Cautiously Optimistic Week: Day Two

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Okay, so we’re continuing on the journey to transition this site so that it is completely written by artificial intelligence. The first step was signing up with the company that has created this incredible technology. (I’ll give you more details on the company later this week.)

One of the services this company provides is if you type in any subject, it will give you ideas for different “listicles” you can write on that subject.

So, the first thing I did was type in “magic tricks” and here are the ideas that it gave me.

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Hmmm… okay. Well…, I’ll be honest. That’s not the most inspiring start. I mean, for being automatically generated, I guess they’re alright. But it seems like they couldn’t even really crack five ideas with this. Are the five best tricks to amaze my friends really that different than the five best tricks to impress my friends? The first and the third idea also seem kind of similar as well. It seems like it’s just about plugging adjectives and an arbitrary number of minutes into a sentence. The last idea is fine, but there’s no chance of me sifting through youtube videos to write such an article.

So I wouldn’t call this the most scintillating start. But that’s okay, this was like a free bonus feature on the site. What you have to pay for are the actual fully formed articles.

To do that, you start by buying ten article ideas. Here’s what we got:

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Now, I admit that nine out of those ten article ideas sounded very similar. Again, it seems like they just swapped in different numbers and descriptors. If I’d known that’s all it was going to be, I wouldn’t have paid for it. I feel like I can do that much myself.

  • A Dozen Magic Tricks to Amaze the Stupid

  • 5 Magic Tricks to Steal your Dad’s Girlfriend

  • 20 Tricks To Make Your Aunt Ask If You’re Involved In Some Weird Devil Shit

That’s fairly easy to do. I was hoping for some ideas with a little more substance. But I did find one topic in that list that was made for this site.

Confessions of An Amateur Magician: How to Perform Magic Tricks At Home

Perfect! That’s an idea that’s right in line with the ethos of this site. “Confessions” suggests the same candidness that I try and bring to this site. “Amateur Magician” is the perspective I write from. And “Home” is one of my primary performing venues. Amazing!

The next step was determining which artificial intelligence-generated outline I wanted to use for the article. Here were the options they gave me…

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Now, while I was intrigued by some of the more detailed options, I thought it might be interesting if—for our first go around—we went with the most open-ended choice. Which is clearly choice number 5.

There was one more step before the article could be generated. I needed to write the intro.

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So that’s how it will begin. Tomorrow I will roll out the first in what I’m guessing will be 1000s of AI-written articles about the subject of magic. We are about to enter a golden-age of magic content and/or the beginning of the dullest Walter Gibson novel ever created. Cross your fingers.