To AI or not to AI

Before you get into an uproar, I’m not talking about using AI to write or even AI for cover creation. While I refuse to use the former, I will use AI for blog images, even for some image elements for covers. What I’m talking about today is using a program/app like NotebookLM to help sort and list information from a book series.

I don’t know about you, but one of my biggest issues writing a series is keeping up with character names and descriptions. It’s not too bad for the first three books or so. But when you get to Book 5 or more, it can become a problem. I find myself searching through previous books to make sure I haven’t changed a name or a character’s eye color, etc. I’ve tried going back and building a “bible” for each series but I suffer from the “I wrote it. I don’t want to read it because I will see all the flaws and will never want to write again” syndrome.

Yes, I’m an insecure writer.

This morning, I came across an article about a fairly new software from Google called NotebookLM. Now, I’m not a big fan of Google, especially when it comes to privacy concerns. So I am going into this with a lot of questions and concerns, starting with whether anything I upload will be used as part of the AI’s “training”.

According to the homepage for the program, “Your personal data is not used to train NotebookLM, so any private or sensitive information you have in your sources will stay private, unless you choose to share your sources with collaborators.” Of course, I haven’t seen any terms of service yet, so who knows what caveats there might be to that.

Still, I went ahead and uploaded one book, one that has been offered for free (but no longer) and has been out for some years now. Your upload options include adding something from Drive, a pdf, a txt file and more. I used Google Drive. It took a couple of minutes due to the size of the file. Another minute or so and then it started giving me what appears to be standard data: a summary and key topics. Interesting but not what I was looking for.

So I asked for it to build a character list with their descriptions. I phrased it pretty much that way. The results were displayed very quickly but they were incomplete at best. Major supporting characters weren’t listed while minor characters who were basically nothing but walk-ons were. Color me not very impressed.

I adjusted the command prompt and told it to list all the characters in the book. That was a much more complete listing. To my surprise, it also gave some basic information about the characters. What it didn’t do was list physical descriptions using that command prompt. So I got more than I had before but still not everything I wanted.

My next text prompt was to give me the physical description of all characters in the book. That was better. What really helped is that it actually links back to the text in the book where the descriptions were taken from. So, while not perfect, it is more than I had before. When I asked for specific character descriptions, it would either give what it could find or explain that there were no specific descriptions in the text and the offer other descriptions like clothing preference, job, etc.

While this is all helpful, it wasn’t perfect. One of the characters is says did not have any sort of physical description in the text when I know there was. When I asked specific questions like eye color or hair color, it came up with the right answer.

So, how effective is this program, or any like it, going to be for writers who haven’t kept up with everything in their “world”? That’s really going to depend on the writer. There is a learning curve in figuring out the best way to compose the text prompt. You also need to have enough familiarity with the texts you upload to know if a character or setting or whatever hasn’t been dealt with. Then you have to be prepared to refine your prompts to get the information you want.

Still, all that will take less time than it takes to reread a book or six.

Do I recommend the program?

Not yet. I want more information, especially about what it does with the files you upload. I don’t want my work being used to train the program, especially if that training is cross-platform and will then be used by a “sister app” to help someone write their “best selling book”.

Still, it is something to keep an eye on.

Until later.