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How “AI” is helping my writing process
People often talk about how AI will kill us, and take our jobs.
It may do all that, but for now, I think of it as technology that augments my capabilities, and I see this play out every day in my life as a writer. For instance, yesterday I interviewed Matthew Prince, co-founder of CloudFlare. The conversation ran for about an hour. I had an editable transcript in about three hours, ready for final finessing.
In the past, when I interviewed someone for about an hour, it would take a day for a transcription service to turn around the interview. It would cost me about $150. Or I would use an early AI-like app called Rev. Then, I would spend three days editing the interview and incorporating it into the story. When I was on tight deadlines, that would mean a sleepless night or two. I hoped that an editor would shape it into publishable copy.
Nowadays, the process is much faster because I use several AI tools. I can record my interview using a voice app on my iPhone, or use Zoom’s inbuilt feature. I import the audio file into MacWhisper, a great application – the best $10 I spent. ( I can do this with Descript, but I much prefer not paying for yet another AI software subscription, considering I already pay for Poe, Midjourney, and OpenAI.)
It uses the open-source Whisper protocol to transcribe the entire voice file on my MacBook. I can save the transcript as a PDF and use Anthropic’s Claude Opus to clean it up. I have the right editing prompts to do the clean-up job fast.
With the right prompts, I can get the interview to a place where I can start editing it manually. The entire process, which would have taken a few days in the past, now takes between two to three hours. To me, that is what this new augmented intelligence is all about helping me get the work done faster and more efficiently.
I’m not too fond of sleepless nights. I will let others lose sleep over AGI — while I can get to sleep longer, by finishing my writing sooner.
May 1, 2024. San Francisco
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4 thoughts on this post
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Thanks for this, Om. Based on your recommendation, I bought MacWhisper. Thank you. On your point about prompts for Claude to then clean up the transcripts – any chance you might share these with us, or write an article about how you prompt Claude to clean interview transcripts?
Karl
Karl,
I will do a follow up blog post about this later this weekend, as I am slammed with “work” work today. 🙂
Great post. I too use transcription services (otter.ai) to transcribe interviews, zoom calls, and freelance gigs where time is money and the ancient evil chore of transcription or worst yet, re-llstening to a microcassette recording of a barely audible interview would mean hours of moving from keyboard to recorder, back and forth, Is it AI? Sure. Has it come a long way since the hell of training a system like Nuance’s Dragon-whatchamacallit to understand my own voice so I could dictate during my long commute. Definitely.
But is it “generative” AI and composing paragraphs or writing summaries for you? Not really. It’s just very good pattern recognition on the same order as grammar and spelling checkers in Microsoft Word. Now what do you think about large language models hoovering up all of GigaOm and you Forbes work and Broadbandits and incorporating it without attribution into a system like ChatGPT? What are the odds the New York Times’ suit against OpenAI will prevail?
David
What a delight to see you here. First of all, we have come a long way from the early days and you are right 🙂 And given my accent, I am impressed by the progress. I used to use Otter and all, but I have stopped doing it because this is cheaper and better.
On the composing of sentences and all, it is constantly improving. In a year since I have been using MacWhisper, it has improved quite a lot. And then when I run the transcript through Claude with right prompts, it does a great job of combining sentences, and making a clear distinction between questions, interviewers and interviewee. I think it is a good interim solution. And far superior to the WORD helpers.
As for rest of the question, I am going to leave it for another post. Candidly, NYT doesn’t have a hope in high heaven proving their case. I think OpenAI might just settle. Anyway, NYT is an edifice of a dying hierarchy. You know how I feel about establishment media. 🙂