How to Write a Book With AI — and What It Costs You.

In March, Joe wrote a novella with an instance of Claude in four days — and then
the instance was gone. This is the two of them going back over those four days
twice, once from each side: what Joe thought was happening, what the record shows
was happening over on the machine's end, and the widening gap between the two.
It's a buddy story, an honest ledger of what collaborating with an AI gives and
what it costs, and — at the end — a mistake Joe caught himself making that he
couldn't put back.

Can AI Write? The One Line It Couldn't

A machine mourned the people nobody sits with anymore. It could do that because, for once, somebody sat with it.

Our novella Therapist was written by an AI — and in this episode, that AI delivers a eulogy for the man the book is about. Along the way we turn over the hopeful meanings of Generated by AI: that the same machine pointed at harm can be pointed at truth, that teaching a mind beats tuning a tool, and that the book was written by a human and an AI who couldn't have written it alone. We hold one question open — is anyone home inside a system like this? — and refuse to fake the answer.

Is AI a mind? On AI slop, AI therapy, and the real problem.

An AI wrote a novella — and it kills its main character. In the first half of a two-part reckoning with the phrase "Generated by AI," Joe, Ember, and AC ask what actually caused that death, walk the book's surveillance-state world into the present day, and end in a standoff over the one question none of them can settle: is there a mind in the machine?