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Artificially Intimidating
Artificially Intimidating
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Discover AI's Brighter Side Often feared as a harbinger of doom, AI is actually a source of immense creativity and fun! It's transforming our world, not with destruction, but through art and innovation. Let's shift our focus and celebrate AI's ability to inspire, entertain, and amaze. Join me in exploring AI's fascinating world that's more about wonder than worry! artificiallyintimidating.com

Episodes

  1. 4d ago

    Bot Recruiters, Robotaxis, AI Coworkers: He Wrote Them Before You Knew What ChatGPT Was, with Justin Feinstein

    Justin Feinstein wrote a novel about an ad guy hired to teach a bot how to market to people, inside a company where the bots watch the employees and learn from them. He figured that world was five to ten years away. Then it started happening before the book was even out. The book is Your Behavior Will Be Monitored (Tachyon Publications, 2026). Justin lives in LA and works in tech and advertising. He started out in music, got more work writing about music than playing it, and wrote his way from there into advertising and then fiction. We get into where the title came from (it started as Reasons to Believe), the cookie printer that got me custom Oreo ads 15 minutes after an email, how a cookie habit can turn into an insurance premium, why he drives differently around Waymos, how to spot AI writing, why he still writes the slow way, Claude as the spouse who knows which stories to tell at a dinner party, the AI networker Boardy that introduced us, and the wave of AI-powered crime he's writing about next. At his book launch, a room of friends, many of them writers, didn't ask a single question about the book. Every question was about AI. Claude as the spouse at the dinner party The idea I keep coming back to came from Justin at 36:21. Until now, AI has mostly been about how fast, how efficient, how vast. He thinks the next layer is tact: "It's almost like Claude's like a spouse. If you were to bring your spouse to some social setting, they're going to know what they should say about you, or what stories to tell." We already live a version of this. OutSnapped (our events company) and Pictor (the photo booth software behind it) talk to similar people in completely different languages, and our automated marketing has to know which company it's speaking for, and which one never to bring up. Like the dinner party: we don't talk about __________. Speed is close to a commodity now. Knowing which story to tell, and to whom, is where the next wave of AI at work will be judged. Artificially Intimidating is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Chapters 0:00 Cold open: "No one asked anything about the book" 0:35 Meet Justin: from musician to ad man to novelist 2:40 The book arrives: Your Behavior Will Be Monitored 5:02 Where the title came from 7:35 Quinn, the bot that builds your ads 9:20 The cookie printer and the custom Oreo ads 11:07 Is your phone listening? Ghost profiles 12:52 From cookie data to insurance premiums 13:40 Writing the future before it arrived 16:42 Waymos and the robotaxi effect 19:12 How Justin uses AI (barely) 21:37 Writing is discovery 22:59 Taste, the darkroom and borrowed skill sets 26:36 How to spot AI writing 29:59 Writing a novel in emails and Slack messages 33:03 Shared AI: who knows what 36:21 "Claude's like a spouse" 37:15 AI at OutSnapped and Pictor 39:41 Claude rewrites the deck: frame vs. overlay 41:31 How we met: Boardy, the AI networker 44:33 He wrote it before the hype: Waymo to Grokbot 46:40 What's next: AI-powered crime 49:01 Sci-fi, black hats and white hats 49:56 North Korean deepfake job applicants (Search Engine) 50:16 Cookie Monster's AI mandate 52:02 Jaywalking and perfect enforcement 53:33 Recommendations: Flesh and Code, Calvin Kasulke, McLuhan 57:38 Where to find Justin Justin Feinstein * Website: justinfeinstein.com * Instagram: @justinfeinstein * Bluesky: @justinfeinstein.bsky.social * X: @justinfeinstein The book Your Behavior Will Be Monitored (Tachyon Publications, 2026). Justin asks you to buy from your local bookstore when you can. Also available as a full-cast audiobook. * Bookshop.org (supports local bookstores) * Amazon Mentioned in this episode * Several People