My early days with AI

The Honeymoon Period—Part 1

AI Field Notes for Leaving the Gap

If this project bombs, I’m going to blame Scott Z. Burns.

Burns is the screenwriter of the 2011 movie, Contagion. Its resurgent popularity in 2020, due to its uncanny foreshadowing of the Covid-19 pandemic, was one of the factors that prompted Burns and Contagion director Steven Soderbergh, to begin discussing a possible sequel in early 2025.

With Soderbergh’s blessing, Burns decided to employ AI chatbots to help with the creative and practical work to produce a new movie treatment that could result in a development deal with a studio. Burns turned this process into a fascinating 8-part podcast on Audible: What Could Go Wrong?

By the end of my first time through the podcast, I felt I’d gotten a pretty good AI for Dummies introduction. By my second time through in early fall, I knew I had to play with it myself. I could see how it might be the boost I needed to finally undertake this memoir project. I started exploring different AI platforms, or models.

I settled on Hyperwrite AI and ChatGPT. They both have features that seem compatible with the work I’m envisioning. Hyperwrite AI seems to specialize in being a writing coach and a personal assistant. It feels low key to me, compared to ChatGPT which is the 800 pound gorilla in the personal AI market. Would you believe about 75%? Both have free versions to get you in the door and try them out. I plan to spend several days with them before upgrading to the paid personal plans, which each run $20 per month, though Hyperwrite gives a 20% discount for paying annually.

Jumping into the deep end

I learned from the Burns podcast the importance of good prompts when interacting with a chatbot. I think I get it, but this will be my first time. Prior to this, keyword search was king, having replaced Boolean, and before that the old wooden card catalog and the Readers’ Guide to Periodical Literature. (I warned you I’m old.) My intuition is that “prompt-based generation” is going to be, well, intuitive. Still, it will also be a paradigm shift.

Keep in mind that I’m treating this as a test drive, a proof of concept. I’m taking mere fragments of oral history that go back 100 years without spending time yet to gather additional facts from other sources, except for including my sister Pam’s great work on our family tree going back much further. I want to see what the chatbot can do with these fragments. Can it take them and construct a narrative based on its historical databank and its ability to make logical inferences? This first interview is with Hyperwrite and frankly I’m winging it:

Please accomplish the following writing task:

Write two or three paragraphs summarizing what circumstances between 1925 and 1935 caused families to migrate from Appalachian states like Tennessee and Kentucky to midwestern states like Michigan.

The 3 seconds it takes to have a response is too little to second-guess myself on the prompt. The response is 2 paragraphs, nearly 250 words. I realize it’s very general and I need to provide more specific information I remember about my father’s parents. I ask:

My grandparents migrated to Michigan during that time. My grandfather worked in a lumber yard and eventually became a yard foreman. What would that have been like for him?

Again, 2-3 seconds later I have 2 paragraphs with good information, but now somewhat anchored to what I know about my grandparents.

I give 3 more prompts, trying to clarify and add more specificity. In no more than 5-10 minutes, I have about 1200 words that have suddenly expanded the fragments onto a canvas with details that make them—if not come alive—seem more 3-dimensional.

This was impressive, but it’s still in the form of research notes. I’m going to ask ChatGPT to tap in and Hyperwrite to tap out. I need to figure out an approach, a structure that will carry the notes into a finished narrative.

The 800 Pound Gorilla

I want to give ChatGPT a tryout on this first memoir piece. Some of the most fascinating parts of the Burns podcast were the human screenwriter’s conversations with Lexter, the AI chatbot who was given the persona of a former film critic and is now also a screenwriter. (I’m going to set aside the issue of personifying chatbots for now, but it’s indeed an issue I’ll revisit.) Much of their discussions revolved around identifying strategies to eventually create the product that Burns and Soderbergh would be happy with. I’m pretty sure he was using ChatGPT. Either way, it seems the model best suited to brainstorming how to approach writing this memoir.

I open ChatGPT like I know what I’m doing. Rather than starting with a prompt, I give a couple paragraph explanation of what I ‘m looking for. Like in Hyperwrite, we go back and forth several times very quickly. (This chatbot is VERY chatty!) I determine that of 6 narrative frameworks that it says are most used, a blend of 2 of them best suits the story I’ve envisioned. In the chatbot’s words, it’s a “braided vignette mosaic with historical counterpoint.” Fine. My Lexter goes on to explain:

· Vignettes as Foundation:
The memoir will be built from vivid, self-contained stories drawn from family and personal history. These vignettes capture moments and milestones.

· Historical Counterpoint Woven In:
Each vignette will be braided with context from the larger world. Rather than separating biography and history into distinct sections, historical detail will be woven directly into the narrative.

· Mosaic Structure:
The memoir will not follow a strict year-by-year chronology but instead move through selected vignettes that build cumulatively. The sequence will honor broad chronology (moving from ancestors through my own early life and into the 1960s–70s) but remain flexible, allowing themes and resonances to guide the order.

I think this looks about right, but let’s find out.

The chatbot says: 👉 Would you like me to take a crack at drafting a sample passage from your father’s story using your raw family notes? That could serve as a model for how to handle these early family-history vignettes.

I say: Let’s see what you’ve got!

And, in about 60 seconds, it did! If you haven’t already read it, it’s the vignette titled, “Leaving the Gap.” It’s lightly edited by me from the AI-written piece and it will have a future revision because there is more to the story.

All told, this Field Note covers about 3 hours. I got some experience with 2 AI platforms, came up with a working framework for the memoir stories, and have the draft of the first vignette. I wanted to see if this had potential. Check.