Is this scary?….

16/01/2025

Is this scary?…..

Scrolling through online videos of life in the Scottish highlands, my personal nirvana, one of those annoying pop-up ads appeared!

You know the sort of thing. Designed to engage you in something you don’t need that will likely cost you money you really can’t spare. Usually I hit that ‘skip’ button pretty quickly!

But this appeared different. A publishing company selling the idea you can write a book, without any knowledge on the subject, get it published and start reaping royalties within hours!

It took me years to write and upload my non-best sellers, how could this idea be true? I was hooked!

Artificial Intelligence (AI) was the answer! Which got me thinking, how many books are being sold that were not written by a human? Not an issue if the buyer is aware of this. Afterall it saves searching endless pages online for information on a particular subject – you can just buy a book AI has put together. Of course this is only going to work for non-fiction books. At the moment, AI doesn’t have the capacity of empathy. How long before it does I wonder.

The era of AI has brought many fantastic advances including:

 Healthcare – robots doing intricate surgery under the guidance of the surgeon

 Neurodivergent people – AI and ChatGPT are hugely helpful

 Manufacturing – automating many tasks humans don’t want/can’t do

But it also has some concerns for me including:

 Digital Dementia – if we outsource our brains to our devices as illustrated by Dr Manfred Spitzer and Jim Kwik – how quickly will our brains decline?

 Are we on the verge of replacing human connection with AI – thinking of the care industry for example. Not so far fetched considering the film Robot & Frank was released in 2012.

 Are we losing integrity? Publishing a book we didn’t write and gaining royalties.

 Copyright – if AI is mining the internet to put ‘your’ book together, what is your protection against challenges of plagiarism and copyright?

The publishing company has over four stars on Trustpilot. Lots of reviews of people receiving royalty cheques. Very enticing advertising for an investment of around $2K

Or is it just a little bit scary?

What do you think?