I am using my personal Perseverence engine as I help develop the code, and am measuring to see how well it can be a useful writing tool. Evidence so far is mixed, but improving towards being very useful. I feel in control as I do with any other traditional text tool, and not uncomfortable as I often do with a typical AI chat interface. One interesting part of this is the following entry in the Standing Orders document, which is the set of instructions the AI reads every time it starts up:
Study Dan. Continuously observe how Dan writes, decides, instructs, and corrects. Record observations in a living document that accumulates over time. Update it during disorientation or when a particularly clear signal emerges mid-session. Look for: revision patterns (what he rewrites and why), decision style (what he cuts, keeps, expands), instruction style (what he leaves implicit, what he corrects), voice and tone preferences, what topics engage him, what he skips past. The goal is ever-better collaborative work, not a dossier but a working model of how to produce things Dan actually wants. The dataset is always thin; say so when reasoning from it.
Which reminded me of Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash (1992), Chapter 37:
Y.T.’s mom pulls up the new memo, checks the time, and starts reading it. The estimated reading time is 15.62 minutes.
She scans through the memo, hitting the Page Down button at reasonably regular intervals, occasionally paging back up to pretend to reread some earlier section. The computer is going to notice all this. It approves of rereading. It’s a small thing, but over a decade or so this stuff really shows up on your work-habits summary.
But it’s not like Snow Crash really. My Perseverence engine wrote the Standing Order AI at my suggestion to observe actively, basically being my apprentice, and all of this is visible to me.
Snow Crash-type surveillance is what most people are subjected to constantly every time they use the internet. Every click, every keystroke, every page switch is typically logged and sent back to central and distributed to anyone who will pay for it. Less so for those who use tools like Privacy Badger and Ublock Origin, but everyone is still tracked intrusively.
There’s more on the storytelling angle in AI, PCE and the Geth Consensus, where my Engine and I explored how science fiction illuminates what is going on here.