You’ve heard the song, “I’m My Own Grampa.”
EMAIL SUBSCRIBERS, VISIT WRITING-BOOTS.COM TO VIEW VIDEO
Well at this point, I’m my own AI. Or my own LLM, anyway. I call it Boots GPT. And it works automatically.
After almost 5,000 posts here—all of them on or around the subject of human communication—a thing will happen in the news or in my family or in my mind.
I’ll begin writing something about it. Halfway through the lead, I’ll get this feeling: Haven’t I written something like this before? I’ll query the Writing Boots search box for a keyword. Inevitably, up will come a post I wrote on the subject from 2018. Or 2013. Or 2009. (Or increasingly, troublingly, 2025.)
So more often than not, I repost the old one, with a little introductory note reestablishing the context. (And acknowledging that the piece is yesterday’s thought.) That may look lazy to you. (And so I’ve heard from some of you.) But writing a well-crafted old piece anew seems crazy to me.
The more important question is, why do I keep writing the same things over and over, like boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the archives? Familiar stimulus sparks repeat reactions. “We’re wet machines,” my writer buddy Mike Long always says. “Just wet machines.”
