The work creates the answer - editing and AI
With the temporary increase of brain space from a holiday, I decided to finally start getting some of my notes in order.
These go as far as back as 2011 and span several different programs - Evernote, Apple notes, text files, and some
research in Scrivener - because I have the bad habit of changing my system whenever I start a new project.
I decided on Obsidian as it looks really easy to use, and it doesn't relentlessly try to upsell me on subscriptions or
to use AI. The fact that it just leaves me alone is refreshing novelty in our enshittified age. The most important
feature for me, though, is that everything is stored locally in Markdown. This means I have complete control of what I
create, and it's in a format that won't disappear behind a paywall. I can take my ball and go home any time I like.
After importing some historical material I have been slowly doing the real work: importing notes about the world and
characters of the book series I'm working on and trying to put them into some kind of order. Here is where the
temptation part of the AI comes in. I don't want it to write anything for me (it sucks at that) but categorising and
tagging the material, and maybe filling out what is essentially a lore wiki with what I've written in two books would be
useful. Finding links between words is actually what LLMs are made for, and they're pretty good at it.
So I could use AI to do this; but I won't.
This is not out of blanket hatred of AI, though in the case of the major tech companies they have earned that hatred. (
Anthropic has probably stolen at least one of my books and used it as training data, and I'm sure other companies have
as well. I'm in no rush to feed it any more.) I could use a local model and keep the data safe, but the larceny isn't
the point. Nor is this some kind of Protestant masochism that I have to do this to 'earn' the words I've written.
The only way to better understand what I am creating is to go through each note and read it, every word, to see what's
missing and what else might occur to me in the process. Often I have written a sketch of a character in my notes, and
they turn out differently once they appear on the page. The latter is usually what stays, but neither is 'correct,' and
comparing one to the other often helps me remember things I'd intended to incorporate and then forgotten.
An LLM can't tell me what the right answers to these questions are, because that right answer doesn't exist yet. It's
made through the process itself, and I'm the only one that can do it.