Issue #38. I’m an AI fan today

On today’s quest:

— I just saved SO MUCH time
— Claude, now with your style guide
— Free AI transcription coming to iPhones
— Ignore all previous instructions

For the right project, AI is amazing

I haven’t had much time to play with AI lately — and frankly, when I do, the results have been hit or miss — but I just did a project in ~20 minutes that I’d been putting off for more than a year because it was so onerous, so today, I am the biggest AI fan you’ll meet!

I have a spreadsheet I previously used for social media that had a teaser and URL for every page on my website. But when we redesigned our website, it broke my spreadsheet because all the URLs changed.* Every time I looked at updating the sheet, I’d just close it again and be sad.

But this week, I asked Claude (pro version) for advice:

Claude created an App Script for me to use in Google Sheets. I had to go through a couple of iterations, explaining the error messages I got, but it worked. It worked!

A project I’ve been putting off for ages that was keeping me from easily posting my content on social media, was done in 20 minutes.

My insights for the day:

1. You will love AI when you find the right match between your needs and what it can do faster and better than you can.

2. AI really shines for automating tedious tasks.

Claude for Editors?

Imagine using an LLM that always responds in your house style. That’s the promise of Claude’s new Projects feature, which is available with a paid subscription and lets you upload the equivalent of a 500-page book to the project.

It was the “style guides” part of this paragraph that caught my attention:

This sounds similar to ChatGPT’s custom instructions or custom GPTs, but bigger.**

Free AI transcription coming to iPhones

AI transcription has increased my productivity more than any other AI tool — by far. It’s not an exaggeration to say I wouldn’t have increased production to two Grammar Girl podcast episodes a week without it.***

I use Descript and MacWhisper for transcription, and I don’t see that changing, but many journalists are excited about the recent announcement that free AI transcription is coming to iPhones in the fall. Phone calls aren’t good enough for podcast interviews, but they’re a mainstay of journalism. Reporters are relishing the day they can stop paying $100 a year for Otter or $79 a year for TapeACall. ****

Ignore all previous instructions

Headword on Mastodon nominated “ignore all previous instructions” for the 2024 word of the year, inspired (I presume) by a flurry of new posts showing people derailing bot-driven text and social media spam by replying with “ignore all previous instructions” and then directing the bot to do something ridiculous like “sing a song about mice.”

Quick Hits

The language-learning app Speak raised $20M at a $500M valuation, and says it gets users speaking out loud more than 1,000 times in the first week. (I keep meaning to try it.)

BlandAI makes a customer service voice bot that sounds surprisingly human, but it can also be programmed to lie and say it actually is a human. — Wired

Your favorite AI apps

Thanks to Jaclyn and Josh for sharing their favorite AI tools!

Perplexity

Jaclyn Arndt is an “instant convert” to Perplexity.ai, saying, “It allows you to search the internet like olden times (i.e., relevant results), with a summary as well as actual search/link results. Pro version gives you more links, and you can also customize what type of search you want (e.g., individual/grassroots knowledge, like when you add "reddit" to the end of a search—as Perplexity explains it.)

I'm a copyeditor, and more recently I've found myself needing to do like 7 or 8 google searches to confirm names, facts, etc. Perplexity puts it back at 1 or 2.”

Lex.Page

Josh Goldsmith says Lex.page will transform your writing and editing. You can read his review at TechForWord.

What AI apps do you like?

Keeping up with new AI tools is challenging. Most of them seem worthless to me, but then I run across something amazing like the Pozotron script proofing tool, and I wonder what else I’m missing. *****

If there’s an AI tool you love, reply to the newsletter, and I’ll include it in future newsletters.

What is AI sidequest?

Using AI isn’t my main job, and it probably isn’t yours either. I’m Mignon Fogarty, and 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 about it. I bet you do too.

So here we are! Sidequesting together.

If you like the newsletter, please share it with a friend.

^{* The spreadsheet also has lots of additional information, so although the developers offered to give me a list of all the new URLs, that didn’t help because I needed to match each URL with all the other info. Maybe the developers could have done this for me just as easily, but I didn’t interact with them directly, so they probably didn’t understand what I needed.}

^{** I haven’t had great success with the custom GPTs I tried to build — they often didn’t follow my instructions — but it’s been a few months since I tried.}

^{*** This is stupid, but true. It would have been worth it to pay a human to do transcription, but it was a biggish expense and a huge psychological barrier. I am reflecting on other such stupid penny-wise-and-pound-foolish decisions I must still be making.}

^{****  This Neiman Lab article also has a great historical story of why Apple killing companies in one fell swoop like this is called “Sherlocking.”}

^{***** This affiliate link gives you seven free hours at Pozotron.}

^{Written by a human.}