I first heard about self-publishing from a student who told me about meeting a guy, a former high executive of a large multinational, who had left the business world to dive into self-publishing, making a ton of money from it. At the time, I didn't really grasp what it truly was; we were focused on entirely different matters, suitors making their advances, but my brain, which is a bit frugal and greedy at its core, stored away the information, just in case.
So, when an old friend talked to me about his new project related to self-publishing, about the complexity of managing it and simplifying it into straightforward sequences—a task he dedicated himself to in the spare time left from running his businesses—I offered to lend him a hand. My typical day is, like many others', filled with things to do, but my curiosity (I'll explain this better later) didn't let me off the hook: this subject needed to be studied and understood better. It's a form of entrepreneurship, individual as it seems, following the usual rule that only one in a thousand succeeds, but that's okay. It's about editing, if not writing, and selling books, which is far from dishonorable. And then there are these devilries of AI about which you know nothing: study, do, try, don't be completely left out; it will continually trip you up.
I'll never become a serious techie; other things interest me more, but this situation is eerily similar to another major shift I witnessed and lived through almost forty years ago, which I initially dismissed, adopting the saying, "I'll talk to this thing when it talks to me": it took me a couple of years to decide to buy, on installment, an M19 from Olivetti.
I was late, but much less so than many others. I went from a super cheap typewriter, also from Olivetti, with which I had typed my thesis (yes, electric typewriters already existed, magnificent ones, but for what I needed, not even knowing how to "type," that cheap plastic thing was just fine) to a personal computer with DOS operating system.
I was late, but much less so than others. And since then, the PC, with all its devilries, hard disks, floppies, and commands to make it do something, has been with me everywhere: and when the internet came along a few years later, I dove right in.
The theme of AI, as a big consumer of Science Fiction (the good kind, not the novellas set in more or less colorful futures, a literary genre often scorned, not many realize that utopia, the search for possible worlds, possible futures, disappeared from all other contexts) had encountered it even earlier, exciting and fabulous... a fairy tale, so to speak, sometimes ending well, sometimes not so much.
And now I find it as a mass phenomenon, it has infiltrated everywhere, where we don't even know it has burrowed, but it's there, hidden, but it's there... and quite often it's right in the spotlight, a business with logarithmically growing volumes and so many people, God, so many people. The latest news (though it's already a few months old) is that applications built with OpenAI (open my foot, like other open-source, try to get in without knowing what devilry it is, and you'll see how it ends) are over 3 million... from what I understand, these are apps, that is, they do something, to some extent specialized, like the other apps we use (once they were called programs, and had the .exe extension, if you didn't know the commands to give them, they would stick their tongue out at you "bad command or file name", and the cursor would blink motionless), the overwhelming difference is there.
3 million .exes that no longer stick their tongue out at you, maybe they don't do what you tell them, not at all or to a greater or lesser extent, the fact is that you speak to them as you would to a human being (absit iniuria verbis), and they do.
What does self-publishing have to do with AIs? Well, one of the big areas where AI has made its mark is in text generation, of any form and purpose. Self-publishing, precisely, publishes, and needs content: the marriage, more or less mercenary, is inevitable.
I'm not particularly interested in knowing and understanding exactly how it works, fundamentally I care about two things: understanding as best as possible what it is, beyond what is evident to the eye, and knowing enough to be able to use it for my purposes.
Here and now, with all due respect to everyone, NOT for writing these contents: these are generated by my machine. True, I'm resorting to Word, which I saw, so to speak, newborn, but already a marvel compared to the DOS editor I started with... but it's little more than paper, pen, carbon paper, and archive, it doesn't think in my place.
Not even AI thinks, even if the result, in terms of content visibility, seems the same: try ChatGPT, Bard, or Jasper, formidable.
However, what appears is not necessarily what is: the biological machine (which then is me... me who? not easy the answer) that is using Word at this moment, this is capable of generating thought.
AIs, not yet, at least.
But now that they are trying to talk to me, that they no longer mock me, oh no, it seems downright foolish (as well as fundamentally impossible) not to listen to them and try to make them useful for something that has value to me.
In short, I've started another journey, while I continue with other journeys, in good company, the Italian way to continuous improvement (https://microkaizen.it), the exploration of the unknown continent we've called Social State Physics of Matter (https://socialphysics.eu, the matter for us Westerners denser, more insidious, and rebellious to scientific understanding), in the channel of what for me, for now, is the best I've managed to find, the immense river of Human Systemics (https://humansystemics.net/).
Yes, I'm in excellent company, few and very select travel companions... but there's no principle reason that prevents the company from growing, the criteria remain those (mine and ours, the other travel companions), good and very select.
Maybe in the end, a book will come out of it, why not, you never know with self-publishing…