(This started out as a comment on a post by @harphony, but it got to be so long I thought it was better to make it a standalone post.)

How to create something substantial—a work of art, a game, a novel, a nonfiction book—if you’re easily bored or find yourself struggling to complete even small projects? My personal experience is probably not that relevant to anyone else, but . . . I have written two books thus far, both completely self-formatted and self-published. I don’t have (diagnosed) ADHD, but I do get easily distracted at times and find it hard to make grand plans, much less carry them through to completion. I think the secret for me, especially for my second book, was that I (unconsciously) divided the work into multiple phases, with different tasks and motivations for each phase.

In the first phase I was just writing relatively small posts, heavy on personal opinion and light on research, with each post relatively complete in and of itself. For my second book this took the form of farting about on Tumblr, with no thought of doing anything more than that. Each post didn’t take that long to write and didn’t take much mental energy to complete, but I got a small feeling of satisfaction at having finished each one. That motivated me to keep writing more of them.

After doing that for a while, I could no longer muster the energy to keep writing more posts. But . . . I had accumulated enough material that I thought to myself, “it might be fun to make a book out of this.” So I started looking for common themes or arguments that I thought would provide an overall framework for the book, and tried to figure out what I needed to know to support those themes/arguments. The interest and enjoyment for me then became that of puzzle-solving: “why did thing X happen, and how did it influence thing Y?” I spent a lot of time doing reading and research, and much less time writing.

At the same time I started the third phase, turning the material into an actual formatted book suitable for either electronic or print distribution. I did this as a mental break from doing research and further writing: now my interest was in learning how the publishing system worked that I had decided to use, and my satisfaction came in the form of seeing my writing nicely formatted and typeset.

Eventually I was close enough to having something book-like that I was motivated to finish the job. In reading over draft chapters, I thought of additional things I wanted to write about. When I got bored of writing, I occupied myself in some tasks I didn’t need to think a lot about, most notably creating a comprehensive index of the appearances of the characters in the manga I was writing about. (After doing said index, I thought, “gee, I now have everything I need to do an analysis of the social graph of the characters,” so I extended my existing R knowledge to do that as well.) I also had fun learning new things about publishing: how to obtain an ISBN, how to register a copyrighted work, and how to license artwork and create a book cover.

I have a tendency to perfectionism, and that carried me through the remaining work of getting the book ready for publication: checking all the references and creating a complete bibliography, proofreading the text and tweaking the formatting, getting the book cover to a point where I wasn’t embarrassed to have people look at it, and validating the PDF and EPUB3 output. Again, I switched frequently between tasks as I got bored with doing one of them.

The final factor was that from the very beginning I worked hard to convince myself that I would never see any external rewards or validation from publishing the book: that no one would buy it, no one would even download it for free, and even if someone happened to read it I’d never get any feedback from them about it, good or bad. That freed me mentally to focus solely on the enjoyment that I myself would get from creating the book, and not persist in doing something I disliked in the (vain) hope of someone compensating me for it, monetarily or otherwise.

All in all, it worked out pretty well: I have something I can put on my bookshelf next to books by other people and think “that’s not too shabby, all things considered.” I sold a few copies, had a few more downloaded, and had one person tell me that they enjoyed reading it. I even had a pleasant surprise, when by a fortuitous circumstance a person came forward to create a Japanese translation—which in turn led to more fun experiences, like learning how to typeset Japanese. (It also improved the English version by having another person find typos.)

So, these are my personal conclusions—which, again, may not be applicable to anyone else—on how to create a substantial work:

• Start small, working in an opportunistic manner on things that interest you, can be done relatively quickly, and are self-contained enough to give you a sense of satisfaction that they exist once completed.
• If you get to a point where at least some of the small things look like they could go together to create something larger and more significant, think about how they might fit together, and what additional pieces might be needed to make the whole work.
• Stave off boredom by switching between different types of project work and trying things you haven’t done before but would like to learn.
• Set your expectations for the work’s reception to be extremely low. Don’t push yourself to work on it if you yourself are not getting any enjoyment from the process.

