Hey AI, Can You Save Me?
Since Sam’s AI hit the streets, most of us in any line of business (or walk of life) have been asking ourselves one question: “How can AI save me _____?” Fill in the blank: money, time, resources, or just full stop, can AI save me (vs. kill me).
Well, I am not one to trust others’ answers, and as a hands-on kinda sorta retired technologist, I had to see for myself using my latest project of editing two books on my to-do list as a test case.
I learned from editing IBM tech manuals for 10 years, without a break, that you have to have a game plan, as well as a bail-out plan when editing other’s words.
So my game plan for editing my pal’s two manuscripts is: let’s not read them at all! Why not use Sam’s Wizbang new techBro-toy to do all the heavy lifting, after all, we are talking about hundreds of typed pages, double-sided, and in a 9pt or less Times New Roman. I can’t even see the print on the pages let alone edit the tiny words. So I needed help. I planned to 1) use Chat-GPT Builder to make a Chat assistant that could do my job for me on this project, including all the editing tasks normal and consistent, and 2) understand just what AI is capable of handling in this capacity, as a Publication Assistant.
My backup plan - my escape chute - was to just do things the old-fashioned way, but first, go out and get a new prescription for new lenses from my optometrist, and buy a red pen.
Does AI Help, Hinder, or Is Neutral?
That is what this article is all about… does AI help or hinder or both, from the perspective of an editor who is trying to save time and money using AI to analyze the text, edit the text, and prepare the text for publishing? This is what I wanted to find out, from first-hand experience.
So I fed the shorter manuscript (10,000 words or so) to the Builder beast before I tackled the larger, more complex, and 100% complete manuscript. Both are from the same author and at first blush, use some of the same story arcs and character deployments, on or about the same timeline.
The shorter work, called The Tantric Truck became my test case to see what Chat-GPT Builder could do for me. The second work, called “Have You Seen Erol Scream” is next, and will be documented as well (in a follow-on post).
Sidebar on Chat-GPT 4.0 Pro Builder/Creator
You can ask Chat-GPT what the Builder is, but you won’t get a technical answer, just marketing gorp indicating it’s the best thing since sliced toast (if you get anything at all). But the truth is, it’s special access to features included with the “Pro” version of Chat-GPT that costs 20 bucks a month to begin with. These Builder/Creator features essentially allow you to upload your dataset of gorp (for lack of a more descriptive phrase), which includes PDFs, text, and images, and then allows the AI machine in the sky to crunch that down into useful bits of responses for the custom chat box of your making. In short, this is a special GPT that you can create, for a specific task or set of tasks that you want the GPT to do, so you can just sit back and…
For example, you want to write a book, and you want a special chatbot that can do magical things with all the text that you feed in. You may want better spelling, better plot development, or more perfect characters, and have them visually created for you as you type. In addition, you might want to do copyright searches on your words or phrases, or just see how your words compare to other words on the internet. For all of this, you need to build your own GPT using Builder within the Pro version. The free version just won’t do!
In addition, using Builder you can inject instructions that make your custom bot reply to random questions from any user of the bot. Or to generate prompts that might be interesting to a user. All of that. But can it help me achieve my goals as a book editor1?
I want to:
Understand the intent of the work, and anything else meta I can think of about the author’s work, as in story plot, twists, arcs, character developments, and the worthiness of the work in the wider context.
Understand the actual structure and layout of the work, as in pagination, headings, the table of contents if there is one, and things like that; things hard to do with unstructured text coming from a somewhat unstructured and unconventional author.
Perform a host of analytical tasks, such as interrogating the work for specific answers to common types of queries, for example, “On what page does “The Character” appear first, and what does that character say or do?”2
Perform other common, mundane editorial tasks, such as illustrating the book, preparing the book for print, cleaning up the dirty text, reformatting and moving things around, changing words, sharing and collaborating with others on the project, etc., etc.
I will score each of these aspects of my findings at the end of this post, but first, here is the blow-by-blow, every step-of-the-way story: from the creation of my GPT assistant to using the GPT to evaluate the text, to actually editing the manuscript using my new Assistant and then giving this “app” that I built with Chat-GPT Pro a star rating, for each of my goals set out to accomplish with my new assistant…
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