Kevin Roose has a new book out tomorrow. The AGI Chronicles, from Farrar, Straus and Giroux. More than 150 interviews inside OpenAI, Anthropic and Google DeepMind. And he says it’s his last one.
Not because he’s tired. Because he thinks the machines will be better at it. He told the San Francisco Chronicle he’s “fairly confident that within a year or two, AI models will just be better than me at writing books.” So why go through the massive effort, he asks, when you could hand your notes to an AI and say go write the Pulitzer-winning book of my dreams? (side bar. Man, I get this. I spent more than 4 years all told writing GOAD, a story stuck in my mind since 1996 when I made the movie Disincarnate with family. I hated it. I loved it. I hated it again. I finally finished it after 2 or 3 hundred thousand words written and pared back to 120k. I will never do it again. Not like that. Being afraid to go near AI until after publishing on Amazon. Claude said it was good. Probably the only review I’ll get.)
This is a guy who has covered AI for more than a decade. So I’m not going to wave it off. And honestly? Been there. Late at night, staring at a chapter, wondering why I bother.
But here’s the part that actually got me. On Amanpour & Company, Roose said he wrote every word of this book himself. He doesn’t use AI to write. He used it for research and fact-checking. And he built what he called a “Council of Claudes.” Six or seven AI personas. A historian. A technical checker. Skeptics and boosters. Even a little Walter Isaacson. Every time he finished a chapter, he fed it in and got back different flavors of feedback.
His verdict? Some of it was “mostly slop,” but some of it was “actually quite useful,” and it caught mistakes his human editors missed. The fake Walter “wasn’t as good as the real article.” But it would text him back at 2 a.m.
Surprise. The guy announcing the end of writing books spent years building himself a writers’ group.
That’s the story to me. Not “AI will write the books.” It’s that a bestselling author, with a major publisher and real editors, still went looking for more readers. More eyes on the chapter. Feedback from different angles. That hunger doesn’t go away when the tools get good. If anything it gets louder.
Now the little world.
Circle is being built for exactly that hunger. Except the council is people. You request an assignment. You read somebody’s chapter or watch their cut. You write a structured review. You earn credit, and that credit gets your own work in front of other members. Real reviewers, real names, accountable for what they say. We’re there in terms of the foundation. Now we need some people visiting us at gapoz.com and deciding to spend some time building a small community. Maybe nobody’s texting you back at 2 a.m. But nobody’s inventing a historian either.
And look, I’m not saying ditch the bots. Roose’s setup is honest. He told us what the tools did (research, fact-checks, feedback), what he kept (every word), and who’s accountable (him). That’s disclosure by role. That’s pretty much the Circle standard, word for word. Self-attested. No detector gate. If you ran your draft past three AI personas before you brought it to Circle, fine. Here you’ll find the humans that tell you what the machines missed. Or what they got right.
Where I part ways with him is the “why bother” part. Why go through the massive effort? Because the effort is where you find out what you think. A book you handed off as notes isn’t the book you’d have found by writing it. And a reader who took the time, a human one, is worth more than a hundred 2 a.m. replies. I believe that, at the same time as believing you’re right. AI will write better than even the best of us. I’m not afraid to say that. But I would posit that if being the best is the reason you write, we can do without you probably. But the real question you pose is ‘why bother’, even though you know the answer. It is what made you a writer.
GAPOZ Press is the people’s publisher. That means people writing, and people reading each other. The machines can sit in on the council. They may even be useful. They just don’t get the chair.
Kevin, if this really is your last one, fine. But I’d bet you a coffee you miss the effort and you’ll be back. Most of us would.
AI assisted research and a first draft of this Circle View. A human reviewed, edited, and is accountable for the judgment and the final take. Disclosure by role — not undetectable.