Exactly this sort of thing makes it feel like there could be a "cliff" or "eternal winter of human publishing", where books like his are never again written by

Exactly this sort of thing makes it feel like there could be a "cliff" or "eternal winter of human publishing", where books like his are never again written by humans. Often when tech comes out that does something better than people, it makes sense for people to stop doing it. But in the case of "books explaining things", AI only learned how to explain things by examining the existing corpus - and there won't be any more human-generated content to continue to learn and evolve from, so the explanatory skills of AI could wind up frozen in 2025. An alternative would of course be that humans team up with AI to write better books of this sort, and are able to develop new and better ways of explaining things at a more rapid pace as a result. A relatively recent example that sticks in my mind is how data visualization has improved. Documents from the second half of the 1900's are shockingly bad at data presentation, and the shock is due to how the standard of practice has improved in the last few decades. AI probably wouldn't have figured this out on its own, but is now able to train on many, many examples of good visualization.