Julian Dunn's Stack

Another great episode from Cal Newport. He posits that the biggest impact AI will have on work is not massive white collar job loss, but making those jobs miserable. That's because white collar managers often already evaluate their employees' productivity using bullshit proxy metrics that incentivize busyness, or the appearance of productivity: how many e-mails you are sending today, how "present" you are in Slack, whether you are visibly working at all hours, and so on. It's already exhausting and about to get more so if these AI tools are here to stay.

I wish Newport didn't focus so much on what individuals can do, but in the absence of more systemic change I guess that will have to do. His five suggestions to resist the urge to jump on every stimulus and ultimately get nothing done are:

Plan weekly. On Monday morning, ask yourself what important things that create unambiguous value for your organization must get worked on that week, and prioritize them by finding & protecting time on your calendar. That might involve canceling or rescheduling certain meetings to do so.

Create and maintain an ongoing portfolio. This is a document listing all important initiatives, projects, or accomplishments you are responsible for, so that you can counter the narrative that you don't "look busy enough". The doc should list accomplishments by month, quarter, etc. and include impact / positive consequences. It's a tool you can bring to quarterly reviews, or show to your managers, or use as an instrument to ask for feedback on what should change.

Avoid what AI can do. If a task is something that you could largely automate with LLM queries, then that is a task not making the best use of your unique skills, training, and knowledge. If most of what you are doing is just automated by AI or could soon be automated by AI, then you are vulnerable and bringing it upon yourself.

Pursue upskill projects. Always have some sort of new skill that you are acquiring that's valuable and relevant to your job that will make you more rare and valuable. If possible, connect this to something you are working on for your job. The harder the skill is to acquire, the more you can escape the trap of "AI-accelerated pseudoproductivity" because it's hard-won value that AI can't replicate.

Care about your writing and write well. This is the most straightforward way to differentiate yourself from the LLMs. Take the time to write well; make your emails, reports, or any professional written document extremely clear, succinct, and well-crafted. When everyone else is sending out long reports with bullet-point lists and emojis attached to everything with convoluted AI-generated language, you are sending out clear and concise communications that have a point and for which its meaning is crystal clear. Set yourself up as an alternative.

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/31/magazine/ai-actress-tilly-norwood.html?unlocked_article_code=1.mlA.YX-h.f6FNjSsACQJZ&smid=url-share

Surprisingly not as terrible a "profile" as I thought it would be. The writer, Taffy Brodesser-Akner, found that "interviewing" the AI made her feel exhausted, like being on a computer all day. Some key observations I had:

Most of the AI's responses were not particularly insightful or compelling, which you wouldn't expect them to be since it's a text extrusion machine that outputs the mean, but maybe people would find them more compelling if they didn't know they were coming from an LLM? Not every interview subject (and celebrities, certainly!) says things that are insightful, but we often ascribe more insight to them because they are coming from a human.

If this is true, then I believe this will lead to more content producers hiding the fact that output is AI-generated, because people get that ick factor/uncanny valley effect when they realize they are interacting with a robot. Such producers -- Hollywood executives, for example -- have no incentive to clearly label output as AI, because if AI-generated content can engender emotional reactions in audiences (so long as they don't know it's AI), then this is a margin-maximizing machine. The only risk is of detection, and AI-generated content is getting harder and harder to detect, so many producers may decide that the risk of a PR disaster is worth it.

SAG-AFTRA's head, Sean Astin, had such a milquetoast reaction to AI "actors" as to be laughable: "The reason that a synthetic construct, an algorithmic output, will never take the place of a human actor is because it is not a human actor.” Yeah dude, that's tautological; you need to say more. You'd think he would do something like explaining that only human actors can create unique emotional experiences and reactions in audiences, unlike language models that essentially just parrot existing patterns in their training data, etc. Or even saying something like audiences will demand to see humans and not AI because humans value connection to other humans, or something like that.

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/19/business/media/future-of-truth-ai-quotes.html?unlocked_article_code=1.lVA.97Uj.inQcWskitKAB&smid=nytcore-ios-share

Also,

“These A.I. errors do not, in fact, diminish the larger questions that the book raises about truth, trust and A.I. and its impact on society, democracy and editorial,” he added.

“People who go all in on AI agents now are guaranteeing their obsolescence. If you outsource all your thinking to computers, you stop upskilling, learning, and becoming more competent.”

danah boyd on how social media became parasocial media.

I have seen this too. Like Mitchell, I find it sad because people I previously respected as rational thinkers seem to have lost their minds over this technology.

Glad to see that "Ghost In the Machine" is getting more airtime and awareness. (I still haven't seen it, though.) This is a good quote:

"AI resistance is also actively being co-opted by big tech. Some AI doomers might look like they have things in common with AI resistance, but their whole point of view is that AI is going to become a super-intelligent godlike entity. It distracts from where the actual power sits and accommodates the actual harm being done—like horrifically racist predictive policing algorithms in justice systems. This isn’t existential; it is actual harm. These doomer groups get all of the funding and media attention, then issue vague statements about phoning your senator and regulating AI. It’s a waste of political will and energy. I think it will become increasingly clear where and how real AI resistance will be centralized and what it will look like. I think that by next year, we’ll look back at our 2024 and 2025 obsession with AI, and we’ll giggle. The limitations of these systems are already becoming clear. And in 10 years, certainly, it will be hilarious."