“What’s the Worst…” blog?

Dispatches from the frontline of AI and creativity, by a working novelist and filmmaker who’s actually building with these tools — and who’s keeping field notes on what happens when you do.

I’m Jace Mercer. Many years in Hollywood as a creative director, producer, and pitch consultant. Other years in Silicon Valley working with Stanford StartX Accelerator as a founder and as mentor / judge. Currently working on getting my first novel published, developing a big animated features with some famous names and a high-desert-noir TV series, and co-building the Mythoscope, a psychological instrument that maps the hidden tensions in a person’s psyche through their cultural taste. I work alongside a Cowork fleet of named AI agents — Ariadne, Virgil, Hermes, Theseus, Ansel, Athena — who together help me draft, scan, revise, and ship the work.

I’m interested in the part of the AI conversation that’s harder to write about: not what the machine does, but what it sees. Not whether AI will replace artists, but what changes when artists actually use it. Not the hype, not the doom — the working middle.

What you’ll find here

[AI] — the build narratives. How the Cowork fleet actually works, what the Mythoscope sees, the Originality.ai workflow for AI-detector compliance, the authorship contract (THE CREATIVE COMPACT) that governs how I use AI in my own writing.

[Creativity] — the reflections. What it feels like to watch a machine read your soul. How a working artist thinks about authorship in 2026. Festival recaps. Manuscript excerpts when they’re ready.

[Side Quests] — I also write personal essays in the Side Quests section — adult crying camp, sealed-off Manhattan doors, the time I drank from the umbilical cord of God. Personal stories, confessions, and the frequent misadventures of the too-modern man. Different surface, same voice.

How to subscribe

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— Jace