Can Books be written by AI?

 

The concept of books written by AI

The concept of AI writing books probably sounds both appealing and scary at the same.

On the one hand, wouldn’t it be great to be able to have fantastic books created for us at almost no cost? However, the concept will also be a bit scary because our relationship with books is an integrated part of what being human is and what sets us apart from any other species on earth.

 

In this article, we will explore if AI can be used to write books, what kind of books AI would be great at producing, and you will also get a hint on when you can expect AI to write books that are at a level that match the worlds best authors.

 

How does Artificial Intelligence write a book?

You have probably come across tools that help you become a better writer, such as Grammarly, and perhaps you have also tried some of the AI-based text generators such as Jasper.

Such tools are partly based on AI, and they help you write text or improve what you have already written.

 

A tool like Jasper can write a text about a specific topic for you. I don’t know the exact way Jasper is designed, but if it works the way conventional AI applications work, then it would be designed to function something like this.

 

You need to create a new piece of content, so you key in a word or a topic. It could be a “whiteboard”. Jasper then scans the internet to find the contexts where the word appears the most. The reason for this is that the AI in Jasper (or any other AI) would not know what a whiteboard is.

 

But it can learn to describe what a whiteboard is by scanning the internet. The first task will be to understand if the whiteboard is an object or a person.

The AI would learn from how the word whiteboard is positioned in sentence contexts that a whiteboard is a physical object. The Jasper AI will then lean from other online descriptions of whiteboards and how it should describe a whiteboard in your text.

 

The quality of the Jasper AI text can be quite good. The AI will master the English grammar well, so it will be reliable and understandable. The information in the text will also be factually accurate.

 

So, it is possible for AI to generate a meaningful explanation of terms, objects and persons. But the AI still has no knowledge of what a whiteboard is.

 

It just knows how to describe it. This is an important limitation when it comes to making AI write the books, and as you will see. There is a big difference between non-fiction books and fiction books AI writes.

What are the limitations of Ais’s wring skills?

In order for us to understand what it takes to make AI write books, we have to look a bit deeper into the limitations of how AI works.

 

Let’s go back to the Jasper example. AI has no conceptual understanding of the tasks that you make it do. It does not know what a whiteboard is. What AI does is look for patterns in the data that it analyses, and using a melodic process in how it sees data, it can create meaningful descriptions of objects and persons.

 

But AI is not intelligent the same way we are as humans. Some say that a human has more than 100 types of intelligence. It could be mathematical, social, and so on.

AI at it current state might be better than us in some intelligent parameters, but not many. So we as a human would approach the task of describing what a whiteboard is with many more dimensions than AI would ever be able to do.

 

This fact would be the greatest limitation to how well AI would be able to write books. A book is a different product than a text that describes a whiteboard. Especially if it is a fiction book. However, we start with the easy books, the non-fiction books.

How would AI write a book

A book has a different structure and communication flow than a simple text piece has. A non-fiction book has an introduction. Then the topics are presented. There will most likely be 3 to 4 sections and then a conclusion.

Artificial intelligence looks for patterns

Remember, AI looks for patterns in the data it analyzes, and it can do so when it comes to writing a non-fiction book too. Our AI would be able to understand how a non-fiction book should be structured and possible also how it could identify the four main parts of the book.

 

Let’s say the topic was still the whiteboard. Our AI would then scan the internet to identify four clusters of whiteboard stories.

It would be able to prioritize them so the most relevant was presented first. It would also be capable of identifying the 3 to 4 chapters in each cluster and writing the text in each chapter.

 

So, the end result would be a book on whiteboards. You would even be able to ask for books of a specific length or with a fixed number of chapters. The quality of such a book would probably be decent too.

Non-fiction books are the challenge

The real challenge is writing non-fiction books. This has to do with the intelligence dimension that we touched upon before. Because a fiction book is always a product of the intelligence, experience, attitude, and knowledge of the author. In other words, a fiction book is created by the many dimensions of intelligence that we as human possesses.

 

AI is lagging in this dimension. With artificial intelligence, I can analyze fiction books and find a structure and a flow in how the book should be composted.

It can lean the optimal length and write the sentence grammatically correctly. It might even be possible to structure the story with the right number of sub-stories and persons and place peaks and cliffhangers where they make the most impact.

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The soul of book

But what AI is missing is what makes the soul of the book. A fiction book is always inspired by something the author has experienced or a message the author wants to present. The creativity and playing with words that are also a big part of many quality books will be difficult for Artificial Intelligence to produce.

AI can be used to write a novel

This does not mean that Artificial Intelligence cannot write fiction books. It can, and the problem is that it will follow the same logical approach as it would with non-fiction books.

Non-fiction books are designed to present knowledge in a structured way, so the AI approach would not be a major issue here.

The author makes the difference

Non-fiction books are different. They are driven by storytelling, by presenting messages and ideas that are based on or inspired by life learnings. This is not achievable with the Artificial Intelligence we know today. So a novel written by AI will probably seem a bit flat.

This means there will probably be a story and a logical flow in the book, but it will probably seem a bit predictable. You will also see that the story will not be creative and leave you with reflection on a deeper level after you have read the book.

 

Examples of a novel written by Artificial Intelligence

The answer is yes. You can find AI-written books, and we have collected the five best here that are all available on Amazon, or as free downloads.

 

All of them are fiction books, and even though they have the limitation that we have just described, they are fascinating. They are interesting to read, just because machines write them.

What do you think?

Let us know what you think of the books and your reflection on when you think AI-written books will be so good that they will make a difference to you.