It's always good to see a team that is clearly very passionate about their mission.
It's nice to see how Flynn evolved overtime within the HC community starting with the original crowdfunding. For a while some people didn't understand what Flynn does, and the updated website makes it very clear to me today.
It seems like a good way to improve the public transit.
"reroute/sf is a hackathon on October 19-21, 2012 to improve transportation in San Francisco with technological innovation. Engine Advocacy, Hattery, Mozilla, Google Maps, the Mayor's Office, General Assembly and the SFMTA are calling all engineers, designers, and business folk to join us at The Hattery (414 Brannan) to make San Francisco a better place. The top teams will receive a total of over $10,000 in prizes, and work with the City to make their innovations real."
The books you're thinking is a type of content. But if you look at book as a delivery technology (a stack of paper together) then its perfectly reasonable to have generated books, just like you have generated pdf reports with generated charts and graphs.
To make the kind of book you and I think of as content (novels, investigative journalism, etc...) using a pure AI/machine approach is still a bit away.
Personally, I'm experimenting AI + human solution to create the kind of books most people would want to read.
You are probably referring to this man.
"Philip M. Parker (born June 20, 1960) holds the INSEAD Chair Professorship of Management Science at INSEAD (Fontainebleau, France). He has patented a method to automatically produce a set of similar books from a template which is filled with data from database and internet searches.[1] At Amazon.com, Parker is listed as the author of 107,000 books that his program created and overall he claims to have produced 200,000 different titles.[2][3] This would make him one of the most prolific authors in the world. Parker publishes the automated books through ICON Group International, using several ICON group subheadings. Via EdgeMaven Media, he also provides applications for firms from different business domains to create their own computer-authored content material.[4][5]"
It's nice to see how Flynn evolved overtime within the HC community starting with the original crowdfunding. For a while some people didn't understand what Flynn does, and the updated website makes it very clear to me today.