I was playing around with AI recently and see if it could fulfill publishing roles for Vanishing Tower Press. Help me get better products out the door faster. I got some great results at the boiler-plate level of product management. Sometimes it helps to have someone tell you what they think you should do. But only if the source has valuable information. Hence AI as a new way to aggregate useful information in ways you can then use in creative ways.
Couple of things I have used it for over the last couple of days:
Space Acid; my space opera retro-clone had serious mechanical issues which plagued the overall use of the book. Considering the source material, no surprise. I had AI review the manuscript and rationalize the mechanics. I asked it to attack the text as a copy editor and playtester would. Gave some good suggestions on how to accomplish this. Gave me enough enthusiasm to start rewriting the impacted sections. Having some sense of how to get out of the box I was writing myself into. Asking what kind of vibe it gets from reading the text can give me decent enough feedback to see if I am getting my idea across in a coherent matter. Asking it to expose weakness in the text the software handles with ease as well as any editor would that you paid. And have the edits back in your hands in a minute, I'm re-writing drafts in real time with some professional critique.
A road map, a refresher course on how a publishing house, no matter how small an ameature and hacky, can go about and make the best product they can. It produced this for me in seconds. I'll attach it here through a link if you care to review it. I'm not saying the output has tremendouse value, but getting even this level of detail out of myself would be hours and hours of work. Which wouldn't make any sense. Because the results I got have me doing what I expected. Hours and hours of editing, and writing, and designing on the publishing software. Which is where I need to be spending my time if I am going to get anything done.
The other task I have it going into is formatting tables so I don't have to build each one in my layout document. This always takes me a long time manually, constructing the table styles, paragraph styles, and character styles. I've got some more learning to do, but I think I can get AI to do these tasks for me within the actual program. Formating press releases and customer email corrispondance, these will be intersting to see how these can be intergrated.
Not to try and grow the business in any grandstanding way. This project is spurred on by a desire to understand what is going on around me in the tech world. That is what VTP is all about. Interacting with the world through a creative hobby. One that has real people interaction at the core.
Any tool which gets me in the chair to actually write, I get exited about that.
Another challange I want to throw at it is editing audio from recorded game sessions for snappy playback. Doing that with my audio software suite is hours of work. I am over it. But I want that tight audio damn it. If it can skin a session as good as did then I could get more episodes up on a regular schedule on the podcast. When I could put months of play in easy to listen to back to back episodes there are people who enjoyed that. And I enjoyed the infrequent feedback. Makes it all the more fun.