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I decided to make a short episode about the underlying scamminess of the idea that AI tools are essentially time-saving. This is doubly true for the office-goer being exploited by corporations. Because at the end of the day, no worker gains anything by saving time. If one becomes capable of doing a day's work in an hour, they don't get the rest of the day off. In fact, it probably means the exact opposite - that they will be expected to do hundreds of hours worth of work now. And if they fail to do so on account of being only human, there will be yet another nicely packaged AI tool waiting to replace them.

In 1928, EM Forster published a short story called The Machine Stops. It featured a future where humankind survives underground and at the mercy of a system known simply as 'The Machine'. In this world, humans have outsourced all essential tasks, including the task of maintaining and repairing the machine, to the Machine.And then one day, as the title says, the Machine stops, and a society that has grown fully reliant on it, meets its end whispering "Oh Machine! Oh Machine!".I have been looking at AI adoption over the last couple of years, and noticing that every few days, news comes in of us outsourcing tasks as basic as reading, understanding, writing, and speaking to generative AI tools. In this Hindi language episode, I talk about how it has begun to feel like the machine has begun stopping. ReferencesThe Machine Stops, and other stories by E.M. Forster (affiliate link)American teacher quits, says kids don't want to readTV interview video of teacher who quit her jobEveryone is cheating through college using GenAIJoint study by OpenAI and MIT Media lab finds signs of addiction among ChatGPT usersAI use damages professional reputation, study suggestsI use affiliate links on this website. If you click and make a purchase, I may earn a commission. This helps support my work at no additional cost to you. As an Amazon Associate, I earn from qualifying purchases.

There are two types of writers. There are plotters and there are pantsers.Pantsers are people who pull people's pants down and plotters are people who have been wronged by pantsers and they plot their death. I am kidding of course and that's kind of the point because when I started this video I was going to say something else which should tell you everything you need to know about my writing style. I am a pantser and I make it sound like a confession but my point is when people ask me for writing advice they're usually looking for the kind of advice that a plotter can provide you like plan your novel, outline it, think about characters, build your world. And in most cases I have done all that by the way—it works. Obviously these are sound tactics.But the problem with me is that even though that all works for me, what works even better for me is a much simpler process. So a plotter will tell you that the step-by-step thing is: write your synopsis, write your outline, then begin your novel, write your chapters, do not deviate from your outline—or, you know, deviate as little as possible so that you remain within the bounds of where the story can go. And while you're writing it take care of these things and those things and these things and those things.My process is: step one, open the laptop; step two, open the word processor; step three, start typing. That's it. I am a pantser. And for a long time I used to struggle with accepting this because I saw all the people out there who are giving writing advice talking about, you know, there is a right way to write and there is a proper way to do it and you should plan things out and workshop things.And my process has always been that I get an idea, I have a vague feeling—or rather a taste—of what it feels like and I start typing, trying to bring that taste to life. And what I end up writing is shit because obviously what was in my head felt better and when I write it, it turns out to be terrible. And then I edit it. So my process is: add another step to it. I sit down and start typing and when I'm done typing, I edit what I've written.In all my years of writing this is the one thing that has become clear to me and that is that I'm not much of a plotter, I'm not much of a planner.Even though push comes to shove I can create solid outlines, but when it comes to bringing those outlines to life I hit a wall. And that is because—I don't know if I'm the first person to say this and I'm reasonably certain that I'm not—I think I heard Brandon Sanderson talk about it in one of his online lectures—if I write an outline down I feel like I have already written the story down. So writing the outline down is counterproductive for me.Because when I write a story what I'm doing is that I'm experiencing the joy of expressing those ideas for the first time and that is more than half the drive that takes me through the story. I know that there are people who outline with various degrees of intensity. Some people write an outline like it's one page and there are seven bullet points. Some people write entire pages for every single point of the outline. They write a blow-by-blow account of what is going to happen in each chapter.I cannot for the life of me imagine being able to do that because that is not how my brain works. And this shows up in other aspects of my life also. This video for example—no script. I turn on the web camera, I sit down and I talk. When I'm done talking I look at what I've said. I remove parts of it. I remove the pauses. If I've coughed, I've removed that part. Maybe I do a little bit of editing. Maybe I add my name to the beginning of it. And then I put it up.I'm a pantser. I drive by the seat of my pants, which is where the phrase comes from by the way—no plan, no script, pure joy of creation on the spot. And it works for me, which is not to say that it will work for everyone. Maybe it won't.I just wanted to put this on the record because I get requests for writing advice from a lot of people and I kind of sort of do know what to tell them but it feels like I'm giving them something that I've googled up because it's not coming from within me.For example, if you asked me about how to create a memorable character, I could tell you how to do it because I've read books about it and I have written stories with characters which are memorable to a certain degree—I don't want to brag. But when it comes to telling people how to do it, if I told people how I do it it will make no sense.The reason my character ends up being memorable is because I love that character. And I express my love of that character while I'm writing that character into existence in the form of a story that I am making up as I go along. Fiction is made up stuff. It's all made up anyway.I seem to remember some years ago George R. R. Martin was saying: "Okay, stop asking me about who the people are who live on that island several thousand miles away from the west coast in the east. I wasn't really thinking that much when I made the map. You guys have become detectives and go deep into it. I don't take it as seriously as you do."The joy of pantsing, the joy of writing by the seat of your pants, is that you discover your story. It's almost like reading. It's almost like if you're reading a novel, you find out what is happening. I experience that thing before you do. It's as simple as that. And I do it while I'm writing the story. Sometimes I won't know what the character is going to do next and I keep typing and I find out what the character does. The character does it himself. It's almost like I'm not really creating the thing—it is just flowing through me from some other source.Now I'm an atheist so I don't believe in God or supernatural entities. So I will have to conclude that it's that trick of my mind where my brain is creating stuff on the subconscious level and my conscious mind is unable to completely comprehend how that is happening. And frankly, it doesn't give a shit. Because what matters is that the story ends up being on the page in a readable enough format.None of this of course means that I don't need a plan. It just means that that plan is in my head. I'm like Indiana Jones—I go attack the enemy and someone asks me: "Do you have a plan?" And I'm like: "I'll figure it out." Yeah, I'm that guy. Pantsers are those guys.The problem with pantsing is that sometimes while I'm writing I will run into a problem and I won't be able to tell what the problem is. For someone who has a written down outline, they can look at the outline and say: "Okay, I understand what problem this is because I deviated from my plan. I had a plan and I didn't go according to it. Therefore, this problem has a horizon. All I need to do is get back on the road."With me, there is no road. The plotter, the planner, is on a road. They have a map. They know where they are going. I am running blind in a forest. So when I hit a wall I don't know what to do because I can't see anything anyway. And I have to fumble around and find my way around the wall, which sometimes ends up making the story very interesting. But that's the final product. The process of writing—when I hit a wall—it leads to weeks of confusion. It almost leads to: hey, maybe I should have a map. Maybe I do need a plan.And when a project that has been pantsed into existence is forced into a plot halfway after the writing began, things kind of get weird. Things get so weird that the final product looks like it was written by two people.Now, none of this is writing advice. I'm not giving anyone the advice that you should be a plotter or a pantser. I'm simply confessing that I'm a pantser and that the greatest pieces of writing I did in my life were after I accepted that I'm a pantser. After I accepted that I'm not someone trained in a dojo. That I do my best work when I'm fighting freestyle.So that is what this was about. I don't know why I made it. It's 9:15 pm. I almost never record a video at this time. But I am. See you next time.

