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?
