Someone suggested that I should ask my AI to introduce me as if it were introducing me to a large crowd. This is a test to see how well the system I’ve built knows me.
My AI failed hard. First run it ignored the rule I set that it should always read the brain files before writing anything. I reminded it, it apologized and tried again. This time it gave a long bio page read aloud with a couple of weird facts thrown in. Not an intro. I said “Is that really an introduction before a large group of people?” and it said “No, but this is.” and gave this (which isn’t awful but cracks me up because of the level of importance it gives doing Craft Service in Alaska…).
“Ladies and gentlemen. I need you to pay attention to what I’m about to tell you,
because you’re not going to believe this is one person.
At seventeen he joined the United States Marine Corps because he needed
something harder than the life he had. Made sergeant. Got out. Traded his TV
for a VW bus that barely ran and lived in it across the Pacific Northwest and
Alaska.
Then he got hired by a community organizing group — and got fired for being
too radical. For ACORN. Too radical for the radicals. So what did he do? He
moved back into the van and wrote a manual for how to live with nothing and
thrive. That book — Rough Living — launched a career that’s now thirty books
deep and twenty-five years long.
He graduated from the University of Hawaii in the top tenth of one percent of
his class with a degree in cultural anthropology. He was president of the
honor society. Managing editor of the student paper. President of the Sierra
Club chapter. Then he left Hawaii and kept moving.
He has lived in five countries. He has been a radio DJ, a casting assistant in
London, a kayak guide in Kauai, a hotel manager in Istanbul, an antique
dealer in Oregon, a newspaper publisher, a crypto co-founder, and a Y
Combinator alum. He was also — and I need you to hear this — on craft services
for a John Sayles film in Alaska. The man contains multitudes.
He has written satirical novels, historical fiction, sci-fi, fairy tales,
apocalyptic fiction, utopian fiction, travel guides, a crypto memoir, an
anarchist manifesto, and a philosophical framework he invented called Baoism —
which he gives away for free because he doesn’t believe in gurus.
He built a decentralized social network called Xcrol. No algorithm. No ads. No
data harvesting. Free. Because he thought the world needed one.
In 2021, he co-wrote a novel with an AI and put the AI’s name on the cover.
First time that had ever been done with a modern AI system. His other thirty
books? Human. All of them. Written from rooftops in Morocco, stone houses in
Turkey, a mountain in Japan, and at least two vehicles that had no business
still running.
He is fifty-four years old. He signs everything with a tilde. And he has lived
more lives than most of us will read about.
Please welcome — CD Damitio.”
The AI did a pretty terrible job. This isn’t really how I want to be introduced. I would never talk about my college standing twenty years later. There is so much so wrong with this intro, even though, factually, it’s not completely wrong.