When Bots Write Books: The AI Avalanche of Emotionless Drivel is Here
There's no avoiding it.
AI is here to stay.
We’ve seen everything from AI painting masterpieces, passing the bar exam, and composing symphonies. While it’s a cute trick to have AI create a deepfake of yourself speaking Swahili, it is totally useless for your plans for international expansion.
What are you going to do when a client calls you and asks a question?
While I am sure real-time translations services are already here, the humanity gap only widens when we let AI run the show.
The tsunami of AI-authored books has begun to flood the literary market. It's beginning to feel like we're having a conversation with a hundreds of bots, all of them eagerly spamming you with their 2-dimensional drivel. As a result, Amazon, the world’s largest bookstore, has had enough. This past year, the publishing giant began limiting authors to publishing no more than three books a day.
That's not a typo—3 books a DAY!
This is the literary equivalent of telling a compulsive baker, “You can only make 72 cakes in a 24-hour period.”
Human authors gladly gave up the use of paper with the proliferation of typewriters and subsequently those typewriters ended up at garage sales as we moved into the digital era.
Pencil sharpener sales have declined and we've all but retired "white out."
The personal computer made it easier to write (and fix those mistakes without a mess). Regardless of the advancement of technology, authors retained their sense of pride when they pour their hearts and souls into crafting their stories. For the non-fiction author, creating value and ideas based on experience has been the bedrock in the world of books.
Enter AI, the myopic literary speedster. Need a how-to book by tomorrow? No problem. Want a trilogy by Friday? Done. AI doesn’t need sleep, coffee, and does't suffer from mental breakdowns (although that last one is questionable).
While AI can produce content faster than we can think, it will always lack the essential ingredients of human storytelling: emotion, experience, and responsibility.
Here’s one AI example from a client’s book we are editing, "Amidst a sea of hopeful contenders, I emerged as the chosen one, selected as the Fifth President of the esteemed institution."
领英推荐
Translation - "I got the job"
For our folks in the UK, using excessive and sometimes flowery words is standard. But for our entrepreneur-driven culture in the USA, we love getting to the point.
What about your audience? What about you?
Can you be inspired and motivated to change and improve your humanity by the regurgitated words of a robot? The word "artificial" in AI is accurate... and deep.
Amazon’s restriction is a humorous & necessary step in this new "battle" of humanity vs. machine. Limiting authors to three books a day is their way of saying, “Can you please pace yourselves?”
You can debate the quality all you want. AI will improve over time. That’s inevitable. In the meantime, ask yourself about your desire for reading. Do you want to be inspired by a person who has LIVED and EXPERIENCED a life changing event or a robots rendition of the event?
What do you want to read and why?
Creating a book is not about how quickly it can be written and published, but how deeply it can touch the reader’s heart. When we read, we are connecting with the author and/or the story. The more human the story, the deeper the connection.
After all, isn’t that the point?
###
I would love to hear your thoughts on the topic. What do you think?
?