In this week's episode, we take a look at hysteria over AI, and compare it to past religious movements like William Miller's Great Disappointment.

This coupon code will get you 50% off the audiobook of Half-Elven Thief, Book #1 in the Half-Elven Thief series, (as excellently narrated by Leanne Woodward) at my Payhip store:

RIVAH50

The coupon code is valid through March 2, 2026. So if you need a new audiobook this winter, we've got you covered!

TRANSCRIPT

00:00:00 Introduction and Writing Updates

Hello, everyone. Welcome to Episode 291 of The Pulp Writer Show. My name is Jonathan Moeller. Today is February 28th, 2026, and today we're looking at AI hysteria and whether or not AI gives any actual benefits to people. We also have Coupon of the Week, progress updates on my current writing projects, and also Question the Week, where we talk to people about AI.

But first, let's start off with Coupon of the Week. This week's coupon code will get you 50% off the audiobook of Half-Elven Thief (as excellently narrated by Leanne Woodward) at my Payhip store. That coupon code is RIVAH50. This coupon code will be valid through March 2, 2026. So if you need a new audiobook as we exit winter and come into spring, we have got you covered.

Now let's have an update on my current writing and publishing and audiobook projects. I'm pleased to report that the rough draft of Cloak of Summoning is done. It turned out to be just about as long as Cloak of Worlds, maybe a thousand words shorter. I am about 20% through the first round of editing, and I am hopeful that that book will be out sometime in March, probably the first week of March if all go as well. I've also written a short story called Dragon Claw that newsletter subscribers will get for free in ebook format when Cloak of Summoning comes out, which as I said will hopefully be in early March. I'm also 11,000 words into Blade of Wraiths, the fourth book in my Blades of Ruin epic fantasy series, and that will be my main project once Cloak of Summoning is published.

In audiobook news, the audiobook of Blade of Shadows (as narrated by Brad Wills) is now out at almost all the stores, so you can get it at Audible, Apple, Google Play, Kobo, and the other main stores. Cloak of Titans (as narrated by Hollis McCarthy) is done and is currently rolling out to the stores. I think as of right now, you can get it at Google Play, Kobo, and my own Payhip store, but it should be showing up on Audible and the other main stores before too much longer. So that is where I'm at with my current writing, publishing, and audiobook projects.

00:01:56 Question of the Week

Now let's move on to Question of the Week. For the first Question of the Week of 2026 and this week's question: have you personally derived any benefits or experienced any negatives from the rise of generative AI? And this question was inspired by the topic of this week's post, obviously enough since we're talking about AI. I should note that this is a contentious topic with divergent opinions, and so I asked people to remain civil in the comments and they definitely were, so thank you for everyone for that.

Now let's have some opinions on AI before I tell you how AI has positively and mostly negatively affected my life. Joachim says: I have not used AI for private purposes. My Con: My Chromebook might be obsolete rather sooner than later. In my company, we use an AI, which is helpful. It has all the knowledge articles, so you can ask, how do I do this or that? The company's Con: laptop prices are going up.

Eddie says: My Cons are much the same as yours. My Pros are using it to create images for tabletop games to help players visualize monsters and NPCs. I have found it effective in turning voice to text meeting notes into meeting minutes and actions.

Jesse says: Software engineer here. I have found it helpful when I'm working on something in a language I'm not as familiar with the syntax. As a "how I might do this" learning tool, it's not bad. As a "do this for me/vibe code" thing, no thanks…too much trust.

John says: Yes and no. I was in an AI startup that stopped paying me and my team for two months then let us go. We're currently suing them for back pay, but the tech worked and is still working. I also work in ad tech. Devs are trying to get more productive using AI tools. It's hit and miss as far as I can tell, but using traditional machine learning and data science to optimize marketing has worked for decades and still works, but that's not what people consider to be AI nowadays. Also drove across the country last August and used ChatGPT to plan my trip, and that works splendidly.

