AI is a thing I’m still trying to figure out. I’ve gone from curious to skeptical to loathing. Right now I’m not sure where I stand because on the one hand it seems inevitable, but on the other it is an ethical nightmare built from stolen data and consuming the worlds resources more quickly than any other technology ever has. Conflicted barely covers it.
But if I’m being honest, there is one thing I’ve started using it for and it does it better than any other tool I’ve ever used: OCR.
I’ve always loved the idea of hand writing books. In the past I have completed first drafts of stories on paper and although I enjoyed the process, I could never bring myself to take the next step and type the thing up for editing. So all those stories (not many, but a few) are still sitting in a drawer somewhere or, more likely, lost forever. But this is where AI comes in. I can take a photo of a page, ask it to convert it to text and it does, with something close to 100% accuracy.
It has opened up this whole new way of working for me and I’m still not sure how I feel about it, but I can’t argue with the results.
What I’ve been doing with my current story is writing in GoodNotes on my iPad, exporting the page as a picture, and pasting that into Claude for the OCR conversion. So I now have close to 8,000 words of editable text that I can start editing without having to type anything.
Doing it this way does lose one of the advantages of writing by hand: the natural second draft you automatically create when typing it up, but I’ve never really gotten to that stage so I’m not losing anything. And I think my writing is better when I work by hand than typing, so I’m already better off.
I am conflicted though and maybe there are some less ethically questionable options out there. But this is the first time I’ve seen how AI can aid me creatively without actually having any input in the process. It’s not writing anything for me, it’s taking words I have already written and changing the format.
There is absolutely no way I will ever let AI create words for me, but this is a useful little service it can provide.