-em...

The Empty Chair — Mare Non Nostrum marenonnostrum.com

Its concerning how many people are loudly repeating that mental enfeeblement is an unavoidable consequence of interacting with an interlocutor you can freely delegate to. No one is forcing you to turn your off your brain or abandon responsibility when using AI for writing. Do better!

LLMs produce average answers given their context. What makes interesting answers is when their context is far from average.

Using LLMs to simulate readers while writing a new book to refine how the plot progresses is partly undone because LLMs have general knowledge too broad compared to most real readers that they cant *not* see certain things...

In my view a lot of the problems with the flood of papers in academia right now are ultimately downstream of publish or perish and publication counting in academia which has long since been causing problems in academia before AI came along.

Very good vibes for GPT-6 around fiction writing, editing and interpretation. It apparently very easily and perfectly interpreted the plot and temporal structure of The Wire Branch which previous models usually only did with deliberate guidance and prodding.

Writing good fiction with AI is hard. I dont know if any of what I've written so far is objectively good, but i know it's a lot better than slop and my latest attempts are a lot better than my first attempts.

I just did a blind test of different LLMs for drafting from a chapter spec in my fiction writing flow and GPT5.6 sol beat every anthropic model (and Fable annoyed me most). Not what I was expecting.

This is a rare book. I think there are only 8 physical copies in existence, only 5 of the first edition were ever printed. Does it matter if it gets destructively scanned for AI training?