Not just books. I remember seeing a "movie" on Amazon (not sure if it was Prime or some other service I was subscribed to). It was called "how to pronounce 'Stranger Things'", and the total length was about 10 seconds. I'll leave the plot to your imagination.
ESOL people: avoid searching YouTube for "How to pronounce" videos because they are usually shit. Often poorly generated computer voices.
Instead look for examples of real usage of the word in use e.g. https://youglish.com/
English is my mother tongue and I often need to look up how to say and use phrases from other English speaking regions e.g. "nowt" recently.
And take care to pick your accent - particularly American or British. "can't" is particularly hard to say properly in my English and US people misunderstand the way we say it.
Noticed a trend on Amazon Prime where movies are allowed to have inaccurate dates. So it'll say (2023) but the second it starts you can tell it's 90s, 00s or even 70s.
Really damages the perceived quality of the service when it can be gamed like that.
I suspect what's happened there is the content provider has improperly filled out the metadata. Usually when something like that happens it's because they've set the release date to whenever it came out on $dominant_format (i.e. Bluray)
> Not just books. I remember seeing a "movie" on Amazon (not sure if it was Prime or some other service I was subscribed to). It was called "how to pronounce 'Stranger Things'", and the total length was about 10 seconds. I'll leave the plot to your imagination.
Youtube is becoming flooded with influencers showing you how to do it and promising massive imaginary profits. Same for AI generated Etsy designs, copywriting gigs, and various other things.
Not just YouTube, but every social media platform seems to be spammed by it. I feel like I am seeing these stupid ads almost every hour now.
A ton of people jumping on the bandwagon promising insane profits from AI. But if you thought for more than 1 second, if they themselves could make this much profit why would they be trying to convince other people to do it.
The reality is they are likely the ones making any money by building up a following making these promises.
> But if you thought for more than 1 second, if they themselves could make this much profit why would they be trying to convince other people to do it.
Often times this stuff is scams that stopped working, so the scammers pivot to selling the non-working scam to others.
There was a YouTube video a couple years ago that exposed the scam of a couple of twins that were selling SEO'd bottom-of-the-barrel ghostwritten books on Amazon. Instead of using generative AI, they used the cheapest possible online ghostwriters. Apparently Amazon got wise and banned them, so they pivoted to selling their "system."
I get a kick out of people pushing the "Earn $5-$10k extra A WEEK with this one simple hustle!"
The hustle? Spam amazon affiliate links, lol. Of course the people pushing this never bother with pushing affiliate links, just trying to sell you the guide on how to do it.
Not new to AI. Before it was learn to code, start a print on demand store, start an FBA store, learn to trade crypto, etc. There's no shortage of suckers looking to buy $5 bills for $2.
Oh man, I had a boss once that was really into dropshipping back in ~2017. He kept it professional at work, but once over beers he got on to how he was making all this money with dropshipping and how it was this great idea. Never pressured us into it or anything, thank god.
I had previously thought that the guy was somewhat smart and had it together. After that, I never looked at anything he did the same way again. The nice clothes and car? Yeah, no way he wasn't doing all that on a load of debt.
That said, all his up-to-date management-speak and being 'with-it' when it came to the latest corporate craze, well, I hate to admit it, but it made him a better boss. He was at least trying really hard. Were a lot of the methods just hot air? Yeah, of course. But it was a lot better than a boss that actually thought that they knew what they were doing. My boss just pretended but was otherwise terrified of being left out, and at least he was hungry that way.
Still, after he boasted about his dropshipping business, I knew the guy was mostly hot air and his ventures would change with the wind. I'm glad that particular get rich quick scheme is (mostly) over.
I'm pretty sure the ads displayed on my Kindle are all for AI generated children's books lately. It's actually kind of fun looking at them to find the AI generated artifacts (e.g little girl building snowman has three fingers, etc.) Not sure who's actually buying these things...
I would be curious the age range for the book in question or the type. I am bifurcating books with illustrations and novels (pure text), not sure if thats the best terms but I hope it gets the idea across.
Even pre-AI lots of childrens book at the lower age range/illustration category are basically low effort junk, this is generally true for most/all books for new children. They use illustrations bought wholesales and copy and paste text into them.
The other day I saw an advert for a "course" that teaches you how to capitalize on the "AI gold rush" by using AI to write and sell ebooks. It's the new get-rich quick idea I guess
I know a relatively successful author and screenwriter. Said person is abondoning their current projects, because apparently their friend is very successful selling books on Amazon, produced with the help of AI. The friend will, apparently, teach them how they, too, can tap into this market.
This conversation over Christmas dinner set off so many red flags, that I could only bite my tongue and nod.
It feels like Amazon has been a willing participant when it comes to seedy vendors flooding their marketplace with crap for a while now.
They made a token effort to curtail some AI spam by limiting how many self-published books you can upload per day to 3, but that's still laughably high.
Real question is whether they'll start making their own 'AmazonBasics' branded AI-generated dogshit, just like they do to undercut/displace successful 3rd party products.
As platforms become flooded with AI-generated garbage, I wonder how people will be able to find meaningful content. Are there going to be a new set of AI tools for content curation? It just seems like this will only spark a new AI-driven arms race.
