What a Difference a Year Makes

It’s been several years since I first posted on my blog about using ChatGPT as a way to work through ideas (what I referred to at the time as “idea winnowing”) for SF&F writing. It was limited, but useful in niche ways.

It’s been a little over a year since I first posted here about using Grok as a developmental editor, when Grok 3 suddenly made a jump forward in development.

It’s been one year since I was at a convention talking about using AI to help your writing through research, copy editing, and developmental editing. I had a lot of people in the audience getting introduced to AI techniques for the first time.

This past weekend I went to the same convention and was on two AI-for-writers panels, and talked about using LLMs, the Patron Toolbox, and Grok Bot in two more panels and several one-on-ones. More people getting introduced to things for the first time, but most of them had moved well beyond the basics (or had rejected everything entirely anyway).

It’s been less than a year since projects started becoming standard in LLMs. It’s only been a few months since we got the skills features. Now we’re getting built-in agentic tools as standard features, not just in the big LLMs but as part of packaged services such as website management.

It doesn’t feel like a year. It feels like someone snuck in a decade somewhere. I don’t know where the next year is taking us but it’s going to be fun. Disruptive, but fun.

Of course, finding it “fun” has a lot to do with knowing way more than the average bear about the topic and therefore not being threatened by it or particularly susceptible to myths about it.

Knowledge is power. Those without knowledge are powerless; those who reject knowledge give up their agency entirely.