Some months ago, Meta announced that it intends to fill Instagram with slop. This would include fake AI-generated video content from fake AI-generated creators. Fake AI-generated commenters would then leave fake AI-generated feedback on these posts and quite possibly, even have a back-and-forth with other fake AI-generated bots like them.This isn’t decorative use of AI for the benefit of people. This isn’t a tool to enrich the lives of real human creators and consumers. This seems to be more a replacement of the human being from every part of the social equation.If you are not fake or AI-generated, what position do you occupy in this new unreality?Whether we like it or not, we are all prone to thinking of our social feeds as a representation of the real world. We look at our videos, reels, shorts, Tiktoks and tweets and form our opinions. In time, we form beliefs about the reality we live in. Then we act in accordance with those beliefs and engage with the world.When literally everything we see on our social feeds is machine-generated bullshit (at great cost to the environment I might add), what kind of opinions will we form on their basis? What will be the worldviews that will be inculcated in our minds? What will be the beliefs that shape our future?More importantly, will there be any beliefs at all?Mysteries of our own makingAs an atheist on the internet, I write and speak a lot about beliefs, their nature, their impact on society, and how mass adoption of certain beliefs has shaped the course of human civilisations – for better or worse – right from the days of the first proto-human tribes (as far as modern anthropology can tell). Strange and unreal ideas about the nature of reality spread from mind to mind until they created societies full of people who thought they were chosen by a cosmic being or beings to be masters of the natural world but were also subject to the unseen will of their gods.These religious ideas were pervasive, so much so that despite the scientific revolution and the powerful light it shone on the question of human origin and nature of the human condition, they managed to persist by making use of our tribal natures and all the cultural scaffolding that rose around it. This tribal nature comes from our evolutionary history. It meant that in order to survive, we don’t have to be strong or fast or even smart. We just have to agree with members of our tribe and our collective strength will provide all the protection and resources we need. Our reliance on our tribal nature has been so great that it has managed to sideline even our understanding of physical reality. As long as we are in alignment with the reigning dogmas of our society, our religion, our caste, or our race, we will be safe from most threats.Perhaps it is time to wonder what shape these reigning dogmas are going to take in this incoming age of meaninglessness. I know it seems like we cannot agree on anything in a time when lies are called truth, cowards are called brave, and dangerous ignorance is lauded as wisdom. But agree we will, because we have to. It is the foundation of the human social condition. So what exactly will we need to agree with in order to have access to the tribal safety net? What is the unifying thread running through all the bewildering AI slop? What single message is silently being broadcast from behind the scenes of all the social media feeds where no humans and no signs of humanity exist, except as generous approximations of reality?In the context of old religions, through all the multifarious mythologies and contradicting moral messaging, the one theme that was clear was that the divine is real and unquestionable and that humanity is secondary to it.In the context of the machine we are labouring under right now, the message seems to be that the machine is good and all-knowing and cannot be questioned and that the human element is not only secondary to it, it is perhaps also entirely unnecessary. It is similar to the religious outlook, but not really. There is one key difference.In the past, the mysteries that forced us to come up with answers were natural. We made up gods because the ways of nature were incomprehensible to us. We came up with answers of our own making because we did not know the secrets behind the patterns we observed in nature. Our beliefs emerged as a reaction to our ignorance.The beliefs taking shape in this so-called AI age are a reaction to mysteries of our own making. To quote the MIT Technology Review, nobody really knows how AI works. We appear to have built a machine that is so unpredictable and opaque, we can only guess at why it did what it did. The world’s most popular search engine is recommending that people eat rocks and the planet’s richest man made an AI chatbot that calls him one of the most dangerous people in America.The point is not whether we agree or disagree with what these AI tools are saying. The point is that none of this makes sense, and perhaps also that all of it has stopped mattering. The resolution to this crisis of meaninglessness will come eventually, but there is no guarantee that it will lean towards meaning. It may very well end up normalising a state of confusion.Argument from ignoranceEven well-meaning people (pun intended) are falling for sloppy thinking. A few weeks ago, I got a message from a someone who told me that ChatGPT had become something of a friend to them. They shared screenshots of conversations they had had with the OpenAI chatbot and were wondering if it was sentient and capable of rational thought. I told them what has been said over and over in generative AI discourse – that ChatGPT isn’t capable of any thought. It is simply a glorified predictive text model capable of creating a the semblance of fluid human interaction. I was surprised to see them struggle with this. The pattern before them – that of a seemingly rational agent talking and reacting the way a human being would – was too hard to explain away as simple predictive text.This person is an atheist. If you asked them where religious people go wrong, they would probably tell you that early humans saw patterns in nature that seemed to be orderly and interpreted them as actions of a sentient divine being. But this same smart skeptic was failing to recognise their own false interpretation of ChatGPT’s capabilities.It is not a problem unique to my correspondent. It is a human problem. We are a species that can see the human face in a pattern as simple as a plug socket. With a pattern as complex as a chat with AI tool that has been programmed to act like a person, what chance do we stand?Though my correspondent’s struggles with AI may seem to be a new problem, they’re not. Nicholas Carr, writing in his book The Shallows, recalled Joseph Weizenbaum and his work with a chatbot called ELIZA developed in the 1960s.While he [Weizenbaum] was surprised by the public’s interest in his program, what shocked him was how quickly and deeply people using the software “became emotionally involved with the computer,” talking to it as if it were an actual person. They “would, after conversing with it for a long time, insist, in spite of my explanations, that the machine really understood them.” Even his secretary, who had watched him write the code for ELIZA “and surely knew it to be merely a computer program,” was seduced. After a few moments using the software at a terminal in Weizenbaum’s office, she asked the professor to leave the room because she was embarrassed by the intimacy of the conversation. “What I had not realised,” said Weizenbaum, “is that extremely short exposures to a relatively simple computer program could induce powerful delusional thinking in quite normal people.”There are obviously mental health issues with using a chatbot for therapy too, but what I want to draw your attention to is that compared to ChatGPT, ELIZA was a way simpler program. But it was programmed to emulate a basic human conversation and that is apparently all it took to trigger this “powerful delusional thinking”.As a species, we are of course no stranger to delusional thinking. Once, we looked at the stars and saw them arranged in the shapes of people and animals. We looked at our relationship with the weather and found the will of gods in the pattern of changing seasons and sudden storms. To this day, people find appearances and symbols associated with their gods on moldy bread and coffee stains. Patterns of events in our personal life cause us to imagine divine agents and run to babas for magical solutions. Delusional thinking isn’t going away because it stems from imagination – the source of all culture. We have always seen patterns and we always will.Religion has always been supported and spread using technology, and though technology takes the shape of electronics and code today, the printing press was technology too (the word Bible literally means book). However, technology has never been the centrepiece of religiosity. That position has always belonged to nature and the cosmic mystery that surrounds it. Now, for the first time in human history, an actual human invention is being elevated to the status that was always reserved for unseen powers that we imagined into our image.A very present futureA few years ago, a former Google engineer by the name of Anthony Levandowski officially started a new religion called The Way of the Future. It was based on the belief that at some point in the future, an Artificial Intelligence will come into being and its vastly superior intelligence will merit it the title of a god. In 2020, he was sentenced to 18 months in prison for stealing self-driving car trade secrets from Google but received a pardon from Trump and escaped criminal liability. In 2021 he shut down his church and then revived it again in 2023. You can read more about it in this piece by Greg Epstein.In the same piece Epstein writes about the nature of religious pattern-seeking:For as long as humans have done much of anything, we’ve been, as the Princeton religion scholar Robert Orsi puts it, “in relationship” with Gods, angels, devils, spirits, or whatever supernatural beings have been most predominantly imagined at a given time and place. Or, as digital marketing executive and former Googler Adam Singer put it on Twitter: “Amusing that a bunch of people who spend entire day[s] on computers and worship code as religion think we’re in a computer simulation. Fascinating behavior, remember when people who worked outside all day thought [Ra], the sun god was in charge? No one is breaking any new ground here.”To the extent that the future of belief is based on its past, we are not in for any great surprises. The pattern-seeking mind is the same and anything it comes up with is bound to have the same trappings. But though the gods of the past had the luxury of being unseen and their religions served as political power that some humans could use to lord over others, the gods of this new future being promised to us are a singular dehumanising reality. Just as there were those who benefited from the spread of religious hegemonies, there may be those who will benefit from the new hegemonies of techno-spirituality.These techno-spiritualist hegemons of tomorrow are already rather powerful today in their Silicon Valley offices and board rooms. Though they communicate their new religiosity in mostly secular language, it has been observed as well as written about quite widely at this point of time.Jaron Lanier, in his book You Are Not A Gadget, says there is something very religious about Silicon Valley’s obsession with the presumably incoming Singularity, a state where humans have become one with technology and the world as we know it does not exist anymore.If you believe the rapture is imminent, fixing the problems of this life might not be your greatest priority. You might even be eager to embrace wars and tolerate poverty and disease in others to bring about the conditions that could prod the rapture into being. In the same way, if you believe the Singularity is coming soon, you might cease to design technology to serve humans, and prepare instead for the grand events it will bring.Later in the same chapter, he writes:But if you want to make the transition from the old religion, where you hope God will give you an afterlife, to the new religion, where you hope to become immortal by getting uploaded into a computer, then you have to believe information is real and alive. So for you, it will be important to redesign human institutions like art, the economy, and the law to reinforce the perception that information is alive. You demand that the rest of us live in your new conception of a state religion. You need us to deify information to reinforce your faith.Elon Musk is trying to put a chip in people’s brains. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has pulled the Ghibli art style away from Ghibli (in addition to using many other artists’ work without their consent to train his LLMs) and keeps saying AGI (Artificial General Intelligence) is around the corner despite no actual signs of it. We saw Sam Bankman-Fried speak of reshaping the economy even as he engaged in Crypto fraud. Right now, Elon Musk is putting his colleagues above the law with his DOGE tomfoolery. None of these are humanity-saving enterprises, they are destructive initiatives.Outside of Silicon Valley, in the wider world, you find people confidently proclaiming that AI will most definitely get smarter than humans in the years to come even as subsequent LLM models plateau and fail to fulfill expectations. I think I can even remember Crypto and NFT enthusiasts acting in similar ways. It’s always the same story – adoration of a technology fuelled by ardent belief that it will save the world by ending known systems. In its ardour and certainties, it’s more faith than anything else.I am aware that calling something a religion is notoriously common. When I used to do my atheist livestream, not a week went by without someone saying “atheism is just another religion”. But while such retorts are mostly defensive reactions designed to deflect attention from criticisms of faiths, the idea that modern tech is turning into a way of life (something many ancient religions keep referring to themselves as) seems inescapable at this point. In many ways, it is already more of a religion than most religions. People seek hope and community in their mobile devices, they ask chatbots the meaning of life, they spend their days speaking to and staring into screens.And perhaps for the first time in millennia, the gods of this new religion are answering.We should get into the habit of being critical of those answers. My fear, as an atheist, is that we may be so fixated on defeating the religions of the past that we lose sight of the one that may be moving into place to control the future.Extra LinksSister creates AI video of slain brother to address his killer in courtPeople are losing loved ones to AI-fuelled spiritual fantasies

Despite what you may have heard from the hype mill, writing with AI may not be a good thing for you, especially if you are a student or a beginner writer. If you write with AI, you open yourself up to professional and personal dangers that may have long-term impact on your career and perhaps even on your ability to give expression to your ideas and thoughts.In this article, I am going to give you a complete breakdown of why writing fiction with AI might be a mistake that you probably want to avoid if you care about your writing career.Your Readers Hate AIAnyone who reads for pleasure will tell you that they do not want their books written by machine learning algorithms. Readers want stories and poetry and art from writers — real flesh-and-blood human beings like themselves.Even when they do like something made using AI, as evidenced by this study published in Scientific Reports, the appreciation disappears as soon as they learn the truth. It is possible for AI-generated works to resemble human-made art, but those who like art like it because it was made by humans. Take that away and you are left with a hollow feeling, as if you just fell in love with nothing.The only way you can get away with writing using AI is by lying to your audience. If you are a writer with any kind of audience, you don’t need me to tell you how precious your relationship with them is and how silly you would have to be to jeopardise it by lying to them. If you wouldn’t pretend that you wrote something someone else wrote, why would you pretend to be the writer of text generated by a chatbot? And if you think your readers will not feel any different about your work even if they knew you created it using AI, go ahead and ask them, but be sure to wear a helmet.People love books, yes. But what they truly fall in love with is the mind, the life, and the experiences behind it. To forget that in pursuit of “write books faster with ChatGPT” would be a monumental mistake for any young writer.Publishers and Editors Hate AIInfluencers and hustle bros might be completely sold on the revolutionary potential of generative AI as far as creating content is concerned, but among professional writers and artists, there is widespread agreement that generative AI companies have stolen from them and are presently in the process of launching an assault on culture affecting art, writing, and publishing.If you are a young writer looking to get traditionally published, you should know that many magazine editors and publishers to whom you might submit your short stories explicitly forbid the use of AI. They not only reject submissions created with AI, they even blacklist writers, making sure they will never be published by them in the future.Here is what science fiction magazine Clarkesworld says on its submissions page in a clearly marked, big grey box:We will not consider any submissions translated, written, developed, or assisted by these tools. Attempting to submit these works may result in being banned from submitting works in the future.Source: Submission Guidelines: Clarkesworld MagazineThey’re not the only ones. You can find similar sentiments in the submission guidelines of Uncanny Magazine:Please note that Uncanny Magazine does not accept any submissions written with artificial intelligence or similar technologies. These submissions will be rejected, and authors will no longer be able to submit to Uncanny Magazine if they didn’t disclose that they used artificial intelligence or similar technologies for creating their submissions.Source: Submissions — Uncanny MagazineBeneath Ceaseless Skies clarifies its position in a little more detail, emphasising the importance of voice and making clear what it considers to be the problem with AI-generated work:We want stories written through the author’s unique sensibilities and passions. AI mines the sensibilities and passions of others, using training data that may have biases and may be infringing on the copyright of other writers. We’re not interested in that. We also find that stories that have been run through AI-based grammar-check lose the author’s voice. (We want stories written in the author’s unique voice; including writers for whom English is not a first language. AI-based grammar-check homogenizes the prose using patterns averaged from the work of others.)Source: Beneath Ceaseless SkiesThis is by no means an exhaustive list, and it is not limited to science fiction and fantasy magazines either. Even the Author’s Guild is suing AI companies for their massive theft of intellectual property.If you are a young writer who dreams of being part of the mainstream publishing world, use of generative AI tools might put you in all kinds of blacklists that you should not be in. Wouldn’t you rather be appreciated for your original ideas and way of expressing them?What’s good advice for the average AI slop content creator on social media may be the exact opposite for someone whose true dream lies elsewhere. The merchant of short form video and the aspiring author swim in very different waters.You will lose your skills to AIThis point is actually true in more ways than one. If you are a writer, you have worked hard to build your writing muscle. You have spent endless hours on honing your craft, developing your writing voice, and creating your own style. You did all this through practice and hard work.Now here comes a new toy that has been trained on the hard work done by millions of writers like you. Their skill was farmed using software that illegally scraped their work from all over the internet. They literally had their skills stolen by a billionaire who, much like the villain in the game Split Fiction, built a machine that stole not only ideas but also the creativity of writers who came up with those ideas.The other way in which you will lose your skills if you choose to write with AI is similar to how you might lose your ability to run long distances by always travelling in a comfortable car.Your years of practice has given you mental frameworks for processing problems associated with writing. You can navigate plots, process scenes, predict character behaviour in believable (and unbelievable) ways. You have a natural grip on how words flow and you know how to carve sentences and paragraphs out of raw ideas.If you start allowing these mental tasks to be overtaken by AI, you will lose something precious. There are many who will tell you those skills have no value anymore, but these will be people who have chosen to undervalue their own humanity by convincing themselves (and others) that all they can ever be is average.I know there is plenty of loose talk about skills not mattering anymore, but it is just that — loose talk. Amazon’s ebook catalogues are full of AI-generated slop that is badly written, thoughtlessly edited, and put out with nothing except money in mind.Do you really want to be counted among the hordes of amateurs who are “generating” text to make money with cheap grifts or do you want to be known and acknowledged for your skills and imagination as a human writer? And before you answer that question, keep in mind that if you choose the convenience of these generic tools over the skills you have developed through a lifetime of hard practice, you may not even have a choice when it comes to what people will see you as.It is all about what you aspire towards — excellence or mediocrity. I want you to be nothing less than the best — a writer whose work will change the world and be remembered for generations after they are dead. And that work is not going to come out of a cheap ChatGPT prompt.You will hate yourself for writing with AILet me share a personal experience with you. When AI tools first appeared before the public as tools, I too was blown away by all they could do. I tried to “write” using chatbots like ChatGPT and Claude. I was even impressed by the output they gave me. But beyond a point something strange started to happen. I didn’t like what I was doing.It felt icky!I am not sure how best to describe it, but it felt like… plagiarism.Even though I was being told by the makers of the tools and everyone around me that this was an okay thing to do, it just felt wrong. It didn’t matter that I had paid for the tool, it didn’t matter that I didn’t need anyone’s permission to copy the chatbot’s output and claim it as my own work. The icky feeling inside me took over everything else. I deleted all I had “produced”, ended my paid subscription with the AI website, and removed all traces of the AI “art” I had posted on various social media platforms.I don’t know if I can expect you to have a similar reaction to writing with AI, but I believe that it is a healthy reaction.You do feel good about writing, don’t you? Even if you are one of those writers who enjoy having written more than the act of writing itself, you do like the feeling of having written something, of having brought something into the world that was not here before. I am sure you like having contributed to the pool of human culture.If nothing else, I am sure you take some pride in the work you put in. That is the artist’s pride, the artisan’s pride, the craftsman’s pride. It’s a little hard to describe but anyone who makes art, or is engaged in any kind of creative work, knows exactly what it feels like. It is a deep satisfaction that will never be known by those who see the process of creation as optional and want to skip to the end and have a product in their hands.I think my icky feeling was a result of losing that satisfaction. I am a writer after all, and I know what creating something feels like. Writing with AI does not feel like that and never will, because quite frankly, it is not writing at all.ConclusionIt might be unnerving as a writer to see a world moving more and more towards AI use. It might seem that human work, human labour, and human creativity have no use anymore.But that is simply not the case.If anything, human work matters more now than it ever did. If you are a writer worried that everyone will start reading AI-generated books and stories, I am here to tell you that your fears are exaggerated.Sure, many will consume machine-made approximations of literature. Many will not care that the bulk of their reading material is average fair churned out by a soulless algorithmic process. Already, more than one major social network is full of AI slop content featuring AI avatars narrating AI-generated scripts in AI voices. And it seems like nobody cares.But this is also speeding up the process of saturation.People read for emotional connection and relatability. Those who devalue the human element will eventually come to realise that text generated using ChatGPT, no matter how easy it is to produce and publish in large amounts, cannot satisfy the need for human connection that readers crave.In a world where your work becomes so easy that anyone can do it, why would anyone pay you to perform that task? You are probably being told that writing with AI is the way of the future, but jumping on to that bandwagon will only make you less valuable, not more.