This is very much not advice for someone who wants to make a full-time living from their work—but in reality very few people will make anything at all from their personal writing, art, or related activities. My advice is rather for those like myself who will never see any significant external rewards from the things they create, but feel compelled to create them nonetheless.

[This post was originally published on Cohost.]

OK, OK, I get it—ChatGPT is indeed impressive in what it can do. But I must confess that I’m amused by all the people doing prompt engineering, that is, coming up with ever more elaborate ways to elicit certain types of output from ChatGPT. I can understand this when it comes to DALL-E, Midjourney, and Stable Diffusion. After all, one of the main selling points of those systems is that they enable the creation of art (of a sort) by people who are good with words but can’t paint or draw to save their lives.

But if you’re good enough with words to construct extremely complicated prompts for ChatGPT, why not devote some (or even all!) of that mental effort to figuring out what you want to say and how you want to say it. The part of writing that both requires the most attention and (in my opinion) is most rewarding is coming up with insightful ideas, apt metaphors and analogies, and stylish turns of phrase.

This post is an example of that. I had no need nor desire to have an AI expand an outline, or write it in the form of an academic paper, or create a limerick out of it. I just made a mental connection between the more elaborate forms of ChatGPT prompt engineering and Dustin Hoffman staying awake for multiple nights to prepare for his performance in the infamous dental torture scene in the movie Marathon Man—an extreme method technique that supposedly prompted his costar Laurence Olivier to ask, “My dear boy, why don’t you just try acting?” And the rest followed from that . . . .

The title of this post is a paraphrase of a tweet by the opinion columnist and investment manager Conor Sen: “AI is potentially to the world of ideas what low-cost index funds were to investing.” (This was in turn in response to another tweet by Derek Thompson: “an AI that spits out the synthetic average of everything it’s been exposed to is an interesting metaphor for a lot of stuff ppl say, write, and think.”)

I found this to be a very interesting and potentially rich analogy, and thought it would be fun to explore it a bit.

But, first, here’s what an AI system itself (the AI-powered Lex online word processor) generated when asked to continue a text starting with that sentence; note that this is a representative example culled from a number of trials:

It has the potential to offer answers to questions and solutions to problems that may have previously been considered impossible to resolve. AI can help individuals and organizations alike to quickly analyze data in real-time, make predictions, and accurately identify patterns in a way that was not previously possible. AI may also be able to help us better understand the world’s most complex systems, from climate change to world markets. Ultimately, AI has the potential to create unprecedented solutions and insights that could revolutionize the way we view and interact with the world.

This is perfectly competent prose, but it totally misses the point of the analogy. So please allow me, a mere human, to take a shot at explaining what it means:

How index funds conquered the world

Prior to index funds, the accepted way to succeed at investing was to do a lot of work to analyze companies whose stocks are traded on public markets, and based on that analysis decide which companies’ stock prices would be likely to increase, and which would be likely to decrease—the point of course being to buy the former and sell the latter. Those investors not willing or able to do this work themselves would outsource it to an investment manager, who would charge a fee for the service (typically a small percentage of the total amount invested by the client). Rather than picking stocks, the job of the investor was then simply to pick a good investment manager.

With index funds the recommended strategy is not to try to pick stocks, or have someone pick them for you, but simply to invest in an overall collection of stocks of a certain type—for example, the S&P 500 (for the stocks of large companies), the Russell 2000 (for small companies), or a very broad collection of all stocks in the US or worldwide.

Index funds subverted the “active management” paradigm in multiple ways. First, they removed the need for human judgement and replaced it with a mechanical rule. This enabled companies like Vanguard offering index funds to charge significantly lower fees and thus enabled investors to retain a higher percentage of stock market gains. (This was especially significant since such gains would compound over time.)

