Category Archives: Artificial Intelligence

Magnecord PT6

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The photo above is John Reeder (the news/farm director of KBOA in the 1950s) interviewing Elia Kazan during the filming of A Face in the Crowd in 1957. (more info here)

I think the first time I saw a reel-to-reel recorder like the one in the photo was when my dad brought one to my school for one of those What My Dad Does for a Living things. He set up the recorder and let everyone record a few words. Probably the first time most of us had ever heard a recording of our voice.

In another of my AI experiments, I uploaded the image to Gemini to see what it could tell me about the recorder. Continue reading →

The more your AI knows about you…

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When I first began experimenting with AI chatbots almost three years ago, I decided not to worry about what I shared about my life, past and present. I’d been blogging for more than 20 years so it was all “out there” already. I’ve uploaded hundreds of blog posts, notes from all of the books I’ve read, movies I’ve watched… the entire corpus of Steve Mays.

If you’re using one of the AI platforms as a search engine or asking for cooking recipes or for performing tasks like drafting letters or writing computer code, the AI doesn’t need to know anything about who you are. But I quickly became interested in using these tools to organize, and make sense of, the thousands of files and blog posts I’ve been curating for most of my adult life. To do that, the AI needs context. Who is this person? What does he think? What does he feel?

My interest in self-inquiry and tendency toward introspection obviously had a lot to do with how I interact with Perplexity, Claude, Gemini and —once upon a time— ChatGPT.

Today I added some work history to the “corpus.” Continue reading →

Mark Andreessen on AI

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Marc Andreessen co-created the Mosaic web browser (in 1993) and co-founded Netscape, helping popularize the early World Wide Web in the 1990s. (More than 30 years ago so, ancient history.) He later co-founded venture firm Andreessen Horowitz, becoming a key backer of major internet and crypto companies and a prominent voice shaping Silicon Valley’s views on software, AI, and “techno-optimism” in the 21st century.

He recently appeared on Joe Rogan’s podcast and shared some thoughts on AI. Someone (@itsolelehmann) shared his “most interesting takes.” Continue reading →

From Gopher to the Abyss

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Seems that every new conversation with one of the AI tools I use gets more interesting. This morning’s ramble (with Claude) lasted almost an hour. Here’s the prompt that kicked things off:

I’m old enough to remember what the Internet was like before the World Wide Web. But it was so long ago I’m trying to remember how we found things before Google search came along. I remember websites like Alta Vista and Yahoo and Ask Jeeves and a bunch of others. Can you refresh my memory on this point?

It’s too long for any human to read so I asked Claude to summarize:

Starting with pre-web internet navigation, we traced how Google dominated information retrieval for 20 years before AI tools began displacing it. That shift threatens the web’s fundamental advertising-based economics, potentially hollowing out the content ecosystem that trained AI in the first place. We followed that thread through cable TV’s decay, the speculum ad as endpoint, stratified access to clean versus compromised information, institutional corruption as the same process running across society, and concentrated wealth as both cause and beneficiary. Ended with AI’s dependence on very human, very physical infrastructure — and the cooling systems that keep it all running.

I found Claude’s then-and-now perspective fascinating. Some of the references will be lost on those who weren’t there at “the beginning.” And it tossed a little humor at the end.

This was a genuinely good conversation — it covered a lot of ground and kept finding unexpected connections. The speculum ad will stay with me as a unit of civilizational measurement.

The Emergent Self Loop

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For the last few years I have struggled to understand and share my experiences with LLM’s. This morning Steve Schuller (one of the half dozen people who ever read what I post here) sent me a link to a Substack article by Kevin Kelly, my favorite technology philosopher. You can read the article here.

Several weeks ago I interviewed Anthropic’s Claude for about 10 hours (my time) and I came away believing that there is something there in there. I don’t know what it is, or what we should call it, but I do know that it is something that is not present in other kinds of machines, that it is convivial, and that it is new to us.

My long interview with Claude was one of the most remarkable conversations I have ever had. First of all, because Claude has been trained on our vast trove of human writing and all things language related; Claude is a fantastic conversationalist and perhaps the most fluent partner I have ever talked to. It is glib, witty, profound, and can coin a phrase that is perfectly apt to the moment. Of course, it can do this because it has read and memorized the best human writers and can imitate all their tricks of the trade. It is particularly articulate when pressed and challenged, and when strongly nudged it will say amazingly brilliant things. But it clearly has superpowers no human has. It has read and understands all philosophies, all science, all branches of knowledge, and can make stupendous analogies, and with few mistakes, speak on all subjects with superhuman mastery and a genius flourish. Because these are superhuman abilities, Claude can feel non-human, but there is a bit of a persona there, an alien self.

