In a recent survey of Textbook & Academic Authors Association members about their use of Generative AI, several shared specific ways they use AI in authoring and promoting their textbooks, academic articles, and books.

Textbook Author Stephanie Lenox has used ChatGPT to write a first draft and an outline, to make the writing process more efficient, to improve the quality of her writing, and to create marketing pieces to promote her work. She has also used it for brainstorming, generating titles, summarizing, refining conference proposals, and editing.

“AI helps me take the emotion out of my writing process in order to overcome anxiety and just get started,” she says. “AI helps me move faster on functional writing, such as emails, so that I can concentrate my creative energy on writing that matters. I use AI like I use Wikipedia to get a sense of what is already out there. I’ve used it to generate learning objectives based on a chapter summary or to come up with 10 possible titles for a textbook based on a description I provided. I’ve also used it to identify grammatical issues or logical fallacies in texts and explain what’s wrong and how to fix it. I rarely use it for purely generative reasons because AI tends to be overly enthusiastic in its responses.”

Academic Author Sercin Kutucu has used ChatGPT to make her writing process more efficient and to improve the quality of her writing. “I have used it for grammar check, alternative word finding, and editing,” she says.

Textbook author Jay Coakley has used AI tools to identify topics he may have overlooked or not attended to adequately. “I request information on chapter topics and then seek to explore issues raised in the AI output. They confirm for me that I have covered important topics in the literature and popular press.” Tools he has used include ChatGPT, Writesonic, BARD, and GenText.

Textbook author Andreas Tsouchlaris has used AI tool ChatGPT to conduct research, write an outline, improve the quality of his writing and to create marketing pieces to promote his work. “I’ve used it to research topics, generate drafts of presentations and clean up text,” he says. “[It’s] much faster than working with Google and Google Scholar when researching.”

Textbook author Margaret Reece has used AI tools ChatGPT and bucket.io to create marketing pieces to promote her work, specifically to market an online video course she is offering to pre-medical anatomy and physiology students. “It has helped me address my marketing message and to better target my audience.”

Textbook Author Ken Campbell has used AI tool ChatGPT to write an outline and to help with writing a book proposal. “It generates ideas and things like reading suggestions very quickly,” he says. “I use it in a variety of ways and have found it very helpful.” To assign students in his class lines for a reading of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, he asked ChatGPT, “Can you break down for me how many lines each of the characters in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar has?”