A Prominent Publisher Used Machine Learning to Write a Textbook

Is this going to be on the test?

BookBot

Scientific publisher Springer Nature just released its first book written entirely by a machine learning algorithm.

The title of the book, Lithium-Ion Batteries: A Machine-Generated Summary of Current Research cuts straight to the point: 247 pages of prominent research into lithium-ion batteries and AI-written summaries of the field. The book shows how AI can help scientists stay on top of the latest research — but also algorithms are now able to review vast bodies of literature and select the most important details on their own.

Ghost Writer

The author of the book is listed as Beta Writer, an algorithm built by scientists at Germany's Goethe University.

To write the book, Beta Writer perused an endless pile of articles on lithium ion batteries published in Springer-owned academic journals and pulled out the most relevant information, according to Gizmodo.

First Of Many

Springer Nature writes that it plans to use Beta Writer to tackle other fields of research in the future, reusing the basic technology but aiming it at different kinds of science for upcoming books.

"Our goal is to initiate a broad discussion," Sprinter wrote on the book's page, "together with the research community and domain experts, about the future opportunities, challenges and limitations of this technology."

READ MORE: The First Machine-Generated Book by a Scholarly Publisher Is a Boring Read [Gizmodo]

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