I’ve been thinking recently about why I enjoy writing indexes. Put another way, what would I lose if I handed the task over to an AI tool?
Counterintuitively, I enjoy indexing because it is difficult. Sure, there are plenty of days I complain about a chapter being too obtuse or I’m anxious because an index is taking longer to edit than I anticipated. But if writing an index were easy, I’d lose interest and want to do something else.
I’ve been thinking of this in the context of a recent article by Rebecca Solnit, published in The Guardian. Solnit writes about the lies that Big Tech tells us, including about AI, and what we can do to resist. One of the lies that really resonated with me is that our work is too difficult. Why should we have to do hard things ourselves? Better to give it to AI to do on our behalf.
What Solnit points out, as does Oliver Burkeman in his book Four Thousand Weeks (which I also highly recommend), is that it is often the friction in our work and daily interactions that makes life meaningful. By friction, they don’t mean conflict, but rather things like needing to interact with a human barista to order a coffee as opposed to ordering through an app or screen. For me, tasks with good friction would also include mowing the lawn or shoveling snow, which, while involving time and effort on my part, are also opportunities to be physically active outdoors in the fresh air away from my computer screen. Or, the friction involved in writing an index. For me, at least, it is the intellectual labor of problem-solving and learning interesting things, along with feeling like I am part of a larger team working together to produce the finished book, that makes indexing a meaningful and worthwhile endeavor.
Of course, no one wants their life to be all friction. What is a pleasurable challenge for one person may be someone else’s mind-numbing drudgery. For me, while I probably could design a new website for myself, it is not my top interest or skillset and I’m happy to hire someone else. I also see this with authors and publishers who hire me to write an index. Could they write the index themselves? Probably, given enough time and maybe some coaching. But they already have enough difficult things to do and hiring an indexer is easier.
So the value of work, for our satisfaction and well-being, lies partly in its difficulty and our ability to overcome that difficulty, yet we don’t want everything in our lives to be difficult. Doesn’t this swing back around to the value of AI or other Big Tech tools? Why hire a web designer or an indexer when you can instead hire an AI tool to do the work for significantly cheaper and faster?
I think this speaks to another lie that Solnit identifies, which is the scarcity of people. It is too hard to find someone qualified and available. They probably don’t exist anyway. Better to use AI, which is always available.
I think this lie is quite insidious and perhaps a self-fulfilling prophecy. If we, as a society and industry, don’t nurture human talent, is it any wonder that it may disappear? But that human talent does exist. And the friction of interacting with other people, to delegate and work together, makes the work more meaningful. It cuts through the isolation of being siloed alone with my computer and whatever apps Big Tech sells me.
I am concerned about the new AI indexing tools which are being developed. There is the concern of whether those tools will ever develop to the point of being legitimate competition to the quality of human-written indexes. There is the concern of whether some publishers, in their push to industrialize publishing and squeeze out all the profit for themselves, will use AI anyway, despite quality issues, simply because it is cheaper and faster. Those are excellent concerns and worth paying attention to.
But what feels even more existential to me is the question, do I even want to work with AI indexing tools? Even if I could leverage such tools to work five or ten times faster, indexing ten or fifteen books per month instead of three to five, would I still enjoy the work? Would writing an index still be a satisfying intellectual puzzle? Or would I be delegating most of that intellectual labor to the machine, and churning out indexes too quickly to meaningfully absorb and process what I am reading and piecing together?
I think the answer is no, I would not enjoy that kind of work.
I have to admit I am starting to think about how I may exit indexing if the industry changes too much and human-written indexes are no longer valued. What else could I possibly do where I can continue to problem-solve, be creative, and still feel like I am part of a community of people?
Thankfully, I don’t think I need to make a decision yet. The silver-lining, perhaps, is that the publishing industry is vast and segmented. Even if some segments turn to AI tools—and I’m pretty sure some will, the same segments that are already heavily invested in contracting to offshore companies and industrializing the production process as much as possible—I’m hopeful that not all segments will. Some publishers are still committed to creating quality books and to working with human freelancers.
I don’t want to be completely against AI. It sounds like there are some areas in which it is genuinely useful. And I don’t want to alarm you too much, especially if you are new to indexing. I want to believe there is still a future for human indexers, and that the work will continue to be challenging and meaningful in all the right ways.
I think it is also important to try to be aware of new developments and to think through all implications, beyond the hype and lies that Big Tech wants us to focus on.
If AI tools are adopted by indexers and in the publishing industry, they need to be accurate and reliable, obviously. But more than that, they need to support human work and human workers. Replacing indexers (and editors, designers, etc…) does not make for a healthy work environment, nor, I would suggest, for books that are written and produced with humans in mind. For an industry and world in which humans can thrive, people need to be kept at the forefront.