Plus: Official ChatGPT iPhone app debuts; Debt collectors using chatbots to chase debtors
In-brief Sci-fi author Tim Boucher has produced over 90 books in nine months, using ChatGPT and the Claude AI assistant.
Boucher, an AI artist and writer, claims to have made nearly $2,000 selling 574 copies of the 97 works.
Each book in his “AI Lore” series is between 2,000 to 5,000 words long – closer to an essay than a novel. They are interspersed with around 40 to 140 pictures, and take roughly six to eight hours to complete, he told Newsweek.
Boucher’s superhuman output is down to the use of AI software. He uses Midjourney to create the images, and OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Anthropic’s Claude to generate text to brainstorm ideas and write stories.
“To those critics who think a 2,000- to 5,000-word written work is ‘just’ a short story and not a real book, I’d say that these ‘not real books’ have shown impressive returns for a small, extremely niche indie publisher with very little promotion and basically no overhead,” he argued.
Boucher said the technology’s current limitations make it more difficult to produce longer passages of text that follow a coherent storyline. Despite these challenges, he said AI has positively impacted his creativity.
AI has divided the sci-fi community. Editors of the Clarkesworld Magazine, for example, consider short stories written by machines to be spam.
Selling an average of six copies per book to make a couple of hundred bucks a month may not be the money fountain authors were hoping AI could provide.
Custom AI chatbots have been pressed into service as debt collectors.
