AI Writes a Book Summarising Lithium Ion Battery Research in World First

Publishing company Springer Nature best known for academic related books has announced what it claims is the world’s first text-book entirely written by Machine Learning. The book called ‘Lithium-Ion Batteries: A Machine-Generated Summary of Current Research’ isn’t the most-easy to read book in the world, but in fairness being a summary of peer-reviewed papers on the subject of Lithium-Ion batteries, it was never going to be. The entire book except for the preface was written by an algorithm, following advances in Natural Language Processing and Machine Learning. Springer Nature believes this book could mark a new era in scientific publishing. They note that 53,000 articles presenting research on Lithium Ion batteries were published in the last three years making it very hard for a researcher to stay on top all the news and developments in the field. This is where the AI comes in, it scanned and summarized all these papers saving time for the researcher. It should be noted however that we are still some way off from an AI writing a best-selling fiction book as they remain limited in their ability to generate the written word having difficulty in long-term coherence and structure in particular. What they excel at though is the ability to mass produce formulaic texts – like the summarization of a longer research paper for example. This is not entirely new, the press has been using this type of AI to create summaries of football matches or a financial press release for a few years now. Springer Nature plans to publish similar AI written texts like these in the future on subjects as diverse as Sociology and Chemistry.