The Two C's for Survival in Knowledge Economy
I came across this article from The Guardian. The title of the article is “Authors shocked to find AI ripoffs of their books being sold on Amazon”.
To summarize, Generative AI has found its way to books publishing. There are people who are using Generative AI to self-publish books, almost everything is generated by AI from title to content for text and book cover images altogether.
This is something foreseeable in my opinion, as generative AI is going to shorten the time to generate content and images altogether. Where these two comes in, it is definitely going to be disrupted, thus books publishing.
We already saw that in videos publishing already. There are more videos on dubious science published to grab attention, and converting these attention to monetary benefits with disregards for its negative impact on viewers.
Books and videos have seen the invasion from generative AI. My prediction for the next media industry to be disrupted will be podcasting and perhaps small radio/news media outlets.
As more of generative AI content, without much human intervention, flood (I prefer ‘tsunami’ but I doubt there’s such a word) the Internet and bombard our senses, how can individuals, like you and I, survive in this day and age. We cannot be covering our eyes and ears and pretend nothing has happened. Lifelong learning as mentioned before is here to stay so we got to learn and the internet will be the first place most of us go to. What can we do?
All these thoughts are results of kind support through donation and network sharing to other readers like you. Support my work, consider buying me a “book”, so I can continue to share. :)
So if we are to continue our work, to update our skills and knowledge what shall we do then?
This is where the two C’s come into the picture: Curation and Critical Thinking
Curation
Curation is the act of “selecting (the best or most appropriate) especially for presentation, distribution, or publication” based on Merriam-Webster dictionary. In the coming world we are going to live in, we will definitely be inundated with information. Before Generative AI, we are inundated with information from humans mostly but now you will definitely see an acceleration of content generation with GenAI and with that the information we have to deal with will increase a few folds.
This is where learning to curate effectively and efficiently comes in. We will need to quickly discern what are useful information and what are the duds. I believe curation is like cycling. It maybe a lot of mistakes made, for instance, trusting the wrong sources, forgot to figure out the agenda of the info source etc. But as we get more experience, we will get better at it, becoming more efficient at curation.
But like any skills, getting effective is more important than efficient. How do we get more effective in curation then? The next C comes in, we need Critical Thinking.
Critical Thinking
“Critical thinking is the analysis of available facts, evidence, observations, and arguments in order to form a judgement by the application of rational, skeptical, and unbiased analyses and evaluation.” ~Wikipedia
Notice it says “facts, evidence, observations and arguments”? This means in order to hone our critical thinking this is what we must do.
Ask “Is this fact or opinion I am hearing?”
Validate the facts and evidence, check out multiple sources.
Ask yourself, given the background of the speaker, will you listen to him i.e. you know the advice on getting rich is good if it comes from a rich man.
Improve your observation skills, look for details more.
Find good mates to do discussion together. Leave your ego. Discuss to gain perspectives, not to win.
These are steps, imo, can help with improving your critical thinking. As you critical thinking gets better, you will be able to curate better and as it becomes habitual, you will be more efficient.
What are your opinion on this? What other steps do you think one can take to improve their critical thinking? Do share with me in the comments or drop me a note on LinkedIn. :)
References
Guardian Article: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/sep/30/authors-shocked-to-find-ai-ripoffs-of-their-books-being-sold-on-amazon
YouTube video: YouTube Science Scam Crisis