What is the Name of my AI companion?

I’ll admit that I have been notoriously against the use of AI. I think this bias is common among academic circles, especially creatives. While I briefly took a foyer with generative AI when Project 2025 came out, so I did not have to wade through hundreds of hateful proposed and now implemented legislative orders to find what I was looking for quickly, it was not until this summer that I saw its true possible potential for creative and critical insights beyond summarization. While there does remain programmer bias within AI, such as transphobia, which I have already had to correct several times, I do still find some of it to be helpful.  

This summer I fed both an early draft of an MS of my new poetry collection and an MS of my first draft of my fiction novel into NotebookLM. Its AI has done a much better job in providing a synopsis of my poetry manuscript than the fiction novel itself, and I am not sure if that is user error or computer error. While it is possible that the themes and story are more transparent in my poetry manuscript in even its earliest drafts, what the AI seems to struggle with the most with the fiction novel is interpreting the identity of the first-person narrator. The novel delivers a full transition from teenaged years, including a disguise that felt right to a child, to becoming accepted by society as a middle-aged man. Perhaps I need to clarify the language more of how he saw himself as a child. The AI did have some questions about what he felt constitutes “being a man” and why he receives a surgery in the text.  

These kinds of questions asking me to explore the motivations of my characters deeper and the relationships between characters deeper were a couple of the areas I found especially useful about my interactions with AI. The questions were very detailed and paginated. While I do believe it took the right type of question to yield these results, such as, “What more do I need to flesh out in the Xavier narrative,” when I simply stated, “ask better questions,” it posed some very good theoretical and analytical questions for me to consider about deeper connections to explore in the work. 

All in all, despite its difficulties labeling my protagonist’s sex or knowing when to use the correct pronouns, I am very satisfied with the experience so far.