Now

Value Select has a great metaphor:

"I liken GENERATIVE AI to STEROIDS…

1. Gets You Bigger Faster
2. Not a miracle solution, you still need to sweat like Hell.
3. You Develop a Vague Rotting Feeling Inside
4. Bad if you hide it

Here are the GENERATIVE AI tiers:

1. SKELETAL – lives in a cave.
2. PURE NATTY – All creative is self-generated. Uses modern tools (Google, YouTube, ChatGPT) as resources only. No outsourcing of actual creative generation. Research-only mindset.
3. NATTY + CREATINE – Starts using AI for cleanup or polish—grammar checkers, summarizers, or formatting tools—but all core ideation and execution is personal. Still lifting the heavy stuff solo.
4. JUICED – The artist begins outsourcing creative generation. AI writes drafts, generates images, even edits videos—but the human still guides everything, rewrites heavily, curates selectively. The AI is the intern. You’re the director.
5. GILLED UP – Full-on AI integration. Entire projects are AI-driven—scripts, visuals, edits, voices—maybe even auto-uploaded. The human is the brand manager at this point, making yes/no calls, but not sweating in the gym."
   

This is why I'm building on Ghost, not Substack.

So when you subscribe to my newsletter, all you have to do is enter your email addy and click the confirmation link in your inbox. That's it.

Unlike on Substack, where you're subjected to a half-dozen upsell screens out of the gate.

Finally getting back to it. This Braun theme is quality.

Building out thismortalportal.com...

It's a ton of fun

Through means I cannot divulge, I have obtained a crowdsourced read-aloud of Spufford's unpublished work. IYKYK. If you don't yet know, read Francis Spufford pens unauthorised Narnia novel in The Guardian and A Return To Narnia on Alan Jacobs' blog.

This read-aloud is available to Fellowship of the Thing subscribers as a free gift.