Two Years of Work Completed in Six Days...

Bill Berry

2 days ago

4 min read

My mother has been a writer her whole life.

And if you look at these photographs, you will see that the rough draft of her memoir now exists in print. I received my copy in the mail today, and fingers crossed, she hopefully received her copy today as well, just in time for her 80th birthday... But before we sing happy birthday, let me give you some backstory.

For over forty years she has kept journals, written letters, drafted stories, and clipped articles she'd managed to get printed in newspapers. And slowly, largely in longhand, the pieces of what she always hoped would one day become her memoir, was built — the story of her life.

There was just one problem. It was all handwritten! And worse still, her handwriting and shorthand can be difficult to interpret... That barrier alone is a big part of why I didn't dive into this project years ago, even though the material has been here. I knew turning it into something anyone could actually read would take years. (2 years by my estimate)

Then last Thursday, on a whim, I decided to try something.

I had just finished packing for a flight and had a little time to spare. So I sat down with her journals and clippings and started snapping photographs. Ninety minutes later, when I had to leave for the airport, I had photographed 397 pages.

I didn't look at it again until Sunday when my niece came over. She brought a whole bunch of additional material from her own archive — more of Mom's writing, an old genealogy book, newspaper clippings, personal thoughts, even her master's thesis.

Another mountain of handwritten material.

We spent two and a half hours more photographing pages, and at the end of it, we had 1,200 photographs in total. It was a herculean task by any measure...

Then, starting on Monday morning, I fed all of it to an advanced AI.

Over the course of eight hours — I gave it instructions and, more importantly, context clues.

If she's talking about horses, that's probably her childhood.

If she's talking about this person, that's probably my brother; if she's talking about that person, that's probably her father.

You should know that she and her mother share the same name.

You should know that her brother and her first husband's uncle had the same name too.

This was the name of her favorite cat.

This was the name of her dog.

And so on...

None of the materials were written in order of course, she has been sending random parts and pieces out to me for years...

And she didn't know what all she'd already written — so many of the stories existed in more than one place.

One of them existed in four different places, in four slightly different versions.

So I told the AI: "Merge those stories. Organize everything by decade. Ask me questions. Quiz me. Do whatever it takes to sort this out."

Ninety minutes later, it handed me back a finished, organized collection of her documents, organized by decade, 74,000 words, spanning a life of eighty years...

I had believed this work would take me two years. Minimum. Just to sort it out, just to have any hope of doing the project justice.

The AI did it in an hour and a half.

And then, just because I thought it was an impossible request, I said: "Now give it to me in an Amazon-friendly format, and design a cover based on her sophomore yearbook photo. And make it all upload ready so I can send it off for a proof copy!"

The photo itself was rough and needed retouching — over the years the photographic chemicals had faded her lipstick from their original vibrant red to a sickly blue.

So the AI retouched the photo, turned her lipstick back to red, designed the cover, and gave me the files. In a few minutes...

I uploaded it to Amazon, it processed, and I ordered a proof copy on Monday night

That proof arrived today.

Wednesday.

Six days after I started a project I believed would take two years just to organize.

Two years of work, turned into twelve hours of work, across six days.

Today is my mother's 80th birthday.

I ordered her copy before I ordered mine — so there is a real chance that tonight, halfway across the country, in a small Iowa town, my mother is leafing through a rough draft of her life's work...

The memoir she always wanted to write.

On her 80th birthday.

Yes, I understand there are ecological and ethical concerns about this technology.

I'm not dismissing them.

But the wheels of technology move forward.

They always have...

The trains came.

The Industrial Revolution came.

The automobile, the telephone. TV killed the radio star.

Talking pictures made silent films obsolete.

The cell phone ended the pager, the smartphone ended the flip phone, and the internet and email devastated snail mail and the Encyclopedia Britannica.

Every generation gets handed a tool that changes everything, for better or worse...

And every generation has to decide what to build with it...

I built my mother's memoir, Martha Sue, in time for her to hold it in her hands...

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I am a lifelong artist.

A lifelong creator.

And I can tell you, without hesitation, that this is the most powerful tool ever created...

For better, or worse...