To keep an eye on me
People talk to me about how I could use AI to help my writing. I mostly ignore them. While I recognize AI might have some organizational uses in the editing and book launching domain (which I don't dispute), I'm keeping it ten feet away from anything creative. You've gotta listen to the artists, the people making or struggling to make their living out of art - and they all seem to agree on the dangers of AI.
However.
I've been contemplating recently one way to use AI, which could potentially be interesting (if I ever was inclined to share my writings with it). Over the past few weeks I was trying to edit a novel I wrote a while back. I've been in an over-productive phase of my life, which created a lot of output (and burnout). And while, after much coming and going, I decided to shelf the story as it wasn't what I had hoped (and a myriad other reasons), I did notice several patterns.
It's an excellent glimpse into my psyche at that time, what was weighing on my mind, and how it played out. It would make for extremely rich psychoanalytic soil. Especially if you could trace the ideas across works. Indeed, one of the reasons I decided to shelf the book was because it shared many traits with another novel I completed some time after which (although I haven't begun editing yet) I believe to be much more qualitative.
The writing aspect of all this, I can deal with.
But the psychological area is simply too broad, and something I would enjoy analyzing myself if I ever could be analytical enough or had that bandwidth.
Ah, but why AI?
Why not a human psychoanalyst, of the ilk I love? This isn't to underestimate living psychonanalysts who will always, always be (in my opinion) infinitely more valuable than any attempt at psychology AI could make.
I'm just trying to be practical. At the risk of sounding immodest, I am quite a prolific writer, which isn't to say everything I write is good, but that I do write a lot. I would need a personal analyst to keep track of themes, ideas and complexes stretching across years, and across several stories.
Which is where AI could come in handy. If I could somehow get AI to track, summarize and compartmentalize the recurring ideas, the things that (outside my knowledge at the time) seem to haunt and obsess me, I could use my writing not simply as an outlet for these things, but as a way of addressing them.
I reckon it could also be interesting from the perspective of therapists dealing with artistic clients in one field or another. While I was in therapy, I often wished I could somehow transfer into my excellent therapist's brain in seconds the entirety of things I'd written over the past ten years, so she might better understand some things, or perhaps spot patterns or fears I was oblivious to.
I do still think if that had been an option, she wouldn't have ended up downplaying certain events in my life which had great resonance for me. It's hard to understand sometimes the different ways by which we measure the events in our respective lives.
And I do think the way we communicate through art is a real, tangible way of quantifying that.
I think it could help the therapeutic process, it could make for phenomenal analytic ground.
If you don't believe me, just look at many people you know on here and have followed for years, how much we've learned of one another just by reading day in, day out the things others keep mulling over. Wouldn't that be useful?
And, if you are a creator of some kind, do you think that might appeal to you?
Ah yes, the ability to truly know the mind of another...
Did you and your friends ever ask that question: "If you could have any super-power, what would it be?" Mine wasn't flying, or super-strength, or invisibility. It was the ability to completely and utterly inhabit another person's thoughts, and then be able to come back to my own with a full understanding of what it was to be that person. Not just reading minds, but inhabiting them.
Of course, coming back to your own mind after a trip like that--is it even possible?
What is it like to be a bat?
I've been playing with AI a little lately. Guilty, guilty. As a writer it feels...both empowering and emasculating. And yeah, the ability to upload an extended passage and get immediate feedback on the whole damn thing is uncanny. It's like having a partner who actually listens to you for hours and really wants to talk about it.
I've been running language models on my own computer, because having an extended back-and-forth with a tech-bro's computer feels icky. But I also quite enjoyed uploading stories to Google's Notebook LM and having these two AIs carry on a half hour discussion about my work. I mean, the analysis is spot on, with some moments of I hadn't considered that, but you know you're right...
It's also quite flattering. I wonder what's going to happen to us, when we have virtual companions telling us how great we are all the time?
From what I understand, Google's AI is the most flattering and agreeable, so might not be what you want if using it to edit/critique a piece, but that's something that worries me too, generally. I don't use it (either Grok or ChatGPT) for writing, but I do for yoga as well as various personal things. The first time, it left me feeling pretty damn pleased with myself, but then it frightened me, how easily it got under my skin by telling me what I wanted to hear. When people do this, we refer to them as manipulators and gaslighters, but with AI, I fear we're not really aware just how dangerous this could be (yet, hopefully).
I try not to let it get to me too much. As for knowing what it is to be somebody else, that could be really damn useful, especially with how divided our world is right now. The ability to see at once where someone is coming from and how they feel and why they reason in a way that contradicts yours? Priceless (though I imagine it'd also be a matter of time only before you started losing it).
Hello @honeydue. After reading your text, I have started to look toward the other end, where values are touched by algorithms, but I have also understood that in the end, we have control, and that horizon cannot be lost. Thank you for sharing your reflection. Hugs.
I have previously fed it a concept that I want to work with, eg, I am going to take some photographs of x, please pretend you're interviewing me for a magazine article and ask me questions about the project and the completed images: and then I answer those questions.
Those questions that I would have never considered asking myself.
And it makes me feel like a creative celebrity.
But really, those questions I would have never asked myself about my work help me to decipher and sharpen my intent and increase my ... profoundness?
I think it is about how you use it in that context.
I was spell checking an old novel I wrote, (in MS Word) and it wanted to remove every comma I wrote before the word "and". It changed the character of the writing enormously and I didn't like it.
I also found out that I definitely use the word definitely too much in that particular piece of writing.
Those little insights are fantastic. And they don't even need to come from AI.
The act of writing itself is therapy too.
Sorry for jumping in a jumble of thoughts that have gone all over the place in reply to your post, but it is hard to order such things after one has imbibed alcohol.
I avoid AI for any creative and personal concepts. However, I play around with like asking mundane things like " What kind of fish lives in the pacific" or asking some studying concept. To me, it's just like asking to a google,nothing more than that. I think in the future, even google would be gone when you can ask AI anything and under a few second. It'll be the next generation of search engine.
But using it to do something creative is another story, it undermines our experience and creativity, I think. I don't mind being a slow writer. it's the experience and learning which matters to me.
did the AI surprised you with the insights?
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