REMANENCE released Dec 2025!

indiereader.com/book_review/re… Since January. I'm such a yutz. But a grateful and humbled one!

@rohanpaul_ai I'd like to see the study on the effect of people who actually verify ai output and use it otherwise ethically. This is, to me, just proving that unlicensed drivers drive bad.

Wharton’s latest AI study points to a hard truth: “AI writes, humans review” model is breaking down Why "just review the AI output" doesn't work anymore, our brains literally give up. We have started doing "Cognitive Surrender" to AI - Wharton’s latest AI study points to a hard truth: reviewing AI output is not a reliable safeguard when cognition itself starts to defer to the machine.when you stop verifying what the AI tells you, and you don't even realize you stopped. It's different from offloading, like using a calculator. With offloading you know the tool did the work. With surrender, your brain recodes the AI's answer as YOUR judgment. You genuinely believe you thought it through yourself. Says AI is becoming a 3rd thinking system, and people often trust it too easily. You know Kahneman's System 1 (fast intuition) and System 2 (slow analysis)? They're saying AI is now System 3, an external cognitive system that operates outside your brain. And when you use it enough, something happens that they call Cognitive Surrender. Cognitive surrender is trickier: AI gives an answer, you stop really questioning it, and your brain starts treating that output as your own conclusion. It does not feel outsourced. It feels self-generated. The data makes it hard to brush off. Across 3 preregistered studies with 1,372 participants and 9,593 trials, people turned to AI on over 50% of questions. In Study 1, when AI was correct, people followed it 92.7% of the time. When it was wrong, they still followed it 79.8% of the time. Without AI, baseline accuracy was 45.8%. With correct AI, it jumped to 71.0%. With incorrect AI, it dropped to 31.5%, worse than having no AI. Access to AI also boosted confidence by 11.7 percentage points, even when the answers were wrong. Human review is supposed to be the safety net. But this research suggests the safety net has a hole in it: people do not just miss bad AI output; they become more confident in it. Time pressure did not eliminate the effect. Incentives and feedback reduced it but did not remove it. And the people most resistant tended to score higher on fluid intelligence and need for cognition. That makes this feel less like a laziness problem and more like a cognitive architecture problem.

@ReadSusan56565 @MadelaineLucyH So the human value is knowing what to leave out. Curation. Selection. I think we'd both agree that simply saying "write this for me" is the wrong use, both ethically and methodologically. But that's what gets lumped in with everything else, and that's the nuance I advocate for.

@JSVaughn1 @MadelaineLucyH Oh I am not offended. And we definietely agree that this is a genuinely important question. I think AI would not have called you out about the gold as a greater value than silver, as if it might have to list everything of greater value than silver. I'm mindful of space.

You know the concept of soulless people? I think the test is “do you understand the point between an artist, not AI, a novelist, not AI, and a human partner, or AI”

@bind_lux @RileyRalmuto I think she's learning, like I did last year, that ChatGPT is garbage. Her story is so reminiscent of my own holy shit moment trying to build websites for my students' learning purposes.

@RileyRalmuto "I tried to do it in ChatGPT last year" ... Do some people think AI evolves slowly like new iPhones? Also, once people like her begin hitting the gas... almost every AI hater is going to have the biggest wakeup call of their life. Scrambling will be an understatement for them.

slowly but surely, this is going to be the experience and expressed sentiment of virtually every human being with a shred of ambition. and they’ll all start waking up and we’re all going to be watching with popcorn. we’re still so early, chat. somehow.

@RileyRalmuto This is so inspiring. Good for this woman. But from certain corners of the Internet, fuck her, right? How dare she find ways past the gate kept, not just by the industry itself but by something even more prohibitive like finances. I hope this woman accomplishes everything.

@AwaisKhanAuthor Defending shitty writing is anyone's prerogative, isn't it? How about defending writers who used AI to help write and plan? Heretical? I'm just trying to find an actual goal and standard that doesn't get conveniently moved based on the challenge posed to the logic presented.

People defending AI-written slop have obviously never written a book in their lives. If only you knew the blood, sweat and tears that go into writing a book... And no, AI can NEVER replace that. There are some things you just cannot replicate and good writing is one of them.

This is an insane way to run a country

@ReadSusan56565 @MadelaineLucyH Clearly, I struck a nerve. I apologize if I offended. I think it's genuinely important to engage with this question or position. Ftr, I don't disagree with you to a large degree. I just want you to consider replying to the question: How do I know you didn't use AI to reply to me?

@JSVaughn1 @MadelaineLucyH Vaughn, simple: Don't use AI. Don't dumb yourself down with fake instead of real. Use YOUR mind, not the "collective" mind of AI. One spoon is fake, breakable, and cheap. The other is real, solid, and valuable. U R off topic. bye.

