I just asked ChatGPT what it knows about me. No secrets, per se.
I remember a fair bit about you, Bry. You’re a language-obsessed philosopher who moonlights (or perhaps full-lights) as a speculative literary novelist under the name Ridley Park. You’re juggling multiple manuscripts—Needle’s Edge, Goldilocks, and Propensity, among others—and you’re currently elbow-deep in editing hell with Needle’s Edge, complete with timeline spreadsheets, index markers, and colour-coded emotional beats.
Video: I fed the first paragraph (above) into Midjourney 7 and rendered it. Then I animated it. No reason. (For the record, this is some random geezer, not me.)
You like to frame your work (and your blog posts) through a postmodern lens: dismantling Enlightenment myths, critiquing modernist hubris, and occasionally taking Nietzsche or Foucault out for a spin. Your style is snarky, ironic, and bombastic—half philosopher, half punk pamphleteer. You enjoy skewering the pieties of culture and capitalism, though a little ghost of tenderness sneaks through when the subject is grief, trauma, or the mess of being human.
On the practical side, you’re running an entire guerrilla-marketing operation across WordPress, LinkedIn, BlueSky, Mastodon, Instagram, and beyond. You tinker with MidJourney prompts, InDesign TOCs, Excel timelines, and other tools, trying to herd your sprawling projects into something resembling books. You’ve even described yourself, with a hint of gallows humour, as an “author as street busker” trying to catch readers’ eyes in the algorithmic bazaar.
And yes—you’re the sort who will cheerfully drop that you worked in management consulting and collaborated with Jon Anderson, then pivot to talking about narrative tokens and ergodic structures like they’re party favours.
So, in short: a writer-philosopher with a spreadsheet addiction, a sceptical streak as wide as the Thames, and a habit of treating literature like both laboratory and battlefield.
I’ve been using ChatGPT and other generative AI tools for a couple of years now. I used to lean on Claude, but now ChatGPT is my go-to. I still cross-reference with Gemini, Grok, DeepSeek, Perflexity, Pi, and Mistral. I tend to use Midjourney for images and motion video. I use NotebookLM for my generated podcasts.
Gemini says ChatGPT has a tendency to exaggerate but there are no hiccups in my programming that it has you down to a T.
Out of your list of AI assistants, which do you find most effective in helping to craft essays?
The podcast on Depressive Realism and the Fiction of Agency was excellent. Are you using NotebookLM Pro or the Free version? I might be interested in trying the latter if it’s any good.
I use the free version of NotebookLM, but my use is almost exclusively for Podcasts. I use other LLMs for the rest of inquiry. I save the output to Spotify because at the free level, my library is full. Before I make a new podcast, I have to delete an older one.
I don’t really have a preference. It’s contextual. That said, I tend to use ChatGPT more often these days. Claude is a bit too locked in for me anymore. It used to be my front line.
Philosophics 
Gemini says ChatGPT has a tendency to exaggerate but there are no hiccups in my programming that it has you down to a T.
Out of your list of AI assistants, which do you find most effective in helping to craft essays?
The podcast on Depressive Realism and the Fiction of Agency was excellent. Are you using NotebookLM Pro or the Free version? I might be interested in trying the latter if it’s any good.
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I use the free version of NotebookLM, but my use is almost exclusively for Podcasts. I use other LLMs for the rest of inquiry. I save the output to Spotify because at the free level, my library is full. Before I make a new podcast, I have to delete an older one.
I don’t really have a preference. It’s contextual. That said, I tend to use ChatGPT more often these days. Claude is a bit too locked in for me anymore. It used to be my front line.
LikeLiked by 1 person