Dear SHOE-listers,

I am writing to inform you of a very strange experience I just had. Hayek: A Life,  the Hayek biography that Hansjoerg Klausinger and I wrote, just appeared in late November. Less than a week later a friend told me he had purchased a summary of the book on Amazon. I knew of no summary, so he sent me a link. It was supposedly by a person identified as “Shirley Luckhurst.”  I clicked on her name and apparently Ms. Luckhurst was producing many such summaries of books recently published. I figured it was some shop somewhere employing many condensers and operating under a pseudonym, but the story turns out to be even better. Our editor at U Chicago Press said it was done by AI. Yikes! My mind was blown, as we used to say. 

Anyway, I thought I would alert book authors out there that this sort of thing exists, in case you get queries from potential book buyers. And no, I did not check out to see how good the AI summary was! 

Bruce

 

Bruce Caldwell
Research Professor of Economics
Director, Center for the History of Political Economy

"To discover a reference has often taken hours of labour, to fail to discover one has often taken days." Edwin Cannan, on editing  Smith's Wealth of Nations

Address:
Department of Economics
Duke University
Box 90097
Durham, N.C. 27708

Office: Room 07G Social Sciences Building
Phone: 919-660-6896
Center website: http://hope.econ.duke.edu
Personal Website: http://econ.duke.edu/~bjc18/

View my recent research on my SSRN Author page:
http://ssrn.com/author=627226