I think John might win here for largest negative in his comment though, to be fair, that's more for business reasons than for AI itself, though I, for his sake, I'm pleased he was able to use ChatGPT to plan his drive across the country and ChatGPT didn't send him driving off a cliff someplace.

Jenny says: I'm so over everyone trying to push this "solution" on me. It's like protein enhanced foods. Stop trying to put protein and AI into everything. Just put it where it makes sense or let me choose it. My negative experiences far outweigh anything helpful.

Jimmy says: I have quit using Google search. It never tried to find the answer that I asked for. It just returned what it felt like. Its answers usually matched the paid ads it led the list with.

Rob says: Okay for meeting notes and rough drafting for job applications, et cetera. Other than that, seems to have limited use for me personally and is a nuisance on my phone, internet browser, et cetera.

And finally, Randy says: my biggest Con is that the AI answers that pop up when I'm trying to search range between inaccurate and dangerously wrong. I suspect many people don't realize they aren't reading actual data when they see them.

So thank you to everyone who shared their thoughts on that. For myself, I've mostly experienced negative things with AI and a few positive things though to be honest, both the positive and negative things were relatively minor in the greater scheme of things. So I shall list off the Pros and Cons of my experiences with generative AI. I should mention that none of my books, short stories, for sale audiobooks, or book covers contain any AI elements. If it says Jonathan Moeller on the cover and it's not on YouTube, then it is 100% human made.

Now, the Pros and Cons. The Pros: Power Director 365, the video editing program I use for YouTube, has an "animated by AI" feature so I've used it to animate some of my book covers for use of Facebook ads with middling results at best.

I used Google's Voice AI stuff to create AI voice versions of the Silent Order books and then put them on YouTube because I wanted to understand the technology. I'm not planning to ever do actual audiobook versions of Silent Order since they wouldn't make back any money, so I wasn't screwing a narrator out of work and the voices involved were licensed by Google, so there was no copyright infringement the way there is with companies like Anthropic. That said, I suspect this is less generative AI and simply a more advanced text to speech technology, which has been around forever. I mean, you could do text to speech back on the earliest versions of the Macintosh. I mean, ideally, I would like text to speech to just be a button in your ereader app of choice for accessibility reasons, and then you can purchase the audiobook if the text to speech was too bland. Overall, a lot of people listen to the AI versions on YouTube, but the listeners mostly complained about the synthetic voice and would've preferred a real narrator, unsurprisingly.

Now onto the Cons. Facebook ads went from very effective to middling at best on a good day, thanks to their Advantage Plus AI. I am constantly bombarded by AI generated scam emails of several different varieties. I deleted twelve before I recorded this. The price of Microsoft Office went up, the price for RAM and GPUs went up due to data center hoarding them all. The price for electricity has gone up. Windows 11 and Microsoft Office's performance has gone down quite a bit due to forced AI integration. In fact, I got so annoyed at Windows 11, I switched to writing on a Mac Mini, which I suppose was a positive because I like the Mac Mini, but still. Google Search and all Google products in general are much less useful because of AI and the quality of information on the internet (already low) has gone down quite a bit due to the prevalence of AI slop.

Admittedly, neither these Pros or Cons are majorly serious to me personally (with the possible exception of electricity prices going up), but the Cons definitely outweigh the Pros. I can confidently say I have derived no real benefit from generative AI, and I suspect a lot of other people could say the same, if they're honest.

00:07:27 Main Topic of the Week: William Miller, The Great Disappointment, and AI

Now onto our related main topic this week, AI hysteria, William Miller, and The Great Disappointment. This past week there were numerous articles from and interviews with various AI bros saying that within 12 to 18 months, AI will replace white collar work and humanity must simply adjust. When I read these articles, I wasn't reminded of the Singularity, of AI, of Skynet and the Terminator, or anything technological. Instead, I thought of a preacher named William Miller who died about 190 years ago. William Miller came out of the Second Great Awakening, which was one of the waves of religious vitality and furor that grip America every so often.

Miller almost died in combat as an officer in the War of 1812, and saw one of his men killed in front of him, which understandably left a lasting...