Are Textbook Authors an Endangered Species Thanks to AI?
Artificial intelligence has an amazingly fast ability to devour, digest and recreate material from the Internet — faster than any human.
Writing textbooks is one way for instructors/professors to make money, raise their professional profile, be promoted, or land a more lucrative job. But there is a caveat: textbooks must be revised every so often and they must contain at least 30% new material.
One professor I knew was so proficient in his field and advanced in his thinking about his subject, multiple regression analysis, that he wrote 80% new material in the second edition. Try to beat that, and you get a special prize as a genius of the craft, I would suppose.
His co-author, an extremely revered professor in the field, told him the new edition should carry only my professor’s name since he wrote the lion’s share of the latest edition. With some reluctance, he agreed.
Keeping your job in academia often depends on producing articles, a book, or something else of value to your institution within the first two years of signing your contract. Unfortunately, this can eliminate many excellent instructors who positively influence their students’ learning, and therein lies a significant problem and a major push for change.
