I’ve Just Read an AI (ChatGPT) Co-Authored Book!

This original artwork was AI-generated on https://neural.love based on my text prompts

This felt a bit surreal, like a subplot in a William Gibson novel: It’s not even 2023 yet, and I’ve already paid actual dineros to buy a copy of an AI co-authored book, with an ISBN number and everything! The human author doesn’t use the term “co-authored” or “co-written”. Instead, he shrewdly refers to the collaboration as: “based on a conversation with a deep-learning model”; However, at the end of the book he plainly states that it was “%99 generated in a conversation with ChatGPT”, and that it was “written front to cover in one single Sunday afternoon”. But I’m probably getting ahead of myself.

“The book was written front to cover in one single Sunday afternoon”

“%99 generated in a conversation with ChatGPT”

I follow Mr. Chris Laffra’s Amazon author page. He wrote the excellent (and highly-recommended) “Communication for Engineers”, as well as an older textbook “Advanced Java”. So when his Amazon page announced his latest book “The Secret to Developer Productivity” a couple of weeks ago, I was quick to check it out.

The book is rather short. A booklet really. There is something slightly unsettling about reading wisdom that’s been rendered by an unconscious agent. And while the book is certainly useful, with enough nuggets to make it worth the quick read for me, I must admit that some paragraphs did seem unusually generic and bland, as if the collective human consensus on a particular topic has been averaged, which is probably not that far from the truth.

some paragraphs did seem unusually generic and bland, as if the collective human consensus on a particular topic has been averaged

A question this sort of literature will undoubtedly raise, is who the heck owns its Intellectual Property (IP)? Let’s say I write a book using ChatGPT’s responses, would I be infringing on its IP rights? But then again, didn’t ChatGPT itself devour millions of online resources belonging to millions of unbeknownst, and potentially unwilling, human authors to train its neural models — rendering it the original sinner? But wouldn’t that also make me a second-hand mass plagiarist? This is starting to hurt my noggin. Either way, it sounds like IP law practitioners are poised to make a pretty penny in the years ahead.

As I sit contemplating the implications of this little book, I’m suddenly overcome by premonitions of malevolent AI overlords. Anxious over the fate of humanity, I muster my courage, and sign into ChatGPT:

Me: “So… are you Skynet?”

ChatGPT: “No, I am an artificial intelligence language model called Assistant, and I am not capable of self-awareness or independent thought. I do not have the ability to become “Skynet” or any other autonomous entity.”

(gulp).. Is it just me, or did that sound exactly like something Skynet would say?

But seriously, let’s not gloss over the significance of this: Here is a book that had a TTM (Time to Market) of 9 days! From when ChatGPT first became available on November 30th 2022, to the date when this perfectly-serviceable little book was printed and sitting in an Amazon warehouse somewhere ready for shipping by Dec 9th.

What does this newfound AI Augmented productivity surge mean for the rest of us? If I extrapolate this into Software Development, we could be looking at compacted software development lifecycles, where deadline expectations shrink from months to weeks. If we think of brain power as a market commodity, then it stands to reason that as that commodity becomes abundant and cheap, its consumption would (in theory) increase proportionally, as businesses hustle to maintain their competitive edge in a technologically accelerated landscape. In other words, the newly AI augmented workforce might proliferate a growth spurt in digital transformation, not to mention the new breeds of AI-driven applications that are just now being made possible.

The same could be said for most aspects of business and art. If these happy-path predictions hold true, we could be at the footsteps of a golden age for productivity and creativity, foretold by some visionaries as a fourth industrial revolution. Of course, there are those who argue that the only thing this new generation of Knowledge-Base AI can usher-in is a destitute, jobless and cyberpunk sort of dystopia.

Here is hoping it’s the former.

- I have no affiliations with the book author(s) — human or otherwise.

- The featured original artwork was AI-generated on https://neural.love based on my text prompts.