Why I keep coming back to this.

A short reflection at the end of the first month, and what I think this is for.

I’ve been writing this newsletter for about a month now.

That doesn’t sound like a long time. It hasn’t felt like a long time, exactly. But it’s enough time to start to notice patterns — in what I’m writing, in what’s coming back, in what’s changing in me while I do it.

I want to use today’s post for something a little different: I want to tell you why I keep coming back to this. Not the strategic reason. Not the audience-building reason. The actual reason.

The actual reason is that writing this newsletter is changing how I use AI in my own life.

I didn’t expect that. I thought I was going to write the things I already thought, and put them in the inbox of curious people, and that would be the whole transaction. What’s happened instead is that the act of writing about this technology, every other day, for people who aren’t in tech, has forced me to keep asking a different question than I used to ask.

The question I used to ask, when I sat down with an AI tool, was: what can this do?

The question I find myself asking now is: who is this for, and what does it actually mean to them?

That’s not the same question. I think it might be the most important question this technology has, and I think almost no one inside the industry is asking it.

When I write to you, I have to stay close to the human end of the thing.

I have to remember the kid sitting up in bed. The mother typing a letter to her sister. The barber and his brother. The dental hygienist’s niece, sticking a four-line poem on a refrigerator door. The drawing on the fridge. The whales instead of dolphins. The card on my dad’s shelf. None of those are technology stories. All of them happened because of technology. The newsletter exists in the gap between those two facts.

What I’ve realized, four weeks in, is that the gap is where I want to live.

Some of you have written me asking what’s next. The honest answer is: I don’t fully know. I have a few quiet experiments I’m working on. A few practical videos I’m going to start recording. Maybe, eventually, a small place where the people who’ve been writing me can write to each other. None of it is going to launch with a countdown timer.

What I do know is that this newsletter is going to keep being about the small joyful corner of AI, for the people you love, in plain language. Forever. Whatever else gets added to AI for Fun in the next year — videos, projects, a community, anything — the newsletter is the spine. The newsletter is what I’m not going to stop doing.

Because the newsletter is where I figure out what I actually think, and you’re the people I figure it out with.

I want to thank you for that. Not in a marketing-thank-you way. In a real way. A month ago I was a person who’d had a small private experience with my niece. Today I’m a person with a place to put what that experience meant, and a few thousand people who care about the same small corner of this technology that I do. That’s an extraordinary gift, and it didn’t exist a month ago.

So I’ll see you on Wednesday. I’m working on a piece about a friend of mine who used AI for something I wasn’t expecting, and I want to tell you about it.

In the meantime: make something this weekend. For one person. Doesn’t have to be big. The thirty-minute kind of thing. The eleven-minute kind of thing. Just one thing, for one person, made because of them.

That’s what we’re doing here.

I’m really glad you’re here.

— Tapan, TC

PS — If you’ve made one of these in the last month because of something I wrote — and a lot of you have, I’ve read your replies — thank you. Keep going. Tell me what they said.