This is my bi-weekly “newsletter” delivered straight to your inbox with at least one guaranteed typo I’ll catch after hitting send! If email collectors’ items aren’t your thing, don’t hesitate to switch to the RSS feed or just bookmark loudpoet.com and check in now and then. You do you!
NOTE: May was a weird month, even by 2025’s standards. I almost skipped this newsletter again, but realized it felt similar to when I’d go too long without running. I never have a theme in mind when writing these, but sometimes one reveals itself as I go. Thanks as always for reading, and best wishes for a good June!
_ONE
Foggy feeds: the decline in my feed reader subscriptions | Baldur Bjarnason
So, if people are suffering from fogginess without being aware of it – a distinct possibility because I certainly thought I had recovered to almost a 100% when I discovered that, no, I had only been at 50% – then the popularity of chatbots and other generative writing aids could be extremely effective at concealing that fogginess from the readers.
This is a fascinating and disturbing take from the always insightful Bjarnason, but it’s a pretty compelling theory. I suspect a lot of the people he’s referring to are obligated to churn out content to make a living (or maintain the illusion of such), which has already had a clearly negative impact on quality across the board over the past decade-plus. That some of them might unknowingly be in a prolonged state of brain fog and are (unknowingly?) relying on LLMs to help them navigate through it is actually kind of depressing.
I know a few people who suffered through prolonged periods of COVID-related “brain fog,” and I’ve occasionally wondered about it myself, but I oddly never connected the dots to a decline in someone’s writing and/or an over-reliance on AI tools.
Rest assured, for better and worse, any “fogginess” in my own writing is 100% my own brain!
__TWO
The Hidden Costs of AI Copyediting Tools: An Editor’s Review | Ariane Peveto
To more objectively gauge the abilities of various AI tools, I took a fantasy short story and performed developmental, line editing, and copyediting on it, then compared my edits with the feedback generated by different AI-powered editing platforms. To round out the review, I also considered other criteria, such as user experience and external factors like the terms of service and how users’ work is stored.
While I hate engagement-baiting “I asked ChatGPT…” posts, I genuinely appreciate thoughtful use and analysis of AI tools for clear and specific use cases. So many pundits make big claims about AI’s potential in publishing, but I’ve yet to find any truly interesting or innovative examples that weren’t just misleading shortcuts for people who lack experience with, or interest in, existing tools. (One of my favorites will always be the guy who used ChatGPT to create a pivot table and presented it as a revelatory use case.)
Peveto does a great job evaluating Grammarly, Hemingway Editor, ProWritingAid, and AutoCrit, and most importantly, shows her work every step of the way. Some of her findings would have slipped by most pundits “experimenting” with these tools because they don’t have any actual editing experience beyond trusting Word’s spellcheck and grammar suggestions.
___THREE
You See? Generative AI is Bad At Doing My Job | Maris Kreizman
More importantly, it’s an insult to readers.
Kreizman nails the heart of the problem with the (latest) AI-generated fiasco in publishing. The executives who thought this was a great revenue idea — from Hearst/King to the individual papers who blindly took it on without vetting it — simply don’t care about readers. After years of multiple rounds of layoffs combined with the never-ending demand for more and more content, this was one of the most predictable AI-related outcomes imaginable.
Practically every objectively boneheaded business decision publishers make is rooted in that simple fact: a fundamental disdain for readers. (Yes, that applies to library lending policies, too.)
I’ll extend a bit of grace to Marco Buscaglia, the freelancer behind the latest embarrassing screwup, because he’s ultimately just another victim of the “inevitable” narrative that’s convinced so many people that AI tools increase productivity, which is effectively the latest corporate spin on “doing more with less.”
____FOUR
How Honeycrisp Apples Went From Marvel to Mediocre | Genevieve Yam
Many farmers who invested heavily in planting Honeycrisp trees likely did not take into account just how difficult it would be to grow, harvest, and store the apples. And maybe some just decided it was worth the risk. At its most expensive, at the peak of the Honeycrisp craze in 2012 and 2013, the apple fetched a hefty price nationwide, with Esquire reporting it at $4.50 per pound in New York City.
Apple-picking has been a family tradition for years, and we still head up to the Hudson Valley at least once a year to do it. I ‘ve noticed some of my favorites don’t taste as good as they used to when we go picking, but I assumed that was just a seasonal thing in our area.
I’ve also often wondered why certain apples seemed to be available year-round at the supermarket but stopped buying them out of season because the taste was wildly unpredictable. Turns out the answer is… wait for it… Capitalism!
_____FIVE
Collaborating on The Mysteries – Bill Watterson and John Kascht
I don’t work that way at all. I don’t want to know where the picture is going. I want the result to surprise me! I don’t make precious objects, and I expect to make radical changes right up to the very end. I try to keep the question marks going as long as possible. It would be hard to overstate the incompatibility of our creative approaches.
When someone asks me about my all-time favorite comics, I often hesitate to name Calvin and Hobbes because some people don’t include comic strips in their personal definition of the medium. I do, though, and I remember when Bill Watterson ended the strip back in 1995, because I was an avid reader from the beginning. I even own the super-fancy collected edition, which you can see in the header above, next to the one for my other favorite, The Far Side.
I was intrigued when The Mysteries was announced and loved it when I read it at the end of 2023. Before I read it, though, this great BTS video of him and collaborator John Kascht completely sold me on it, and I rewatch it now and then for inspiration.
My own creative approach sits somewhere between them but definitely leans heavily in Watterson’s direction. While I appreciate structure and clearly defined goals, I also love winging it and seeing what develops. I have to reign that in more often than not because, as they both note, it’s not an ideal way to collaborate, but like their experience with The Mysteries shows, it can also create something magical and unexpected!
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On mental fog:
being foggy can be an intensely humiliating experience: having a confused moment in public, whether it’s in the store or among friends, or being unable to do something you used to, has the effect of collapsing you down into a broken body and is an experience that sits with you for a long time.
WORD.
I believe far too many people who had COVID with few symptoms, or perhaps even no physical symptoms, really aren’t aware of how it changed their brain; humanity was already struggling with self-extinction via changing the climate and the petty hatreds between groups/nations/religions, but this fogged thinking will, I fear, finish us off.
On GenAI in “writing tools”:
While I appreciate spellcheck, because I often type too fast to catch the typos, there’s a reason we’ve spent a decade cursing autocorrect: it can’t reason.
The suggestions GenAI throws at you while trying to write an email do nothing but derail your train of thought (Dr Malka Older posted about her annoyance with that on Bluesky a few days ago), and will make people who aren’t used to thinking as they write, second-guess themselves into incoherence that matches whatever homogenized template the mass comparison of LLM conjured: “nuance” is just another collection of characters fed into it.
On the confabulated list of books:
There are entire industries constantly shooting themselves on the face; publishing–news, books, magazines–is just ever so consistent about it.
On capitalism and what we eat:
These fuckers are why we can’t ever have nice things (substitute apples with green, seedless grapes)
On The Mysteries:
This passed me by entirely! HOW?
I previously assumed we’d find out 20 years from now how much damage COVID really did, but current events make think we’ll never know — and that’s the goal.
The Mysteries is an admittedly weird book, but I like to think of it as something Calvin would have created as an adult, and it makes me happy!