Introducing Musk-Eye

Regular readers of Muskeg Musings will have noticed that there has been nothing regular about our posting frequency since the beginning of December. We could make all sorts of excuses about this, but let’s face the facts together and come to the cold, core truth:

Writing is hard.

Have you ever tried it? First you have to come up with idea, and you never actually know when those things will come around. The Muse is a mischievous devil. Then it takes a long time to actually get stuff on the screen or on the page, and then once you do, you need to do a bunch of work to it because the first draft is always rubbish and you need to make sure it’s actually readable. Which brings us to the readers – you put this stuff out there and you never actually know if people are reading it, or if they think it’s any good. Finally, as any literary critic will tell you, the only good judge of the written word is the passage of time. Good writing lasts, and bad writing simply doesn’t. There’s a reason we still read Sophocles and not his younger brother, Larrycles.

All that said, we have noticed more and more people accessing Muskeg Musings over the last few months, even though we haven’t posted much in this calendar year. It seems that some readers look forward to the content on this site, and we don’t want to let them down.

So we’ve come up with the perfect solution. Since the beginning of January, we have been working hard to create an AI bot that will help us write our Musings! And now it’s ready for prime time.

We’ve named the program Musk-Eye, and its mission is quite simple: a few times each week, we will feed a prompt to it, and it will, in turn, spit out a short funny essay. We’ve trained it on the content that has heretofore appeared on this site, and we’ve also fed into it the collected works of some of the finest humourists who have ever lived, including Dave Barry, Mordecai Richler, Gary Larson, and Fyodor Dostoyevsky. In each entry, we will display the prompt above the mini-essay.

We’re not sure where Musk-Eye will take us, but that’s one of the unpredictable things about AI: you never actually know if it’s just going to innocently plagiarize a graphic artist’s oeuvre, or if it’s going to simultaneously launch all the planet’s nuclear weapons.

And with that preamble, we’re going to fire up this AI. Hope you enjoy what it comes up with!