🍹 Getting Started

Starting something new is daunting beyond compare. This applies particularly to creative work, where you're essentially offering a chunk of your fragile heart to the monsters and men to do with it as they wish.

But you put yourself out there anyway because you believe you've got something to offer. You love what you do, and you can only hope your audience will love it, too.

Welcome to Kessentials, a multi-faceted email newsletter I'll send out thrice a week. I'm in the early stages of figuring out a consistent Kessentials theme and message, but you can generally expect fun, truth, and thought provocation.

I'm glad you're here for the beginning of what I hope will become bigger than all of us someday. :)

Na ikikubamba, you can use any of the miniature icons under my name 👆🏼 to share Kessentials. Alternatively, sambaza hii link.

ChatGPT: A Backstage Pass

ChatGPT is pretty impressive, creating coherent strings of words from whatever prompts you feed it.

Unlike many of my fellow word nerds who write for a living, I didn't feel threatened by its seemingly magical capabilities. It's far from perfect, and it's fairly easy to tell when someone's writing borrowed a page from the generative AI tool.

Recently, I discovered that "Everything that glitters isn't gold" also applies to Microsoft's $10 billion buy.

A lot of behind-the-scenes work goes into turning robots into capable conversational partners. One of the things OpenAI, ChatGPT's creator, had to do before releasing its baby into the world was ensure that that baby wouldn't proceed to cuss people out and uncover graphic (and) sexual content.

Since generative AI is trained on the entire internet catalog, leaving it unhinged would quickly go south for its users.

Who can effectively separate the wheat from the chaff? Humans. But that meant that some humans had to be exposed to the chaff, never mind their allergies.

TIME wrote a brilliant exposé on the Kenyan workers OpenAI contracted to dive into the internet's darkest depths for a measly 200 bob an hour. And that's not all. As it turns out, mental health services were limited or missing for those who arguably needed them most.