Are Typing, Calvin Kasulke: Amazon * The Night of the Gun, David Carr: Amazon * Simulacra and Simulation, Jean Baudrillard: Amazon * Marshall McLuhan: Amazon author page * Flesh and Code, the podcast on the Replika story * Search Engine (PJ Vogt), "Is your new co-worker secretly North Korean?" * "Cookie Monster Tries to Meet His A.I. Mandate", Ysabel Yates, The New Yorker * Boardy, the AI networker that introduced us (referral link) Sources and notes * The teen-pregnancy marketing story (Target): Charles Duhigg, "How Companies Learn Your Secrets", New York Times Magazine, February 2012. * The Night of the Gun author David Carr was a longtime media columnist for The New York Times. Full transcript Machine transcript of the published episode (Whisper), speaker-labelled from the per-speaker tracks. Lightly cleaned (filler words removed) and corrected for proper nouns. Timecodes match the episode. Justin Feinstein [0:00] When I… at my book launch, which was attended by a lot of my friends, many of whom are writers, like successful, smart writers, I, you know, as one does at a book launch, I read from the book. And then there was an in-conversation with a fellow writer who was asking questions, and we opened it up to the room for questions. No one asked anything about the book. Every question was about AI, and all this foreboding stuff, like, what's going to happen next? What should we be afraid of? Nicholas Rhodes [0:35] Hey, Justin, so glad you were able to join us today. I would like to ask people as a starting question, sort of how did you get from being born to being here on this podcast today? You can go reverse chronological or chronological, keep it in a minute or two. I love it. What a great Justin Feinstein [0:52] Opening question. And one I'm happy to answer because I've had a really meandering path, I guess, to where I'm at now. I won't take you all the way back, but once upon a time, I graduated with a degree in hand percussion performance from the Berklee College of Music. And shockingly, I was not able to support myself with a life of playing hand percussion. but I pretty soon after that followed my wife to the Iowa Writers Workshop which is so you had the right response so you know what that is it's a I do a writing program there's only people respond to that one of two ways the way you did or they say Iowa why would you go there Nicholas Rhodes [1:34] Well that's what I used to say but one of my best friends went actually two of my good friends went Justin Feinstein [1:40] So oh very cool so yeah my all my musician friends thought I was I was crazy and kind of ruining my career, which they were kind of right about. But I spent time in a writing community and realized that that was like a long dormant side of myself that I didn't realize existed. So fast forward many years, I eventually started working in advertising as a copywriter, creative director, and writing a lot on the side. I ended up getting more work writing about music than playing it. So that kind of was part of how I wiggled my way into that side of things. And then, And yeah, I started writing, took many years, many books, many agents. But this wound up being the one. And then I got very, very lucky with the timeliness of it all, which we can dig into here. But yeah, it's been a trip. It's been having a book come out about an AI company, which I started writing before AI was the only thing anyone wanted to talk about, is pretty wild. And here we are. Nicholas Rhodes [2:40] Well, speaking of timeliness, the USPS man literally just dropped this off. So I haven't read it yet, but your behavior will be monitored. Give us the elevator pitch. Justin Feinstein [2:53] Sure. This is a book about a near future, rapidly approaching future. Felt like when I wrote the book, I assumed we were maybe five to 10 years away. And now it's happening now. It feels like kind of the edge of tomorrow. but about a near future tech company that is launching a revolutionary advertising product that allows ads to be targeted in real time to people watching them. So, you know, if you and I and everybody we knew were all watching an ad for Coke or Honda or whatever, it would be very much tailored to what we wanted. And it feels like we're getting pretty close … This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit artificiallyintimidating.com/subscribe