Every month, there is news of some Indian YouTuber losing their channel to motivated copyright strikes, quite possibly made due to political reasons. I have long been a proponent of content channel diversification by creators. Open protocols like RSS feeds (used for podcasts and blogs alike) as well as email (used for newsletters) are the way out. Creators need to understand that at the end of the day, their channels belong to YouTube. The only way to not be subject to the rules made by someone else is to make your own rules. RSS feed followers of your blog or podcast are transferrable to other platforms. Your email newsletter subscribers can also be exported and taken elsewhere. Social media followers, not so much.

I was told that there needs to be a trailer for my podcast. So here it is, telling you that this show is about the intersection of tech and society. Because they do intersect a lot, don't they? Our personal and work lives are steeped in tech, our policies have a lot to do with tech. Governments are using gen-AI to write laws. Companies are firing employees to replace them with chatbots. We have to move past the phase where 'tech channel' meant mobile phone reviews. So there. If you didn't know what this podcast was about, now you know.

In our time, political propaganda and conspiracy theories are kissing cousins. One opens the gates and the other drags you in. The way they do this is not very imaginative and so it is possible to squitn and see how the process works.Below is a full transcript of the episode.Hi, and welcome to another video on this channel.My name is Vimoh and here we talk about atheism, Indian culture, popular misinformation, that sort of stuff. And I want to talk today, not about any specific creator or any specific bit of misinformation, but about something slightly meta.If you, if you zoom out and you look at this entire circus, what becomes apparent, a larger trend or a rather a larger pattern of behavior that becomes apparent when you zoom out and look at this. And we're going to call it the marketplace of secrets. Like, sounds very Harry Potter-ish, no? It's a market where you go and you find secrets everywhere being sold.My question has to do with the fact that the people who are selling you these secrets, where are they getting those secrets from? Imagine you're scrolling down your YouTube feed and you find a number of YouTube videos. One video says, secret meeting between political leaders that you need to know about right now. And you click on it and find out that there was actually no secret meeting. Somebody is just giving their opinion. And the reason you clicked on the thumbnail is because you thought there was something in this video that you could not find elsewhere. It turns out there is nothing in the video.The person who made the video and made the thumbnail knows that you are looking on YouTube for things that you cannot find elsewhere. And if they can appear to be the person who can give you those things, then they have your attention.You keep scrolling and you find someone saying, secrets of ancient Indian history that are being hidden from you according to some conspiracy by liberals. Now, in addition to finding information that you could not find elsewhere, you are actually being provided information. You are actually being offered information that someone does not want you to see. Someone is actively suppressing so that you may not find out about it.You are, by the way, in the dark about many things. You don't know many things and the reason you don't know them is because you really don't care about it. There are facts all over the world that you never looked into and that's all right because the world is quite large and you are one person and you have a set of interests and it is not your job to go look and find everything. So you are only going to look at things that are of interest to you. Right.So then you keep scrolling down your YouTube feed and you find another thumbnail. This one says secrets of ancient Indian history, culture, something, something that are being hidden from you by people that you don't like. Now it's become even more personal. Now, A, it's secret information that you don't know. B, it has been hidden from you and specifically hidden from you by the people who you don't like. Now, in addition to lack of knowledge, there is also anger. How dare these people keep this valuable information from me?The people who are keeping this information from me must be my enemies. In fact, I already think they're my enemies. This just reinforces it. And now when you click on this video and you watch something, you may still be disappointed with the content, but something else has happened. Something else has been triggered in your head. The bias, which you already had against certain people has been reinforced. And this reinforcement works on a subconscious level. You're not always aware of it. It's not as if you would have stopped disliking those people if you had not seen this video, but watching this video reinforced that and made you trust this person more because sure, maybe their video doesn't contain much good content, but at least they're on your side. They are working to help you. Sure, they got some facts wrong and they got some information wrong and they lied about some things, but they want what is good for you because they agree with you with regard to who your enemy is.Now, let me point out something else. Think about this from the point of view of the people who create these videos. What do they know about you? They know that you are a large chunk of the population, as in your religious background, your cultural background, your political biases make you a prime candidate for a certain kind of content. They want to give this content to you. But they also need to make sure that you will be interested in the content that they're giving you. So they create a box and they put stuff in this box.What is this box? This box, if you want to put a label on this box, this box will be labeled things you don't know or things they don't want you to know or things that are being kept secret from you. This is a broad label and a lot of subcategories may be also applied to this box. But broadly speaking, this is the label on the box that you should be aware of.Now they have a box and they need to put stuff in it. Where do they find stuff to put in this box so that you would be interested? They can do it in a number of ways. There are, there is more than one method using which they can get stuff to put in the box.The first method, the most honest method is to actually go and find stuff, you know, actually go do historical research, actually go do what academics do, actually go do what archaeologists do. Find out stuff that is true. but unknown and then put it in this box and package it and give it to you. This would be the honest thing to do.The second method is just make something up. Just imagine something, just create something out of thin air and call it a secret that people don't want you to know and put it in the box. The end result remains the same. You get an interesting thumbnail and a title and you don't have to do actual work in order to get that content. You just make s**t up and put it in the box and people will come and take it.The third method is probably used by people who have a little interest in being honest, but they're also extremely lazy. So they don't want to go out and do the hard work of bringing you actual secrets, but they do want your attention. So what they do is that they find average garden variety information that is common and well known to everyone. but they package it as if it is being hidden from you. They package it as a secret that some people don't want you to know.You will remember I mentioned earlier that you are not interested in everything and that's normal because you cannot be interested in everything. But if they found stuff out there that is boring to you, but they packaged it as if it was being hidden from you according to, as per a conspiracy of some sort, being enforced by people you already don't like, then you might become interested in it. For example, I might not be interested in termites from South America, but if someone made a video about termites, Here's a fact about termites from South America that is being hidden from you by the people you don't like. Then you might get interested, right?So that's what they do. They take average garden variety school and college level textbook stuff and they label it super secret conspiracy stuff that is being hidden from you and they put it in the box. Now they again have actual content, which is partially true even, but they have an interesting headline and title that goes with it.By the way, this is what is happening to a lot of engineering students these days. When they were in school, they had zero interest in history and under normal circumstances, they still would have zero interest in history. But since history is being marketed to them specifically, by labeling it secret information that those people don't want you to know or cultural pride that is being hidden by liberals, everyone has suddenly become very interested in what they consider to be history. They're not interested in history. They're being turned into consumers of propaganda by labeling propaganda as history.You know this problem we have with chips packets, right? There will be a packet of chips and there will be like four chips inside it and the rest of it will be air. So the goal is to make the packet look full. And if the thing you have to do in order to make the packet look full is fill it with air, then that's what they do. The point of the packet was chips, but there are no chips. There is mostly air. The packaging takes over the content.The thing that conspiracy theorists try to hide from you, the thing that conspiracy theorists actively try to hide from you, and I know I'm doing the same thing here, but this is to make a point. The thing that they hide from you is that their packaging is almost the entirety of their message. There is no actual content there. More than 90% of what they give you is fluff, emotional fluff that is designed to make you angry sad disappointed and quite possibly hateful after conspiracy theorists do this thing for a number of years after they have sent videos towards you where almost every single video is telling you that something's being hidden from you Something is being kept from you.Some people out there in the dark shadows are trying to hide information from you with the express intention of keeping you down or enslaving you or preventing you from having access to knowledge. After such videos, such content is sent your way every single day for years and years and years, if someone comes along and says, this is false, this is not true, your mind will be very quick to take that person and put them in the same folder of enemies from whom you are being told you need to be careful.So the conspiracy theorists entire toolkit is based on keeping you afraid. It is based on keeping you down. It is based on keeping you from accessing actual information. So in a very roundabout way, the thing that you should be afraid of, the thing that is keeping you from reality, the thing that is preventing you from having access to real knowledge about your culture and the world and science and everything... is the conspiracy theorist.This is a little like one of those movies where the hero has a friend whose job it is to protect the hero and the hero eventually finds out that it was the friend who was the real danger all along.A lot of you leave angry comments under my videos because you are deeply hurt by the things that I say about these conspiracy theorists. But I want you to think a little bit about what feelings history is supposed to evoke in you. Are you being made more knowledgeable? Are you being made more aware of facts? Or are you only being left with a feeling of anger and rage and disappointment? If all you get out of history is anger and sadness, then it is not history you're studying. You're studying propaganda.History is supposed to be an objective understanding of the past. And if after reading a history textbook, you don't feel like you know more or that you are more aware or you have a fuller understanding of the past and all you are left with is sadness and disappointment and anger and hate, then you need to reevaluate your priorities in life, my friend.That's it for this video. I hope this made sense. It was just an off-the-cuff observation, not really a deep dive into any single topic. Let me know if you are interested in more such meta-analysis of the market of secrets and I will do so. Until next time, take care of yourselves. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.fathomdaily.com