Second, they lowered the risk for investors: the returns from an index fund were comparable to the returns achieved by an average active manager, and better than an average active manager after subtracting their higher fees. An investor would therefore be better off investing in an index fund than with a typical active manager. They wouldn’t get the extraordinary returns achieved by the very best active managers, but they also wouldn’t get the poor returns achieved by the worst.

Conversely, index funds made the job of an active manager harder, since they had to work more to try to get better returns than an index fund. Then, given that a typical active manager would not be able to beat the returns from an index fund, they had to justify why that work deserved a higher fee than one would pay for an index fund.

The horn of plenty and the worm Ouroboros

Now consider AI, in particular the type of AI exemplified by systems like GPT-3. The systems have so-called large language models (LLMs) trained on lots of human-generated text, and based on that text can perform what seems like magic: given a string of text, to predict a suitable string of text that would continue on from that point (as in the example today), or (as in the recent ChatGPT) given a question, to generate a plausible response.

Based on the analogy to index funds, we can imagine several responses by both readers and writers to the growing capabilities of LLMs. Readers may simply accept AI-generated texts as a “good enough” product for most purposes; this is very similar to how we use index funds or (closer to home) consult Wikipedia as a “good enough” substitute for trying to seek out other sources of information on a topic with which we’re unfamiliar. This approach leaves little or nothing for (human) writers to do, except to provide uncompensated “grist for the mill,” as their writings past or present get fed into the maw of the LLMs, then used to produce an almost inexhaustible stream of new writing. But under this scenario, who (but an AI) would bother to write?

And if no one (human) decides to write, where would the writing come from to feed LLMs in future? For example, one team has predicted that in the next five years the size of training sets used as input to LLMs will exceed the amount of “high-quality” data available (e.g., books, news articles, scientific papers), leaving them to be trained on lower-quality data (e.g., YouTube comments). We can imagine one possible future in which the input to LLMs (or their successors) will primarily consist of text previously generated by other AIs.

This resembles the scenario warned of by some opponents of index funds (for example, as cited in The Atlantic): that a stock market dominated by index funds will no longer perform its supposed function of efficiently allocating investor capital. Instead the price of a firm’s stock may simply rise and fall based on whether it is included in major indexes (like the S&P 500). Similarly, the popularity of certain ideas may in future depend on their reinforcement by various AIs, and not on the number of humans who actually believe in or espouse them.

Writing after the end of writing

So, what’s a writer to do in a world where AIs can generate more text than we humans could ever create?

A writer might commit wholeheartedly to the use of AI as an aid to writing, in the hopes that it might provide some sort of exploitable edge—perhaps a way to write faster, to surface previously obscure source material, to serve as inspiration, to come up with a striking turn of phrase, and so on—anything that might help them stand out from the crowd and reward them monetarily or otherwise. This is analogous to the “quants” in investing, who throw ever more elaborate mathematical models (and now machine learning) and ever-increasing amounts of compute power at the problem of finding exploitable trading opportunities.

Alternatively, a writer might scale back their ambitions to achieve widespread success, and focus intensively on either a particular group of readers or a particular niche topic. The former approach is analogous to that of local financial advisors, who may not provide any better returns than an index fund or any better advice than a robot, but have the advantage of knowing a particular set of local investors and providing a personal touch.

The latter approach is similar to that of investment advisors who specialize in particular areas (e.g., biotech, or energy) and don’t attempt to provide advice on well-covered areas like consumer Internet services. But there is a danger here: as AIs extend their reach to encompass more and more of human knowledge and writing, the territory untouched by them may become smaller and smaller, until writers on niche topics ultimately are writing about things of interest only to themselves.

Then there is another more speculative approach: In tweets adjacent to those above, the legal entrepreneur Scott Stevenson muses that we should stop thinking in words, as businesses and investment funds strive to become illegible and no longer use stories to explain their world, a world that “can only be understood as a matrix of numbers”.

