Like it or not, AI is everywhere.

If you’re like most of us, you’re using AI for at least a few things, like planning a vacation or finishing that last-minute report for work.

You may have been amazed, disappointed, or (most likely) a mix of both.

AI might be useful for a lot of things…and it might be deeply unsuitable for others. But it’s hard to tell based on what you see in the news or on social media.

That’s why I created this newsletter. It’s dedicated to testing out real-world applications of AI and reporting the results, no matter how lame or inconclusive they are.

My story

Hi, I’m Karen Spinner, the creator of this newsletter.

As a marketing copywriter, my interest in AI began as an exercise in self-defense. When ChatGPT was released back in November 2022, I immediately saw its potential to torpedo my professional life. After all, even the early version could write in fairly clear, coherent sentences, even if they were a bit stilted and bland.

Since then, the technology has evolved rapidly, and so have the wild promises and claims. Reading the latest tech news, I would find myself asking questions like, Can it really do that? And, knowing first-hand that a lot of technology marketing is more aspirational than grounded in real, tangible functions and features, I decided to see for myself.

Over the past couple of years, I have tested AI at work and at home to figure out exactly where it’s most useful and where it may be counterproductive or even present new risks. The results have been exciting (building stuff!), dismaying (the 13-hour itinerary from hell!), and just plain weird (AI agents collapsing into infinite loops).

And now I’m spending more time and energy on AI than ever before. My old employer recently went out of business, in part due to disruptions from AI, and now my day job is helping companies both create content and find ways to integrate AI into their writing and research processes.

So I’m testing, learning, and now sharing my experiences with AI in this newsletter. Thanks for reading, and feel free to add the results of your experiments to the comments of any post.