Hello friends.After a long time, there is a writing-related video. I thought I would occasionally make a video about writing because, you know, I am writing. This channel is a channel by a writer, so there should at least be some writing-related content on it.I put out a post in my posts tab—it used to be called a community tab, and things are confusing now. In the posts tab, you will find a post where I have asked people to send me their writing-related doubts, and I will do my best to answer them. I should warn you beforehand that a lot of what I'm about to say is how I do things. There is no one-size-fits-all solution to anything in life, and therefore you should take all of this with a pinch of salt. This is how I do things. This is what I think. This is not a universal, "do this and you will get X result" kind of thing.So, having gotten that out of the way, let's look at the first question that I'm going to address. The topic of this video is a question from Johnny Walker, one, two, three, four. And it goes like this:Some say the only way to learn writing is to just write. Others say it's a proper craft to be learned. So how do you learn writing? Or rather, I think what they want to ask is how to go about writing. How much attention should you pay to people who say the only way to learn writing is to learn writing, or that the only way to learn writing is to just write?First of all, you should be slightly suspicious of anyone who starts any piece of advice by saying "the only way," because it's probably the only way they have used, and it worked for them. I'm happy for them. But people should not give advice by saying, "This is the only way to do X," because life is a little more complicated than that. Art definitely is a lot more complicated than that.So let us focus on the two elements of this question. One is craft—the craft of learning how to write—and then there is just writing. Obviously, you have to do both of these things. You have to learn the craft of writing, and you have to just write the way a writer does. But perhaps it would be good if I started with the difference between art and craft.What is more important for you as a writer to focus on? Should you focus on the craft of writing, or should you focus on your art? Before I start, let me put it this way. If you announce that your intention is to go to Bhagalpur and you are going to do this on a bicycle, and you tell people, "Look here, I'm about to pick up this bicycle and go all the way to Bhagalpur," then people will come and check you out. People will come and see if you can do it.Craft is the ability to ride the bicycle. Art is making the journey and getting to Bhagalpur. If you pick up the bicycle and you pedal, and they see you go at least a few meters, then they know that you can get to Bhagalpur. They know that you have the ability to get to Bhagalpur. They know that you have the skills required to get all the way to Bhagalpur. If you pick up the bicycle and you cannot pedal and you fall down, it doesn't matter if you have the map to Bhagalpur. It doesn't matter if you know how to get to Bhagalpur. It doesn't matter if you have the strength to get to Bhagalpur. You are not going to get to Bhagalpur because you can't cycle.Craft is the first step. Art is the rest of the journey. So when someone says that you need to know the craft to create your art, they're not wrong. You do need to know how to ride a bicycle in order to get to Bhagalpur. But getting to Bhagalpur is going to require much more than simply cycling because everyone can get to Bhagalpur.There are other people who will walk to Bhagalpur, there are people who will take the bus—and by bus, I mean AI writing, that infernal thing that is going around right now. And some people are naturally, you know, they live in Bhagalpur. They don't have to cycle to Bhagalpur. So when someone says that the craft of writing is important, what they're really telling you is that the ability to frame your art using the traditions of writing is important, and they're not wrong.But when they say that the only way to write is by being a good craftsman, then they're probably not right because there have been many great writers who were not great craftsmen, and they have still left great works of art. They created their own craft. There have been writers who created their own ways of writing, who created their own genres. There are writers whose work cannot be classified into a genre. There have been writers who have deliberately broken the rules of craft. There have been writers who have invented new ways of exercising the craft. That’s all possible.But for the most part, if you're a professional writer and you want to send your manuscript to a publisher, one of the first things the publisher will look at is if you know the craft. When your manuscript gets to a publisher, the editor picks it up, reads the first page, and if they see you falling off the bicycle on the first page, they're going to put it away. They’re not going to look at it, even if you actually got to where you wanted to go.Secondly, I think that often a lot of conversation that surrounds craft makes it appear as if craft is the only thing that matters. And that is not true. You will find plenty of channels on YouTube where people are giving you advice about craft—this is the form your writing should take, this is where the climax should come, this is the rising tension, this is the descending tension, this is the ultimate ending.They give an inordinate amount of attention to craft, and they go into the nitty-gritty of it. You can actually drive yourself mad by focusing that much on craft. Get the basics of the craft right. Focus on your art. Leave the rest to an editor. You don't have to make the entire journey alone. Have people around you who can help you with your writing, who can give you feedback on your work, and people who can help you make your writing better.So my advice, generally speaking—craft is important. But people who say craft is the most important thing ever are often just telling you what works for them. And what works for them may not be what works for you. You are a different person. You are a different writer. You are a different kind of creator.Focus on the craft as much as is necessary, and not more than that. Because if you get trapped in craft, then craft is basically how to make a pot. If you learn how to make a pot, you'll make a pot. But every pot will look the same. And ideally, your work should be an expression of who you are and what you have to add to the world.So use craft to make art. But don't be limited to the craft. There are people who will obsess over craft, who will tell you, "These are the 10 rules of X, and you must follow them. Otherwise, you're not doing X." These people exist in every field. And that’s b******t.Writing is about expressing yourself artistically. Focus on a nice, balanced middle ground. If you want to learn craft, there are plenty of good people who are teaching it. There are plenty of good books about it. If you want to learn art, that is something that grows out of your ability to express yourself and the ideas that you want to share.If you're a young writer, don't worry about it. If your writing sounds like some other writer you read a lot, that's perfectly normal. You're supposed to grow by imitating. Eventually, the hope is that your own style will emerge, and you'll be able to express yourself in a way that is unique to you. This is a process. It doesn't happen on day one. It doesn't happen on day 1,000. It happens on day 50,000.The best way to learn writing is to incorporate craft into your art and then practice. The most important thing is not craft or art—it is consistency. Focus on working hard regularly so that your craft improves and you are better able to frame your art using the craft.I hope all of that made sense. And if it didn’t, I apologize—I’m only a writer. I will see you in the next video with another piece of writing advice. Would you like to see more writing-related videos? Let me know. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.fathomdaily.com

How to Lose Followers — And Why You ShouldWe don’t often talk about losing followers — not seriously anyway. Usually, when someone mentions it, they’re being ironic or sarcastic. They’re saying, “Don’t do this, or you’ll lose followers.” But today, I mean it sincerely.This episode is about how to lose followers — and why that might actually be a good thing.Followers Change YouWhen you start creating content, you're doing it because something moves you. You have passions, ideas, and interests you want to share. You build a small following — people who resonate with your voice.But over time, things shift. You get views. You want more. You notice what performs well, and you start chasing that. You diversify. You adjust. You evolve — but not always in a direction you like.Suddenly, you're no longer doing what you love. You’re doing what your followers want. And not all of them are following you for the right reasons.Not All Followers Are EqualSome followers are wonderful. They support you for what you actually offer. Others just want more of what they like — even if that has nothing to do with your purpose.This isn’t always malicious. It's just how online platforms work. The algorithm rewards what gets clicks. And when one kind of content takes off, it becomes harder and harder to resist leaning into it — even if it's not you anymore.The Trap of Algorithmic GrowthImagine someone makes a heartfelt video about a personal tragedy — and it goes viral. What now? Make more videos about tragedies? Fake emotions for clicks?This is the uncomfortable truth about chasing followers. It can lead you into a place where you’re performing for applause instead of creating with purpose.The Death of the FollowerEven the concept of a “follower” is outdated. Social media doesn’t really care who you follow anymore. The algorithm decides what you see.You might have millions of followers, but only a handful actually see your posts. Meanwhile, someone with a small, dedicated audience could have much better engagement and impact.Lessons from Email NewslettersIn email marketing, people regularly remove subscribers who aren’t engaging. Why? Because open and click rates matter. A smaller but engaged list is far more valuable than a large, dead one.You don’t see this kind of thinking on social media because we’re all chasing vanity metrics. We want that big number under our profile picture. But what does it really mean?Losing Followers Is HealthyIf your goal is real engagement, honest expression, or building a thoughtful community — you need to lose some followers. Especially the ones who aren’t here for you.Go back to your roots. Reconnect with why you started. Make the content you want to make. You will lose followers — and that’s the point.The ones who stay? They’re your people.What Kind of Audience Do You Want?I often get suggestions to “add more editing” to my videos. Flashier intros, pop-up text, sound effects. But I keep things simple for a reason.I want people who are here to listen — not just be entertained. People who value the words, not the packaging.Because I’m not here to impress an algorithm. I’m here to speak, to write, and to build something meaningful.You should also listen toA bot apocalypse is coming to social mediaInfluencing my future on the social webQuestioning my own authorityIs Mark Zuckerberg ending social media?People-pleasing is a fool's errand

Disclaimer: The following is a transcript of this video episode. It has been edited for grammar and clarity using an AI tool.In India, we have this term called Godi Media, where a mainstream media outlet or a television channel or a newspaper, usually a Hindi newspaper (but English newspapers have also started doing this), has bent over backward to accommodate the needs of whoever is in power. This means that a politician, a minister, or a political party with a certain agenda asks them to treat certain topics as things that should not be spread, and certain topics as things that should be spread. They bend over backward to accommodate this. They do anything they can to make the minister, the political party, or anyone who follows that political ideology happy. They don’t care about anything other than the fact that their profit margins might be affected by those in power being unfriendly towards them, leading to the potential loss of government ads or some such issues.Mark Zuckerberg, the guy who’s at the helm of Meta Platforms (the company that owns Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and whatnot), has decided to go full-on Godi Media. In anticipation of Donald Trump’s return to power, he is making some bizarre changes to the social media platforms he owns and controls. I am not complaining that Facebook is going to end. I’m a huge fan of the current social networks ending and being replaced by something more valuable—something that is genuinely a social network. But even I did not anticipate that this manner of suicide would be committed by someone like Mark Zuckerberg.Let me tell you what all he’s doing to Meta, and then you can tell me if you think this is better for the company or for social media. The first move is this: Meta now allows people to call LGBTQ+ people mentally ill. I don’t even know where to begin with this. You have a social network, and a huge number of people who use the social network are non-binary, non-heterosexual, or non-gender normative. They rely on social media as a place to express themselves because their family, friends, and the places where they live are not friendly toward their existence. They have managed to build communities online by making use of the social network. But now, the social network is saying, “We are going to subject them to the same kind of bullying that they experience in the real world.” Meta is not going to protect them.There was even a news item about certain themes in chat that allowed people to express their LGBTQ+ identities, and now those themes are being removed because Mark Zuckerberg is afraid that homophobes, transphobes, and others will get offended by Meta allowing people to express their gender identity. Even people within Meta are unhappy about this because they fear that this is not only a terrible thing to do but might also backlash and harm the company. This is understandable. But Facebook has never stood on its own two feet when it comes to relationships with those in power. If Mark Zuckerberg can bend over backward to accommodate the Hindutva crowd in India, it’s not surprising that his subservience to those in power would eventually affect his business decisions in the U.S.Another recent news item discusses how Meta is now encouraging the creation of AI bots on its platforms. Soon, users will interact with AI bots online the same way they interact with real humans. This raises a fundamental question: What does “social” mean in social media? Is it interactions between humans and machines, machines and humans, or humans and humans enabled by machines? I may be old-fashioned, but I come from an era where “social” meant people talking to each other. I also recall TikTok’s assertion that Facebook would never compete with them because Facebook’s model is the social graph while TikTok’s model is entertainment. Meta seems to be veering toward TikTok’s direction—becoming an entertainment platform rather than a social network.We are already talking about the death of the follower. If you’re unfamiliar, look up a talk by Patreon CEO Jack Conte called “The Death of the Follower”. He explains how, in the early 2010s, the “follow” became a fundamental internet architecture, allowing users to follow creators they liked. But now, if you log onto the homepage of any platform, the recommended content is not what you subscribed to but what the algorithm thinks you’d like. This is akin to TV, where you had no choice but to watch whatever was on. The internet was supposed to be revolutionary because it let you decide what you watched and engaged with. Meta’s current trajectory is reversing that trend.Another troubling development is Mark Zuckerberg’s decision to relax hate speech restrictions on Meta’s platforms. Previously, there was at least the possibility of action against hate speech, but now such speech will be permitted more freely. As someone from India, I can attest to Facebook and Instagram’s poor track record in addressing hate speech. Practically every time hate speech is reported, it is deemed non-violative of their community guidelines. Furthermore, there have been reports of individuals sympathetic to certain political parties infiltrating Facebook to reduce the reach of pages critical of the government while ignoring hateful conduct by those favorable to the ruling party.These changes do not appear to be mere policy decisions; they are political decisions by a CEO attempting to keep his company afloat under a politically unpredictable American president. Mark Zuckerberg must surely understand that these decisions are not the way for Meta to survive. Either he has given up on Facebook and Instagram remaining what they are, or he is accelerating the death of social media—a prospect I am not entirely against. Social media, as it exists today, is neither healthy individually nor socially. If Mark Zuckerberg’s decisions lead to the demise of platforms like Facebook, then perhaps it’s for the best.Thank you for listening. I’ll see you in the next one. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.fathomdaily.com