Of course, producing words is what a writer does, and stories are the natural way we structure the world, whether they end in “happily every after” or “quod erat demonstrandum.” But there is a type of writing that relies much less on stories, especially in its most compressed and compact form. Perhaps writing about ideas should aspire to the condition of poetry, stringing concept after concept together for our appreciation and (ideally) elucidation, like a linear combination of vectors in a very high-dimensional space, pointing the reader to a destination previously unknown to them.

But writing good poetry is truly hard—as Randall Jarrell put it, like spending a lifetime standing in thunderstorms, waiting for lightning to strike. (The ratio for Sturgeon’s law in poetry is much closer to 0.99, or even 0.999, than 0.9.) And the audience for such “nonfiction poetry” would perhaps be small, since to truly appreciate it one would need to be familiar with all the concepts touched on and pointed to but not explained at length—like classical Japanese or Chinese poetry, where each individual poem seems banal unless you know the host of older poems that went into its making.

I myself am no poet, and so will take on a much less ambitious task: posting to my small group of cohost followers, about topics of peculiar interest to me, and surviving on the occasional like or share, or the very occasional comment.

tl;dr: I got my wish, but I’m not ready to sign a contract just yet.

Back in April I read about a new service Sudowrite, which promises that you can “bust writer’s block and be more creative with our magical writing AI.”¹ How could I resist? I signed up for the private beta, and last Friday I finally got my invite and a chance to try it out before the official launch.

Although the Sudowrite web site is coy about it, Sudowrite is based on the GPT-3 AI system, “an autoregressive language model that uses deep learning to produce human-like text” (per Wikipedia). Stripped of the jargon, GPT-3 takes a vast mass of pre-existing text (extracted from the English-language Web, books, and Wikipedia) and “trains” itself on that text. You can then give it some of your own text and it will produce new text in response.

Sudowrite is primarily pitched to writers of fiction looking for help in fleshing out scenes, including generating suggested dialogue and descriptions. However it’s based on a general-purpose AI technology, so in theory at least you could use it to help create nonfiction as well. As a spare-time blogger and (self-published) book author this was like catnip for me, and I rushed to try it out.

The AI needs some text to start from. My first thought was to use a half-finished blog post I’ve been wanting to fill out, but my initial attempts were sort of fumbling—and in any case I wanted something that I didn’t mind exposing in a post like this. So I gave Sudowrite a three-paragraph blog comment I once wrote regarding the ending of the anime Puella Magi Madoka Magica.

Here it is, unmodified except for my rewriting the first sentence to make it more like the introduction to an essay. (Note that I’m somewhat spoiling the ending of the anime, but I presume that you’ve either watched it already or you never will. In the latter case you can read the plot summary on Wikipedia to provide context for my comment.)

The anime series Puella Magi Madoka Magica is sometimes hailed as a feminist take on the magical girl genre. Please forgive me if I take a more cynical view of the series’s resolution.

After Madoka’s wish young girls are presumably still lured into becoming magical girls by Kyubey (who presumably continues to withhold key facts from them unless asked), they are still estranged from their bodies and judged on the purity of their souls (the “Soul Gems” presumably working as they did before), they must still struggle and suffer in order for human civilization to survive and advance, and they are still treated as discardable objects by alien others who feed vampire-like on their emotions. The only real difference seems to be that instead of becoming adult women consumed with bitterness and rage (i.e., “witches”) they can never become adult women at all, but instead must die when they (inevitably) lose their purity and innocence.

So for me an alternative moral of the story might be: whatever else you do, make sure that Kyubey gets his magical girl fix. And since we the anime audience seem to agree with Kyubey that “emotional energy” is needed to counteract the force of boredom (excuse me, “entropy”), and that the most effective of all sources of such energy are “girls in the second stage of development,” the “meta-moral” might then be: whatever else happens, we the audience must have our magical girl fix as well. (And, hey, I hear there’s a new Madoka Magica movie coming out later this year . . .)

