This New York Times article describes how to crank out $500 market research reports without, you know, doing the tedious work of researching and writing. As Philip Parker of the Icon Group International describes it,
Using a little bit of artificial intelligence, a computer program has been created that mimics the thought process of someone who would be responsible for doing such a study. [...] But rather than taking many months to do the study. the computer accomplishes this in about 13 minutes. [...] it will then open a Word document and export the information into Word just like a real author would out of their minds, so to speak, or spreadsheets.”
Um, right. Except that an algorithm can't mimic the thought process of a market research analyst; the most it can do is retrieve data and - within limits - analyze it.
This is what happens if you take e-books and print-on-demand to an extreme; it's great that we can self-publish (I'm going to sell a compilation of some of my columns on info-entrepreneurship soon), but there still has to be some brainpower involved in the content.
No, do you think? Really?
Posted by: Reva | April 14, 2008 at 05:27 PM
Doesn't this kind of compilation violate copyright laws?
Posted by: Andrea | April 15, 2008 at 03:54 PM
re: copyright -- hard to tell. If he uses the content primarily to mash up numbers and generate bogus forecasts, probably not. Otherwise, it's probably an issue. But since the books are print-on-demand, how many people are going to shell out $500 to find out if their copyright has been violated?
Posted by: Mary Ellen Bates | April 15, 2008 at 04:39 PM
Reminds me of the CMU CS report generator. http://pdos.csail.mit.edu/scigen/
Joe
Posted by: Joe Kraus | May 22, 2008 at 09:51 PM
Ooops -- Make that MIT. Mary -- Do you like the paper we "wrote" together?
http://apps.pdos.lcs.mit.edu/scicache/805/scimakelatex.72828.Mary+Ellen+Bates.Joseph+Kraus.html
Posted by: Joe Kraus | May 22, 2008 at 09:53 PM