The first quarter of the book and some AI concerns

As I mentioned last week, I’ve reached the milestone of drafting one quarter of the book. It made the book feel real when I put it all into a file and added things like a title page and table of contents. I would love to share that with any of you that may be interested. Several of you have indicated that you have been meaning to read what I’ve done so far and this is a way to read the latest version of the introduction and first four chapters in the correct order.

I’ve been making changes to all the chapters since posting them. Here are some of the changes I’ve made:

• Incorporated comments and corrections from you all into many of the chapters.
• Moved some of the content between chapters to try and make the flow work better. 
• Updated the Introduction to make it match the current outline.
• Made a lot of changes to the chapter on leisure to make it less academic, more retirement-oriented, and generally match the tone of the other chapters.

Please email me at bill@catchings.com if you’d like me to send you a PDF of what I have written so far. You are under no obligation to read it, but if you do, I’d love any feedback you may have.

A week ago, I received a long email quoting from my blogs on the book from someone I did not know. He had written a book, saw some similarities in what I had said about changed identity, and contacted me. I decided to check out his book, and it didn’t seem to be particularly related especially as it was fiction. I went back and reread his email and am now largely convinced it was AI generated, probably in the hope of getting me to buy his book.

No harm done, but it did reinforce a concern of mine based on experiences a couple friends told me about this summer. One had bought and read the book The Correspondent for a book club he was in. He thought the book wasn’t very good and told the group. After discussing it a bit, it became apparent that he had not read the same book. What he read was an AI-generated book with the same title. Another friend told me that his daughter had written a book she wanted to publish. Someone had gotten hold of what she had written and used AI to turn into a book available for purchase on Amazon.

Both those stories raised my concerns a bit. In an abundance of caution, I will continue to write about the book, but I won’t post the chapters on my blog. I will let folks know when I’ve written one and I will gladly email it to them on request.

I am still trying to draft another chapter before the end of the month. We shall see. Thanks again for accompanying me on this journey!