Computer Generated Books
What if you wrote some software that scoured the internet for content on a specific topic and compiled it into an eBook that you could sell on Amazon? According to an article in today’s New York Times , Philip Parker, a management science professor at Insead, a Business School with campuses in Europe and Singapore, has done just that.
Now, I have no problem with the research. AI is an interesting and important field. Visions of Skynet not withstanding, it holds great promise. But compiling and selling medical books using this research technology is just plain irresponsible.
People assume that information printed in books has received at least some editorial review, and is therefore more authoritative than the information you might find on the Web. For some fields of knowledge, violating this trust may not matter. But for medicine? Astounding.
On a lighter note: According to the New York Times story, Parker is also interested in computer generated novels.
And he is laying the groundwork for romance novels generated by new algorithms. “I’ve already set it up,” he said. “There are only so many body parts.”
Rest assured that I have no plans to add algorithms like this to Storyist.