My own writing ends here. At this point I invoked the Sudowrite “wormhole” function. This feeds your text thus far to GPT-3 and produces several alternative ways to continue, each consisting of one or more paragraphs. You can then select one of the proposed continuations, insert it into your text-in-progress, and edit and/or extend it as you please.

In my case I chose the continuation that seemed most appropriate and include it here without modification, except for completing the last sentence (which was left unfinished) as indicated.

I mean I’m sure there’s a more charitable reading of Madoka Magica’s moral universe than the one I’ve just offered. For example, one could argue that Madoka’s wish “stablizes” [sic] the moral universe. If there is only a limited supply of magic, then the pressure on magical girls to fight witches to the death (and Kyubey’s need to negotiate with them) should start to decline. But even this reading of the situation suggests that the moral universe isn’t one we would really want to live in. At least under the old system magical girls had some control over their fates. Under Madoka’s new world order, love, fate, and the needs of the larger community all seem to play a much bigger role in the ex’s [?] decisions.

So on the one hand, everyone seems to have some control over their fates in this universe. But on the other hand, there’s a lot of pressure on all of the magical girls to [continue to fight, while everyone else stands by and lets them do their work].

My original blog comment was self-contained; I had said what I wanted to say and didn’t intend to say any more. So when I asked Sudowrite to add some more text I was unclear what it would produce. The proposed continuation that I chose did the logical thing, which was to start an “on the other hand . . .” transition.

It’s important to note that Sudowrite/GPT-3 is not simply pasting in whole chunks of someone else’s writing. A quick Google search of some sentences didn’t return any hits, and two online plagiarism checkers I tried detected no plagiarism. (The free version of Grammarly did detect “significant plagiarism” but didn’t provide further details. I didn’t feel like paying for the Premium service to find out more.) As far as I can tell the AI is producing at least some relatively novel text, and surprisingly readable text at that.

However there are a couple things that look out of place. The first is the misspelling of “stabilize” as “stablize.” This doesn’t seem to be a direct lift from anyone’s writing on Madoka Magica, but I did find some places online where “stablize” was used on the same page as a mention of Makoka Magica. The second is the reference to “the ex’s decisions.” It’s been a while, but I can’t remember an “ex” being referenced in Madoka Magica.

Flushed with success, I went through the wormhole again to generate more text. The following was my favorite of what was proposed, again included unmodified except for editing punctuation:

And so what Madoka Magica largely seems to be asking its viewers to do when they encounter the phantoms of loneliness and shame is . . . what? To cry, perhaps. To affirm that it’s not their fault. To empathize, so that we can regain a sense of our own innocence and freedom. But not to be too hard on our younger selves either. Finally, we’re told, “don’t forget how much the world needs magical girls.” Basically, I think what Madoka Magica is asking us to do is to recognize our own subjectivity, our own pain, our own alienation from the world, and to embrace these things because they are part of who we are—while simultaneously affirming the magic of the magical girl whose body dies every time she’s called up to fight.

In other words, Puella Magi Madoka Magica is asking us to stop and to give the aesthetics of the magical girl genre a chance to work on us.

The “is . . . what?” in the first sentence is a nice touch, and it continues well from there.

I took one last trip through the wormhole, and made my final choice of text:

Remember and imagine, Puella Magi Madoka Magica tells us as its viewers, remember what it feels like to be a magical girl, remember the joy and the weariness, remember the pain, the loneliness, the alienation, and the struggle to understand your own condition. Remember when you were young, and “you” were a magical girl. Remember when you looked out upon the world, when you suffered and cried, when you were vulnerable and elated, and when you dreamed of flying through the air. Remember and imagine, but don’t forget—in the end, you have to be a magical girl, constantly trying to save everyone, always getting hurt, and struggling against entropy. These things are the fate of magical girls, these are the things which you will remember, when you remember having been a magical girl.