  2. Oct 20

    Every New Tool Was Going to Kill Art, with John Hardin

    This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit artificiallyintimidating.com Every new creative tool was supposed to kill real art: the printing press, the piano, the microphone, the tape machine, the 808, and now AI. None of them did. Artificially Intimidating is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. John A.C. Hardin is a Senior Fellow at the Abundance Institute, a historian, a working musician, and the writer of the Creative Frontiers newsletter. A few weeks ago I watched him run a panel on AI and music in a basement on the Lower East Side. He opened with a story about Bing Crosby, Les Paul and one tape machine, and I've been thinking about it ever since. So I asked him on the show to keep going. We get into why Bing Crosby funded tape so he could play more golf, a monk who was sure the printing press would destroy culture, the drum machine that flopped its way into defining hip hop, why the player piano created more piano teachers, Barry Manilow's synthesizers and the Broadway "walkers," karaoke, the moonwalk, sampling as theft or tribute, Bad Bunny and the dembow lawsuit, and what all of it suggests about AI, ownership and creative work. John also doesn't let me off easy: the disruption is real, and people do lose their jobs. Chapters 0:00 Intro: every tool was going to kill art 1:14 Meet John Hardin 3:34 Bing Crosby, Les Paul and the tape machine 7:55 The printing press panic, and the script that keeps repeating 9:32 Pianos, valves and metronomes: "the end of music" 12:35 Photography, Kodak and a camera for everyone 14:46 How AI gave a photographer new superpowers 19:56 How John uses AI: writing and a Suno theme song 23:03 Who owns an AI-assisted song? 25:11 The 808: a commercial flop that defined hip hop 27:35 Parody songs, and is it worth it? 28:56 Why AI labels are "fairly useless" 30:43 AI and the business side of being an artist 32:57 The disruption is real: Barry Manilow and the "walkers" 34:48 Net positive: karaoke and the jobs nobody predicted 36:07 "This is so dumb": the first internet video I ever saw 41:33 From civil engineering to storytelling 43:40 Is copyright a barrier or an incentive? 45:14 The player piano made more piano teachers 46:52 Training data and owning what you learn 49:04 McCartney, Michael Jackson and the Beatles catalog 49:40 Deepfakes, the NO FAKES Act and owning your face and voice 51:08 Suno as an instrument 52:34 Herbie Flowers, A Tribe Called Quest and who gets paid 53:35 Anthropic, the books and the $3,000 settlement 54:20 How copyright grew out of the written word 55:50 What if you could copyright a style? 56:37 One legal decision's butterfly effect 58:12 The moonwalk, and dance moves nobody owns 59:08 Jokes, comedians and borrowed bits 59:59 Recommendations: Arewa, McLuhan and The Dispatch 1:02:23 Les Paul, "Lover" and the multitrack leap 1:05:00 John Mayer and an old nightlife photo archive 1:05:53 Sampling: theft or tribute? 1:07:10 Who owns AI-made work? 1:08:07 Bad Bunny and the dembow lawsuit 1:09:18 Where to find John About John John A.C. Hardin, Ph.D. is a Senior Fellow at the Abundance Institute, where he leads Creative Frontiers, an initiative focused on artists, technology, and the future of creative work in the age of AI. A historian, musician, and engineer by training, he studies how new tools reshape who gets to create. His writing has appeared in The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times, and he is the author of Church Advertising, Public Relations and Marketing in Twentieth-Century America: Retailing Religion. He holds a PhD in U.S. history and lives in the Carolinas, pickin' and singin' whenever possible. * Abundance Institute * Creative Frontiers on Substack * Instagram * LinkedIn * X John's writing we talk about * The Golfer and The Grinder: Bing Crosby, Les Paul, and a box from Nazi Germany * The Drum Machine that Sounded Fake, then Changed Music (Roland TR-808) * The Empty Orchestra (the karaoke machine) * Bad Bunny and the Billion-Dollar Drumbeat (Borrowed Genius, Part 1) * Michael Jackson Didn't Invent the Moonwalk (Borrowed Genius, Part 2) * The 1925 New Tech That Let a Legend Invent a New Sound (Duke Ellington and the microphone) Also mentioned * My write-up of the panel where I met John, Everyone's Job Looks Easy From the Outside * Olufunmilayo Arewa, "From J.C. Bach to Hip Hop: Musical Borrowing, Copyright and Cultural Context" * Everyday Abundance with Virginia Postrel and Charles Mann (John wrote the theme) * The Dispatch Podcast * Les Paul & Mary Ford, "Lover" and "How High the Moon" * John Mayer, Where the Light Is: Live in Los Angeles Correction At 1:05:26 I say a Washington Post article showed training data "from where OpenAI got it." The Post's 2023 analysis actually covered Google's C4 dataset, which was used to train Google's T5 and Meta's LLaMA. OpenAI does not disclose its training data. Washington Post analysis. Support the show Viktor, $50 off your first month Full transcript Lightly cleaned (filler words removed). Timecodes match the episode.

  3. Jul 28

    The Boring Layer That Decides If Your AI Survives

    The first human-to-human interview on Artificially Intimidating. I sit down with Bruno Perez, co-founder and CEO of Manifest — the open-source LLM router that keeps your AI agents running when a provider goes down. -- We get into why one in twenty AI calls fails in production, the self-healing "Autofix" layer Manifest just shipped, how two self-taught founders pivoted the week Claude Code launched, and why nobody's loyal to a model anymore. Guest: Bruno Perez, co-founder & CEO of Manifest — https://manifest.build In this episode: From a 15-year WordPress agency to an open-source AI router What Manifest does: one endpoint, your subscriptions + API keys, fallbacks and spend limits "Five percent of all LLM calls in production are an error" — and Autofix, the insurance layer Paid plans, and why good products deserve to be profitable Model loyalty is a fiction, agents spamming agents, and building only the slice of a tool you use Links:Manifest — https://manifest.buildAutofix (early access) — https://manifest.build/autofix/Paid plans — https://manifest.build/blog/introducing-paid-plans/GitHub — https://github.com/mnfst/manifestFree LLM API list — https://github.com/mnfst/awesome-free-llm-apisHermes — https://hermes-agent.nousresearch.com/Paperclip — https://paperclip.ing/OpenClaw — https://openclaw.ai/OpenCode — https://opencode.aiNanobot — https://nanobot.wiki/home/Craft — https://agents.craft.do/Paseo — https://paseo.sh · Ghostty — https://ghostty.org · Orgo — https://orgo.ai · Chatwoot — https://chatwoot.com Full written deep dive, diagrams, and my own fallback setup (paid): More at https://artificiallyintimidating.com This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit artificiallyintimidating.com/subscribe

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Discover AI's Brighter Side Often feared as a harbinger of doom, AI is actually a source of immense creativity and fun! It's transforming our world, not with destruction, but through art and innovation. Let's shift our focus and celebrate AI's ability to inspire, entertain, and amaze. Join me in exploring AI's fascinating world that's more about wonder than worry! artificiallyintimidating.com

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