AI Book Regarding Lithium Batteries Gets Published

Springer Nature claims to have published the first AI written book titled “Lithium-Ion Batteries, A Machine-Generated Summary of Current Research.” The claim is difficult to verify, since this comes after Ross Goodwin’s “1 the Road” (2018), that is sold as “the first real book written by an AI.”

The book is available as a free download providing an overview of lithium-ion batteries, putting together more than 150 papers published between 2016 and 2018.

Assistant professor of the Applied Computational Linguistics (ACoLi) lab at Goethe University, Christian Chiarcos, who has overseen the process states: ’’This publication has allowed us to demonstrate the degree to which the challenges of machine-generated publications can be solved when experts from scientific publishers collaborate with computer linguists’’. The professor believes the project also enabled them to relate to the expectations of authors, publishers, and consumers – from both a scientific and an economic point of view.

On the other hand, Jeff Bigham, associate professor at Carnegie Mellon’s Human-Computer Interaction Institute, is unimpressed by the project: “It is quite straightforward to take high-quality input text, spew out extractive summaries pushed up next to one another, and have it look somewhat coherent at a cursory glance.”

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the book is hardly captivating, sounding like it was written by an algorithm.

Texts written by code are not a novelty, machine-generated journalism being used to write earning reports, earthquake alerts and sports scores.
Henning Schoenenberger, director of product data and metadata management at Springer Nature, says the project is increasing functional production workflow, incorporating natural language processing, as well as today’s technology.

Over the past three years, more than 53,000 academic articles were published about lithium-ion batteries, which makes him believe that future battery tech progress is very important for humanity.

“The future of mankind depends on progress in research on lithium-ion batteries, and we need to think of innovative ways to enable researchers to achieve this progress. This is where the potential of natural language processing and artificial intelligence (AI) comes in that might help researchers stay on top of the vast and growing amount of literature,” he said in the preface.

There are, of course, some issues to be addressed, like to determine who is responsible for the machine-generated content from an ethical perspective.

Schoenenberger also highlighted Springer Nature’s intention to focus on fields like the social sciences for future machine learning prototypes.