In lieu of my recent tirade against the use of AI, I decided to see if AI could do some heavy lifting for me.
Yes. I can perceive the irony.
One of the things that I have been obsessing over, much to the detriment of my own productivity, is the conceptual continuity of the project as it will span across 3 books and take about 15 years to write (5 years per book, roughly). Moreover, having an intuitive structure to my existing worldbuilding is equally important, so that I can have a better “bird’s eye view.” Similar to accessing Google Earth and pushing in on a random region to uncover what’s there, my process begins on a macro level, which then informs the rest of the tone and style for the project. To account for all this lore overhead, a friend of mine from my local Dungeons and Dragons group—a true acolyte of the AI takeover—suggested that I look into creating a local AI model on my laptop using Unsloth, an open source app which suspiciously sounds like the name of some cosmic horror, dreamed up in the chloroform induced nightmares of Lovecraft. One of my prerequisites before doing anything related to AI was that my information could not leave my laptop. Unsloth apparently can perform these local processes fairly well.
After doing some preliminary tests on a new laptop I got recently, I was pleasantly surprised by how comprehensive the output was. Despite several category mistakes that Unsloth made, I was able to categorize and consolidate all of my existing notes— spread out over about 10 other .docx files—into a single, intelligible document. As I’ve said before, AI is just a dumb calculator. Use it for dumb calculator things.
This is one of those dumb calculator things.
One of the notable limitations of using a local model is my own RAM resources. I haven’t yet poked around with the settings or the wording of prompts to process jobs incrementally over several sessions, but the hope is that I might be able to scan all my notes, pause in the middle to free up my RAM resources, then start again. I have yet to consult my buddy on the limitations of this approach, but if this all works, this will save me a lot of time. At the very least, I will be able to perceive certain blind spots in my lore by seeing how the AI gets it wrong.
The MSI Prestige 16 Flip AI+ is a fantastic piece of hardware so far. Having the ability to hand draw my maps, have more real estate, and fold the keyboard back into a tablet PC configuration allows me to tackle writing on the go without feeling like I’m constantly shuffling windows around. Using an OLED screen long term will be interesting, as far as burn-in is concerned, but I’ve enabled certain features, like a rotating wallpaper and reminders to Win+Tab every half hour in hopes of mitigating this. Things like the “Task Bar” remain the chief offenders of burn-in, but I’m not quite ready yet to hide it.
Overall, I’m still firmly in the camp that AI can’t improve your writing. It can’t “give you feedback” or tangibly add anything useful. It’s use as an organizer of information that’s been carefully vetted can’t be overstated though.
On a personal note, my dad’s cancer seems to be rallying, which has been occupying a large amount of my brainwidth. I will be visiting him in November for Thanksgiving, and taking my daughter in tow. If you are a believer, please be praying for his health!
SW
