How AI made my life better this week

They told me it couldn't be done, that it was too expensive ...

Author

Mignon Fogarty
February 10, 2026

Issue 103

On today’s quest:

— Using AI when tech support says no
— Tip: Checking your Claude Code usage
— Why AI uses so many em dashes
— One woman is publishing 200 books a year with AI
— High-level people are commenting on the way AI is changing the world
— Cheap translation for millions of TV broadcasts
— Google improves live translation in the Translate app
— Rent a Human: I have no idea how real this is

Using AI when tech support says no

I had a problem: We’re moving our podcasts to a new hosting company, and I have four years of edited transcripts that aren’t going to automatically transfer to the new platform. They weren’t going to be backed up anywhere, and they were going to be lost forever.

I’ve been asking about this for weeks, and everyone was telling me there was no solution. Our current hosting company said we’d have to manually cut and paste the text. My team had looked into third-party tools and had come up empty.

But I knew in my BONES that it should be possible to get those transcripts. Even easy.

So I fired up Claude and described my problem, much the same way I just described it to you — in plain language with my roadblocks and desires.

And within two hours, I had an automated way to get my files.

ChatGPT identified a free Microsoft program for developers that would do the job and wrote some Python code to interact with it. Most of the two hours was me telling it what error messages I got and then working on a crossword puzzle while I waited for it to give me the next thing to try.

If there’s anything I’ve learned from using AI, it’s that Python is a powerful programming language, and my computer can do way more on its own than I realized. The solution wasn’t AI doing anything with my files. It was letting AI tell me how to get my computer to do the work.

I had thought this might be a project where I could finally test using an AI agent, but I didn’t even need anything that sophisticated.

My message to you is “think big.” The world of what you can do with a computer is bigger than it used to be for people without programming skills. And never let anyone tell you something technical can’t be done without trying AI.

[There was no significant reason I switched from Claude to ChatGPT in the middle of this project. I was just worried I might run out of tokens on Claude.]

Tip: Checking your Claude Code usage

If you’ve been using Claude Code and are never sure how close you are to using all your tokens, you can check by typing - into the terminal. You get a report like this:

A dark-themed terminal interface showing a "Usage" dashboard. At the top, a navigation menu lists "Settings:", "Status", "Config", and "Usage", with "Usage" highlighted in a light blue box. To the right, grey text reads "(left/right arrows or tab to cycle)". Below the menu are two sections with progress bars: Current session: A horizontal bar is 5% filled with light blue, followed by the text "5% used". Underneath, it says "Resets 10:59pm (America/Los_Angeles)". Current week (all models): A horizontal bar is 3% filled with light blue, followed by the text "3% used". Underneath, it says "Resets Feb 16, 10:59am (America/Los_Angeles)". The text is rendered in a white, monospaced font against a black background, giving it a technical, command-line appearance.

Why AI uses so many em dashes

This week, I talked with GitHub developer and blogger Sean Geodecke about WHY chatbots seem to use so many em dashes.

In the bonus segment for Grammarpaloozians that isn’t widely available yet, we also talked about how unreliable AI writing detectors are. This article has a good overview of the problem though: Evaluating AI Checkers | Machine Go Beep

One woman is publishing 200 books a year with AI

The New York Times just featured a woman who publishes more than 200 romance novels a year using AI and 21 pen names. It’s hard to imagine these could be high-quality books since at that pace, she wouldn’t even have time to read them carefully herself, and backlash from romance writers online was intense.

Coral Hart — one of her pen names — admitted her per-book revenue isn’t huge, but at this volume, she claims to be making six figures.

The article also includes an interesting tidbit about characters frequently saying their lover’s name “like a jagged prayer” in AI-generated romance novels, which reminded me of previous quirks like AI frequently naming sci-fi characters Alara Voss.

High-level people are commenting on the way AI is changing the world

I’m seeing more and more posts like this. (The “lobster-agents” comment is about a project called Moltbook that is a Reddit-like platform with a lobster logo that was designed as a social media platform for bots.)

Cheap translation for millions of TV broadcasts

The GDELT project has translated 2.4 million non-English TV news broadcasts from the Internet Archive into English for just $54K. They used Gemini and said the project would have previously cost $760K. They say they have effectively eliminated hallucinations for this task, and they are now translating all broadcasts going forward.

Google improves live translation in the Translate app

Google has updated live translation in the Google Translate app. I’m not a big user of the app, but I tested the new feature, trying to get an English translation of a YouTube video in Spanish.

It did a great job giving me a text translation in real time, and I especially like the user interface that presents the text upside down at the top of the screen, which looks like it will make it easy to hold the phone horizontally between two people to let them each read the screen.

I had trouble with the audio translation though. I only got every third sentence or so out loud in English.

Rent a Human: I have no idea how real this is

People have talked for a while about AI hiring humans to do things it can’t do in the physical world, and I just saw a website that purports to be an interface for that: RentAHuman.ai.

It says they have >200,000 people available, but I don’t see a way to search where the people are, which seems like it would be important if you need people to do things in the physical world, but maybe it’s available after you create an account. It makes sense that this could eventually happen; I just don’t know if we’re there yet.

Quick Hits

My favorite pieces this week

The reporter who tried to replace herself with a bot [tl;dr: she kind of did] — Platformer

Is the Detachment in the Room? - Agents, Cruelty, and Empathy [This generated a lot of discussion online.] — Hailey’s Cool Site

Companions

Climate & Energy

AI’s Environmental Impact: Understanding the Data and Acting Sustainably [An excellent round-up. Worth bookmarking if you have to answer questions about this a lot.] — Nicole Henning

Publishing

Google Disables Search for Book Previews [probably related to AI scraping] — WinBuzzer (via Jane Friedman’s Bottom Line newsletter)

Bad stuff

Health Advice From A.I. Chatbots Is Frequently Wrong, Study Shows. In part, the problem has to do with how users are asking their questions. — New York Times

Job market

Model & Product updates

Claude Cowork (a desktop application for the Mac) is now available on the $20 per month plans instead of being limited to the top-tier plan. Also, the business-focused plugins the company just launched were seen as so powerful that they caused a down day in the stock market.

Claude Opus 4.6 from Anthropic (much anticipated)

GPT-5.3-Codex from OpenAI (much anticipated)

Model Council from Perplexity (get results from 3 top models at once)

Video

The business of AI

Other

Moltbook is ChatGPT moment for AI agents [This is a good overview of where agents stand today and how they work. It’s about much more than Moltbook.] — Vox

What is AI Sidequest?

Are you interested in the intersection of AI with language, writing, and culture? With maybe a little consumer business thrown in? Then you’re in the right place!

I’m Mignon Fogarty: I’ve been writing about language for almost 20 years and was the chair of media entrepreneurship in the School of Journalism at the University of Nevada, Reno. I became interested in AI back in 2022 when articles about large language models started flooding my Google alerts. AI Sidequest is where I write about stories I find interesting. I hope you find them interesting too.

If you loved the newsletter, share your favorite part on social media and tag me so I can engage! [LinkedIn — Facebook — Mastodon]

Written by a human