Plugin proposal:
A clean, markdown solution to identify different authors/AI within one md note.
The problem:
A single note often has multiple writers, sources, and levels of meaning. But how do we know what is what?
Maybe you know this problem:
When writing a note you wear several hats: You write text that is intended for publishing, you add comments and reminders to yourself (e.g., find a better word for this), you paste in a quote from another author, and some idea generated by ChatGPT. Maybe you also collaborate with co-workers and/or editors and their words also find a way into your notes. All these different voices live within the same markdown file.
Weeks or years later you open the note and you have no idea which text is coming from where. You ask yourself: Did I write this great sentence, or did I “borrow” this from somewhere?
This can be a very serious problem: If you make your living publishing, not properly distinguishing these authors/voices can break your reputation and your career. With text generated by AI, this problem becomes even more pressing: It is crucial to distinguish which text was generated in our brain and which text was generated by AI.
Possible workaround solutions within the current md
I tried many possible solutions to get a handle on this: Using inline HTML tags, entering text segments into predefined blockquotes, adding footnotes, and finally using level 6 ######headings exclusively to separate different voices.
New clean solution implemented by iA Writer
Now, I saw that the amazing developers of iA writer have implemented a very elegant solution for this problem: They count the characters written by each author and append the data at the bottom of the md file. Here I have prepared an example of what that looks like in iA Writer:
---
Annotations: 0,339 SHA-256 {SHA-156 key here}
@AuthorName1 : 22,96 191,46
@AuthorName2 <AuthorName2Contact>: 0,22 140,49 190 237 286,28 338
&AI: 119,21 238,48
&ChatGPT <GPT4>: 314,24
...
So, while keeping track of the total number of characters in the note, each human author is identified with a @ prefix and each AI author with a & prefix. Authors can be defined and given optional contact information or other descriptors in the app settings.
Further suggestions for Obsidian Plugin
While the iA writer solution is elegant, a plugin solution for Obsidian might be even cleaner by including the authors and their respective character counts in the frontmatter/Properties. That way no appending text to the note would be necessary.
The other part of such a plugin would be the visual differentiation by applying custom CSS to the specified characters. For this, very subtle visual clues would probably work best to not clutter the text. One idea is to leave the main text as is, and simply use different colors in the line numbering to indicate the various voices.
Hopefully, these remarks are inspiring and useful for someone.
I for one would love to have this kind of functionality.
Greetings!