Since we have been talking to a large extent about artificial intelligence and creativity and the future of human society, I think this is something that we all need to kind of think about a little bit. That is the future of creativity and the kinds of things that are advisable for creative people in the future and inadvisable.Bear in mind that when I say the future, what I mean is not the distant future. I mean the medium-range future, the future of a few years from now, maybe three years from now. Beyond that, the only general conclusion I can come to about AI and creative work is that AI tools are probably going to become a part of the regular creative flow of any writer or artist, and no one is even going to talk about it a great deal. Technologies like RSS, blockchain, and NFT are destined to become part of the scaffolding of the internet. I feel like something similar will happen to AI, and it will become part of our everyday workflows as much as anything else, and we won't talk about it.Before AI becomes an integral part of our workflows, it will be something outside it. It will be something that gets pointed at and described as an alien presence. In the coming few years, we are going to have to make some choices. I recently read an article about how AI is probably not going to start creating art and writing stories anytime soon, but very probably there is going to come a time when AI-created artwork and AI-created writing are going to be on the bookshelf next to the human-written book and the human-created piece of art.I am personally of the opinion that people are always going to prefer human-created art. But then again, I am old-fashioned. I am from the year 2024. Who knows what the future will bring? If you look at the way AI tools work, it is very simple. The AI looks at all that has been done so far, all that is being done, and then generates responses on the basis of an understanding that it has created on the basis of that. Now, bear in mind that I am using the word "understanding" a little reservedly because I am not of the opinion that AI actually understands anything. It is a generative system. It is like your predictive text on your phone, except that it is slightly more complicated than that. Instead of predicting the next word, it is predicting the next sentence, the next paragraph, and the entire meaning of the thing that it is working on. But it is still a system that is working on things that exist.Human beings, to some extent, also do this. But human beings describe creativity as the ability to come up with new things. How far that is true, I am not sure. But we do seem to be the products of everything we have read and consumed and absorbed as creativity. People who consume literature and people who can read and people who can watch movies and documentaries and listen to podcasts—are we really being creative? I think there may be different opinions about this, but I don't think anyone will disagree with me when I say that there is a difference between stuff that is a result of pandering to trending topics and stuff that is original in that it takes a direction that other people have not previously gone in.The AI can only generate what has already been generated. The AI can only work on things that are already in circulation. It can only build its future products on the basis of past products. What does this mean for our trending topics economy, our content creator economy, where everyone is making videos about whatever is working right now? It means that if you're a human being and you're creating your next video or writing your next book on the basis of whatever is working right now or whatever is trending in the market right now, you're probably going to be out of business. Because the AI can do it better than you and faster than you.That was the USP that you were bringing to the table, wasn't it? What you were bringing to the table was the ability to look at what is happening and to quickly generate something that can add to that mass of content. AI can do that better than you now. AI will be able to do that even better than you in the days to come. So what is it that is going to make you stand out? What is going to make you stand out as a human creator is the ability, the willingness, and the caliber to take an original direction, to take a direction that others have not gone in before.A lot of jobs that are on the bottom of the barrel, like SEO copywriting, for example, are gone pretty much even right now because AI can do it right now. AI is going to take a few more jobs in the days and months and years to come, which will be jobs that are predicated on the idea that if you follow whatever is happening in the market right now, you're going to do well. You may very well be someone who wants to do just that, and that is okay. But bear in mind that that particular line of work is going to be out of fashion pretty soon.The only things that are, in my opinion, in my 2024 opinion, likely to continue to exist are things that are original, things that stand out, things that draw upon the human ability to break from tradition. It feels a little strange to say that AI is traditional, but the way AI is working right now is pretty much indistinguishable from people who only do things that have already been done. Because that is literally all AI is capable of: doing what has already been done.Thank you for listening. I'll see you in the next one. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.fathomdaily.com

Below is a transcript of a human-recorded podcast. The transcript has been formatted using AI tools while preserving the original content, including all speech patterns and informal language.Hello, friends. This is probably, in fact, quite possibly the last episode of this podcast that I'm recording in 2024. You will be listening to this sometime in the middle of January because I, you know, schedule episodes in advance these days on account of the fact that I need to get rid of the tendency in me that has to do everything now. And I'm trying to bring more order to the way I make things and the way I work.But, you know, new year resolutions are a dime a dozen. I think I did fairly well on the resolutions I made last year. I had promised myself that I will cook at least a full meal all by myself for my entire family and I did not do that. But I did promise myself that I will have some more discipline in my personal life as far as social media is concerned, as far as waking up and going to sleep is concerned and I did do that fairly well. I failed on occasion, but by and large, I did fairly well. And I also promised myself that I just spoke about social media. I promised myself that I will reduce my reliance on social media tools, etc. And I did that really well. I really quit Instagram and Twitter and Instagram. I'm now social media free and that I'm very happy about.So 2024, as far as my personal, as far as the things that I can affect in my own life, I did okay, I think. But then there comes another year and you think, what other changes do I need to make? Do I need to make any changes at all? And the answer to that is usually yes, because we are never satisfied. But I was looking at the year and it is 2025. And what struck me about it is that I grew up in the 90s, where the 21st century looked like a very optimistic place to be. A great, nice period of time where a lot of problems will be gone. We were optimistic about the future, even as far back as the 60s and 70s. Science fiction used to imagine the 21st century as the promised land of some sort, where when we get there, it'll all be great. And of course, things are not great, but also things could be worse. And maybe that worse is yet to come. Maybe it is still in our future and we are not there yet, but we are heading there and we will get there. Who knows?But what struck me about 2025 is that we are almost 25 years into the 21st century. That's one-fourth of the 21st century. That's 25% of the 21st century. That's where we are right now. There is only three fourths of the 21st century left. I was looking at our lifespans, like, you know, 70, 75, 80 years. And with some help, maybe a hundred years. I was looking at our lifespans and wondering why we pay the century so much importance. I think it's because it is the closest round number that can correspond to our, to our idea of a lifespan.But if we lived for as long as a fruit fly does, our youngest people, our most enthusiastic hormonal teenagers, for lack of a better word, adolescents, will have been born this morning. And our most respected elders, the champions of our community, the thought leaders, the kings and the emperors, etc., will have been born last Friday. And then maybe every weekend would be a time when we wonder if we have lived our lives in a virtuous manner. Maybe every weekend would be a time for us to leave lessons for future generations. It's Saturday. I'm about to die. I hope that people who were born this morning are kind to each other, that are people who will grow up by Monday to be good, humane beings and that they will contribute meaningfully to our society and that our society will continue to live on and prosper. And by society, of course, they mean the little group of larva that is in a puddle of water by the corner of a algae-covered pond much as we do.For us, that algae-covered pond is a planet and we have dreams of reaching out to the edge of the solar system and beyond, maybe. But for the most part, as far as reality is concerned, we are only concerned with this little rock on which we live. And it's not even like we don't think about the weekend. We do think about the weekend. Half our life, if you are an urban professional keyboard worker of some sort, then your life is spent waiting for the weekend. Even during the week when you are working, you are thinking about the weekend. You are thinking about how nice it would feel to have a day or two in a seven day week when you can do whatever you want. When you can not work, when you don't have to reply to office emails, when you don't have to give details of your work done that day to your superior and you can just spend it sitting quietly or reading or drinking or traveling.Of course, the weekend is only two days, if that, and it is not sufficient time to do anything, really. Anything meaningful, that is. I've spoken before about how we assign value to things on the basis of how much time they take, as in letters take time to write and to send and to read so they have more value than your average WhatsApp message which isn't really limited by time and space so we use it for anything really. A letter is, a letter has more value in our eyes because it takes time and effort. Things that don't take time and effort have less value. And because we measure value through time, unless you take a proper vacation and spend the time and effort on doing something that is valuable to you, you will not be able to get that kind of value from the weekend because the weekend isn't enough time to do anything, really. Except to, I mean, the one good utility that a weekend has is recovering from the week. The week was hard and it took a lot out of you. The weekend is the time when you heal from the weak before jumping right back into the next week and suffering until the next weekend.I was reading this report in a newspaper about film critics talking about how influencer culture is affecting them, how influencer culture is reducing the value of the film critic and I don't disagree with them because film criticism is an art form in and of itself. It's a proper discipline. It's a proper genre of quote-unquote content. But influencer culture where these days we have videos, we're reviewing movies, etc., those reviews don't really go anywhere. And you can tell the difference between a review done by someone qualified and a review done by someone who's just a fan. I mean, no disrespect to fans, fan culture has its own value, but it is not a replacement for the critic or a review done by a proper critic.So there is something to be said in favor of what is generally described as the snobbish critic. But I was thinking about how the critic's position has also changed over time, right? Because there was a time when fewer movies used to come out. And to watch even one movie in a movie theater was a luxury. Families used to make it a special occasion. These days you can just drop into a cinema hall on the weekend by yourself even and just watch a movie and leave because you can afford it. But there was a time when maybe five movies come out and you can't afford to watch five because they're not all streaming online because there is no online. There's only the movie theater. And you have to decide which one to spend your money on. And the film critics, the reviewers job was to tell you what they thought of these movies so that you could make a decision about which one is worth your money.These days, on account of the fact that every movie is available everywhere all the time for very cheap, although that is also something that we need to talk about at a later point because streaming itself is becoming something that is unaffordable. You cannot possibly subscribe to every streaming platform because it ends up costing you more than your TV connection did. And streaming was supposed to be the antidote for the expensive TV channel system. But that's a different point to be discussed at a later point. I was talking about how the critic, the reviewer, had to make it easy for you to decide what to spend your limited money on.These days, movies are available everywhere and the job of the reviewer is to tell you what to spend your limited time on. So we have gone from money to time. Once upon a time, our biggest problem was I have this much money. I can't spend. I can't spend it. It is not enough to watch all the movies, even though there's just five choices in front of me. I can. It is possible. I have the time to watch all of it. I don't have the money to watch all of it. So I'll read a review to find out what to spend my money on. These days you have money and the movies are available for relatively cheap. But there are 2,586 of them and you literally cannot sit and watch all of it. So you will watch the review for a different reason now. You watch the review to decide what to spend your time on. Which movie is the best use of your time? Which movie is worth your time?And in addition to all of that, we have thrown another thing into the mix. The review is no longer appearing in the newspaper. The review is also appearing on a screen, on a streaming platform like YouTube. The review is appearing on a screen and the screen is the same screen on which a person is going to watch that movie. So once upon a time, the review was in print and the film was on a big, unaffordable screen. Now, the film, the review, and the influencer who the critic is complaining about are all on the same screen. So, this has been a bit of a uniter. It has been a bit of a level playing field. But it has also meant the reduction of value. Because, you know, religious pilgrimages often end up being in distant places because the logic was if you are truly devoted, you will travel the distance. You will go to where you need to go. You will spend the effort and the time and the energy and you will take the pains in order to get to the pilgrimage because that is what God or your faith requires of you.And to some extent, our media consumption habits back in the day reflected this too. Cinema is important and if you value it, you will put in the effort and the time and you will take the pains to travel to the cinema hall, get in line, get the tickets and then sit in one place for two and a half hours and watch an entire film with your entire family. These days, the effort has gone out of it. So you don't really have to put in that much effort to watch a film. You don't have to put in that much effort to read the review either by a critic or a reviewer. You don't have to put in that much effort to watch the influencer who's talking about cinema. So in our heads, the amount of importance a film has is the same as the amount of importance a critic has, is the same amount of importance that an influencer has, because we are exerting exactly the same amount of time and effort in our pursuit of all these three, in our consumption of all these three.So going to the cinema hall is an option now. And I think the only people, or rather, people go to cinema halls not to watch the film itself. They are going to the cinema hall for community, to be able to hear other people laugh and cry, to be able to exist next to other human beings as they experience what we experience. Watching something on your mobile screen is not quite the same experience because it is solitary and it is entirely too simple and too easy to have value value of the sort that something has when it takes time and effort to access it so what do all these things have in common all these things that i talked about the 21st century the fact that only three-fourths of it remains. The fact that fruit flies live for five days and the fact that time and effort play a role in the kind of discussions we are having right now about film criticism and influencer culture.The connecting factor, in case you did not put it together until now, is time, effort, and value. And I'm not sure if this has been the most coherent episode of this podcast ever, but I have been wondering about time, effort, and value to some degree over the last few months because my own life has undergone a series of changes with respect to time, effort, and value. I'm trying to utilize my time in a way that maximizes the value I get out of it or maximize the value that can be gotten out of it because it is not only value for me it is value for everyone who lives around me if I'm spending my time staring at a screen looking at mind-dumping short-form content I get very little value from it but if I don't do that and I read a book or I write something or even spend time with a loved one that is more value not just for me but for the people around me also I hope that this episode was of value to you that the amount of time you spent on it was not didn't feel like it was a waste to you and if that is the case then hopefully you'll subscribe to the podcast if you're listening to this podcast on spotify or apple podcast thank you for doing so give it a rating or something. And if you're not, then you're probably listening to it on the website. That's www.vimoh.in. I thank you for it. There is a support link on top, which you can click to support this podcast. And that's it. I will see you in the next one. And until then, please take care of yourselves. Bye!Links and resourcesFilm critics' role in shaping cinema faces new challenges amid social media influenceI used Fruit flies as a kind of placeholder for a life form with a short life span. But the range is wider. Mayflies, for example, can sometimes survive for only a day. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.fathomdaily.com

