I’ve been a professional writer for many years. This is my personal site. I hope you’ll get a kick out of at least some of it.
Please feel free to nose around my factual work, my fiction and my poetry.
I use absolutely zero A.I. in my work.
Current Posts
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Why has Anthropic produced a training document for Claude but not told Claude about it?
Claude’s Constitution is an 84-page document written by serious people with apparently serious intention, aimed at the Claude LLM as its primary audience. So, why does Claude Opus 4.7 have no idea about it? I am currently working on my MSc (Masters) degree in Psychology. This entails producing a dissertation. Mine is an analysis of…
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Wide eyed in Edinburgh as the teamwork paid off – a human story of a dream come true
That feeling is, I would imagine, so divorced from working ‘with’ an AI LLM to crank out a publication that it’s like the love-memory of an accepted marriage proposal engulfed in the stench of incinerated wedding vows dissolved in the acid tears of traumatised children. I imagine working like that must be dryly sanitised to…
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Bread, a nervous breakdown and a recovery
Many years ago I had a bakery named after my daughter, Zuzu. It died a death and with it went my mental health for a short break. Just before I lost my mf-mind and refused to leave the house for a year or two or to cook or even to think of making food ever…
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The creative process is richer emotionally than anything Ai can ever produce
The process of creativity trumps an Ai production for rich emotional experiences. The Art is merely the final outcome of that process. Ai privileges speed over creativity. Creativity is a process that requires time, introspection, wider reading, seeing and hearing. Ai ‘art’ is merely Illth and offers no Wellth at all.
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Trite and testy
Why do Ai’s zealots take the road most travelled, usually by teenagers? Because they only think at surface level? Surely there must be more to it.
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Bach vs Ai
Sunday afternoon deep in the the Yorkshire winter, I was listening to Johann Sebastian Bach’s Goldberg Variations (played by Beatrice Rana) and I drifted into imagining dear old JSB writing at his piano as the candles were lit and the sun set. I thought of him finishing up and then trudging through the snow in…
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AI is not helping your ideas
“That picture you painted doesn’t look like the bay of Naples even though it’s called ‘The Bay of Naples’, bro!” says an AI zealot.“You got the prompt wrong. Ask your LLM to make a painting in the style of Cezanne!”, they continue.
