Salad Days for Con Men

How long can a grift go on before the mark catches on?

The Great Change began nearly twenty years ago as a series of unscheduled posts to Blogger dot com. I had been putting out a quarterly newsletter in print for at least twenty years before that and writing for other people’s publications since I was in grade school. In 2008, I paused to ponder why I write but decided to keep at it anyway. This is my 809th post to The Great Change.

Artificial intelligence has reached an inflection point, as we all see. Many creative artists are struggling to decide whether to embrace that or reject it. Justine Bateman just concluded a remarkable film festival in Hollywood that featured all A.I.-free content and 100% of the proceeds went to the filmmakers so they could be less inhibited by not having to curry favor with distributors to make their films. At the same time, Bateman-the-filmmaker is also experimenting with A.I. and making no secret about it.

An interview with Mark Cuban hipped me to the potential for A.I. platforms like NotebookLM to turn written blogs like The Great Change into a podcast, using human voice simulation to imitate a talk-show-style conversation from the text.

Then, using a transcript of your faked podcast, other software can be used to produce a short video segment, perhaps 10…