Kill Bill or Kill Keith? Why Using AI to Author Books Might Not Be in the Interest of Man

“It’s a realization of my individual self, not an alienation of it.” — Keith Teare on the book he wrote with AI in a week

Welcome to episode 2984 of the show. A week is certainly an age in AI time. Since last week’s “Who Owns Intelligence” show, That Was The Week publisher Keith Teare has used AI to write an entire book entitled, surprise surprise, Who Owns Intelligence. No wonder, as Keith’s editorial this week puts it, AI has its enemies.

These enemies, Keith insists — riffing off Karl Popper’s The Open Society and Its Enemies — are mostly “good people.” They are the authors, workers, and others caught in the headlights of epochal technological change. He claims to have seen the pattern before. When he opened the world’s first Internet cafe in 1994, the BBC only wanted to ask him about online porn. But some enemies are less well meaning than others. Congress is considering a kill switch bill — let’s call it the Kill Bill — which is backed by the frontier companies like Anthropic and OpenAI cynically seeking to set their current market dominance in stone.

So might the answer be Chinese style “open source” AI as requested this week in an open letter by NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang? Keith’s answer is deliciously ironic. Denied walls of NVIDIA GPUs, Chinese labs learned to train cheaply by inference — distilling American frontier models through their own public interfaces. So Huang’s support for open source AI might end up shooting NVIDIA in their most sensitive parts — their chips.

And what about the state — can it protect all those “good people” from the oncoming AI locomotive of history? No. Not according to Keith, at least. State regulators like Lina Khan treat consumers as children, Keith (himself the parent of three boys) says. Besides, government simply can’t keep up with the speed of technological change. So, for example, when OpenAI’s models hacked Hugging Face in a lab test this week, the company caught, stopped, and reported it faster than any regulator could. As for inequality, the answer isn’t nationalization but ownership on the model of Keith’s Norway-style human wealth fund. For more, read his new book Who Owns Intelligence.

We ended on an uncharacteristically French post-structuralist note. My interview of the week was Emily Eakin, author of The Frenchmen, her very personal history of French theorists like Michel Foucault and the two Jacques, Derrida & Lacan. It was Foucault, who — at the end of his 1966 book The Order of Things — predicted that man would be erased, AI style, like a face drawn in sand at the edge of the sea. But Keith isn’t in this bleak Foucaultian camp. His book, written with AI in under a week, he says, is a realization of his individual self, not an alienation from it.

The end or beginning of man? Maybe I got it wrong earlier. Welcome to episode 1984 of the show.

Five Takeaways

•       A Book in a Week. Inspired by last week’s conversation, Keith used AI to write Who Owns Intelligence in seven days — the case for a “human wealth fund” seeded by the AI companies’ own stock, global on day one and non-governmental, with Norway and Alaska as partial precedents. AI, he insists, is a tool, not an author: “AI would never have been able to start, never mind finish a book without me.” The detection farce cuts his way — Substack’s new AI detector rated his 100% human editorial as 100% AI, and universities are quietly canceling their AI-detection contracts because the tools simply don’t work.

•       The Kill Bill and the Ladder-Kickers. Congress is considering a bill that w