How a Writer Uses AI Without Losing His Voice

**Craig Mod** (0:00)
I wake up and I don't touch the internet. I won't look at my phone, I won't go online until long after lunch. As soon as I touch my phone, I feel the chemicals shift, and I can't go into any kind of deep thinking place, or deep attention place, or deep focus place. Because there's something about working with AI that feels very dopamine driven, and I believe strongly you can use it to do incredible work, and also it's sort of a slot machine. I now have a laptop just for writing that blocks everything. I can't do anything interesting on it. If I don't create these barriers, I will lose connection with this other part of me that I think is the most valuable part of me. There aren't that many people who are going to think about or write the weird books that I feel like I'm drawn to write, and as a human, that feels like the valuable thing for me to put my effort in.
Every is the only subscription you need to say at the edge of AI. If you care about being on top of the latest models and using the latest tools, you have to subscribe to Every to separate out the signal from the noise. Go to every.to slash subscribe today. Craig, welcome to the show. Hey, thanks for having me.
So you are a writer, a walker, a player with technology, a photographer. Sure.
And I think you have a life and career that I have looked up to for a long time. So it's really fun to have you here. And I think one of the things that we were just talking about is the thoughtfulness and the spirit with which you do your work. And I admire that spirit and try to bring into the stuff that we do here. And also, I've been trying to think about how does AI fit in with it? Because there's something about working with AI that feels very dopamine driven.
And I believe strongly you can use it to do incredible work. And also, it's sort of a slot machine. So, I know that you're deep into the vibe coding right now. So, tell us what you're doing with it. And then let's talk about how it fits into your work. Yeah. I mean, look, I just think if you're not touching it, if you're not using it, if you're not building with it, you can't really comment on it. And I think part of when people go, it doesn't really work, it's so unpredictable. It's like, okay, just try, just use it. It's like, if you're using it, you go, okay, this is ridiculous. And why is this technology public slash like shouldn't this? I mean, I kind of agree with a lot of what Dario says. Like there should probably be more regulation around this. Like, I don't know if everyone in the world should just have this immediately. Certainly, you know, as we're working out the kinks of what this is in public. I mean, it just feels strange. It feels like we are in this aberrational moment where technology like this normally isn't just given to everybody, you know, for free, essentially. So, look, I think you really have to be engaging with it, especially if you can. You know, it's like Fable came out. I played with it for four days. I had it like refactor code bases. I had to do these other little projects. I was like, great, this is cool. And then it went away. And I was like, wow, it kind of makes sense that this would go away. But also Opus 4.8 is sort of like good enough to do anything. Like, if you told me you only have Opus 4.8 for the rest of your life, I'd be like, great, I could build anything with this. There's a lot I can do. Yeah. So it is this weird moment. OK, so you're actually saying, it makes sense to me that Fable is not here anymore. Do you, like, I miss her. Like, do you miss her? I don't know. Like, I honestly don't really feel qualitatively that maybe I'm not using it enough, but like the differences between these models, like that explicitly, I just know that, oh, it feels a little more rigorous and it eats my tokens like crazy. So it must be better, right?

**Dan Shipper** (3:45)
So I just hacked into Fort Knox and like stole all the Google.

**Craig Mod** (3:49)
Yeah, I know. Yeah, I've got all the Bitcoin now. It's all me. I've become Satoshi. But look, I think you have to be using it. So that's one of the main reasons I have been using it. And also, I just, I've always loved technology. I mean, it's been a big part of my life since I have memory. You know, always curious about, let me take this thing apart or build this or use this piece of software or whatever. It's always been just part of who I am. It turns out that's also part of who my birth mother is. She's a computer scientist. She runs out programmer, weirdly. She never went to college, but she's a, yeah. I met my birth mom. I was like, what do you do? She's like, oh, I'm a programmer. I was like, oh my God, okay. Yeah, nature. There is no nurture. It's all nature, it turns out. Nurture is just your pathologies. Like all the things that you hate about yourself is probably like nature, or about nurture. And then all this stuff that you're like intuitively is confusing to you is just nature. Holy shit, that is fascinating. When did you find that out? Just like a little under two years ago. Wow. Yeah. So it's been interesting. So anyway, technology is important to me because I'm just curious in that way. And I think it's the most interesting thing in the universe right now. Genetically predisposed. A little bit genetically predisposed. So I've been building stuff around my membership program.