Whoa, can you believe it’s already November and we’re on Issue #3 of the newsletter? Sunrise. Sunset.*

I know it’s been less than a week, but the last newsletter was too long. I’m trying to keep it more manageable, so I may send them more than once a week. I’ll send a newsletter whenever a draft feels like it has enough to be worth sending.

Tip: Change the Name of Your Past Chats

I start a new chat when I’m working on a new topic. For example, if I’ve asked whether kale or zucchini have more fiber (it’s kale), I’ll start a new chat if I want to get Cosmo-type headlines about grammar, and another new chat to run a clean-up process on an interview transcript. ^†

But later, I may want to go back to the vegetable chat to ask if cooking reduces the fiber content of kale. (It doesn’t.^‡) Keep all the vegetable-related work together is my philosophy.

The problem is that the names ChatGPT creates aren’t always helpful when you’re scanning through the list of old chats on the left side of the screen (on a computer). Some of them aren’t even named. They’re just called “New chat.”

Fortunately, you can rename your chats by hovering on them and clicking the pencil icon. I’ve started doing this for every new chat I create.

You can do it in different ways. Maybe you’d keep everything together for a specific project and use a topic-related name, like this:

Or maybe you’d keep all your transcript-related work together and give it a process-related name, like this:

I haven’t figured out which is best yet, but I do know that giving old chats clear names has made it dramatically easier for me to find what I’m looking for.

News

Get Ready for a Deluge of Content

Casey Newton of Platformer attended OpenAI's big update event and then built a custom AI copy editor in just a few minutes using the beta "GPT builder" tool.

You might be surprised to learn that's not what worries me most.

What keeps me up at night is the firehose of automated content we're going to face, including large, fully automated influence campaigns like he describes near the end of this article.

Apply for Government AI Jobs (Maybe)

In the last newsletter, I highlighted the announcement that the US government plans to do an AI hiring surge. Yesterday, Craig Newmark (of Craig's List fame), posted this message "Begin your career at the intersection of technology and government as part of the @WhiteHouse AI Talent Surge! @USDigitalCorps applications are now open: https://digitalcorps.gsa.gov/apply/"

I don't see anything specifically about AI jobs on the page, but the Digital Corps does seem like a route for an AI job surge. They say there are work-from-home options and starting pay varies by location but is $86K in Washington, D.C. The deadline for applications is November 17.

Syllabus: Writing with Robots

Ryan Cordell, an Associate Professor in the School of Information Sciences and Department of English at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, just posted the syllabus for his "Writing with Robots" class next semester. Check it out if you want to get buried in reading or just skim the reading list and see how one professor is approaching the subject.

Fail of the Week

Wow, I thought image generators had gotten better at hands, but Canva’s certainly has not! 

I wanted a quick image to illustrate the fun origin of “over the transom,” which, according to Etymonline, is this quotation from an editor at the “Atlantic Monthly”:

"Mr. Weeks once said that some very interesting material comes from writers who, too shy to walk in and talk to the editor, just toss their manuscripts over the transom and run."

This was the prompt: A photorealistic image of the hand of a businessman tossing a stack of papers over a wooden beam onto a desk.

Also, none of the images had a wooden beam.

I just used one of the basic quotation templates instead. (Keep getting your work out there, shy writers!)

What is an AI sidequest?

Using AI isn’t my main job, and it probably isn’t yours either. Grammar Girl is my main gig, but I haven’t seen a technology this transformative since the development of the internet, and I want to learn all about it.

So here we are! Sidequesting together.

I’m glad you’re here, and if you like the newsletter, please share it with a friend.

^{* That’s a joke for my older readers. It refers to Perry Como’s song “Sunrise, Sunset,” which is about time passing quickly. Now I feel bad about myself for explaining a joke — in a footnote no less. But we soldier on.}

^{† I’ll post my process for cleaning up transcripts in a future newsletter.}

^{‡ WeightWatchers agrees. If  you’re not just messing around, always confirm the accuracy of any piece of information you get from chatbots.}