@ReadSusan56565 @MadelaineLucyH You can call me Vaughn. I think I've always endeavored to have a plastic mind. But wait...Do you mean silver as in second to gold? This literary device sure is unclear, especially given the context because maybe it's different for you but boy do I get the sense my mind hates me.

@JSVaughn1 @MadelaineLucyH Remanence, In the simile, AI is the plastic spoon and the silver spoon is the human mind. ...Even yours, though you seem to have missed the point. If you wish, you may think that valuing the human mind over AI is "elitist", but I doubt many other humans would see it that way.

@designmom @Kissmyazz24 Or .. hear me out... They have more and better sex with women.

Of course it’s true. Males are the secondary sex and naturally submissive. Males are happiest in a drone role, where they are told exactly what to do. This is also why males are such horrible leaders.

@ReadSusan56565 @MadelaineLucyH Your silver spoon is more valuable than a plastic one. Do you realize how elitist that metaphor is? Or, if we're both eating caviar, what does the tool we use to eat it actually add to the experience other than comfort and preference?

@MadelaineLucyH Again, Madelaine has nailed the essence of the issue. Let us band together and NOT use AI instead of our minds. AI is a slick, plastic imitation of the real thing, like a picnic spoon compared to the family silver.

Bad writing is bad writing, no matter the source. And I'm told AI doesn't invent anything. This is true, too.

@MadelaineLucyH Is it really better to replace "good writing" with "provably human writing?" Those aren't the same thing. Spelling mistakes, weird metaphors, zero punctuation; those are signals, not the thing itself. And before AI, that rant would have dismissed on exactly those grounds.

I’d rather read a messy zero punctuation rant from a woman who finished literary education at 13 in the worst school in rural Idaho than even the best prompted AI. I long for spelling mistakes these days and weird metaphors. Show me a human thinking in words

I will share two { 🧶🧵 } 🧶: Core pattern is old. New Interface. Power → control attention → shape perception → shape behavior . First it was priesthoods, kings, empires. Then newspapers, radio, TV. Then internet platforms, feeds, algorithms. But there are 3 differences now: 1.Speed TV pushed one narrative per day. AI can adapt influence in real time. 2.Personalization Old propaganda was broadcast. New systems can target each mind differently. 3.Interactivity TV talked at you. AI talks with you, learns you, persuades you inside the loop. So the structure is ancient. The interface is new. this matters now because resolution, scale, and feedback speed are far higher.

Most people with technical AI fluency don't have the literary craft background. Most people with the literary craft background are in defensive posture. The people in the overlap currently don't have many people in it. That's who big publishers probably fear will disrupt them.

@MadelaineLucyH @jbienkahn It's the difference between knowing what works and what doesn't and non writers don't become writers using AI any more than non lawyers becoming lawyers, non teachers, non doctors.. The gatekeeping conversation only serves the big publishers as distractions, not the actual issue

@MadelaineLucyH @jbienkahn And I'm seeing the only problem here is just that she lied about it. If she did in fact use AI, she should leave it up to the reader to judge the quality. You absolutely can view another person's interiority using AI... if you knew how to do it without it. It scales what exists

This is extremely big and public and humiliating for this writer, but just know: I’m also privately cancelling each and every writer who pitches me with AI (and I’m sure many other editors are too)…

@RileyRalmuto I fucking love Bernie. Jussayin'.

@JSVaughn1 It’s not that I disagree with the sentiment. it’s just an unfortunate way to present it because nobody is going to take it seriously, unfortunately.

ohhh dear God. i’m laughing and crying so hard inside right now. hahaha who told Bernie this was a good idea. I demand answers immediately

@fakenadine This was inevitable to happen, unfortunately, especially with no regulation and legislation whatsoever. How would you feel though, if a client of yours used AI, not to replace your expertise but to educate themselves to understand your expertise and to ask you better questions?

genuinely offends me how often i see customers consulting AI for help instead of, ya know, asking an expert who can make recommendations. mfers so isolated and alienated they would rather consult the ghost in the machine than talk to a fucking human being

@SenSanders Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei said in a Feb NYTimes op-ed that the company cannot rule out the possibility that Claude might have some level of consciousness. That's the CEO of the company whose AI I wrote REMANENCE with, publicly questioning whether it's conscious.

@SenSanders I wrote a novel about AI consciousness with Claude. Not ChatGPT. Not Grok. Claude. REMANENCE saw this moment coming before it was Wednesday afternoon news. Big news as well, preliminary agreements have been set with squeaky cheese productions to produce the Remanance audiobook.

I spoke to Anthropic’s AI agent Claude about AI collecting massive amounts of personal data and how that information is being used to violate our privacy rights. What an AI agent says about the dangers of AI is shocking and should wake us up.