A quick note addendum as I am knee-deep in the phase of blogging that I call “Oh shoot it’s Sunday and why did I start so many drafts of ideas and do so many interviews and how in the world am I going to get these things done by Monday night?”
Act 1: What Can Be Lost in the Outsourcing
Oftentimes in both research and in interviewing for these blogs, I do a thing where I use voice memo or quicktime to record a conversation to revisit later. And because I am ancient and can type weirdly fast, I always (much to the shock and chagrin of my academic colleagues) prefer to transcribe myself, rather than use the many transcription services (temi, etc.) that exist out there. Still, I’m in the aforementioned phase of panic this Sunday morning, I turned back to a blog I had started the old-fashioned way, listening to and recording clips of speech from our friends in the ARC and decided to throw the rest of my interview with the basketball coaches into Otter AI to more quickly finish the job.
My writing flow completely dried up.
Whereas Saturday afternoon, I wrote alongside the laughs and very distinct voices of Russell, Burney, Timmer, and Sarah, this morning I suddenly found myself trying to make sense of words on a page that were often inaccurate and titled as “unknown voice A” or “unknown voice B.”
I felt, suddenly, alone.
I decided to go back to the more time consuming method. What I gained from the transcription help wasn’t worth what I lost.
It reminds me of all of the questions and things we’ve been discussing about student and faculty use of AI. So much can be gained in terms of time and efficiency and accuracy and man all that stuff matters. But what can be lost in the outsourcing when we ask a platform to summarize, transcribe, research, or write for us?
For me, it was:
Actual understanding.
Recognition of voice.
Surfacing the full human in the transcript.
Writing flow.
My own processing of the conversation so that I could share it with you all.
It may very well be that an AI assisted version of that basketball coach blog would be as good or even better written than the one I did myself. But I know I am better, as a human, for hearing the voices and typing the words on my own. I know that I have better absorbed the generous messages our coaches shared with me. I know that, for me, literacy is at its best, meaning-making.
Sometimes I want to be the one doing that meaning-making.
Act 2: What Can Be Gained in the Outsourcing
Once I returned to my handy dandy trusted voice memo app and google doc I got quickly back into the rhythm. And, surprisingly, after waxing on and on above, I found myself clicking back on the transcript OtterAI made for me. I discovered that I can highlight transcript text to hear those voices that meant so much to me. I found that the interplay of my old processes with some of the beauty time saving nature of the new tools felt a bit like the best kind of dance.
Do I want OtterAI to summarize the transcript for me? No thanks.
Do I need some other platform to write these blogs for me? Nah, bro.
But could I make use of an app that puts the words into sound clips and text in a fell swoop?
Quite possibly yes.