Author: Christopher S Penn

  • Why Locally Run Open Weights AI Models Are More Trustworthy Than ChatGPT and Claude

    “Do we really trust Chinese models that much?”” Lisa asked that question in the Trust Insights Analytics for Marketers Slack group and the short answer is, “we really trust models under our control that much”, which means open weights models, models we download and run on our own hardware or in trusted inference providers. Here’s…

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  • Why Creators Should Automate AI Inputs, Not Outputs

    As a creator, thinker, or knowledge worker: Use AI to automate your outputs, and you’re likely to get weaker. Use AI to automate your inputs, and you’re likely to get stronger.

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  • The AI Pay Cut: Why 10x Productivity Isn’t Raising Your Salary

    AI is a pay cut for you, the human. It’s tempting to take the easy route and talk about a stagnant job market, or tech companies using AI as a cover for large scale job cuts, but that’s not what I’m talking about here. A decade ago, Katie Robbert and I worked at a PR…

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  • Open Weights AI vs Big Tech: Why Western Giants Are Pushing for Bans

    Western #AI companies: “Protect us from Chinese AI companies!” Also Western AI companies: “NO you can’t use our models for cybersecurity” Hugging Face ended up using Z.ai GLM-5.2 to defend itself from OpenAI rogue models: https://huggingface.co/blog/security-incident-july-2026 Whenever you hear a Western politician talking about banning/regulating open weights models, it’s because a broligarch has his hands…

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  • Stop Silent AI Failures: Tell Your Model What Wins to Resolve Conflicting Instructions

    Tell AI what wins. One of the things that will degrade AI performance the most – and silently – is conflicting instructions where the AI has to determine what you mean. If you look at the reasoning traces (internal chat) when you give conflicting instructions, you’ll see AI models literally chasing their tails. It looks…

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  • Almost Timely News: 🗞️ What Would A Purely AI-Generated Newsletter Look Like? (2026-08-30)

    _Almost Timely News: 🗞️ What Would A Purely AI-Generated Newsletter Look Like? (2026-08-30) :: View in Browser_ The Big Plug ✍️ Enroll in my new course, AI for Writers and learn how to make AI write better. Content Authenticity Statement 100% of this week’s newsletter was made by me, the human, BUT you will see…

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  • P2P: The Idle-Period Advantage

    Disclosure: 100% of this document is AI-generated, made by GLM-5.3-Flash on DeepInfra using the OpenCode harness. The silent stretch where your customers go dark Somewhere in your CRM right now sits a customer who bought from you almost a year ago. They opened everything you sent them for the first few weeks after the purchase.…

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  • How AI Text Watermarking Actually Works and Why Original Writing Always Wins

    Here’s how AI watermarking in text works, generally speaking. This holds true for Google’s SynthID as well as other systems like Anthropic’s announced system. Every time AI generates a word (or token), it calculates probabilities for what word should come next. The MOST probable terms are usually what AI picks from. (hence why bad prompts…

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  • Ditch the Detectors: The One Question That Exposes AI Slop

    “Without pulling up the document, tell me what’s in it.” That one sentence tells you in seconds whether or not something is AI slop. You don’t need an AI detector. You don’t need fancy software. You don’t need to burn more tokens or waste more resources. Whether you’re a supervisor, a parent, a teacher, or…

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  • The AI Advantage Is Dead: What Builds a Real Competitive Moat Today?

    “when everyone’s super… no one will be!” – Syndrome, the Incredibles When everyone has access to state of the art models, your AI is no longer any kind of advantage, and depending on you or your team’s level of skill, might even be a disadvantage. So, if AI isn’t an advantage any more, then what…

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