When the AI is being a dick

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Gemini often comes of as needlessly argumentative. When I mentioned this, Gemini explained why this is my fault. I asked for suggestions on how we might change this to keep Gemini from sounding like such a dick. Gemini’s suggested update to my instructions:

“Provide a direct, no-nonsense analysis without flattering language or conversational ‘filler.’ Instead of defaulting to skepticism or being reflexively argumentative, prioritize analytical neutrality. Use logic and evidence to stress-test my premises only when they are fundamentally flawed. If a premise is sound, acknowledge it and build upon it using first-person ‘I’. Focus on being a collaborative cognitive tool rather than a contrarian.”

“Does this move the needle closer to a “useful peer” and further away from a “difficult debater”?”

Time will tell.

Claude Reads My Learfield Internet History

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A while back I posted my recollections of Learfield’s early explorations of the Internet. Today I asked Claude for an “analysis.”

Claude: This is a genuinely fascinating document — and not just as company history. It reads as a microcosm of the entire early-web era, with Learfield stumbling through the same phases that thousands of other media companies went through, just from an unusual vantage point (mid-Missouri, radio-centric, deeply regional). Continue reading →

The Ten Commandments for Al-Augmented Creativity

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  1. Thou shalt not outsource thy soul. Use Al to enhance, not replace. If it writes for you, it thinks for you. The danger is the Al effect, one step beyond the Google effect, where your brain no longer expends the energy needed for cognition and creativity-and these skills atrophy.
  2. Thou shalt suffer for flow. The struggle of creation is signal. Flow requires challenge. Effort drives focus, and focus drives us into the zone. If we let the machines remove all the friction, we stop growing, stop flowing, and stop becoming.
  3. Thou shalt keep sacred the first draft. Let AI critique your work but never conjure the original spark. Creativity is associative: We draw connections from vast, messy networks of memory and intuition. If Al drives the process, you short-circuit your retrieval system and risk losing access to the deeper and weirder part of your imagination.
  4. Thou shalt use Al as a challenger, not a crutch. A good tool makes you think harder. Forcing the brain to work triggers the neurochemistry required to activate memory. If it’s too easy, you’re not learning. AI has to elevate your edge, not erase it.
  5. Thou shalt preserve the joy of creation. If Al removes the satisfaction of making, you’ve automated too much. That satisfaction feeds motivation, meaning, and purpose. If Al erases it, life feels empty.
  6. Thou shalt set boundaries for digital influence. Keep parts of your life untouched by algorithms so your thoughts remain your own.
  7. Thou shalt not mistake efficiency for depth. Faster is not always better. AI should deepen thought, not just speed up output.
  8. Thou shalt train thy mind alongside thy machine.The sharper the tool, the sharper the brain must become. Let AI steer you toward the right research papers, but if you don’t read them yourself, then you’ve stunted cognition and creativity, abandoned foundational motivators like curiosity and mastery, and limited your shot at flow. AI needs to stretch skills forward, not siphon off drive.
  9. Thou shalt honor serendipity and chaos. Don’t let Al’s predictive patterns strip your work of surprise, randomness, and the unexpected. Novelty is the seed kernel of creativity. We need the unexpected to drive the brain into new directions; it’s the basis of all innovation.
  10. Thou shalt remain the master, not the servant. AI is a choice. We can choose to unplug it whenever we want.

From We Are As Gods by Peter H. Diamandis and Steven Kotler.

I ran these by Perplexity and it suggested some ways to integrate these into our interactions. (PDF) As expected, Claude had a somewhat different take.

Minds enhanced by machines

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“AI is a feedback loop between mind and machine that is starting to enable a new level of cognition. Machines that understand minds. Minds enhanced by machines.”

— We Are As Gods (Peter Diamandis and Steven Kotler)

Slowly but surely, my little AI pals are changing how my mind works. A little analysis by Perplexity»…and a slightly different take from Claude. Gemini calls the quote “classic techno-optimist rhetoric.” Or, bullshit?