The AI-Driven Author Time Shift
Some musings about what to do now that anyone can write a passable book about anything.
Up until the mid-1990s, non-fiction authors often visited libraries to do research. If someone checked out a key book or magazine in 1988, then you'd be out of luck. Card catalogs still mattered. If you wanted to interview an expert, you could email an author and ask for some timeāif that person used email, that is.
Fast-forward to the end of the century. With an increasing percentage of all content digitized, you no longer needed to visit a brick-and-mortar location to access content and do research. The idea of checking out a book, journal, or magazine applied less and less. At least you needed to read the contentāor a summary of itāin order to properly cite it. Doing proper research became much, much easier thanks to Netscape, Yahoo!, AlltheWeb, and, of course, Google.
Where Are We Now?
We've entered an era of generative AI. You don't even need to read a book or academic study to cite it and pretend that you really understand it.
Here's a quick visual:
