In short, AI is a great tool for mimicking well-done work, summarizing a discourse, and spitting out an iconic result that looks like what a meticulous craftsperson would have produced; but as soon as you enter the intimate workings of a book-indexing process, taking into account all the formal, editorial, and semantic subtleties of the operation, the great athletes of collective hallucination quickly break their muscles on technical detail.

Even so, the clever user of a script such as IndexMatic should not turn their back on the productivity gains released by these blind machines. There is always a nice way to make their empirical genius coexist with reasoned human craftsmanship.

As for supervised extraction of lexical units and document indexing, I know of no InDesign solution that matches IndexMatic in reliability and speed. But precisely for that reason, you have to supervise IndexMatic's work. To get the best out of this product, you must send it a list of skillfully crafted queries that will act like seekers moving through the document.

A paradigm shift?

On the one hand, the initial exploration of a document's themes and keywords before indexing calls for a review that IndexMatic will certainly provide in material form, but without synthesizing it itself. On the other hand, IndexMatic's query syntax has its little quirks that a beginner has neither the time nor the patience to tame. As for me, whenever a question arises that touches on syntax or synthesis — the two tangible boundaries of any conscious process — I tell myself that AI may come to the rescue as a prop, a crank, or a crumb collector.

Here is a protocol I have used over the past few months with a decent signal-to-noise ratio:

1. Open the book or document to be indexed in InDesign.

2. From IndexMatic, send an “automatic query” (say words between 3 and 15 characters, excluding stop words) and generate a Hit Report including frequencies.

3. Load the resulting report (TERM/FREQUENCY table) into an AI interface of your choice.

4. In parallel, send this AI the IndexMatic manual, or its URL, setting out the full syntax of queries and query lists (regular expressions, directives, etc).

5. Finally, submit a complete prompt according to the following model:

Here is a quick video capture of what it will look like in the heat of the action:

You will often need to refine your prompt and/or your AI tool to ensure it doesn't generate an excessive number of lines and that the whole remains consistent. In any case, this method will save you a huge amount of manual refinement work. Ultimately, you end up with a fantastic Query List ready to run in IndexMatic!