{"type":"rich","version":"1.0","provider_name":"Transistor","provider_url":"https://transistor.fm","author_name":"Behind the Book Cover","title":"He's Doubling Down on AI and IP While Everyone Else Is Panicking","html":"","width":"100%","height":180,"duration":2500,"description":"I was a snob about AI in publishing. I'll just say it. When companies started popping up in late 2022 promising to use AI to write books, I had the same reaction I once had to self publishing when I was still in the traditional world: I want nothing to do with these people. Dan Curran has made me reconsider—some of it, anyway. Not because he convinced me AI can match what a skilled ghost writer or developmental editor does (I don't think it can, at least not yet) but what he’s building at Chapters may be as interesting as the manuscript.Dan spent a decade running a company that interviewed scientists and PhDs for technical writing. When ChatGPT launched, he didn't use AI to replace writers. He used it to organize, deduplicate and structure the words that were already coming out of real people's mouths—recorded in conversations, timestamped and attributed, so every sentence traces back to the person who said it. The result is a manuscript in 90 days. Chapters has started over 100 of them in 16 months with a team of 14 people, and they charge $25,000—or as low as $18,000 on a payment plan—to do what a ghost writer charges $60,000 to $150,000 for.But what I really wanted to talk about is what Dan's actually building, which is not a book company. He calls it a \"living library\"—a vault of authenticated IP that can generate Substacks, LinkedIn posts, speeches, white papers and documentary frameworks from the same corpus. And he's timestamping and chaining custody of every piece of it, so that when the large language models come scraping for new knowledge, authors can prove what they said, when they said it and demand to be paid for it. Can a 90-day AI-organized manuscript compete with a book that's been through months of human developmental editing? I have my doubts. But that's arguing about the wrong part.We also get into why about half of Chapters' clients come from publishers who offer them as an alternative to a $150,000 ghost writer, why Dan thinks 90% of digital...","thumbnail_url":"https://img.transistorcdn.com/Xb3KmOvREtDe2gC76u6FvR351DxBU4X6pzMVALw3Snk/rs:fill:0:0:1/w:400/h:400/q:60/mb:500000/aHR0cHM6Ly9pbWct/dXBsb2FkLXByb2R1/Y3Rpb24udHJhbnNp/c3Rvci5mbS9lYWIx/MGM4YTQxNjY2ODgx/YmY4YmY1YTM0NzBm/NWNhZi5wbmc.webp","thumbnail_width":300,"thumbnail_height":300}