#Blogging

Yesterday I listened to an episode of The Daily, my favorite news podcast, titled “The Writers’ Revolt Against AI Companies”. The episode focused on a current news story about comedian Sarah Silverman, who is suing OpenAI (the company behind ChatGPT) for copyright infringement. Sheera Frenkel, the New York Times tech journalist interviewed on the podcast, also spoke about her own experience asking ChatGPT to write a paragraph in her voice. Frenkel said she was “creeped out” by how accurately the bot was able to mimic her language and style.

I haven’t written a 2Summers Support Group post since February and I think now is a good time to revive the series. It’s a strange time to be in South Africa, at least for me. I feel super weird and whiny.

A few months ago, I wrote in a blog post that I was finally working on writing my memoir. Like, for real this time.

“I’ve started working on my memoir again, for real. I’ve set myself a strict rule of writing for at least one hour and 500 words per day. It’s a modest goal, to be sure, but in the past five days I’ve written 3801 words. For the first time in a while, I feel truly confident in my ability to complete this book.” -Heather Mason (pretentiously quoting herself), February 2021

Ten years ago today, I opened wordpress.com for the first time and started this blog. I published a short, not terribly interesting post about why I named the blog 2Summers and my recent experience obtaining an international driver’s license for my impending move from Washington D.C. to Johannesburg. (I started the blog six weeks before moving.)

It’s Day 76 of the South African lockdown, and I have now blogged on 71 of the last 79 days. (I started my Lockdown Journal three days before the lockdown began.)