This experiment started as a simple way of learning how to use Designrr, which I was keen to do as a way of professionalising the presentation of my “real life” research and thinking. However it quickly morphed into deep anxiety and self-doubt about the value of the resources I create relative to what is possible with AI. As it was an initial experiment, I kept it simple, so in no way does it reflect what Designrr is capable of creating in more experienced hands. I focused on using AI generated content for this experiment, so that I could then follow up by developing my own “human written” version, benefiting from the template and ideas that the AI “author” came up with.

Hypothesis:

I can create a useful, professional looking e-book without writing any of the content myself.

Process:

I used Designrr, and selected the option to generate an e-book with Wordgenie. This promises to “generate your eBook title, outline, the description and the first paragraph of each chapter based on your chosen niche. When the AI finishes generating your eBook you will be able to edit your new eBook, add more content and publish it”. I selected “Worldviews” as my Niche, and then selected “worldviews” from the options offered to define a sub-niche. I put “Business Leaders” as the audience. Next, I selected one of the suggested titles “The Power of Perspective: Transforming Business Through Worldview Awareness”. For the theme of the project I selected “Business”, “Training and Development” and “Self-Development”. Wordgenie suggested 10 Chapter titles, each with 3 content sections. I reviewed these and clicked next. Wordgenie took some time to populate the text for each section (under 5 mins). I then selected a template for the front page and on the last page, I changed the author’s name to Wordgenie AI as I don’t want to claim credit for work that isn’t mine. I then inserted an “Author’s Note” explaining the experimental context of the e-book creation. Finally I clicked publish and chose the option to create a flipbook.

Output:

As promised Designrr has created a very professional, tidy e-book, and given me the functionality to publish this as an e-book.

The e-book can be found at: https://designrr.page/?id=394305&token=2270951340&h=5935

I actually went through this process twice as I didn’t record the process steps properly the first time, and couldn’t remember what I’d selected at each stage, which resulted in a different book. The first e-book can be found at https://designrr.page/?id=394285&token=3703055937&h=6209

Was It Useful / What Did I Learn?

Well, the hypothesis is confirmed, which is unsurprising. Designrr is a very powerful technical platform, with a sophisticated AI. However, the bigger question is how can I use this, because the general idea would be that I would use and evolve this text to incorporate my own ideas and research – essentially partnering with AI to create a book that looks good, works well, and is useful.

I found the suggested chapter titles and content sections extremely useful. It would have taken me a long time to get to this succinct, logical flow – and that’s as an experienced instructional designer who used to edit undergrad and postgrad distance learning manuals. I was a little disappointed with the setting of the internal pages – the page breaks are not in logical places, and I was hoping for a more varied page set up. I could have done this manually, but it wasn’t really in the scope of this experiment.

I am very impressed with the AI writing, it was fast and a lot less verbose than my normal first drafts, and closely followed the style of business books aiming to support practical application. However, whilst the writing was good, and it connected topics such as worldviews, culture, decision making etc. This was definitively not what I wanted to say. A lot of the content was familiar and felt like the AI had “read” a lot of the same sources as I had when I put together my own work around worldviews, but didn’t really dive into the topics in any depth, or bring them to life. The draft offered case studies, which for some reason really disturbed me. I have no way of knowing whether these were taken from real case studies available online, or totally fictional. However, they are presented as real world examples. The tool offers these as examples, which I can replace with my own, but the onus is on me as the human partner to actually do this.

Whilst there are draw backs, it was an interesting and useful experiment. My takeaways are that I would definitely use Designrr again – creating an ebook is effortless from a technical standpoint. However, I would probably use another tool to create the content, using my own writing as a start point. Or, I would take the headings suggested by AI, and write my own content to fit the headings. I feel like I would need to do a lot of work before I could put myself as the author – but it would be a lot less work than if I started from scratch.