Tell It Forward

I have a hundred questions for my mother and father that I wish I’d asked them when they were alive. My brother had the presence of mind to bring a tape recorder with him when he talked with our grandmother about her life. And you know what? We have the technology to easily do that today! Our phones have voice recorders and many of those apps can transcribe so we can read the conversation after the fact. But even if your voice recorder app won’t transcribe there are many ways to turn that recording into a readable form. One good way to do it is to go to https://huggingface.co/spaces/openai/whisper?utm_source=chatgpt.com, click on the Audio file tab and upload your audio file. It’s free but you may be delayed during periods of high use.

And you can record your memories and stories about your life. Think you don’t have anything interesting to tell? I’ll bet you do! Some foolish things you did when you were a child - that quick taste of your father’s beer that made you make a face. Cutting class to meet up with some friends. Meeting up with your boyfriend or girlfriend during the high school football game. Pranks that you pulled in college or at work. Your first car or apartment. You can easily commit them to posterity or just record them for your own listening or reading pleasure later.

Who will want to listen to or read those disjointed memories? Maybe your kids or your siblings, but disjointed memories are just that - nothing to tie them together and no central theme, so it quickly loses its appeal.

Weave Those Stories Together

You can turn those memories into a book! So you’re not a writer - we have a tool now that can take those stories and weave them together into a coherent whole. What is that tool? You might have guessed already - Artificial Intelligence! Pick your favorite Large Language Model AI and tell it that you want to write the story of your life. I mean literally type or say to it “I want to write a story of my life.” It will prompt you for what form you want it to take. But you don’t have to answer - you can just say “I’m going to give you my stories and I’ll tell you when to start writing.” Then give it your memories - speak them or upload recorded or typed memories, and tell it to start writing your story (again, literally tell it “start writing”). It will organize them and offer the results to you for editing or your approval.

You don’t have to stop there. You can create any sort of book or recording. Narrate a run through your photo album so those pictures have context. Recite those recipes that have been handed down to you or the ones you’ve created on your own or the ones you particularly enjoy.

Record a discussion with your siblings about your shared life and memories. Record a discussion with your friends about the things you’ve done and shared. Or your coworkers.

Have a favorite author that’s stopped writing or has passed? Ask Artificial Intelligence to write a story in their style. Always wanted to write a novel that would be an easy read on vacation? Put the idea together and go to AI.

Length Matters

If you’re writing something relatively short - maybe less than 50 pages or so - then pretty much any AI will do the trick. But if you intend to write a longer form - a hundred pages or so - then you need to consider the “context window” offered by your chosen AI. As we’ve discussed before, the context window is how much information your AI can retain throughout your conversation. Context is spoken of in tokens, which is what the AI uses internally to work with and from. A token very roughly corresponds to a little more than a word (I know it sounds odd, but that’s the way it works). Right now, to engage in a longer form of book you’ll likely need to pay for a subscription. A friend wrote a 26-chapter novel using Claude.ai, paying $20/month to gain access to a 200,000 token context window. I began writing my own story with ChatGPT and only got through 4 chapters (about 20,000 words) before ChatGPT began forgetting context.

But you don’t have to start big like that. Start small. Record some things and do a little experimenting. Try tying a few things together and see what you get. Or don’t! Just leave them as disjointed snippets and enjoy them that way. But I would encourage you just to start.

That’s all for this time

I hope this might motivate you to tell your story or narrate your photo album or record your favorite recipes or commit just about anything to posterity. Don't hesitate to write to me if you have questions! And please let me know if you’ve undertaken any of these suggestions.

As always, my intent is to help you understand the basics and equip you to search for more detailed information.

Please feel free to email me with questions, comments, suggestions, requests for future columns, to sign up for my newsletter, or whatever at [email protected] or just drop me a quick note and say HI!

If you like, you can read my most recent newsletter in the Hillsboro Times Gazette at https://go.ttot.link/TG-Column - I should have that link updated shortly after this edition of the newsletter appears in the online version of the newspaper.