The New Book
Writing for AI Consumption
Like most trend-following techies, I have been playing around with ChatGPT. My initial reaction was similar to most honeymooners — I dreamed of how this AI engine could transform information the way the Internet did in the 90s. And so too did my honeymoon abruptly end when ChatGPT’s limitations quickly became apparent by its lack of depth and seemingly authoritative and confident responses that were abjectly wrong. But those failed interactions also failed to curb my enthusiasm for the potential that this shift in information interaction could bring. With Microsoft, Google, and a host of other companies working on 2023’s “the next big thing,” new alternative to searching for information will arise. Why wade through dozens of links going to content farms — potentially filled with intrusive ads, malware and generally waste-of-time results — when you can use a clean, interactive interface to find the answer and save several minutes per query.
Of course, this near-term future vision has alarmed some authors, journalists, and others who make a living by writing about their thoughts, ideas, and intellectual investments. Many writers fear that ChatGPT will neutralize their contributions. For luddites who try to fight this changing tide with arguments that AI will never be as good as sentient thoughts of people, I argue that it doesn’t have to be. As long as the information is factually correct nearly all of the time and can therefore be trusted as a source of credible data, it doesn’t matter if the AI presents information in a unique voice. So, my book-writing peers at The Pragmatic Bookshelf and my fellow Medium authors, take heed. We are entering a world where AI can interactively inform and teach readers and students unbridled by the old ways that we define “story,” “article,” and “book.” The times are changing, and so are the ways that future generations will collect, absorb, and process information.
Since what we think of as a book or article today may not be what they transform into a decade from now, authors need to consider how their written contributions will be consumed and presented from the AI collective. The tech companies building these engines are not charities and will work with content providers to monetize their engines. Trusted news sources today will be paid to funnel their content into these collectives — and the AI response will attribute the content to its trusted source. For book authors, static, one-way tech books will give way to interactions with an AI that never tires of questioning. The AI will pace conversations based on the comprehension demonstrated by the replies of the entity asking the questions. As such, future authors will need to think about how their ideas will be presented in an interactive session and account for the potential variety of additional queries and responses that each sentence may generate. Over time, the idea of a book may transform from a static, one-way content delivery platform into a fully interactive scenario that satisfies the reader and accomplishes the author’s objective of knowledge and idea transfer from one entity to another.
📢 What do you think the future holds for technical books? Share your thoughts in the comments.
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