Further Reading:

• Martha Nussbaum on Empathy
• The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry on Empathy

Again, this is readable and flows nicely (although it’s not clear to me exactly why the AI put quotation marks around one of the occurrences of “you”). The mention of “entropy” is apropos as well, since the need to fight entropy was the technobabble explanation Kyubey gave for why he needed to create magical girls. The text leans a bit heavily on repetition for my taste though, with the constant refrain of “Remember . . .”

The “further reading” reference (which I’ve edited slightly) is a surprise. I wasn’t able to find anything online directly referencing the philosopher Martha Nussbaum in the context of Madoka Magica, so I’m unsure exactly where this came from. (I did find a few articles mentioning empathy in connection with Madoka Magica, including the TV Tropes page on the “empathetic healer” trope, and Nussbaum has written on the importance on empathy and related emotions.)

Another surprise: one of the alternative text choices offered was simply the word “Source” followed by the URL “http://brilliantideas.us/2015/10/puella-magi-madoka-magica-and-the-aesthetics-of-the-magical-girl/”. This article certainly seems like a possible source for some of the concepts and phrasing in the AI-generated text, as well as the “further reading” references. Unfortunately the brilliantideas.us site is now offline and to my knowledge is not archived anywhere, so I can’t compare the article to the AI’s output.

What does it all mean?

So, what’s my verdict? I could say of the AI’s writing what Samuel Johnson said of women’s preaching, but (contra Johnson) there was and is no real reason why women couldn’t preach just as well as men. The “unreasonable effectiveness” of GPT-3 is a more genuine surprise.

The phrase “garbage in, garbage out” and its inverse are relevant here. GPT-3 slurped up an entire Internet’s worth of writing in English, and what it produces is for the most part a reflection of that, for both good and ill. Here I suspect the difference between fiction and (certain types of) nonfiction may come into play, along with the specific way that Sudowrite might be “tuned” for the use case of writing fiction:

A lot of fiction, especially genre fiction, is based on relatively common story templates. For example, a romance set among the rural gentry in Regency England will share a lot of elements with other romances of the same type. It’s the style and sensibility of a individual writer that makes a novel in this genre more or less enjoyable, as much or more so than its particular plot twists.

An author of such a fiction can use a tool like Sudowrite to generate possible dialogue, character and locale descriptions, and turns of phrase that can be adapted to their particular needs. Since GPT-3 has presumably seen a lot of text of this general type, it has a good stock of material from which to generate such suggestions.

Much nonfiction is based on common templates as well, for example, reporting on the outcome of sporting events or recapping corporate product announcements—and indeed AI technology is being put to use in those cases. However in the type of nonfiction I like to read, and the type I’d like to write, the primary attraction is insight: a novel and interesting idea well-argued and well-supported. For example, whatever the merits of my blog comment above, I’m at least putting forth a clear proposition supported by specific examples.

In contrast the AI-generated text seems more expressive than insightful—not surprising for a tool intended primarily for fiction writers—and doesn’t reference or cite any details in support of what the text is saying.

However, as cryptanalysts say of the task of breaking ciphers, “attacks always get better.” I have no doubt that GPT-3 is far from the final word on what AI systems can do for text, and that future systems will be significantly more capable of creating both fiction and nonfiction.

Leaving aside dystopic or utopic scenarios in which advanced AIs either exterminate humanity or enable us to live as gods, what does that mean for writers specifically? How might tools like Sudowrite and its future successors be used?

The current consensus view among people who’ve tried it is that different authors will likely use Sudowrite in different ways: some will use the wormhole feature to generate possible ways to continue a story, some will use the (experimental) “expand” feature to take outlines of scenes and generate example text to fill them out, others will use the “description” feature to give them ideas of how to enrich writing around characters and locales.

