I used to run illegal internet game shows

(Okay, maybe not illegal. But definitely unregulated. And probably inadvisable.)

I’ve been doing something with 30 years of my writing that I’m not quite ready to talk about yet. Big project. AI involved. More on that later.

But it’s already surfacing things.

Last week, I fed some old posts into NotebookLM and asked it to tell me what it found. What came back was a summary so formal and clinical that I had to read it twice to confirm it was about me.

It referred to me as “the author” throughout.

Here’s a sample:

Inspired by the voyeuristic reality TV craze of the early 2000s—particularly shows like The Real World, Big Brother, and Survivor—the author became a pioneer of “weblog game shows.” When he discovered someone else had already taken the idea for BIGBROTHERblog, he launched SURVIVORblog in August 2000. These games became infamous in the early blogging community for their drama, creativity, and the immense stress they caused the author.

The immense stress they caused the author.

YOUR MOM is immense stress they cause the author.

To be clear, it’s not wrong. I ran four of these things between 2000 and 2003. SURVIVORblog, PuppetMaster, BlindDateBlog, Big Blogger All-Star. I funded the initial prize money out of my own pocket. Drama, I absolutely invited. One game generated enough hate mail that I still think about it. Another ended with contestants threatening each other with ACTUAL PHYSICAL HARM, a final date at a Spanish restaurant in San Francisco, and at least one photograph nobody can find anymore. Including me.

NotebookLM described all of this in the same tone you’d use to summarize a municipal budget report.

The author’s stated goal was to “reduce ten otherwise civilized people to curse and use racial epithets on each other.”

(I also spelled “civilized” wrong in the original. The author would like to note that.)

I don’t know what I expected. But reading yourself described in the third person by something that has no opinion about you—no judgment, no nostalgia, no awareness that this was a person’s actual life and not a Wikipedia entry—is a specific kind of strange I wasn’t prepared for.

Anyway. More on the bigger project when I’m ready.

The author is still processing.

P.S. NotebookLM also generates infographics. I asked it to make one about the web games:

I did not ask for this analysis, and I am not sure how to feel about it.