Writing Like Socrates Didn't
A response to the AI allegations against my writing.
I’d like to continue to disseminate my work through the written word. I believe most of what I talk about is better served through writing.
While I can speak coherently, I have somewhat of a flat affect when presenting information. And what I’ve been told by numerous people is the presence of an “intense facial expression” while presenting information, which can put some people off.
Although I’ve experimented with masking this aspect of myself, I’ve come to accept it as part of being on the spectrum and no longer do it. Although, that likely will bar me from reaching the kind of audience that I’m interested in speaking to.
So I’d like to continue writing.
Socrates Was Right (As Usual)
I’m a huge fan of Socrates’ works and regularly revisit them as recounted by Plato. Socrates was notoriously against writing and I think that’s an interesting viewpoint that has come back around in a novel way for me.
I’ve always felt judged by Socrates when preferring to write over speaking. Socrates’ main argument for feeling this way was that writing would make our minds lazy. We would lose the ability to remember and to organize thoughts without relying on some kind of external medium to do so.
To a large extent, this viewpoint has bore immense fruit when you consider how modern technology has decreased our attention spans and may even be responsible for the continuous generational drop in IQ.
Platos Are In Short Supply
Unfortunately, Platos are in short supply these days and I don’t have a scribe that just follows me around taking down all of my witty conversations.
Although sometimes the idea of giving up most of my worldly possessions and just walking around the town square and talking to people does seem appealing to me. If I ever happen to come into immense wealth, this will probably be the move for me.
But just like Socrates, I have mouths to feed, but unlike Socrates, times are different. So for now I work, and don’t have a Plato.
How I Found My Plato: And U Can 2
I’d used some audio dictation and even wrote a large portion of my dissertation by speaking into the computer using the built in Google Docs text to speech functionality. Although this was a long time ago, the technology was nascent and it would never pick up on proper nouns or specific terms that I was working with in my dissertation that were not common words.
I wrote it off until somebody introduced me to Whisper Flow and Scriber Pro and other AI assisted tools.
Whisper Flow is great for short form and I use it throughout my day for Slack messages, emails, even text messages. But Scriber Pro is an AI assisted dictation app where you feed it a video or an audio recording and it spits out a pretty good transcript.
I also love that it’s a pay once application, there’s no subscription. You buy it from the Mac App Store and then you own it on your computer in perpetuity.
The Workflow
So a lot of the time my writing setup looks like this these days.
If I am feeling photogenic and up to it, I’ll sit in front of the camera and I will record a YouTube video. I’ll then edit that YouTube video down in Premiere, export it, put it online, toss the video into Scriber Pro and then meticulously edit the transcript by hand until I feel it’s ready for a blog post.
Some days like today I’m feeling much less photogenic, so I curl up in the corner of my office on the imitation Eames chair with a cup of coffee and I mumble my blog post into the iPhone voice memos app. Then you guessed it, it goes into Scriber Pro, I grab the transcript, edit it down by hand and you have what you are reading today.
So, In Response to the Allegations
In response to the allegations of my blog posts being written by AI: in part, yes, but it’s a technicality. The Scriber Pro application and Whisper Flow do use machine learning models in order to dictate my text. But they are my words, not the AI’s words.
It’s simply a way for me to fix the Plato problem.
If you’re interested in hearing what my typical cadence and tone of voice sounds like when I’m dictating one of these blog posts, I’ve posted a small snippet below. But beware, you might drift off while listening to it. This is just generally how I prefer to speak when I’m unmasked and just talking. It takes a lot of energy to make my voice and vocal cadence listenable for YouTube or even a podcast episode.
The voice you’re hearing in your head while you read this text is probably much nicer to your ears!