More AI books news but slightly less AI horror.
I think I might have mentioned before that I subscribe to a fantastic publishing industry newsletter called The Hot Sheet. Well worth my sixty bucks a year for stuff like this.
Dutch publisher releases AI editions of authored books
Founded in 2009, Dutch nonfiction publisher Maven specializes in narrative nonfiction. It recently announced that readers can now engage with some titles through an AI chat model that’s been trained on the full text of the book. This AI chat edition is embedded as a WhatsApp contact and works by messaging in the app. It’s meant to be conversational, offering knowledge from the book in response to specific questions.
Authors must grant permission to Maven for this special edition to be produced and sold, and it is purchased separately from the standard editions. Only four such books are now available; Maven is also assisting other Dutch publishers with AI chat editions.
When I saw the headline I gulped, but its actually pretty cool. A bot trained on specific books so that you can chat with it about that topic.
I’d be super happy to feed it all of my various series so that I had a sort of live ‘story bible’ I could consult whenever necessary.
I am more disappointed that the industry newsletter didn't take the opportunity to call it 'Holy Sheet'.
It seems extremely likely (to me) that all technical reference manuals will wind up like that too. No one reads the manual anymore (TM), but having a potted expert on hand that you could ask specific questions of? That seems really useful. Depends entirely on what it costs, of course. I don't expect to have to pay domain-expert telephone assistance rates for such a thing, more like an increment over the book itself. Guess we'll have to see how that shakes out.
(AI data center energy costs might overtake cryptocurrency data center energy costs in the next couple of years, but both are still dwarfed by the incremental growth of the rest of the data center business over the same time.)