Who does not run … it’s becaus it’s flying. That is the maxim for which many people are betting at this time when AI is taking off. Those who take advantage of the boom and are the first in certain functions, will surely get a good slice of it. Tell that to a man who has written 97 books with ChatGPT and is already making money selling them.
It started in August 2022 and, in less than a year, it has already had a good income. The protagonist of the news is a smart AI enthusiast who has seen business taking advantage of his ability. By now he’s already gotten over $2,000 clean which he expects to add up since he’s pretty much just started selling the books.
Are good?
No, possibly they are not. Even the “author” himself, Tim Boucher, hints that the quality is not exactly to get excited about. But what could be expected? He says that the books he has “made” the fastest have taken him 3 hours. And that includes absolutely everything in the book: from the text to the images between the pages and the covers. Because yes, Boucher leaves all the work to artificial intelligence and he only takes care of putting it together to lay out the book and be able to sell it.
In any case, although the fastest books have been done in 3 hours, the average time he mentions that he has to spend is around 6-8 hours. Then he takes care of publishing the books in a online bazaar known as Gumroad, where he puts them up for sale at different prices depending on the quality of the book or its number of pages. Because everything varies depending on what the AI provides each time it asks it to write a book with certain characteristics. Some may be very short, around 2,000 words, but others extend their pages and reach more than 80,000 words. The prices at which they are sold range from $1.99 for the cheapest to $5.99 in the case of the most expensive.
Everything is done by the AI
This is Boucher’s work philosophy. He wants to do as little as possible. What’s more, he has recounted his experience in a text sent to Newsweek of which he confesses that he has only written 40%, because the rest has also been left in the hands of ChatGPT and another AI: Claude. Is he the height of laziness or is he a genius because of his ability to take advantage of artificial intelligence? It’s obvious to him that it’s a good deal.
Boucher confesses that many of the books do not have stories that are well developed, nor characters that are described or built properly. He has found that everything is more difficult when the books are longer and that is why he is trying to keep his production in the range of short stories. That’s when AI can do a better job. For example, what it does is collect stories of the same theme that it adorns with descriptions of places that help create more atmosphere, carried out under the same philosophy of book summaries that ChatGPT carries out.
Then what the AI does is think of a title, usually with a lot of hook, like “The Circle of Wise Men”, “The Mysterious Buzz” or “The Plastic Prison”, and after that Boucher uses the Midjourney tool, another artificial intelligence, to get the images. In the process, he recovers the descriptions that ChatGPT has made in the book and based on that he obtains the artwork. So he already has the books ready to be published and purchased by users. Browsing through his selection, you can see that it’s not that his AI books get very good reviews, but it can’t be denied that he’s making money and, at the same time, becoming famous.