scott b. weingart

Let's make a Grammarly competitor, also with AI personas offering advice.

The first persona (without permission, of course) is called Grammarly. It gives you mostly helpful Grammarly-style advice, but sometimes suggests sticking commas inside words.

The Grammarly folks would be ok with that, yeah?

(I am sure that story exists, I've just never read it, and until recently never lived it.)

Sci-fi predicted a full-as-possible simulated you, but I've not read a story describing a million different sims of you, each lossy and bad in different ways—some created by you yourself but most created by companies from your thin traces in their worlds.

Cool story, uncomfortable to live through.

It really does represent one logical conclusion of social media's evaporation of the public/private distinction. I'm no celebrity, but I now have an unauthorized grokipedia entry and an eponymous grammarly bot.

We're all public figures now, and public figures have less control of their likenesses.

Let's make a Grammarly competitor, also with AI personas offering advice.

The first persona (without permission, of course) is called Grammarly. It gives you mostly helpful Grammarly-style advice, but sometimes suggests sticking commas inside words.

The Grammarly folks would be ok with that, yeah?

see also

🫠

I'll be rich!

Grammarly window showing "Scott Weingart" helping me out with a helpful writing tip.

I just made up the most inane-yet-me-sounding 150 words I could think of and shoved it into Grammarly, and indeed the first 'AI expert' it came up with to help was me.

Grammarly window showing "Scott Weingart" helping me out with a helpful writing tip.

I just made up the most inane-yet-me-sounding 150 words I could think of and shoved it into Grammarly, and indeed the first 'AI expert' it came up with to help was me.

Tomorrow!

Turns out a technology optimized over centuries actually works pretty well!

I'm in the "AI has good uses camp" but 99% of people working in our around AI are working as hard as they possibly can to alienate even me.

Question 7: If you chose "no, but I would like to" in Question 1, please write a 500-word apology to our contractor, OpenAI:

(❗) This is a required question, and insufficient groveling will result in dire consequences.

"𝘏𝘢𝘮. To be, or not to be, that is the Queſtion:"

📎: It looks like Ham is trying to write a question! Have you considered adding a question mark, and one of the six basic question words ("who", "what", "where", "why", "when", or "how")? Hope that helps! 🤗

(Fun story! The military spends more on music annually than Congress spends on NEH.)

(Fun story! The military spends more on music annually than Congress spends on NEH.)

This was in 2014 or so, but they could have been ahead of their time!

Still shook by that college radio show: "Okay guys, this one's a deep cut and starts kinda slow, but stick around 'till the end because I think you'll like it. It's called Stairway to Heaven by a band called Led Zeppelin."

Indeed, and adjusting for inflation, the agency distributes only a third of what it awarded in the late '70s.

As reported, NEH is now focusing more dollars on fewer awards. The fewer the awards, the more difficult it is for the wide breadth of the humanities to find support. That is, even though their budget hasn't decreased, their ability to provide structural support for the entire sector is shrinking.

But realistically, a long-term vision isn't possible without federal support. To simply continue existing NEH funding levels in perpetuity as an endowment would take a one-time donation of $4.2 billion.

There are maybe fifty charitable foundations in the world with endowments that size.

There are potential paths forward. Congress has the opportunity to grow and reshape NEH to be the support it has always needed to be. Organizations like the Federation of State Humanities Councils, the National Humanities Alliance, and ACLS are stepping up both to plug hole and to offer leadership.

In an environment where the breadth of the humanities already gets so little (and private philanthropy has in recent years either receded entirely or focused on more specific areas), these programmatic and funding cuts will fundamentally alter public and academic humanities in the US.

The programs shuttered at NEH were core infrastructure for some subdisciplines, or offered a critical route to the humanities for underrepresented communities.

Although some individual grant cuts were rescinded, in many cases the damage is already done: projects are shuttered, jobs are lost, etc.

A chart showing how the relative sizes of federal grant funding in the US, with arts and humanities getting an infinitesimal portion.

To offer some context, here's a graphic our fabulous intern Aidan Nuttall put together in 2023.

When we compared our per capita humanities research funding against 42 other countries, there was only a single country that spent less (South Africa), and most countries spent 10x-250x more.

It's a truly distressing state on both sides of the pond, to be sure.

I no longer have access to the data from when I was at NEH, but we did a deep comparison of the UK and the US across several agencies and we found the UK spends about 10x more per person on the humanities specifically. But both countries underspend quite a bit compared to other wealthier nations.

My partner certainly agrees!

Stop doing it, obviously, but also cut yourself some slack. Your expertise is unexpectedly, suddenly, and globally relevant! That's never a good thing for someone on social media.