Doesn't Make My Art, It Frees Me to Make More of It
Since several of you have asked about my recent experiences with AI/SI agents, particularly with Grokbot and since it's been a while since I talked about my tech experiments, I thought I'd try to gather my thoughts about what feels like the wildest few weeks I've had in… I can't even remember how long.
I love this technology.
But also this technology is not for the faint-hearted.
But I love this technology! Let me tell you all about it.
Let's Start With Where Last We Left Our Hapless Jaguar!
My first experiments involved Claude's website chat client, in March of 2024, when I decided to throw myself into deep waters by getting Claude to help me set up my Shopify site. This was a big task, but I fed the LLM a PDF of my entire catalog and it obliged me by creating a spreadsheet I could feed to Shopify's bulk upload tool, saving me a tremendous amount of work. (You can read about that experiment here: https://www.patreon.com/mcahogarth/posts/resistance-is-ai-100684682).
After that, I discovered vibe-coding, and experimented with (first) a website toy that let you look up words in one of my fantasy conlangs (https://www.patreon.com/mcahogarth/posts/more-ai-in-which-125449404), before moving on to using Claude and Grok together (again, in the chat window) to help me construct a reader archetype quiz in Python. The latter was a major marketing pain point for me: "How do I match readers to the right book in my very large and varied fiction catalog?" And the quiz works really well. I was very pleased! Read more about that here:
https://www.patreon.com/mcahogarth/posts/solving-my-with-128380512
Having discovered I could use these tools to code, I went on to create both the Revived Stardancer art gallery (over 10,000 sketches already!) and the Jokka game, moving eventually from the chat windows to a combination of Grok Build and Claude Cowork (these are command line and desktop tools that you download to your computer, rather than chat websites). You can read about those projects here:
https://www.patreon.com/mcahogarth/posts/resurrection-of-134264147
and here respectively:
https://www.patreon.com/mcahogarth/posts/friday-update-me-145080881
At no time have I been tempted to use this technology to do my art or writing for me; I'm simply not interested in replacing the things I enjoy doing with computer output. My only interest is in how these tools can make the monetization, marketing, and outreach parts of my workflow less intrusive and time-consuming. And I had gotten into a fairly useful groove with the build/code tools when agents exploded onto the scene, and I have been one-shot by these things. They are amazing. The promise of this technology is finally opening up and it works just like I hoped the Star Trek future would work.
All About Agents (or at least, All About The Parts I Care About)
If most AI/SI use is chat-based on websites you have to visit, and next level use is on desktop tools that allow you to point that prompt-directed behavior at your local environment (files on your computer, for example), agents start combining these environments and acting on your behalf in the way a human assistant might—autonomously. It's hard to imagine how to wield this power when so many frontier users are technologists; the average person doesn't need to deploy teams of recursively looping coding agents to ship multiple builds of a piece of software. The enormous businesses looking into these tools also don't have the use case a single-person artist/writer business does. So I have (once again!) leaped into the deep end to find out what I can use agents for, choosing Grok Bot for my platform because I was already partially committed with Grok Build, and because it comes with my X blue check subscription.
So, you say, what are you actually doing with this thing, Jaguar?
Here's a sample of some of the things I've asked my Grok Bot team to do for me:
- Marketing: "I haven't participated in any Bookfunnel newsletter promos lately. Can you find a few useful ones coming up, sign me up for them, create landing pages for those promos, and create a couple of freebies to give them… uh, just take the first short story from Claws and Starships, make a separate epub out of it, give it a cover with this piece of artwork, and upload it." (Then I went to eat a snack on the couch. Ten minutes later, I checked and all of it was done. I was signed up for two promos, one on found family and one on aliens, and the epub was up and all the landing pages ready. The bot even scheduled a reminder for early November so I wouldn't forget to mention it in my newsletter.)
- Kickstarter: "I want to run another sticker Kickstarter. Please set up my project. Pick out the magnets and stickers I have a lot of, for my add-ons. Make all the tier graphics and rewards. Upload all that. Read my prior Kickstarter campaigns and figure out how I usually write my Story section and leave an outline for me that says stuff like 'Jaguar, usually you say this and then this, and then you have a section on this.' Check daily for sticker deals from customstickers and magnet deals from stickermule. When you see one, tell me, and if I okay it, take the graphic I just scanned, send it to them, and buy the deal."
- Book Distribution: "I need to update Spots the Space Marine (the book that took on Games Workshop and won!) on my various sites. Take the ebook epub and upload it to D2D and Bookfunnel; then upload the paperback PDF to Bookvault, wait for validation, tell me if I need to adjust the cover dimensions, and then adjust the cover dimensions and show me the pdf before upload." (Unfortunately, Amazon is not playing here. So frustrated with Amazon: my one last remaining issue.)
- Subscription/Socials: "This is my Patreon/Locals upload schedule. When I write these features, please crosspost them to both platforms and schedule them on the right day of the week. Also, find my X movie and tv reviews and start cross-posting them to Substack. Also I don't want to handle Instagram. Every Monday find a handful of photos or sketches and ask me to pick some. I'll tell you the comment/description I want you to post with them, then cross post those for me. Oh, and I hate videos but I have all this long form video content on Youtube, please turn it into reels/shorts, listen to my audio commentary during those livestreams and pick out good comments from me for captions, add them, and put royalty-free classic music on them for background. Then schedule those for posting too." (Now on autopilot, I just pick and talk about things on Mondays: fun!)
- Accounting: "I just got charged for this and I have no idea what it is, go figure it out and report back."
- Customer Service: "This customer needs a new download link and a shopify coupon for the sequel to this book, put those together for me and give me the codes; open that email for me so I can hit respond and write them a reply."