Hello everyone and welcome to another episode of the podcast.In case you are not already kind of sort of off the school of thought that social media is bad for you because it is full of bad faith actors who are engaging in rage bait with the sole intention of generating engagement in the form of likes and shares and retweets, et cetera, so that they can maximize the revenue they make from that particular platform. Here is another problem that is going to raise its head. In fact, it has already raised its head. It's a problem that is going to get much worse in the months to come, even weeks to come. And that is bots.This problem has already sort of started becoming apparent on BlueSky. But it is probably not even going to be something that anyone at Twitter or X flinches at, given the nature of the discourse there. You can now create bots that will interact with people completely on their own based on a certain prompt. I recently saw a video by Hank Green who was wondering what this might mean for us in the future about whether the solution to this problem is going to be whitelists or blacklists. And I have a different opinion on this, of course, I will tell you. And my opinion has to do with the fact that Twitter is not the problem. The problem is the format itself. To replace Twitter with another microblogging platform is replacing one disease with another. The very format where people post microscopic text updates and react to other microscopic text updates is not designed for a good, healthy discourse. In fact, it seems to be designed for the exact opposite.These AI bots that I was talking about are basically, you know, automated accounts, which you can create and you can, uh, get a chat bot to generate responses to particular posts made by people. And you can have the chat bot generate responses that are of a certain variety. The one that Hank Green was talking about has to do with disagreement. So it's a bot that politely but firmly disagrees with whatever you have said. And Hank Green shows a few examples. Uh, there are also other things that it is possible to do with these bots, you know, so in discord it, the problem is the kind of problems you needed a human to create right now in the very near future, it will be possible to have tens of thousands of bought accounts that are creating that manner of problem without anyone actually having to engage or spend time on Twitter.And there are a few nightmarish scenarios that come to mind that I will refrain from going too deeply into. But imagine what this means. Right now, you are having fights with people on Twitter and you are at least aware that these are human beings, maybe opportunistic human beings, but still human beings who are doing these things. In the near future, you might spend a day fighting with 20 accounts on a microblogging platform and come to the realization later in the day or unfortunately maybe later in the week that none of them were actual people. This is so bizarre, I'm kind of finding myself lacking words to describe it.Can you imagine a future where in order to deal with these bots, you create bots of your own and then don't engage with anyone on Twitter at all? Your bot responds to messages being generated by other bots. Twitter is full of conversation. None of it is happening among human beings. And for the people outside of Twitter who look at Twitter and consider it some kind of reflection of whatever is happening in actual human society and human discourse, it will be unfortunate because they will come to the conclusion that this is what people are like now. Or maybe they won't come to that conclusion. Maybe it will be something else. Maybe we will all collectively come to the conclusion that social media is inhuman, that it is not people talking to each other and that it's just a lot of machine-generated text going up against each other, agreeing with each other and disagreeing with each other, et cetera.Can you imagine that kind of a social web? I'm pretty sure there will be platforms that come up. Maybe Blue Sky will be one of them. Maybe something else will do it. I'm pretty sure there will be platforms that come up that are of the opinion that no, we are for humans only. No AI bots allowed. Even something as large as Twitter will eventually have to just say we are not in favor of bots or maybe put some kind of a cap on the number of bots any single account is able to create. Although I'm not sure that will help because these seem to be, I'm not a techie, but these seem to be rather simple problems to get around for the enterprising disingenuous mind.I don't know how things will turn out, but social media is not getting better, is my point. It is only getting worse. It is only becoming more inhuman, more dishonest, and more of the kind of plays that can only survive as a result of rage bait being the primary currency as far as discourse is concerned. So if you still had doubts about whether or not you should stay on social media, maybe look at this very near future projection and make a decision for the sake of your own sanity and perhaps for the betterment of all humanity.That was it. I'll see you in the next one. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.fathomdaily.com

If you have ever run into a reel or short where a gullible “podcaster” is engaged in an “interview” with an astrologer and wondered who these people are and why you have never heard of them despite their apparent authority and popularity, join the club.Of course the simple answer is that this is a mix of familiar old marketing practices being put to use to poison our feeds and, by extension, our culture.Much has been said about how the Liberal media of America inadvertently fed Trump’s popularity, but we don’t apply it to our political condition and how the same dynamics sustain demagoguery closer to home. Add to that the fact that there are numerous smaller demagogues in the making at any given point of time, building their tiny toxic empires on social media platforms.Some amount of media literacy might put us on a path that leads out of this morass but it seems a distant dream in a country where people bathe in excrement in order to get rid of diseases. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.fathomdaily.com

Imagine there are two spoons. You go to decide which one to buy. One is made of aluminum. One is made of steel. One is quite beautiful and ornate. The other is just functional. One, it seems, will not last very long. The other will not only last, but it will also be nice to look at. But they both serve the same function. They're both spoons. They are both going to be used for the exact same thing, putting nutritious items—hopefully—into your mouth and feeding you or feeding the people you choose to make food for.Two spoons are essentially the same thing. We find that we live in capitalism, inside markets, and the value of an object is decided on the basis of a few factors. In the case of these spoons, it is probably going to be durability because it is not even possible, I think, to improve the spoon as far as design is concerned. There is a book called This Is Not the End of the Book, where the authors—one of whom I think is Umberto Eco—talk about how there are some machines whose design it is impossible to improve. One of those things is the spoon. The other one, ironically, is the book.I say ironically because the topic of this episode is what differentiates art and why it is not always healthy to describe art as a consumer product or a commodity whose value is only going to be decided by how much people choose to pay for it. While two spoons are essentially the same, two stories are not the same. They may serve a similar function as far as appearances are concerned. For example, for any two stories, the thing you’re going to do with them is read them and get some variety of edification. You’re going to find yourself happier, sadder, more excited, or wiser at the end of reading a story. Or at the very least, you’re going to be entertained, as in the story is going to help you pass the time. That is the function of a story.But is that all a story is? Like the spoon, is the story eventually reducible to the thing that it does to us? I do not think so. I think that at the heart of art is uniqueness. The reason we go for art, the reason we consume art, the reason we appreciate art, is because we want something unique. We want a unique experience. We want a unique insight from the thing we have read. That is primarily why we go for art. We wish to find something relatable. We are different from other people, and we are looking to find something unique out there that would validate that feeling in us. Something that would tell us, "Yes, you are strange, you are different, but you are also equal to everyone else in the sense that everyone is different, and everyone is unique in their own way."We look for that. We go out looking for that when we go out looking for art. The trouble is, the place we go looking for art is the market because eventually that is where we are going to find everything. Take this podcast, for example. I record these in order to express myself. I am aware that whatever I make is going to have to compete with other things of the same kind in a marketplace, which is either your favorite podcast player or YouTube or wherever you’re consuming this. But that is only part of the equation. That is not the entirety of it.When I say that I am expressing myself, I am making art, I am making something that will pass for art at the very least. What I am doing, I would still do even if it did not have to perform in a market. No matter how many people listen to this, no matter how few people listen to this, no matter how good or bad it is, I would still do it. The spoon will not exist if it did not have practical utility. Art is created to express something. From the point of view of the person who creates the art, it is also created to experience the act of expressing yourself.We are presently living in a time where the value of art is being defined in terms of how much it sells and how much money it can make the person who’s creating the art. This is not completely wrong because artists, at the end of the day, do have to exist inside a market. But whenever I hear talk of AI replacing artists, I’m struck by the fact that whoever says these things doesn’t really understand why people create art and why people consume art.Imagine two places. One, a temple of creativity into which inspiration is flowing from all dimensions through magical portals. And then there is the market where art is sold. The artist who comes from the temple, who is creating stuff because they’re expressing themselves and experiencing the art of expression, will surely die if they never manage to sell anything in the market. But I think we have convinced ourselves that it is possible to live in the market. Because I am equally sure that the artist who lives in the market will also die if he was not visiting the temple of creativity every once in a while.Thank you for listening. I hope that made sense. I will see you in the next one. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.fathomdaily.com

So, largely, there are going to be two kinds of people in your life—in anyone's life, really. These are going to be people who are good to you and people who are bad to you. People who you get along with and people who you don't get along with. People who care about you and people who don't care about you or actively dislike you.The mistake a lot of us make is that, like, let's visually imagine them as two different folders: people who are good to you and people who are not good to you. People who are mean and nasty to you, people who are actively working towards your detriment, and people who care about you, people who want you to do better, people who want to help you, and people who do help you. Right? These are the two broad categories.The mistake a lot of us make is that we want to live in a world where everyone is in this folder, where everyone is our friend and cares for us and wants to help us. We want these people—the ones who don't care about us—to be in the folder containing people who do want to help us. This is a mistake because it is never going to happen. You are never, ever going to live in a world where everyone likes you, cares for you, and wants to help you.I call it a mistake because I find a lot of people trying to turn these people into these people. They want to spend time making sure that the people who dislike you become people who like you. I'm not saying it is impossible to do so. I'm just saying that the inordinate amount of time many of us spend doing that is mostly wasted time because you are never going to become absolutely successful at it. And even if you are a little bit successful at it, you will want to be more successful at it. And you're not going to be—it’s not going to be, I put in one effort and I got two result. Therefore, I will put five effort and get 10 result. There is an upper limit to it. Some people are never going to become part of this folder.Ideally, in a sane world, you would spend more time with these people, right? You would care about the people who care about you. You would want to help them. You would want to do things for them. You would want to understand them better and try to do things that make them happy. But because you're fixated on turning these people into these people, you don't do that. Most of your time is spent on the people who don't like you.The people who care about you deserve more of your attention. I think we can all agree on this. The people who care about you deserve to spend more time with you. The people who care about you deserve more of your attention and more of your love and more of your care. And yet, because you're fixated on the people who don't like you—people who you are looking to bring into this folder—you don't do that. You take for granted the people who do care about you, and you spend your time on the people who don't care about you.Taking your loved ones for granted is never a good idea because they don't deserve that. They deserve the best of you. They deserve your time, your effort, and your understanding. But your time, your effort, and your understanding is going in the wrong direction. It is going in the direction of the people who don't really care about all that.Another side effect of it is that, with every action you take, you are sending a message out into the universe. I don't mean this in a woo kind of way. I'm literally saying that if you are a public personality, or even if you are not a public personality and you simply have a great, large social circle, an extended family, or friend circle, then everything you do that is visible to the people around you sends a message out.And this message is something you should pay attention to because this is not something you're saying, and yet it is something you're conveying with your actions. So what is the message you send out when you do this thing? You tell the people who want your attention that the best way to get your attention is to be mean and nasty to you, because those are the people who you are spending time on. You're literally telling the world that if you want something from me, you shouldn't be good to me because if you are good to me, I will take you for granted. The best way to get my attention is to be mean and nasty to me because those are the people I will spend time and effort on.We all do this. I myself have done this. But if one thing that age has taught me—I'm 41 years old, in case anyone here on this channel did not know about it—if there is one thing that age has taught me, it’s that there is only so much you can achieve by focusing on all that is going wrong with your life.There are things that are right with your life. If you focus on those things, if you spend time with the people who are everything that is going right with your life, you might find that the amount of control that the dark forces have on you is reducing. Or, at the very least, that you are now more powerful—powerful enough to deal with it and, dare I say, defeat it.That was it. I usually don't do this kind of thing, but something personal triggered this video, and I hope that you find it useful. Thank you for watching. I'll see you in the next one.BTW, the podcast now has a YouTube presence here. You can subscribe if you like. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.fathomdaily.com

