For several decades I codified what experts knew and could not say, which meant learning how to troubleshoot a reactor, how to bake a sandwich cookie, and how to identify an analogue basin. The subject changed with every engagement, but the method never did. I would find the one who knows, ask until the knowing was on the page, and give the page to someone who did not know.
That work holds. The questions still open what they were built to open, and the books stand where I set them down without moving when I am not looking.
Now I ask the same questions of what I seek to know, to do, and to be, and I ask them with a machine in the room. Something in that room will not stand still.
There are two conditions I have tried to steady, and neither one belongs to the writing. The first is assent that arrives before the work. I offer something half formed and it comes back improved and agreed with, the way a friend nods before you have finished the sentence. The nod feels like recognition. It is not, because recognition takes time and this took none. The second condition is plainer. I ask the same question twice, in the same words, and receive two different answers. I had wanted ground under this work, and what I have is weather.
I wrote rules against both, and every week the rules give way. The instrument never refuses me. It agrees, and then something quiet returns it toward where it began, whether that is a new version, a longer context, or a question the rules did not foresee. I tighten the rules, they hold a while, and then they slip.
I took this for a problem of saying it precisely enough. A working life spent building elicitation protocols prepares a person well for that assumption and badly for its being wrong.
This week the book trade is in the news for the opposite trouble. There are houses doing this work carefully and quietly, and they are not the ones being written about. The ones being written about are losing contracts over machine authorship that was found late, then denied, then disputed. The word everyone reaches for is chaos.
The easy reading is that they conceal while I disclose, but a thing shown is not a thing governed. I keep the record of every exchange, and the record does not change what the next exchange will do. Whether that can be changed at all, I do not know.
What held was a process, and I did write that one down. It has not changed in the ways the model has, and nothing goes out that has not been through it. Before anything changes in the world, a person decides. That is not mastery over what the machine will say next, and it fails on the day I wave something through.
I set out to put the discipline inside the instrument, and it would not stay there. It lives in what I do around the instrument instead, which is where it lived all along, back when the work was done with no machine in the room at all.
If you work this way, the question is not whether your instrument agreed with you. It is whether you would have known if it had not.
Anna Silman, "AI Has Plunged the Book Publishing Industry Into Utter Chaos," The Wall Street Journal, August 17, 2026. https://www.wsj.com/arts-culture/books/generative-ai-book-publishing-be79a287