What AI means for the future of publishing
As an insider in the AI industry, here’s what I predict the future holds.
For my day job, I work as a content strategist for an AI data platform. That means I think about AI a lot. Not just what our technology is capable of and what’s on our roadmap, but what our competitors are doing, how the industry is shifting, and what public perception makes of this emerging technology.
As an author, I also keep my ear to the ground about shifts in that industry. Usually that’s limited to drama on Twitter and Amazon’s latest shenanigans, but more and more recently my two worlds have collided, with interesting consequences.
What is AI?
First, a dumb question. What is AI? See, AI basically refers to any kind of autonomous action a computer can perform that we more normally associate with human intelligence—stuff like analysis and reasoning and learning from experience. Most “AI” is more properly “machine learning” and really it’s just a collection of relatively simple programs designed to complete a specific task. The power of AI comes in its capacity to handle data in massive, inconceivable amounts.
Let’s consider mammogram scans. Somebody has to look at those scan images and decide if they’re clear or there’s cancer on there. Humans have about a 78% accuracy rate at doing…
