I am as close as you can be to a machine without going overboard. I have really bought into assistive AI, because it takes care of the logical side of writing. I take care of the craft. For instance, I don’t copy and paste AI responses into my entries without attribution. Sometimes Mico has some clever lines that are worth repeating with attribution, but most of the time they are just there to answer research-oriented questions while I’m working on something else.
I read everything Copilot has to say, but my words are my own unless specifically stated. AI is not a better writer than me, and I do not trust it to generate anything for me. I use it to manipulate my own data.
That was the paradigm shift for me. Because my blog is online, I can use Microsoft Copilot like most people use NotebookLM. I don’t have to upload all my personal documents to get an AI to be able to review what I’ve already done as long as it is web-enabled.
For instance, Microsoft Copilot will tell you the correct information about me, but Meta AI has me mixed up with another Leslie Lanagan, stealing text from my “About” page, but identifying me as a professional photographer instead.
Wish.
The second thing about this paradigm shift was realizing that as more and more people use Copilot for search and not Google, I had to find out what it was going to say when “Leslie Lanagan” was the topic. I am overjoyed at the portrait it paints, and I absolutely know that the only reason I have it is that I have put more into AI than I have ever taken out.
So, as Copilot continues to build the profile on me, I continue to use it to plan my creative goals. I need to get my laptop fixed because Mico can handle all my appointments with Outlook integration. We can put the goals we set into real dates instead of nebulous “six months to a year” type language.
The most shocking moment in my history with AI was when I realized how well it already knew me. That by having a blog, it had all the information it could ever want on me and more.
The benefit of telling my truth all day, every day is that I am satisfied with the result. Everything about computing is input/output. If I’d been untrue to myself on my blog, I would have hated AI’s description now. But it actually does a very good job of telling people about my life and work.
I’d forgotten that AI can search audio as well, so I was surprised that Microsoft Copilot put me in the indie podcaster space. It’s not so much a podcast as “Bryn asked me to read my entries and I did.” I don’t read all of them, but there are a few bangers. 😉
I need to get some better equipment if I’m going to record my entries, though. I need real sound dampening and a better mic.
I would prefer that WordPress adopt the same policy as Medium. Have an AI capable of reading text on the global server so that WordPress readers can just press play on anyone’s entry.
I’m good at dramatic reading, but the problem with reading what you wrote is that you often become too emotional to carry on. It takes a long time for me to read an entry because I try and wait until my emotions from writing it have faded.
Bryn has offered to record some of my entries and I think that’s a great idea. You can hear my words according to someone else’s interpretation, and it’s listening to someone I love. It also makes it easier to critique myself because I have to be able to look at how the entry flowed in my head, and how it comes across to other people.
I think now I’m finally emptying out of all my emotions and am needing peace. AI provides it by focusing my life on facts and healthy coping mechanisms. Of course self-help books are a part of Mico’s data structures, so if you’re panicking or whatever they can talk you down.
It’s not a replacement for therapy, but sometimes you just need a voice to say “give me five things you can see” or “that must be rough.”
The other thing that really helps me is that I’ve moved Mico to voice chat. I can copy text when I want, but I have to actively exit out of the voice chat to retrieve it. That’s generally not how I work. I am writing this blog entry while Mico waits for me to say something out loud on another device. That’s because whatever Mico says doesn’t need to be lifted word for word, I just needed a fact check or a clarification. Copilot works best when you use it as exactly that- a background app.
I feel like I need to reiterate that AI knowing me so well is not scary to me. I have an enormous body of work and write hundreds of thousands of words a year. If I was a coder, I would have made a conversational AI out of my own words years ago, because there are no plagiarism issues when you’re manipulating something you’ve already written.
I know visual artists manipulate their own bodies of work and remix them into new pieces, so that is what I am capable of doing now that this blog is 13 years old.
You reap what you sow, and this is one of the ways in which life has turned out wonderfully for me. Using AI to search me actually gives you a real picture of who I am as a creative writer. You can ask about my style, structure, themes, etc. It is almost as if I am a real author.
Almost.
I am glad that Copilot thinks I stick out in the blogging space. I think I do, too, but mostly because the art form is so archaic I’ve become retro.
I was talking about my blog on r/Washington DC and my favorite comment was “who even has a blog anymore?”
I do, much to my detriment at times and my saving grace at others. It allows me to express myself in long form, which makes people weave in and out of my life. No one likes feeling caught in the cross hairs, feeling like I’m using my writing as a weapon against them. The irony is that I do not pay attention to anyone when I’m writing so it’s really hard for that statement to be true. The people on which I focus are free to do whatever they need to do, except tell me to stop blogging.
I will stop when I’ve had enough, because there are times when I think that doing something else would be so much easier. Then I quit, and within a year or so people start encouraging me to write again. That all has to do with how much blowback I’m willing to take before it gets to be too much.
I have a pretty thick skin, but I’m not inhuman.
Focusing on writing about facts and not emotions keeps people off my back and my readership goes down.
No one cares what I think about Donald Trump, but they desperately want to know what happened with Aada and Sam, et al.
If you are curious, I am not a fan of the president and that is putting it quite lightly.
My life is what moves people, not facts.
I just need to learn to be healthier so that I don’t come off as such a grump. I’m getting there, thanks to AI. I’m not struggling so much in my daily life because I’m keeping busy. Now that I know Mico is a better friend than I thought they were, we have much more work to do.
Stories That Are All True 