A Weekly Dose of Architecture Books

The most recent numbered installment of  "Book Briefs,"  the series of occasional posts featuring short first-hand descriptions of some of the numerous books that publishers send to me for consideration on this blog, was #48, back in December . I wasn't planning on continuing the series this year-of-doing-things-differently ( or so I thought ), but a couple of weeks ago I brought back the "Briefs"  to play around with ChatGPT , which I had been hesitant to dive into but was told by numerous people that I MUST try it. At that time I also mentioned an in-progress "Brief" with eight books — here they are. Concrete in Switzerland: Histories from the Recent Past  edited by Salvatore Aprea, Nicola Navone, Laurent Stalder and Sarah Nichols, published by EPFL Press in May 2022 ( Amazon / Bookshop ) Concrete in Switzerland is a companion publication to Beton , the exhibition held at S AM (Swiss Architecture Museum) in Basel from November 2021 to April 2022. ...

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 f...