I begin by writing, like any human writer, in a notebook with a pen. Please note that this was only made possible with the help of technology. My pen, the paper I write on, and even language, are all technologies.

Then I took photos of the pages and asked Claude Sonnet 3.5 to transcribe them. It was through the mobile app, but desktop works too. If you've ever sent a picture to someone through WhatsApp, you can do this. The prompt was basic, but you can make it slightly more detailed like this:

Transcribe the following handwritten pages exactly. Leave out parts I’ve cut out. Avoid line break issues and put all of it as the same essay. Leave out other elements in the photographs too.

If you want, you can stop here. Getting a proper digital transcription of your own handwritten article, ready to be posted to a blog is cool enough. But you can do more.

I took the transcription to HeyGen, where I have made a model of my own likeness and mannerisms and fed it into that. It gave me the following video.

It's not perfect. The head shakes at odd times, the audio breaks towards the end. The tool's recreation of my voice is iffy too. Even the translation is not ideal and veers towards being stilted. But the point is to show you what is possible. All of this was unimaginable a few months ago. Although, the rate at which things were going, I did speculate about the possibilities.

If you already have video of yourself talking in English, you can have it translated and dubbed into other languages too. Below is a sample of me doing exactly that by using Heygen.

Here, the quality is slightly better, mostly because there were fewer steps between the original and the dub. But the lip syncing is still quite convincing.

What does all this mean?

Now that all that fun stuff is behind us, I want to discuss what all this means and does not mean philosophically.

I am a writer. I write. That will never change. I am not going to replace myself with a chatbot. I am not going to ask AI to write for me. Writing is at the core of who I am. It is what makes me, me.

You may be an artist who is at her creative best when she is drawing and painting. You will never ask AI to draw for you. You won't give your audience AI-generated artwork.

But for a writer who is ill-at-ease speaking, YouTube perhaps seems to be outside their reach. For someone who speaks for a living, writing may be a chore that they have to engage in unwillingly. It is this extraneous stuff, the bits that are outside your core, that AI used as a tool can help do better.

I had not written in notebooks with a pen for a long time because transcribing it was a pain I did not wish to endure. My quest for reduced screen time, ironically, is being helped by AI tools. Hi-tech systems are helping me live a more low-tech life.

A response I sometimes hear from concerned members of the artist community is that the skills that lie outside our core are still worth learning. This is true. But often, it is also true that the Hindi belt YouTuber can't afford to create videos in English and that limits his reach to his neighbourhood. Sometimes, high-quality material in English language remains inaccesible to people in rural India because of the language barrier. These too are realities.

I am not proposing AI tools as the solutuon to all of the world's problems. I am simply saying that our suspicions regarding the motivations of corporations should not blind us to the bridges that such technology is capable of building.