Do You Have Concerns About AI?
About My Book
Straight from the Bot's Mouth: A Conversation With ChatGPT About Artificial Intelligence
** Free sample below **
Some time at the end of last year, there was a huge wave of new artificial intelligence apps that started to work their way into the common consciousness. The first things I heard about were Lensa, the app that takes pictures of you and turns them into a collection of incredible artistic representations. It was everywhere on social media until some artists started to recognize their styles and raised their voices. It's still one of the most popular app downloads but is now old news. Dall-E was another that you could give a text prompt, and it would generate art from your request.
Digital entrepreneur and influencer Matt Wolfe has been so excited about all the options emerging that he created a website and podcast to start curating and reviewing them. In just a few months, he reviewed almost 700 AI tools on his https://futuretools.io website.
The latest excitement is being generated by language-based AI platforms like ChatGPT from OpenAI, whose latest iterations are being merged into the Bing search engine and other Microsoft products. Google had a false start with its language-based AI, Bard, but it won't be long until they're both feet in the game. ChatGPT has turned heads due to its capacity to take prompts from humans and respond with mostly well-written and balanced answers.
As we've started to become aware of even the most basic things AI can do, we're also starting to imagine how it will affect what we do and how we live.
We see not only the benefit but for those of us in creative fields, we're starting to sense an inherent threat as many of our skills become automatable and replaceable. I work with a lot of creative freelancers, and over the past two months, most of our conversations have been about how to adapt as AI becomes more widely available and useful.
I started to keep a list of their questions as well as my own, and it was growing quickly. I remember thinking in January that I might take these questions and turn them into a book, but as I realized the depth of research it would require, I backed off that idea. But then something else happened. I decided to experiment with ChatGPT.
A few weeks ago, I was writing a sales page for an online course, and I needed a series of lists. Features, benefits, bullet points - standard sales page stuff. This listing usually takes me a few hours because I like to generate more information than I need and whittle it down to the best selection. I asked ChatGPT to generate my lists for me based on some simple prompts I created.
In only a few seconds, my lists were generated. After a few very minor edits, they were ready to use. What used to take hours now took minutes, and the results were favorable in comparison between my old way and using ChatGPT. I immediately wondered what impact this was going to have on all the people I know who write marketing and advertising copy for a living. They won't be able to charge by the hour anymore, that's for sure.
A week later, I was thinking about the experiments I'd done over the previous week, and I had a brainstorm - what if I asked ChatGPT to answer the list of questions I had collected about artificial intelligence? That afternoon I did just that. Less than two hours later, I had 17,000 words worth of ChatGPT responses, and as I read them, I knew I wanted to share them. Straight from the Bot's Mouth: A Conversation with ChatGPT About Artificial Intelligence was conceived.
This gave me an excuse to finally engage with Kindle Direct Publishing and learn how to publish my own book. Six days later, the book was published in both Kindle and paperback versions. It's hard to say that I wrote this book. I was mostly just a curator or compiler. But ChatGPT insists that the user is the one who is the author of the information because it all started with their prompts. So my name's on the cover, but this was a human/AI collaboration.
Since I didn't have an audience in mind or any kind of marketing plan before I started this project, I'll speculate that this book will be helpful and insightful to people who have been wondering about AI but haven't experienced it yet. It may also be a good primer to identify some of the known issues we'll be facing as AI is integrated into our lives. There are definitely some challenges ahead, and ChatGPT isn't programmed to generate positive PR about itself. It just takes the prompt and generates the answer it predicts will be most useful to the user.
The sample here includes the intro to the book and the first couple of questions I asked ChatGPT. I decided not to edit the responses because I wanted to share the raw experience I had. The responses tend not to be emotionally charged or biased, and that they have a kind of uniformity in their syntax and structure. The only editorial task I did carry out was to verify that it didn't contain plagiarized content. It passed that test with no further action needed.