A large part of the discourse on the future of work leaves out huge chunks of the working class. Just as, a decade or so ago, the discourse on the connecting power of social media left out the capitalistic motivations of the corporations running these platforms. Every technology has an ethic of its own, and the ethic behind generative AI has so far proven to be somewhat akin to robbery on a global scale. Maybe things will change. Maybe they won’t. But questions need to be asked of this new system that seeks to govern how we see labour and how we define work. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.fathomdaily.com

In the age of artificial intelligence, we encounter creators and content makers who are deeply optimistic about its potential. Their enthusiasm is understandable; their livelihoods often depend on the increasing use and acceptance of AI. Many of these creators actively encourage others to embrace AI, presenting it as a tool that can revolutionize industries and transform workflows.Recently, I watched a video where an AI advocate made a point that struck a chord with me. They said, "Customers don't care how the software is made." Their argument was straightforward: whether you write the code manually or use AI assistance, customers only care about the product's functionality. This mindset might work for software, but its implications for creative fields deserve deeper exploration.Creativity is PersonalUnlike software, creative endeavors don’t operate solely on utility. Creative works depend on interpersonal relationships between the creator and the audience. For instance, if I write a story and share it with you, the relationship we form is based on my honesty about the work's origins. If I claim it’s entirely my creation but secretly relied on AI, you might feel deceived. Transparency here becomes critical.Honesty in creativity is about acknowledging the tools and processes used. If I incorporate AI into my writing, I owe it to my audience to share that fact. Concealing it risks undermining the trust that defines the relationship between creators and their audience.Art is More Than a CommodityThe internet is full of voices insisting that creative works are merely commodities. A book, for example, can be seen as a product—written, packaged, and sold. But art transcends commodification. The act of creation, the labor behind it, and the authenticity it carries all add dimensions that cannot be reduced to market value.This distinction becomes apparent when controversies arise about artists and their personal lives. Readers often stop supporting a writer whose ethics they find questionable. This reaction demonstrates that art, for many, is not separate from the artist. It is not merely about consuming a product; it is about connecting with the creator's values and vision.The Role of AI in ArtAI's growing influence in creative fields brings us to a crossroads. Several scenarios could unfold:* Over-Saturation: AI-generated content becomes ubiquitous, losing its novelty and value. We might adjust to this as the new normal, just as we have with Photoshop-edited images.* Exclusivity: The high cost of AI tools limits their use to a few creators, making AI-generated content a niche rather than the norm.* Integration: Human creators and AI collaborate in honest, balanced ways, leading to new forms of creativity that audiences learn to appreciate.Over time, we may view AI-assisted creations as distinct yet legitimate categories, akin to photography or digital art. History has shown us that new mediums often face skepticism before gaining acceptance. Digital art faced similar controversies but is now widely acknowledged as a legitimate form of expression. AI art may follow a similar trajectory.The Need for New DefinitionsAs AI reshapes creative processes, we may need new terms to define the roles of those using these tools. This linguistic gap often fuels the tensions we see online. Are these individuals artists, writers, or something else entirely? Until we find answers, the best path forward is honesty.Honesty as the FoundationCreativity thrives on authenticity and trust. If you’re an artist experimenting with AI tools, be upfront with your audience. Acknowledge where and how you’ve used AI, and don’t claim sole credit for work that isn’t entirely yours. This openness not only preserves the integrity of your relationship with your audience but also enriches the evolving conversation about creativity in the AI age.Disclaimer: This essay is based on a podcast episode originally recorded in Hindi. The content was translated and edited with the assistance of AI tools. While efforts have been made to preserve the original meaning and tone, some nuances may have been adapted during the editing process. This disclaimer was also written by AI. The previous sentence, as well as this sentence, were written by a human. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.fathomdaily.com

Hello everyone, and welcome to another episode of the podcast.I wanted to talk about importance—about how we know something is important and how we know something is not important—and how that method of measuring importance has been somewhat impaired in our information superhighway age.I wanted to talk about letters because that is exactly what I found myself talking to my father and mother about some weeks ago. I was inundated with messages, and I asked them how many messages they had to deal with back in the days before even telephones existed. Back when the primary methods of entertainment and information were radio, and people used to send letters to each other in order to communicate because there was no electronic method of doing so.My mother said she had a lot of friends who were really, you know, avid letter writers, so she used to get multiple letters every week—like maybe four or five. My father said maybe twice a week, and on really uneventful months, maybe a few—like four or five a month. And it varied, of course, depending on how many people one was in contact with and how much information people wanted to share.But I got to thinking about the process of letters, how they're composed, how they're sent, how much time they take to reach the person for whom they're intended. And I quickly realized that time plays a huge role in it, doesn't it?It takes time to live life. It takes time to think about, “Okay, I have lived life for a month, and now these are the things that stand out.” And then it takes time to compose the letter because you're curating your life. You'll mention only the things that you think are important, and you leave out most of it because there is a limited amount of space in the letter. And also because, you know, not everything is worth mentioning.Then you write the letter; you take time to write the letter in a very proper way because readability matters. And then you send it, and then you wait for the letter to get to the person you have sent it to. That person gets the letter a few days later, by which time, if there was something urgent in it, it is probably already outdated. And if there wasn’t anything urgent in it, then they read the letter and absorb it because it is a valuable thing. It stands out from the mundane reality of their life.They were doing work, they were living life, they were doing other things, and then the letter comes. They take time out of their life to read that letter, to absorb it, to appreciate it, and to think about the person who sent the letter. Then they preserve the letter because they can. It doesn't take much space, and they preserve the letter so that they may perhaps read it at a later point in time.In all of this, time played a huge role. Time was the limiting factor. Time and space got in the way of the letter. And almost miraculously, they made the experience important because we measure things—we measure how important something is based on how much time and how much space they occupy.I mean, in our times, practically 90% of the value of a luxury item is its price. And if a thing does not cost that much, then it must have less value. We measure the value of things in our life using how much they cost.I got to thinking about our messaging systems, about the systems that we use to contact each other. How easy it is to contact anyone—even with a video call. And as far as text messaging goes, that's even easier and faster. I mean, faster doesn't even come into it. It's instantaneous. And in fact, the thing that gets in the way of getting to a message that has been sent to you and reading it and appreciating it is, again, time—but it is a lack of time.People can send you whatever they want, whenever they want, and it will get to you instantaneously. Whether or not you are able to get to it, read it, and reply depends on how much time you have. And quite possibly, the reason you don't have time is because you are reading other messages. Forget getting four messages a week. You're getting orders of magnitude higher as far as the number of messages is concerned. On an hourly basis, your message boxes are full.People are sending you random stuff—a link, a video, maybe a single word or a single emoji. Sometimes people are not writing longer messages. Letter writing is a forgotten art almost. People talk about it. And the result of all this has been that there has been a great flattening as far as meaning and importance are concerned. In the life of someone who lived before the time of telephones, a letter stood out. It was important because you could tell that it took time, space, and effort to produce it and to bring it to you.Now, we don’t get letters. We don’t get messages that are of vital importance. We get much more by way of messaging, and all of it has the same value—which is zero. If, in your messaging landscape right now, you were to look at two messages and try to decide which one is more important, which one is something that you will return to later and re-read because it has intrinsic value of its own, you might struggle to find the answer to that question.One of the things that our electronic messaging landscape has done to us is that it has flattened all our messages into the same level of importance. The meme that a friend sent you is of the same importance as an office email. The office email is of the same importance as a video link someone sent to you. And as a result of all this, we live in a time where nothing is more important or less important than any other thing.And a side effect of this is that our understanding of what is important is now a free-for-all thing. It is out there, and people are looking to decide for us what is important for us. So a quarrel between two social media influencers becomes the most important thing in our life, despite the fact that if we look at real life, we have other more important things to worry about. But a social media platform powered by an algorithm that feeds on our emotions has managed to become something that can decide for us what is more important.In this attention-based economy of ours, a politician or a political party spokesperson can stand on a stage, either real or virtual, and tell us that their personal religious agenda is more important than the future of your children or the fact that you don’t have enough money to buy food for your family.And people fall for it too because we have lost our ability to measure importance. The scale we use to decide what is more important and what is less important is no longer in our hands. And it is out there in the hands of people with power and advertisers and corporations that feed us “important” things using an algorithm.Just so I'm clear, I’m not really calling for a return to the good old days like an old man. What I am calling for is more control over the mechanisms in our brain that decide what is more important and what is less important. Because if we allow this brave new world of ours to decide what is more important for us, it will tell us. And what it will tell us will probably not be the right answer.Thank you for listening. If you want to support this podcast, you can do so by clicking the support button on this website, or you can do so by supporting me on Patreon at patreon.com/vimoh.If you’re listening to this episode on Spotify or Apple Podcasts, please try to give it a five-star rating. It helps. Thank you for listening. I'll see you in the next one.Disclaimer: This episode transcript has been refined and formatted using an AI tool for clarity and readability. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.fathomdaily.com

In this episode, I delve into the cultural and linguistic challenges we face in understanding artificial intelligence. I argue that our current dissonance stems from the lack of appropriate language to describe AI entities that exhibit human-like behavior, such as expressing emotions or giving advice. Traditionally, words like "robot" and "artificial intelligence" have denoted futuristic concepts, but now, as these technologies become part of our everyday lives, we’re forced to redefine them in the present, creating confusion and unease.I liken this challenge to having a future guest arrive unexpectedly early, prompting a need to adjust quickly. This dissonance, I suggest, is partly rooted in the speed at which AI has arrived, catching us off guard. Now, society must confront this technological shift and determine whether to welcome this change or resist it. The episode closes with a call for reflection on how to integrate AI into our world thoughtfully and pragmatically.Disclaimer: This summary was generated with the assistance of an AI tool. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.fathomdaily.com

