AI is so new the general public does not know what to make of it yet. AI did show up for the general public after I retired. I worked as an academic, an educational psychologist, teaching and conducting research. I no longer have to evaluate assignments and wonder if students had written them on their own or was the work I evaluated written by AI. We were more concerned with whether students had paid to have written work written for them and never really figured out how to make that call.
Certainly, AI represents a very interesting development for those who now do the work I did. It is not just evaluating the work students submit, educational psychologists consider how important cognitive skills are developed. With AI readily available, tasks assigned to hone skills and time demands must be applied without teacher supervision and tolerated because of the work and frustration involved. Writing makes a great example. Writing activities are assigned partly to help students learn to write and also to organize, evaluate, and communicate. Writing is a convenient way to ask learners to process raw information.
AI provides a dilemma. It offers a tool we all should learn to use, but requires discipline that it not be used as an alternative to personal work necessary to develop knowledge and skills. Certain distinctions must be made by educators, but also by learners and those who can influence the behavior of learners. I think of the distinctions in this way. When does AI augment personal skills, when can it productively replace personal skills, and when does the use of AI diminish the development of skills. I have written previous posts that can be organized using this classification system.
AI and the Creative Process.
I have come to think of myself as a creative. This is a new self-definition and I think the label has only been used lately as well. There is a certain creativity involved in conducting research and speaking or writing to inform others. Britannica describes creativity in this way – the ability to make or otherwise bring into existence something new, whether a new solution to a problem, a new method or device, or a new artistic object or form. With academic research, very little involves pure replication so the point is to come up with a new way to test an old hypothesis or a new hypothesis and a way to test it. With teaching, ways of explaining and directing individuals often require making adjustments. No, we don’t usually use the same yellowed note cards for years at a time.
AI and Creative Information Processing
Since I have retired, I no longer conduct experiments or face students in a classroom setting. You are reading the output of what I do now. I try to process the existing research and writing of other scholars and offer my own take on this content and how it might be applied. I have mostly focused on personal knowledge management (PKM) with a focus on the processing of digital written inputs often with the assistance of AI tools. To some extent, it is the reflection on this process as I engage in it that surfaces insights I can now write about.
Here is how I think of the roles AI might play in my creative process. I have read hundreds of books and far more journal articles and taken notes and highlighted as I read. These notes and highlights have been stored in digital format using several online services (Mem.AI, Readwise) or my own hardware (Obisidian). I can use AI to interact with my content or with the general knowledge the AI system has been trained on.
Perhaps my interactions might be described in terms of
- Retrieve – I know I read something that would be useful in what I am trying to write, but I can’t remember it. Find XXX for me.
- Explore – I have read lots of stuff and now I am trying to write about YYY. Are there things similar to XXX in what I have read I should consider?
- Expand – How would the AI write something in a given structure?
I write what you read myself, but these different uses of AI sometimes provide a basis for what I say. With retrieve and explore, I have previously written or recorded notes from which I can construct something new. With expand, I am not building directly on what I have saved but am asking for a product I can take ideas from in a similar way that I took ideas from a book or journal article. Retrieve and Explore make use of AI directed at my content – RAG retrieval-augmented generation. Expand is based on the AI responding to a prompt without my provision of content.
What I am describing as Retrieve and Explore may be pretty abstract. Here ere are a couple of specific example based on the Smart Connections extension to Obsidian and Mem.AI. Both have what might be described as a “related to” capability. Perhaps it is fair to describe this as an enhanced search.
The first image shows a typical note I have stored in Mem. The button within the red square asks the AI to generate “related to” notes. The second image shows the output which consists of links to other notes. The top group of note links are related based on the content of the note. The lower groups of links are based on any tags I have added.
Obsidian with Smart Connections
Smart Connections is an AI extension for Obsidian that does several things. It can be used to input an AI prompt that returns a response “based on my notes”. The other major capability is to identify connections based on a selected note. In the main panel, you see the note I have selected. In the right-hand panel, you see the connections. When I roll the mouse over one of these links I am provided a preview of the related note.
I use these capabilities in two ways. I identify related notes as I write to do what I have described as Retrieve and Explore. I also use these capabilities in a long-term way as I spend time within what has been popularly described as my Second Brain. If I am just spending time looking through my personal collection of notes, I can add new tags and links based on what these AI systems bring to my attention.
Summary
AI capabilities can be used in so many ways. What I have attempted to describe here is a use that allows me to identify connections among ideas I may not have been able to generate on my own that I can then use to generate written products with more detail and depth. I have created the building blocks and the AI is augmenting my ability to put these ideas together.
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