Making this book

A minor digital miracle

TIMELINE: Creating the first two books and the website took about 22 days start to finish, July 4-26, 2026.

THE PROCESS:

  • Finding contributors: personal contact with potential authors via phone, text and email. Emailing 200+ friends. Texting many of my 700+ phone contacts. Two yard signs printed and posted outside of the domes. Creation of a one page website to describe the project and solicit stories. Migration to a full website on publication
  • Processing Stories: Some people had given talks on the TM Talks website. With their permission, I used this free service to extract transcripts: https://tactiq.io/tools/youtube-transcript
  • Those transcripts were typically broken into 4-5 word chinks with timestamps, so I had ChatGPT clean up the transcripts.
  • I trained ChatGPT to use my writing style by inputting an entre book that I published in 2004
  • I had ChatGPT analyse the transcripts for story candidates and then propose first drafts.
  • I edited the acceptible drafts mostly to correct AI-proposed name spellings (e.g. - changing "Roger" to "Raja").
  • All drafts were sent to the speakers/authors for approval
  • Final versions were assembled using the Vellum book design software platform for publication on Amazon (KDP environment)
  • The cover designs were done in ChatGPT, with some resizing processes performed in Photoshop.

NOTE: In the case of the Bevan Tribute, the stories were extracted by ChatGPT from the 3.5 hour memorial video, and the cover design was AI-created based on the results of an AI search for an iconic Australian flower.

Caveat:

The result of all this is a 350+ page main first volume, and the 75 page Bevan memorial book.

That said, there may be some name spellings and other anomalies that I did not catch in the editing process. Please be patient with that and if possible send me an email and I will make any and all corrections.

I hope that you enjoy...

Paul Stokstad

paul@stokstad.com

Regarding AI

I have suggested elsewhere that AI is not the best of terms for the technology that it represents, and that I prefer the phrase guided intelligence, in that it needs informed input to create meaningful output. In creating this book it has functioned primarily as an accelerator, turning what could have been a months long process into a three week sprint. More centrally, the book simply wouldn't have happened without it, due to personal time constraints. There are currently various concerns about AI use and I address a lot of that in my (AI-enabled) book - see the third row here - Paul