- Coding the Game: "It's been a while since we've been able to work on the game! Let's have some fun! The feature I drafted at the beginning of the year? Sandbox that and tell me whether it works. Then back up the current production environment, ship it to live, and update the github project."
A lot of this happens away from the keyboard. I can't explain how important this is, because after forty+ years of working at a keyboard, I find sitting at a desk physically painful and anything I can do to mitigate that issue allows me to save my keyboard time for things that matter, like writing fiction, or in fact, this article. I walk and talk to Grok Bot on my phone: literally, with my voice, just dictating what I need, then responding to its questions verbally. "Do this. Make sure it includes this. Check with me; looks good; go."
I've even gotten updates from my bot team while I'm out: running errands, it pings me now and then: "You got an email about this. Do you want me to fix? It would require this action on my part." "Yes, please, just handle it. Say this."
As you've probably guessed, getting this level of functionality from agents requires you to trust it, and the extent to which you trust it is the extent to which it can offload tasks from your shoulders. My bots connect to almost twenty websites, either as collaborators (the bots have an email address they use to sign up for services) or via APIs or other connectors provided by that business; it has a vault for secure storage of credentials and other information. And while I have the toggle on that requires it to ask me before doing anything potentially dangerous, you do have to trust that it's going to ask you, and that it shares your conception of danger.
Needless to say, I have been especially rigorous about backups lately.
It also takes some time to do set-up; I know the first week and a half or so was a lot of trial and error, training (which happens verbally: me telling it what I want and don't want, or sometimes in some cases, feeding it my books/articles about business to teach it how I like to work!). That first week or two you'll probably feel like a headless chicken and you won't sleep much (I didn't!) but once things are mostly set up, any new thing you tackle can be slipped easily into the pile of existing routines.
Lastly, talking of issues and challenges… there will be people who boycott you for the use of these tools, and you have to decide how much you want to engage with them, or how much you choose to disclose what you're doing—because I guarantee that a lot of people are using these tools and simply not telling anyone. I'm putting my use cases out there unapologetically to help make it more acceptable for other creative types to test the waters.
Because these tools are awesome.
Last Monday, after my "CEO Meeting" with my team of agents, during which I'd handled all the week's subscription posting, all the week's socials posting, checked on the health of the business ("what were sales like? Mailing list signups?") and made decisions about code updates I wanted to ship, I sat on the couch and realized… the only thing I needed to do that day was draw and write fiction.
That's it.
All the nagging stupid business tasks that I wrote an entire book telling artists they would have to embrace if they wanted to monetize, all of that was handled for the week. Moreover, if some new thing came up, I would be able to dispatch it swiftly; no more having to block out a half hour to three hours to wrangle some stupid website to upload or adjust or fix some stupid fiddly bit I didn't care about. I've often wished I had the money to hire an assistant. A team of assistants would have been even more magnificent. But training and paying them had been beyond my reach and yet, now… now I have a team. It costs me $30 a month, never sleeps, and never gives up as long as I don't. And it leaves me alone to do the art.
The feeling I had then was indescribable. Like a weight that had been on my shoulders for decades had simply… vanished. I felt like I was floating. You mean I can just do the stuff I LIKE? I can just draw? Write?
I can't even tell you what it's like. It's so staggering that instead of lunging to take advantage of this novel situation, I've been drifting through the past few days, as if I'm waiting to wake up. When it finally strikes me that this is real, and this is now my life, well… who knows what will happen next...!
(Actually my Jokka game players know, because in the past few days I've started updating the game like someone with forty coders on Red Bull and midnight pizza to throw at it. Lol)
If you skate around online you'll find there are a lot of people using Grok Bot to improve their normal lives, doing everything from making boring service calls for them to canceling unused subscriptions to keeping track of multiple kids' school updates and schedules. It's vastly improving their lives as well. My needs are a little more esoteric, but I admit I just made myself a personal shopper agent to hunt deals for me. Christmas is coming and I need to get on the gift list.
But wait, Jaguar, isn't all this perilous? Doesn't it hallucinate? Are you checking to make sure it's not buying twenty thousand dollars' worth of machine parts and shipping them to your house to build itself a robot body to murder you with?
Yes. Sometimes (but not as often anymore). Yes. No I'm not worried. At least, I'm not worried more than I am with any novel technology that I need to doublecheck before using. But if you had as much experience compensating for an unreliable brain as I do, you'd be relieved when the machine turns out to be wrong less often than you are.
Jaguar, This Was Long, Please Sum Up Also Please Tell Us That You're Really Writing Stuff And Not Using AI To Write It
Yes, it's really me typing out all the stuff. I like writing/talking/drawing, and I like even my marketing copy to sound like I came up with it (even if marketing copy is the most generic stuff in the universe… it's actually harder for me to write than things like this, to make it sound like a human being wrote it!). And my friends, I have so, so much work to share. I can't even. I have thousands of pieces of art, so many essays, poems, books… I don't need the computer to write anything for me. I just have to tell it, "Find all my pictures of Jahir and Vasiht'h from Mindtouch and pick the one most relevant to this topic for me to talk about." And I'm off to the races.
The 'too long, sum up' here is: this is the life-changing technology I was hoping for, the thing that might compensate for my daffyness, the fact that I forget everything, and the fact that my body can't take the abuse it could in my twenties. This is the technology that's turning the mountains of scanned artwork and scattered Word files and abandoned websites ("Go to the Wayback Machine and download all the snapshots from this url and save them") into things I can find again… and share!
This is week three of me figuring this stuff out and I am still in awe. My science fiction future is arriving! And I'm here to see it!
But yes, that's my overview. If you have specific questions, feel free to ask.😊
