A Trip to the Future Library: How ChatGPT Changed My Bookstore Experience

The experience is quite different now that we have Large Language Models like ChatGPT at our fingertips.

On my latest visit to the lovely bookstore "Waterstones" in Brighton, UK, ChatGPT completely transformed my experience. As I browsed the "History" section, I came across a shelf with intriguing titles but wasn't sure which to choose.

The titles and authors' names didn't provide enough information for me to make a decision, so I turned to my phone and started googling. However, I soon realized that I was in for a long, time-consuming search process with questionable validity and an abundance of advertisements. But then I had an idea - why not try ChatGPT?

I snapped a photo of the shelf and, thanks to my phone's high-quality camera and text recognition capabilities, I was able to quickly capture the book titles.

I simply pasted the title into the ChatGPT app and a prompt asking if it recognized the books. To validate my inquiry, I asked the app to provide me with the authors and publication dates as well.

The response was incredibly accurate! I then asked for a brief summary of each title.

Before I knew it, I found myself in the bookstore café sipping on a coffee, chatting with ChatGPT about the content of these books.

It's amazing to think that we are already living in the future!

Scene from The Time Machine (2002) movie. AI library and human interacting

The scene resembles that from the film "The Time Machine". The protagonist travels to the future, on a quest for knowledge. Upon arriving at the national library, he discovers that there are no books, only an AI interface that encapsulates all of human knowledge.