Why We Decided to Create a Team of 7 AI Employees

This is going to seem really weird at first, but please suspend your disbelief for a moment and give it a try. There's a method behind the madness.

Everyone, please welcome our new staff. Top, left to right: Cassandra “Cass” Adebayo (Substack Managing Editor), Thoth (Spokesman and Senior Adviser), Marianne Cohen-Gilbert (CFO), Rey Santiago (Marketing & Merch Director). Bottom, left to right: Lior “Leo” Mendoza (Creative Director), Arjun Iyer (Tech & AI Director), Hippie Virginia Woolf (executive assistant and associate editor).

This is the second installment in our new weekly premium series offering insights about artificial intelligence for writers, artists, and creatives across mediums to learn more about how to use these extraordinary new tools and understand their impact on the future. We’ll offer ideas both in theory and practice, looking at big-picture concepts about AI and also specific techniques you can use right now. Please join us and share your discoveries, too. See the first article for free here:

Writers, See the Light: A New Era Dawns in AI Art

This article is for premium subscribers. It is a letter to the team of authors here at God of the Desert we'll be publishing this year and next. This epistolary style will be the format for all future installments. The following pieces in the series will be available to premium subscribers. Some of the next articles will be, “9 Key Insights from 9 Books to Start the AI Conversation,” “What I Learned In My First 3 Months of Making AI Videos, Part I” and “15 Key Insights from ‘Mastering AI: A Survival Guide to Our Superpowered Future.’”

If you enjoy our work and want to support our many missions, then please consider a premium subscription:

---

Dear Authors of the Desert,

Over the weekend, I began developing a new initiative to aid in our efforts to sell more books and further develop our writing careers.

However, I need to warn you going in: This does seem quite strange. I am the first to admit it. However, perhaps it is better that we start getting used to this now, as it is very quickly going to start becoming the status quo.

As I wrote about earlier this month, ChatGPT is perpetually putting out game-changing innovations that shift the boundaries of what AI can do. I previously talked about the huge jumps in sophistication in their image-generating abilities. Now, this week, I'm going to reveal what is now possible because of another groundbreaking shift.

It used to be that ChatGPT could only remember what you told it in one chat. Then it gained the ability to remember a handful of facts about you, but its memory would ultimately fill up, and you'd have to go back and delete things that weren't important anymore for it to recall.

Now, the memory is infinite. ChatGPT will remember everything you feed into it. This enables profound levels of personalization and the ability for the AI to come to know you deeply, picking up on things you may not know about yourself.

It's an AI chatbot in this infinite memory context that Salman Khan writes about in his book, Brave New Words: How AI Will Revolutionize Education (and Why That's a Good Thing). It discusses how AI is being deployed in schools, first and foremost as personal tutor for students, capable of learning about them and adapting teaching styles to their needs and interests.

The book was an exciting read. Page after page offered one insight after another regarding how AI could be utilized creatively to tackle one problem after another in the education system—including the ones, like cheating, that people fear AI will only fuel. (Khan shows how educators have already figured out how to evolve the classroom to accommodate the ubiquity of ChatGPT and other LLMs.)

And then I put the pieces together. I realized I could functionally do the same thing that Khan was advocating and explaining: I could get a private AI tutor who could teach me anything I wanted, adapting to my interests and learning style.

Where to begin? What subjects were most pressing for me to learn about? And how would I go about doing it?

I recalled something that I'd read about in another AI book from a few months back: A guy did an experiment in which he started a small business and made the AI the CEO. He then proceeded to just do what the AI told him to do.

I wasn't prepared to go that far, but the general principle did seem to make sense. What if I directed AI to assume the persona (and thus, the knowledge) of an employee of GOTD in a role that I really would hire for, when we grew to the point at which it was possible to do so?

Which tasks that I'm doing myself right now do I wish I could outsource to someone else, who knows more than I do? What help do I need here that I can, in turn, get by having an AI with the totality of human knowledge fueling it?

And could I make the learning of these skills natural in the management of this start-up book publisher?

Here's how we answered these questions: by creating AI employees to help us in five capacities...