Guess What You’ll Find in The Library of Nonhuman Books

09.03.2020 Nate Hoffelder 1 Comment

AI has been used to write everything from poems to blog posts to books, and now it’s been put in charge of (for lack of a better term) a publishing company.

The Snakes and Ladders newsletter just tipped me to a site called The Library of Nonhuman Books. This site sells books that were written, published, and printed by AI.

This video explains how the process works.

I know the site is called a "library", and I know that it looks like a store, but if it really is AI-driven from one end to the other then I would have to call this an AI-powered publisher.

Now, the works it produces are little more advanced than the spam comments on a blog, and the codexes are less books than an especially abstract form of art, but I am still intrigued by the point being made here.

These books were designed for today’s post-literate society, where most of the reading is actually done by machines, not people. That’s not a dig along the lines of "people don’t read anymore" so much as it is an acknowledgement that if you use a a search engine to find web content, that search engine "read" tens of millions of web pages to present you with the ten or fifteen you are actually going to read. (The same is true for Google Books, although with a slightly less extreme ratio.)

If most of the reading is done by machine, then why not write the content for the machines as well?

The Library of Nonhuman Books.