I Wrote a 40-Page Motivational Manifesto About How Not to Be a Mark for Predatory "Intimacy Capitalism" AI Girlfriends
And because who doesn't love irony, I used AI to create the book cover, combine the writing into a PDF book and initially brainstorm ideas for the book itself.
I once had a newspaper editor tell me when I was taking a job that had nothing to do with the industry, “Just don’t forget how to write. Every day I don’t write I get worse at it.”
So I always try to push myself even when I don’t feel like it to hit certain goals to keep me in practice. And this Substack is a good example: three times a week, even when it requires me to experiment. Which is exactly what today’s post is all about—a grand experiment in seeing exactly how I use AI to write: which is usually by realizing how much I hate what it generates…and inspiring me to do better.
I do actually love AI for marketing writing. As marketing writing is usually fairly cold, dead and high-converting. Example: I took a course at a shooting range earlier this year, and I quickly showed the marksman teacher exactly how you could iterate with ChatGPT to create a marketing lead funnel tailored to different populations and demos and go back and forth to make it more aggressive. The output was great—“Empowered women, roll up!”—and exactly what its best at. Just cold hard, leadin’.
But when it comes to writing that comes from the human spirit, the best way that it works is often in realizing just how cold and dead it feels that it eventually inspires you to use none of it at all.
Think of it like the “I Really Don’t Want People to Ask ‘Did ChatGPT Write This?’ Effect.”
However, I did use the AI to help streamline the process of book creation at several points along the way—including learning how to put the book on Gumroad, how to create the book and in creating the book cover using Midjourney and Canva. I’ll also show you my iterations of the book’s “principles” that I used in brainstorming with it initially so you can see how even though I didn’t use a word of the AI’s writing—what it did do was use it to provide what I would call the “editor effect” that can make you feel like you are brainstorming alongside another party.
My initial attempt was going to be a sexy novel called “Plaything,” and then I moved into self-help, and then yesterday when this new AI girlfriend advert on Twitter inspired a deluge of quote-tweets talking about how it was basically over for humans I pivoted to make the book be speaking directly to (mostly) men who feel like they have no chance of asking women out anymore at all. Essentially, it draws together what I’ve found to be my best you-can-do-it, take-risks life advice for powering through the terror of rejection and getting out of a place where you feel like you’ve just given up completely.
You can download the book for free here—and I hope you do! And below, I’m going to take you through the behind-the-scenes process of its creation for anyone wanting to try selling digital downloads themselves on Gumroad to see how I did it.
Ready to learn? Away we go.