In science fiction, artificial intelligence is sometimes portrayed as an incredibly useful tool everyone is glad to have constant access to, and at other times, as a terrifying spectre that brings about death and destruction. Rarely is it anything in between! But nothing in sci-fi prepared me for the ways AI has manifested itself (so far) in real life.
You’ve heard all the pros and cons, all the weird stories (people marrying chatbots?), and all the marketing hype. Maybe you’ve found some ways AI can save you time and effort. On the other hand, maybe you’ve felt annoyed that every app, cloud service, operating system, and gadget seems to be forcing AI features on us everywhere (often, with higher prices to go with them). I’m not going to tell you anything you don’t already know or try to convince you of the virtues or evils of AI (and, more specifically, of chatbots and other tools powered by large language models, or LLMs).
What I can tell you is what AI has to do with us, Take Control Books. Here’s where we stand:
First, all our books are 100% written and edited by human beings. It will be a cold day in hell when I ever allow an AI-written book to appear in our catalog. Our authors have names and faces. They have families and mortgages. They’ve done the hard work of researching, testing, and figuring out how things work so that they can explain them in a friendly, straightforward way in our books. They write from real-world experience. They sometimes make mistakes, too, but at least they don’t hallucinate.
Some of our books touch on AI topics. For example, a lot of our books cover Apple products that incorporate Apple Intelligence, and some of the other apps we write about (such as DEVONthink) also have AI features. So, where appropriate, we explain how to use those features. Our authors have, and often share, their opinions about those features, which are sometimes positive and sometimes not. We’re here to be helpful, not to be AI cheerleaders.
When appropriate, we use AI tools to help us solve problems. For example, I’ve used LLMs to help fix bugs on our website that I couldn’t figure out on my own, and to add new features in hours that would have taken me days or weeks to code manually. I exercise the utmost caution to avoid exposing any customer data to an outside company and I test everything thoroughly. (I have also frequently spotted bugs in AI-produced code, and I don’t take anything for granted.)
But now the big one. We don’t (and won’t) have a book about AI. People have asked us for a Take Control book about ChatGPT, or Claude, or LLMs generally. It’s not going to happen. I’ve mentioned the reasons for this in blog posts, but here they are again:
AI is in a state of rapid flux. New features, engines, models, and indeed paradigms appear on an almost daily basis, and older ones disappear at a similar rate. Likewise, laws, policies, and security risks are always changing. A consumer book about how to use AI would need to be updated constantly, into the indefinite future, because what we’d write today is guaranteed to be laughably wrong next month. That’s not sustainable for us.
We’re not AI experts. No one associated with Take Control has any inside information on the inner workings of AI engines. We could only tell you what we can see, which is the same thing you can see. And yes, I get it, we could do research and testing that you don’t have time to do, but we’re still not going to be able to speak authoritatively, because all these AI engines are black boxes.
AIs are not I. You know “artificial intelligence” is just a made-up term to sell stuff, right? These machines may give the superficial appearance of being intelligent, but they’re just algorithms that build up sentences and paragraphs one word at a time based on statistical models. No actual intelligence is on display. And, they are wrong very much of the time. They sound convincing because they were programmed to sound convincing. But they’re not actually intelligent!
There are, ahem, some ethical issues. Most of our books have already been pirated by AI engines so you can ask them about things and get answers we came up with, except our authors don’t get paid for that; the money flows to the AI companies. That teensy concern aside, we have innumerable other misgivings about LLMs and the companies that create them: environmental issues, job loss, an endless appetite for RAM and SSDs that has driven up consumer prices dramatically, hallucinations that have led to disastrous consequences including numerous deaths, the dangerous spread of AI-driven misinformation, and so much more. All this makes AI, shall we say, a rather uncomfortable fit for us.
In sum: Use AI products if you want to. Or don’t. I have opinions, and you’re entitled to yours, too. But don’t expect to see a Take Control book on this topic. Sorry!
—Joe Kissell, Publisher (March 31, 2026)