We are moving into the future today, taking the tech for a ride and seeing if it can help build new stories and storytellers.  Some will use it to cheat, others to dilute, but the work will speak for itself.  We show off some impressive lyrics our Bing Chat bot wrote today.  It's like a musician who plays covers for years, only this is a supercomputer system that took seconds to reproduce words from an unfathomable amount of data.  After fun with robots, we move on to real stories about real people.  Speaking of musicians, how about one who went on the road and showed us how you can make a living doing it.  Test your knowledge of A.I. in everyday life, and finish with a story about a guy who decided we waste too much hotel soap and did something about it. 

Love it, Hate it, Don't understand it, the word filler apps will only grow.  We are in the play with its stage at With A Shout, and we plan to show off what we are playing with when the results are fascinating.  We have used ChatGPT and now have the pro version; we have used the commercial version of Jasper which has templates and formats for several types of writing.  Our newsletters are assembled using Grammarly and Axios H.Q.; both help with formatting rather than with actual content.  This week we were invited to use Bing's new ChatGPT 3.0-backed search engine, and we started to play around with it.  We are experimenting with different content, and the results have been impressive.  We should also note that on Friday, NTY journalist Kevin Roose reported downright scary findings when he spent the weekend with Bing, listen to his experience on the podcast Hard Fork here.  We did not go into any lengthy conversations with Bing Chat; we only asked questions to see what sort of writing it would provide. 

We reserve the right to change our hearts and minds as time passes; for now, we appreciate excellent writing, exciting stories, and storytellers.  We follow great writers, journalists, and artistic personalities who tell stories in many different ways.  If the story is good, well written, and not plagiarized, we will read it.  Our early indications are that these tools can enhance writing, prompt new ideas and, in the hands of professional writers, improve the products.  We have not used any A.I. to write any content for our newsletter or other content, but use it to experiment and build on ideas. In the below experiment, we will show you what the A.I. produced.

Here is today's prompt:

Bing Chat’s Response:

Chat Bing writes punk rock:

John Vanderslice, a musician and entrepreneur detailed his revenue and expenses over a short 12-date west coast tour.  The article on Consequence describes earning a middle-class living in the music business.  The headline grabbed us and made us think, how many musicians and artists feel about it like that?  Do most think I'd like to be able to make a living as an artist, or do most think I want to be a "rock star?" 

Vanderslice goes through his tour, which was a very DIY tour; he was the talent, the roadie, loaded up all his equipment and merch into his car, and traveled to all the venues.  What stood out in his details is how little he made to perform and how much he made from merch.  If you want to know how most artists survive (or don't), it's a good read.

Pew Research recently put together a survey on various A.I.-related information, and with the survey, they created a quiz you can take to determine if you know when A.I. is being used.  The examination is quick, with only six questions, and will give you multiple-choice answers to each question.  The average score in our office was 5 out of 6; we were not as versed in the A.I. in our homes.

Freakonomics and The Economics of Everyday Things, a podcast that looks into the hidden side of everything, went looking into hotel soaps.  Anyone who has ever stayed at a hotel has wondered what happens to all that soap, or worse, many of us assume they all end up in the trash.  Spoiler alert, most of them do.  In this podcast episode, host Zachary Crockett talks to Shawn Seipler, who thought the same thing and started a company called Clean the World. 

Seipler’s organization has provided 75 million bars of soap to countries with little access to clean anything.  We salute you, Mr. Seipler, someone who saw a problem and worked on a solution – you are making the world a better place.

Crockett also spoke to Chekitan Dev, a professor at Cornell University, and Dev said the first hotels did not offer soap; as time passed, hotels now offer; soap, shampoo, shower caps, sewing kits, and the list go on.  Of all those items, the soap is the hardest to carry, take with you, or reuse.  Some hotels use squirt bottles, as seen in most restaurants or public restrooms, but most offer individual soaps wrapped up in paper. 

Following up the story about Shawn Seipler, who did the great work we all think about, Seth Godin explains what that is.

Getting pushy.

Click on the Apple Music image to listen to the song on Apple Music or on the Spotify Image to listen to Spotify.

Thank you for spending a few minutes with us. Here’s one for the road!

With A Shout newsletter is written by Johnny Christian with the support of a thousand idea bits and the help of many people.

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