What holds me back from sending newsletter emails? Well, I try to communicate in a way that is personal and recognises the people I’m speaking with or writing to. And I know that a message that fails to “see” the recipient isn’t merely neutral – it’s alienating.
I care about this a lot – as you may know1.
(This is a kind of note-to-self, posted here to hold myself accountable and transparent.)
Over the years I have tagged people on my email list with all kinds of tags, so many tags I can no longer hold them in my head. They include things like “met on an Arvon course” or “bought a first-edition of my Speccy Breakdown book”, and many, many more.
In theory, I could sit down and create a spreadsheet to work out what really matters and how to combine it all into larger segments – “people who went to my school”, “published author”, “artist” or whatever – but that will just take an eternity and I’m not at all drawn to the task.
It’s a chore, not least because it requires me to put real, complex and multifaceted human beings into a defined box.
Well, one of the things I have enjoyed about working with LLMs is their capacity to sort and filter information at my request.
Could I work with an LLM to sort people by tags – without including any personal information?
More soon.
1 You may know. I don’t actually know who you are! I’m only going to post this by RSS, and have no idea who subscribes to my feed (if anyone). To let me know, jp at this domain name.