While the GPT-4 chat continues to leave us with our mouths agape, research into Artificial Intelligence in the book sector has led to the development of some amazing products. One of them is called the Non-Human Book Library, a custom-designed autonomous art system that uses Artificial Intelligence to create new books from existing publications. Once each page is processed, the newly “illuminated” book is automatically uploaded to print-on-demand services and the resulting volume is added to the Non-Human Book Library. The idea that books can write themselves gives us goosebumps, but there is already tons of books being written with the pre-GPT-4 chat version. This is the story in Programming, Healthcare or Literature: How AI experts use ChatGPT-4? in the MIT Technology Review. The author of the article sheds light on this fact through the testimony of Reid Hoffman, the creator of LinkedIn who published the first book co-written with Artificial Intelligence. According to him, he used GPT-4 as a writing assistant to get new ideas and analyse his responses to the book.
Society needs to be prepared to deal with disruptive technologies. Fact-checkers around the world are already providing micro-training on how to detect an AI-generated image. Will they also be able to help detect AI-generated writing, or will we need to consider creating an “AI-free” certificate? The impact of disruptive technology on society is great because it demonstrates the ability of a trained intelligence to accumulate knowledge. It shows technical progress, but does not endanger the foundations of our society. The machines that defeated chess master Kasparov and Go master Ke Jie have not put an end to the practice of these games. The Catalan philosopher Josep Maria Esquirol in his essay on human life (2018) invites the reader to think that Artificial Intelligence cannot take our place as human beings: “There is no way that Artificial Intelligence can have a lump in its throat”. The advance of technologies adapted to the needs of society shows that in the near future there will be different ways of consuming books. Technologies will offer us new ways of accessing literature that will allow us to delve deeper into the stories we consume. However, machines will never be able to replace the way people convey our emotions or our experiences through writing.
Marjorie Grassler, European Project Executive.