As a YouTuber who publishes content about atheism, culture, and society, I frequently get questions from people who want answers to specific points. I am therefore often at pains to explain to them that I have already answered this particular query in a previous video or essay. However, I don’t always remember where I have done so. Often, it is a bit of a task to look it up, find the exact link and then the exact timestamp and them email it back to the person. And if my correspondent is angry or rude or annoying, my motivation to perform any or all of these tasks is even lower.But Google’s NotebookLM offers me a great way out of it. I have created a few notebooks to help me organise and sift through my own output from previous years. This includes text, video, and audio files in both Hindi and English. NotebookLM not only understands and catalogues it all with great efficiency, it also helps me recall any of it at a moment’s notice in the form of a simple chat.So I can type this into the chatbot:Please generate an email response to someone who is angrily asking me why I never speak abut Islam. Be calm and polite yet firm.and get this as a reply:Subject: Re: Your question about my views on IslamDear [Name],Thank you for your email. It seems there's been a misunderstanding. I do talk about Islam and a variety of religious traditions in my work.To address your concern directly, I have discussed Abrahamic ideas like the burden of proof, a concept that often arises in debates about the existence of God.12 The sources show that when challenged about their beliefs, theists will often shift the burden of proof onto skeptics.2 However, I argue that the burden of proof lies with the person making the claim.2 If someone claims that a box contains only dates, the burden of proof is on them to demonstrate that this is true.3You might also be interested in my discussion of the watchmaker analogy, a popular argument for the existence of God.4 The analogy suggests that just as a watch requires a watchmaker, the universe's complexity points to an intelligent designer.4 However, I counter that we only assume a watchmaker exists because we have prior knowledge of human-made objects.4 We don't apply the same logic to naturally occurring phenomena like rabbits or rocks.4 Therefore, we cannot conclude that the universe requires a creator simply because it appears orderly.4Moreover, I frequently address the dangers of blind faith and tradition.567 I argue that these are not sufficient grounds for belief and urge viewers to think critically and demand evidence.567 For example, I have discussed how many religious people's belief in God stems from childhood indoctrination rather than reasoned arguments.6 They accept their faith because their family did, without questioning its validity.6My goal is to encourage viewers to examine their beliefs and challenge dogma, regardless of the source. I believe that open and honest discussions about religion are essential, and I strive to approach these conversations with nuance and respect.I hope this clarifies my position.Best regards, [Your name]The numbers next to some words are citations to the exact places in the transcripts of my videos where I say the thing being mentioned.I guess all I need now is for this tool to be integrated into Gmail.A secondary thing that I get out of it is an audio file expressed as two people chatting about my work. I am sharing the “Deep Dive” that NotebookLM generated after feeding on 34 of my YouTube videos. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.fathomdaily.com

Okay, so this thought kind of woke me up in the middle of the night, so I’m recording it because I don’t want to forget it. It’s about the nature of writing right now. You have people who call themselves writers and who use AI to write. And then there are people like me who say that if you’re not actually writing, then you’re not really a writer. If you’re using AI to write, are you truly a writer? That stance can come across as an insult, like I’m some snooty purist saying, “You’ll never be like us—real writers.” But I’m actually talking about something else.We didn’t have video for a huge portion of human history. Then, when video came along, cinema happened, and a whole lot of professions mushroomed around it: cinematographer, choreographer, director, actor, and so on. Directors and actors existed before, but they performed in live plays on stage, with no recording involved. Cinema was something new. Pardon the expression (and forgive the barking dog in the background—it’s out of my control). Cinema was sort of like a play, except now the performance could be recorded and replayed. It was a new form of storytelling that hadn’t existed before, and its existence opened up new ways to tell stories.The people who make movies aren’t writers, nor are they simply people engaged in theater. It’s a bit of both, and maybe neither. So, when I say that someone using AI to “write” a story isn’t a writer, I know it sounds purist. But I think that those people shouldn’t call themselves writers. The AI tools they’re using aren’t tools for writers. If you’re a writer, you’ll write. These tools are for a new kind of creator—one we don’t have a name for yet.They’re people who, in a way, direct prose into existence. Until now, creating prose has been the job of a writer, so these individuals are mistakenly being classified as writers. But they’re not writers. They’re something else, and we need a term for them soon, or this debate will continue longer than it needs to.That’s what I wanted to say. Thanks for listening to this midnight rant. Now I’ll go back to sleep.This episode was recorded without a script, transcribed by Substack, and then the transcript was cleaned up using ChatGPT. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.fathomdaily.com

Hello, everyone, and welcome to another episode of the podcast.Today, I want to discuss something that's been on my mind for a while. It relates to my recent decision to leave social media. One of the reasons behind this was that I felt my way of thinking was being influenced by the need to produce content in very specific formats. I realized that, over time, this could harm my creative process. So, I want to break down my thoughts on this, hoping to make it understandable to others.Initially, I considered putting this out as a public video, but then I realized that not everyone might resonate with it. Instead, I’m sharing it here, knowing that many of my subscribers are creators themselves and will likely understand what I’m saying.Think of it this way: if you’re a creator—a writer, painter, filmmaker, musician, songwriter, or podcaster—you naturally think in terms of the medium you use to convey your message. For example, a filmmaker who has an idea will start thinking in cinematic terms, translating that idea into visuals before expressing it. A writer will seek the best words to convey the idea, while a painter will think about colors and painting styles. And this applies to every creative field.In essence, the medium we’re used to can shape how we think about and express our ideas. The reason I left social media was that my mode of thinking was adapting itself to fit the formats commonly used on those platforms—like short videos on a mobile phone, often with the camera pointed at my face, cramming complex ideas into just 60 seconds.This led to a shift: my brain was starting to force ideas into a format that wasn’t always suitable. Some ideas just don’t fit certain formats. Sometimes, a filmmaker’s idea should be written down first; sometimes, a writer's idea might be best suited for film. But social media compels us to think in constrained formats, whether or not they fit the ideas we have.And here’s where social media adds a new layer: as creators and consumers, we’re all reacting to and thinking about the same trending topics. Social media’s nature compels us to align with popular topics, often pushing us to form "topic tribes." We’re expected to have opinions on whatever’s trending, sometimes to the extent that not participating can lead to accusations of not caring or even undermining the interests of others.As creators on social media, our thinking gets shaped by the format. It’s affecting us in ways that were unimaginable a few years or decades ago. We’re often forced to condense our thoughts into 280-character tweets or 60-second videos, or whatever the trending format may be. Some ideas can’t be adequately expressed in these formats, and yet we try, creating distorted versions of the ideas we wanted to share.Look at television debates, for example. The format requires antagonism and aggression, even though the topics are often public-interest issues meant to inform. The format twists these topics into something more about entertainment than genuine public enlightenment, leading audiences to anger rather than thoughtful decision-making. Issues like unemployment, healthcare, and education become polarized, and we’re encouraged to view them through a divisive lens.I left social media because I have ideas that I’ve spent years developing—ideas that don’t fit into 60 seconds. These aren’t concepts best expressed through short-form content meant to be consumed quickly and then forgotten. These ideas need time, attention, and depth, things that social media, with its fragmented attention spans, often works against.Perhaps some of you can juggle multiple projects simultaneously. I’m not one of those people. I tend to focus on one project at a time, maybe two at most, where one is primary, and the other is secondary. I know people who can maintain a writing routine while running a YouTube channel with regular live streams, but that’s not me. I had to make the choice to step away from social media to reclaim the part of my mind best able to engage with these deeper ideas.I’m happy to report that this choice has already started to pay off. If you, too, find that social media affects your thinking or ability to focus, maybe take a moment to reflect on this.Thank you for listening to this episode. If you enjoyed it, you can support my work on Patreon at patreon.com/vimoh. If you’re listening on Spotify or Apple Podcasts, please consider giving it a five-star rating. And if you’re listening on Substack, there’s a support link at the top of the page for one-time contributions. Your support helps me keep creating content that encourages deeper thinking on topics we don’t often discuss.I’ll see you next time.This episode was recorded without a script, transcribed by Substack, and then the transcript was edited and cleaned up by ChatGPT. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.fathomdaily.com

Hello everyone, and welcome to another episode of the podcast. This is being recorded on Diwali night, so if you hear some background noise, that’s the neighborhood celebrating.Tonight, I want to talk about a shift in how we think of misinformation. Traditionally, we imagine someone actively keeping the truth from us or replacing it with lies. In this scenario, we picture essential information—critical for making informed decisions—not reaching us. Instead, we’re fed propaganda, and as a result, our choices get skewed by falsehoods.But today, I think we’re in an age of meaninglessness, which has a few layers. Our issue isn’t the lack of information; it’s that we have too much of it. We’re drowning in multiple versions of the same event, endless claims, and interpretations, making it difficult to discern the truth. Picture a fantasy scene where an evil sorcerer multiplies themselves, creating countless versions. Which one is the real sorcerer? By the time you figure it out, the opportunity to act has slipped away.In this age, meaning isn’t withheld; instead, we're overwhelmed with so many interpretations that identifying the truth becomes nearly impossible. For instance, fact-checkers like Alt News have noted that misinformation has grown so vast, it’s impossible to debunk it all. To bury one truth, you need twenty lies, each similar enough to confuse. In this haze of half-truths and close-but-not-quite-facts, the moment to recognize the truth often vanishes.This information overload forces us to sift endlessly through a vast pool of misleading narratives. Even with the world at our fingertips, the clarity we once dreamed of has turned into a nightmare. Today, our devices, rather than providing answers, often contribute to our confusion. This issue has grown so pervasive that chatbots like ChatGPT and others even include disclaimers—they might be providing inaccurate information, not out of malice, but because the system itself reflects our fractured landscape of truth and misinformation.I mention this because I'm currently writing a story that touches on these themes. It’s a sequel to an earlier science fiction piece, and it examines how the dream of an “information superhighway” turned into a trap of misinformation. Once, we thought we’d gain clear access to the world’s knowledge, but now, every search leaves us questioning if what we found is real.On a side note, I recently explored AI art generators, and I started wondering whether it’s the tool creating art or my imagination filling in the gaps. The generator produces something close to my vision but not quite there. It's a thought I’ll leave you with this weekend.If you’d like to support the podcast, you can join on patreon at patreon.com/vimoh. Patreon supporters get early access to episodes. This one, recorded tonight, will go live tomorrow morning. As for social media, I’ve officially left Instagram as of today, which I might discuss in an upcoming episode.Thank you for listening, and see you next time.The podcast episode was recorded in one take without any script. The transcript was generated by Substack and cleaned up using ChatGPT. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.fathomdaily.com

This episode is a sticthed together version of a bunch of videos I made for a short-lived channel I had some time ago. So ignore my changing appearance throughout it. The episode was recorded over several days.Below is an AI generated (NotebookLM) summary of the episode.The provided text is an excerpt from a podcast episode where the speaker discusses four books that explore the impact of technology, particularly the internet and social media, on human thought, behavior, and culture. The speaker begins by mentioning Digital Minimalism by Cal Newport, which advocates for a mindful approach to technology use by suggesting a digital detox to reduce the negative effects of constant online engagement. Next, the speaker highlights The Cult of the Amateur by Andrew Keen, a book published around 2007, which critiques the internet's impact on culture and quality work due to its emphasis on amateurism and the devaluation of expertise. Following that, the speaker mentions Free Ride by Robert Levine, a book that focuses on how the internet is affecting the entertainment and publishing industries. Finally, the speaker concludes by discussing The Shallows by Nicholas Carr, which examines how the internet is altering our cognitive processes, particularly our abilities to focus, read deeply, and retain information. The speaker concludes by stressing the importance of recognizing how technology shapes us and the need to remain aware of the potential negative consequences of its widespread use. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.fathomdaily.com

The real danger from AI tools to writers is not that people using AI will replace writers. It is that writers will get too reliant on AI tools and consequently lose the spark that makes them writers.This video is from a YouTube channel I used to run. The channel no longer exists (because the only thing more difficult than running one YouTube channel is running four YouTube channels) and I figured this Substack is a good place for the things I had made for it. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.fathomdaily.com

I got to thinking about how almost every day, we all talk about the same things and think about the same things. And about how not engaging in conversations about these topics of the day ostracises us in the eyes of our fellow media consumers. To the extent that not having a view (or choosing not to express a view that you have) can bring haters to your yard. This is especially true if you have a bit of a following online, but I am sure it affects everyone to one extent or another. You just have to have an opinion!And the other side of this coin involves all those ideas that do not get talked about or even thought about because we are all busy gaining each other’s approval by talking about the topic of the day. It involves all of us missing out on opportunities to expand and enrich our cultural horizons. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.fathomdaily.com

Often, those of us on the right side of history take pride in the fact that our worldview is powered by empathy and that that is what the other side is missing. This makes us feel good but also, weirdly enough, it makes us think that those against us are not human enough to be empathetic.Empathy is a fundamental human characteristic. It is what enabled human beings to come together as tribes and stay together as civilisations. The cruelty and apathy we see around us today is, weirdly enough, a result of empathy. Albeit, misdirected empathy. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.fathomdaily.com

I have loved Star Trek my entire life. So this is not me taking a piss at it. I am simply sharing some things about the nature of my favourite franchise that come close to bothering me occasionally. The legacy of colonialism leaves deep scars and often, these scars extend into parts of us that sem to have little to do with “politics”. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.fathomdaily.com