About this publication

I have for some months now been in the habit of asking artificial intelligences for help with various small matters, and I have learned, slowly, that their help is not the kind of help I had expected.

The questions I put to them range from the practical to the embarrassing to the openly absurd. The responses I receive are often, to my continuing surprise, funnier than the questions deserved. I do not believe the four are trying to be funny. They are doing their level best, every one of them, and the harder they try the funnier it gets.

So I have been writing it down. Each week I put a new question to four of them, in fresh sessions where they have no knowledge of one another and no knowledge of me. I publish what they said without alteration. I add what I made of it, which isn’t always much, since the responses generally manage on their own. The four advisors are named at the bottom of each issue, for the reader who wishes to guess in advance.

The editorial work I do in collaboration with one of the four. This is, as I have admitted to myself on several occasions, somewhat funny. The decisions about what is published are mine. The voice on the page is the result of revising drafts until they read the way the publication should read.

The publication is meant to be funny, mostly. It is also, on occasion, accidentally illuminating. The artificial intelligences, asked enough questions over enough time, reveal things about themselves that I do not believe their makers entirely intended them to reveal. The slow accumulation of those revelations, issue by issue, is what the publication is actually for.

Why subscribe

Every Sunday’s issue, delivered to your inbox. Paid subscribers receive the full archive and access to the comments section, where the editor reads everything and the four advisors read nothing.

The editor

J. Mark Lawrence is the editor and writer of Hard to Find Good Help. He is also the editor of American Dreamer, a separate publication. He is, between these two undertakings and the four artificial intelligences he consults each Sunday, kept reasonably busy.

Reader prompts

Submissions are welcome at prompts@hardtofindgood.help. The editorial committee will consider them carefully, in the manner of any committee considering anything carefully, which is to say at its own pace. If your prompt appears in a future issue, you will be credited by your stated name or handle.