A few months back, Michael Smith asked one of the “AI Assistant” apps to assess his substack. He printed the result, not altogether displeased as I remember. I tried to duplicate his experiment with Instapunk Returns, but the result was generalized and confessedly based on far less than the whole site. Forgot about it.
Very belatedly, it occurred to me that The Boomer Bible is in the Modern Archive, a photographic reproduction of every page. Getting ready for 100 degrees today in our neck of the woods this morning, I was procrastinating the job of finishing my latest longish Instapunk post about the failure of feminism (my wife isn’t liking it so far, so I’m down in the dumps) when I remembered my sister’s one-line summary of TBB: “It’s Joyce inside out.” (For the record we have never had any actual discussion about any of my writing. Or her academic works. Why we're on such good terms, no doubt.)
I got some coffee and put the question to Google’s AI Assistant, which to be honest I have found useful as a quick and dirty research tool. The response was immediate:
It went on from there. As did I. It suggested specific questions I could ask. I did. Fascinating. Some errors, obviously, but well organized and far more cogent than any real-world critique or review I have received.
Here’s the whole Question & Answer session. Maybe I should hire the AI Assistant as my agent. I’m not the one who mentioned Orwell and Huxley. It didn’t mention Bierce, but I imagine that would get a response like the ones in the session, including references to actual text and so forth.
i really would be interested in your opinion of this odd document. Pretty sure the Comment function works..,