Editing and fiddling with AI tools

I’m making sense of the me that does office things. I am so easily distracted. But today was a day for it. It took me two days to build myself up to it.

All I had to do was edit some Shakespeare, make it look nice and send it to the client. They are being demanding, which is fair as we are charging what we are worth. But I need them to confirm. They’re a media company so they’re masters at wasting time and charging extra. I know and the venue knows that I can provide what they’re looking for better than anyone they could possibly ever find at the price. This is a thing I know so well now, playing into my two big areas of professional geekiness: Shakespeare and rigorous but flowing performance. But they want spreadsheets and measurable proofs. I even made sure I found two Factory actors for my Romeo and Juliet just so we have the media footprint. Our event company is very new and I need to work out how to make Ffion a partner.

AI is in the conversation at the moment, inevitably. Two of my potential clients want AI Shakespeare stuff. What a world we live in where these aggregators are called creators.

I can write this blog without brain freeze, every day, without fail. But that’s because I’ve given myself permission to do it without structure and to barely check my work. As soon as there’s the idea of assessment in it I freeze.

I found myself using Copilot. Not for text, but for donkey work. The copypaste Shakespeare texts always have line numbers that end up just in your script35. Placed in a way that seems quite random36 until you figure out it’s counting lines37 based on the way they’re spaced out in the text38

What I would have just ignored and sent to the actors, as too much work to get it out, I did with a prompt. “Can you take all the extraneous line numbers out please?” Blurpblurpblurp done. And then you have to read it to make sure it hasn’t randomly made something up to replace the numbers.

We can hate it but it’s here. So how do we get it to do the bullshit work so we can be creative. That’s what happened today. I had an enthusiastic dumb office intern who is brilliant at tech and thick as shit. “Can you format this better and make it look like a script please? Oh and change the font to Times New Roman without messing up the formatting.”

I currently say please so that it likes me more. Maybe I’ll end up being a better breed of cattle if that’s the way the singularity goes. With the hideous narcissists in power in so many major companies, this is the world AI is training on. My client would have got the same idea today without it but it wouldn’t have looked as shiny. But I had to have clear opinions and guide it. I didn’t like the font or formatting it first proposed. As I say, like an enthusiastic intern… Perhaps this is why some people who prompt art start to think they are making art. They aren’t. They can’t. But this is a curious tool for taking crap labour out.