Is ChatGPT making tech publishing obsolete?

Writing a book on a topic is an art unto itself. Even most technical books have a coherent narrative, carefully crafted to bring the reader from point A to point B.

If you want a quick reference on a well-known topic, then sure, use an LLM. Or a search engine. Chances are it will even answer you correctly (but also chances are it won't, and if it is a new topic for yourself - strap in, you're in for a ride).

But if you want to really understand something, then you will have to do your research, and a lot of this research has already been summarized into tangible artifacts optimized for your consumption which LLMs would never be able to replicate.

Even if you can convince one to regurgitate a book verbatim, the narrative thread would be lost unless you weave it yourself with your prompts - but would you, the learner, be able to do re-enact the narrative better or even on the same level than the original author who posessed the knowledge on the topic?

I had the same thought a while ago. My personal conclusion was - there is a place for well-written books that bring the reader along a step by step process to understand a topic and impart knowledge such that they can make their own opinions from then on. Example - Designing Data Intensive Applications, Effectice C++ etc from my personal collection.

There are other books to the tune of “Docker Cookbook” “Java Pocket reference” etc, that will lose their relevance when LLMs could do that job of digesting existing info into easily usable form.

Tech books will still be useful in the future in a few ways:

- When you're first learning a topic, ChatGPT isn't as useful because you don't really know what questions to ask. It's useful to get a broad overview guided by an expert so you can learn the concepts, and more importantly the vocabulary, which you can then use to dive deeper into parts you're interested in with ChatGPT.

- For really new stuff, ChatGPT obviously won't have any training data. So the books will be the only real resource until the models are updated.

AI doesn't make writing obsolete, it makes it even more important because human inputs are necessary for all existing systems.

How do you know if these LLMs are stating facts instead of hallucinating? Also, where would these things learn about new topics?

Published works are more authoritative. With ChatGPT you're getting something broader, more creative, and possibly wrong.

Less ChatGPT, more YouTube. Barring the population trying to study languages formally through a course, a lot of people use YouTube courses and video-content.

OFC, if video makes tech publishing obsolete, then it would've made it obsolete a decade ago.

A more realistic expectation is to divide learners into readers, video consumers, course-takers, etc. ChatGPT could integrate into any of those workflows, albeit with varying results. If using an AI becomes as second nature as watching a video, it might have some effect.

I reckon these books or any other learning material will be sold with access to a trained AI on the subject.

So basically the expert/author will help fine tune the model.

I think eventually these books will end up becoming training data for LLM's but at the moment, a human plus a machine is far more powerful than either one in isolation.

You still have time to derive some utility from them. Additionally, you can use ChatGPT to help you learn the material faster.

It doesn't have to be mutually exclusive.

I think it's changing them. You still need a person to think of the topics we want to talk about, that are interesting to talk about. But AI can help gather the info around these topics. If we 100% rely on AI for topics and content our content will be flat and not interesting.

They’re different modes of learning and IMO the published format’s not likely to completely dissapear but it will get impacted heavily for sure, same way video chipped away a big part from its profitability.

You can't Ctrl-F paper books, but they survived computers and the internet, because sometimes, it's nice to discover a new subject by reading sequentially over chapters carefully wrote by someone who knows what they're doing.

Sure CGPT can generate a table of contents if you want to learn a programming language for instance, tell you what to do first, what to try, delve deep in concepts, etc., but I think it's still hit or miss, as opposed to great tech authors and great publishers, where you can be sure you're getting your money's worth.

Also, IMO people tend to have a bias to go slower with paper material, because they committed to reading a book, they are less likely to skip sections, which means the end result is that you get more out of a book than the Html/pdf same content, might be different if you need to try things out on a computer while reading though.

Ban AI.