I exported a year of my conversations with an AI last week, mostly out of curiosity, and half expecting to find a record of a productive year. Projects developed. Systems built. Documents made. All of that is in there. It is just not what the file is mostly made of.
What the file is mostly made of is revision. The word that appears most often, by a long way, is more. After that comes maybe, and then again, and then show me. There are around fifty separate occasions on which I told a machine I was not sure. There are hundreds of small corrections, and most of them are not factual. Too neat. Too clinical. Too fluffy. Too staged. Too much like a wellness coach. Not quite me. Somewhere further down the file there is a message in which I appear to have simply typed that I was confused, which I do not remember writing and which is probably the most accurate thing in the whole export.
I had thought I was building an external memory. Something outside my head that would hold what my head cannot hold at once, which on any given day is work, children, patients, writing, three things I want to make, a sentence I liked at five in the morning and an idea that feels enormously important and will be entirely gone by lunchtime. So I started putting things somewhere. And then I spent a remarkable amount of time asking the somewhere where I had put things.
None of which is really about technology. It is what happens to any system built to hold a mess. The diary that needs its own weekly review. The folders that need a naming convention. The spreadsheet that starts as relief and becomes a small unpaid job. You build the container because you are overloaded, and then the container joins the load. It is not that the systems fail. Mine work. It is that the effort of keeping them working is made of the same material as the overwhelm they were built to solve, and after a while it is hard to tell which is which.
There is a loop in the export that shows this happening almost line by line. I bring something messy. It comes back ordered. And then I spend the next several messages arguing with the order, because the ordering has taken out the thing I was actually trying to say. Make it plainer. Less lyrical. Less like writing. More human. I was using a machine to tidy up and then fighting it to put some of the life back in.
For most of that year it did not occur to me that this was simply what the tool does. I assumed I was doing it wrong. That there was a correct way of asking which I had not worked out yet, and that a better instruction would produce the right thing first time, and that the arguing was evidence of my not having got to grips with it. There is another essay in that reflex and I am not going to write it here, beyond noticing how quickly the fault came to rest with me and how long it stayed there.
What I think now is that both halves are necessary and neither one is the enemy. Without the container, nothing gets held at all, and the ideas simply go the way ideas go, which is quietly and without ceremony. Without the arguing, the container would have quietly eaten the thing it was built to protect. The order is what makes the holding possible. The resistance is what makes the holding worth doing. They are not in competition. They came into being together.
What surprised me more was how the conversations change over the year. Early on they read like instructions. Make this. Develop that. Give me the script. Later they read like someone thinking out loud with something to push against. I do not know why this is not landing. Hang on. Let us pause. I know this is contradictory. I am struggling to explain this.
Reading it back, I do not seem particularly interested in the first answer. I seem to be using the answer to find out what I actually meant. Something comes back slightly wrong and the wrongness is informative in a way that a blank page is not. You know it is not right before you have any picture of what right would look like, and then you know a bit more, and then a bit more, and somewhere around the sixth attempt you recognise the thing you were trying to say, which you could not have written down at the start because you did not yet know it.
We do this with people too, and much more than we admit. A friend gives an account of what you have just told them and it is not quite it, and the not-quite is what shows you the shape of it. Most of the time it is not the accurate reflection that moves anything. It is the near miss.
There is one more thing in the export that I have not stopped thinking about. The system keeps a summary of me. A short document, built up over the year, describing who it is apparently talking to. It is accurate. It knows what I do, what I am interested in, what I am trying to build, how I want my writing to sound. If you handed it to somebody who had never met me, they would come away with a fair picture and no wrong information.
And it is a strange thing to read beside the actual conversations, because the woman in the summary is considerably more competent than the woman in the file. The summary has my life in it. The conversations have the changing of my mind, the going down another rabbit hole, the enthusiasm, the irritation, the five messages in a row because another thought arrived before the first one was finished. Nothing has been falsified. Something has been compressed, and what compression removes is not facts. It is movement.
I do not think that is a flaw in the summary. Summaries have to compress, that is the work they do, and a longer one would do exactly the same thing more slowly. It is more that I recognised the process, because it is not only machines that do it. We make coherent versions of ourselves constantly, and mostly in order to be met. I am the organised one. I am not really a confrontational person. Each one true, each one built from something that genuinely happened, and each one quietly ruling out the afternoon when you were neither.
I am wary of turning this into a position on AI. I do not have one. I use it a great deal, probably too much on some days, it helps me enormously and it occasionally makes me want to put my laptop in the sea. What I have found more interesting than what it can do is what happens to me while I am using it, and I did not expect the answer to be a year long record of somebody circling.
So I am not sure what to do with the file. It is not wise and it is not orderly. It is full of maybes and of things I felt very strongly about for about twenty minutes. And it is the closest thing I have to an account of a year of actually thinking, which I only have because I was not trying to keep one.
