The quiet early hours, from 5 to 7 in the morning, have always been my most fertile time for ideas. However, there’s a catch: when I sit down to type, I lose the flow of thoughts because I’m still processing them while trying to write.
So, this morning, as I sat with my half-drunk coffee and a half-completed Sudoku, my thinking drifted, yet again to the challenge of producing consistent work and/or producing work consistently. In my personal technology-free fantasy world—definitely sometime before I was actually born—I would have a secretary to transcribe my handwritten notes or dictation, an editor to review my drafts, and a publisher ready to turn it all into paper material to be distributed to places where people who might like my work might pick it up and pay some cash for it.
But inspired by Jay Springett’s recent words about his “Menagerie of Models” I’m now playing with tools that can serve as my own digital secretary and editor. They’re still my words, but I’m getting help from the machines when it comes to capturing and organising my ideas so that I can distribute them more effectively. And here we are, writing not only to people who happen to be in a bookshop or newsagent or are lucky enough to be my personal correspondents, but to just about anyone with a computer.
The 1960s are the only decade in my life (so far) which I didn’t use computers. I had a bit of a dip in such activity in the eighties (at college *nobody* thought of using a computer for anything!) But despite that long relationship, I’ve always had a nagging unease about letting machines do all the hard work that I thought I had an obligation to do myself. But if I really believed that, where would I draw the line? Is using a word-processor too lazy? Should I be hand-coding my html pages? I don’t think so, so why am I squeamish about using ChatGPT with due intelligence and discernment?
That’s the question. Where’s the line between what’s authentic and what’s too artificial? I recently saw a personalised video response, for example, which addressed the recipient by name. And it made me uncomfortable in a way that personalised text does not now, but might have done when I first saw it (just to remind you that I’ve been mail-merging since before you were born!) And that leaves me wondering about future generations who are being born into this kind of digital intimacy or weird (to me) interactions. Will they find it perfectly normal? Or will there always be an inherent strangeness that they learn to ignore? It makes me think of my relationship to photographs – 200 years ago people might have wondered about what effect it has on me that I have so many photos of myself, my family and my breakfasts.
Anyway, I’m not (yet) making video mail-merges but if I did, I wonder how long it would take you to realise?