Last week I cobbled together eight books, some of which publishers had sent me more than a year ago, in an effort to write a "Better Late Than Never" installment of "Book Briefs,"  something I had done back in April 2018 with Book Briefs #35. But, sensing I would not be able to absorb the books quickly enough to get the post done in less than a week, I thought that revisiting that five-year-old post would be a great way of (finally) dipping into the timesaver that is AI, asking OpenAI's ChatGPT to write similar one-paragraph reviews and see what it came up with. So that's what I did. Specifically, I told ChatGPT to "Give a short, one-paragraph review of 'X Book' by Y author." Its output is featured below, in four of the six books that were part of Book Briefs #35, accompanied by my own "briefs" from 2018 and blurbs from the publishers.  How do the reviews compare, my own vs. OpenAI" My takes are certainly more personal, with first-person commentary that isn't always germane to the book at hand but indicates where I'm coming from and what I find of interest and/or value. ChatGPT is, on the other hand, formulaic, with four sentences in a clearly repetitive structure for each review: statement of importance; two descriptive sentences; a closing statement indicating relevance to a particular audience. The AI "reviews" read well and have a clear position, but they are prescriptive, repetitive, and boring (so m...