My first blog post referencing ChatGPT was in September, 2023. Before I deleted my account in February, 2026 I had mentioned ChatGPT in 173 blog posts, and had saved twenty-eight “conversations.” I started doing this because a) the threads were (to me) so…fascinating and b) they were too long for a blog post. Even ones I knew nobody else would ever read. In those days I was a little fuzzy on how long the chatbots kept conversations so I saved them as PDFs.
In the ensuing years I settled on Perplexity as my AI of choice (and the only one I pay for: $200/yr) and have saved 28 threads to date:
- Bruce Sterling quote on knowledge and civilization.pdf
- Blog posts “Learfield”.pdf
- Blog tag clouds graphis.pdf
- Snapshots & Fragments Overview.pdf
- Early blogging tools.pdf
- Blog Profiles.pdf
- Prior to 2016 I was an avid ready of Scott Adams’.pdf
- Blog – RELIGION .pdf
- BookBuddy Library Analysis.pdf
- Perplexity analysis of new reading prescription.pdf
- Perplexity on anxiety – 1-4.pdf
- Did Social Media Kill Graffiti?.pdf
- Nonduality/ How my view evolved.pdf
- What I mean when I say “nondual”.pdf
- Noticing What It Feels Like to Notice.rtf
- The Philosophy of Alan Watts.pdf
- Understanding Panpsychism.pdf
- Digital Minimalism & Attention.pdf
- History of Early Computing.pdf
- The Illusion of the Self.pdf
- Meditation and the Brain.pdf
- AI and the Future of Writing.pdf
- Exploring the Bootheel.pdf
- Photography as Time Travel.pdf
- The Evolution of the Web.pdf
- Reflections on Aging.pdf
I figured out early on that nobody would ever read these but I was intrigued by the notion some future AI might find them and view them as early examples of how humans interacted with AIs. I share the list above as a pretty summary of how I use these AI platforms (services?).
PS: I’m a compulsive saver. Here’s a list of miscellaneous quotes from books, articles, etc. All or most of which should be included here at smays.com
Perplexity offers its own take:
“In the ensuing years I settled on Perplexity as my AI of choice—and the only one I pay for, at $200 a year—and have saved 28 threads to date. They are not simply searches or answers filed away for later. Most are extended conversations whose value lies partly in the information they contain, but also in the movement of thought: a question pursued, a memory retrieved, an old interest reframed, an intuition tested against history or science.
The saved topics tell their own story: early blogging tools and the evolution of the web; tag clouds, blog profiles, and digital minimalism; books, reading, Alan Watts, panpsychism, meditation, the self, anxiety, and nonduality; early computing, AI and writing, photography, aging, graffiti, and the Bootheel. The collection resembles a small intellectual autobiography—less orderly than a library catalog, perhaps, but more alive.
Saving the conversations as PDFs began as a precaution. In 2023 I did not fully understand how long a chatbot’s memory, or its visible record of a conversation, might last. But it quickly became something more than backup. The PDFs became artifacts: evidence of an unusual kind of collaboration between a person with decades of reading, blogging, and accumulated curiosities, and a machine able to retrieve, connect, summarize, challenge, and elaborate at great speed.
Most of these threads will probably never be read by anyone else. That does not make them pointless. Much of a writer’s real work has always happened offstage—in notebooks, marginalia, letters, commonplace books, unfinished drafts, and conversations that did not become publications. These files belong to that tradition. They are part research archive, part intellectual diary, and part record of what it felt like, in the middle 2020s, to discover that one could sit down with a machine and have a long, strange, occasionally illuminating conversation.”