To my knowledge no one to date is using the system to auto-generate whole chapters, and at least one author (Leanne Leeds) who has tried a milder form of this reports that over-using the tool can lead to her feeling disconnected from her own writing. The preferred model is to become a “centaur,” a term from chess referring to players who make their moves in close consultation with a computer chess program, but do not simply turn the game over to the machine.

From my point of view as someone writing blog posts and other nonfiction, Sudowrite is still far from being generally useful. I had some hopes for using the “expand” feature in a nonfiction context, to fill out an argument where I had written the basic points. It didn’t work very well for this, either generating somewhat off-topic text or just repeating my own text back at me.

The “summarize” feature (also still experimental) may have more promise. It seems to work well for summarizing one’s own text (e.g., to see if key points are coming across), but when I tried to use it to summarize an entire academic paper (as a shortcut to reading the whole thing) it produced a “summary” that was multiple times the length of the original paper, repeating sections of summary text barely modified from one instance to the next.

In a spirit of fairness I’ll turn things over to Sudowrite to close out this post. First, a summary based on what I’ve written thus far (leaving out the sections where I talk about the AI-generated text). This definitely shows the current orientation of the service toward writing fiction:

The protagonist, a writer, is trying out the new service Sudowrite. The service promises to help people write better by getting them in touch with their creative side. The protagonist uses the service to generate possible dialogue and descriptions for a story. However, the AI has difficulty generating insightful writing.

And for the conclusion of the post, one of the alternatives generated by the wormhole feature that I thought worked best:

What does Sudowrite (and GPT-3 in general) mean for non-fiction writing going forward? I’m not sure yet. I do think there’s an important principle here, that given enough text of the same general type, even an AI system that isn’t exactly “aware” will begin to have instincts about what to do with that text.

There are a lot of interesting questions for any writer, but for a blogger in particular: What types of text am I writing, and how can I use AI systems to help me? How can I use AI systems to expand my capabilities—or “replace” me, if only partially and subtly—in writing?

The rising tide of AI-generated language will raise all writing boats, regardless of what is written. In turn those writers who are able to understand the AI-generated waves and surf them will gain a competitive advantage. I’m looking

Looking for what? It doesn’t say. I’ll finish the sentence myself: while I don’t think I’ll be signing up for Sudowrite in the short term, I’m looking forward to seeing what systems like this evolve into.

Further exploration

In case you’d like to read more about Sudowrite (or GPT-3):

• “The computers are getting better at writing” by Stephen Marche for _The New Yorker is the article that originally got me interested in Sudowrite, and is probably the best introduction for a general audience.
• An interview with Amil Gupta, one of the creators of Sudowrite, by author Joanna Penn. Gupta explains why he and co-founder James Yu decided to create Sudowrite, and how he sees the service being used.
• Author Leanne Leeds has an interesting series of blog posts describing how she tried to use Sudowrite when writing a new novel.
• The Alliance for Independent Authors issued a call for comments on AI for indie authors, to which one of the comments in response was from Amit Gupta. The call for comments was followed by an official ALLi statement “AI for Authors: Practical and Ethical Guidelines.”
• “Introduction to GPT-3” by Daniel Guterriez is a not-overly-technical summary of GPT-3 and related natural language processing systems.

And of course you can sign up for the private beta at the Sudowrite web site. It appears that the service is going to cost $20 per month after the free trial. (In comparison, the Grammarly service I mentioned above starts at $12 per month for the Premium version.)

In case you’d like more takes on Puella Magi Madoka Magica, here are some written completely by humans:

• “Kyubey’s Multi-Level Marketing Scheme: The Capitalist Metaphor of Madoka Magica” by Audrey Dubois for Anime Feminist. This essay is in the same general spirit as my blog comment, although I remain more cynical than her regarding the resolution of the plot.
• Nick Creamer’s review of episode 12 of Madoka Magica (part of his overall series of reviews) is a much more positive take on the ending of the series.
• A Google Scholar search for “Puella Magi Madoka Magica” returns a number of academic papers discussing the anime, some of which have full text available online without charge.