I think that individuals who care about meaningful, non-deceitful content, will have to create their own parallel net in which content can be sanity-checked and fact-checked.
Fast, free, or fact: pick any two. The current internet is fast and free, but is increasingly non-factual. An alternative emphasizing meaningful facts and observations will almost necessarily be slower.
We might even be able to use pressed bleached dead trees as a backup medium.
What do you consume in terms of content? Thinking back on my weekly viewing/reading habits from the past year, I've read William Gibson, watched a whole lot of BBC Earth nature docs, FX primetime television, and live sports from the NFL.
Those names, brands that have been established for decades, are how I curate. I feel reasonably certain BBC and FX will continue serving valuable content for the foreseeable future. Random YouTube channel I've never heard of or all-caps company name on Amazon not so much.
> I feel reasonably certain BBC will continue serving valuable content for the foreseeable future.
I hope so but there are forces in the UK (and I suppose outside it) who see the BBC as "unfair" competition and will continually attempt to defund/destroy it.
The bigger risk frankly is that people watch so little they no longer pay the license fee because it makes no financial sense to do so.
I haven't watched terrestrial tv in a decade or more, pretty sure there's a generation of UK kids who will never bother because youtube/twitch/netflix is better as far as they're concerned.
The goal should be to quality check not the AI vs human distinction.
It shouldn't matter if something was written by AI or human if it is high quality , fact-checked.
But I think AI (or the way we use it) still needs some improvement for that.
Having disabled Google's personalized ads, I did see many "get rich quick (now with AI" schemes that promoted the production of this kind of spam. I think the quickest and simplest way to at least lower the acceleration on this mass spam is for Google to actually vet their ads, especially non-English ones.
> Amazon in September limiting authors to uploading a maximum of three books to its store each day.
Why not 3 books a month? Or even a few a year? Even extremely prolific authors rarely write more than a few books a year. This is a ludicrous rate-limit that seems designed to not actually do much (so Amazon can still get their commission) while giving the appearance that it does. It's hard to take this in good faith.
The indie authors whose work I read on Royal Road (and similar sites) have been posting about how their work would get scraped and modified by AI before being published on Amazon.
Remember - Amazon is a marketplace. They don't care what they sell as long as the sales go on. I stopped ordering books from amazon after I got some poorly printed (by amazon), blurry books. The problem is that amazon will not tell you if it is print on demand or a real book.
There are so many reasons why this is happening and I personally think it's only tangentially related to AI. The internet has now become the home of "hustle culture" and is no longer serving the purpose of why it was first created.
Covid only accelerated this trend as people began to look for other ways to generate income online. Just look at the Gamestop and AMC amateur stock trading craze or the explosion of flipping sneakers or Pokemon cards for income.
A huge percentage of the internet consists solely of people looking to make a quick buck and/or establish some channel of passive income. The internet itself has been redefined as this weird vehicle for capitalism because we're careening towards a weird transitionary period in history as the rise of AI takes hold.
The only thing that can solve this is UBI or some kind of shared equity system where huge megacorps primarily operated by AI generate trillions and trillions of dollars in wealth that needs to be distributed to the populace somehow.
idk why you're getting downvoted, but I kinda feel the same too. I've been gradually abandoning all social media sites bc it's all hustlers and fake antics (fake news, fake tiktok 'hidden cameras', fake articles, fake everything!), vying for a second of fame to sell you on something. The fact that it's 99% video also compounds it, I feel like
And this time it's not only driven by larger media organizations, but also by random people who now have a chance to propagate their views from decreased barriers to entry.
I believe it wasn't only journalistic gatekeeping that prevented this for so long, but simply a lack of affordance for willing parties to do those things. High-speed Internet has made everything so much easier.
My feelings about the rise of streaming video are also conflicted. It has given us high-quality longform content on topics that hadn't been covered before, but all those other people's passions and hobbies take up way too much time if you as a consumer become deeply invested in them (not even counting the conspiracy genre and its implications). It's easy to do partially because YouTube facilitates that, but I think in the end people want to consume all this information in the end, for some definition of "want". And dozens of 6-hour streams of the latest game or another will keep being uploaded every day.
And there's this other thing that I keep coming back to. Someone I know was really into this engineer creating fake Apple product boxes that recorded thieves stealing them and being glitterbombed. They found it hilarious, but I was sort of confounded. It was the conversion of a few people's bad choices into entertainment and ad revenue, coated over with the intellectual sheen of detailed makerspace engineering diagrams and wit mixed with a moral high ground. Though what the thieves did was not right, there was something smug and passive aggressive about the entire thing that rubbed me the wrong way. And this was presented as just a humble guy with engineering experience creating his content and getting people interested in STEM. Anyone has the capability to do this sort of thing now, not just a media machine with questionable motives. It's just regular, driven people with questionable motives now.
I think what you're describing ("the long tail") has been a phenomenon for a decade or so - tons of youtubers, tons of bloggers, tons of twitter personalities, etc. I see it as a good thing, people definitely want to consume it.
What's been bothering is the layers of skimmers that are dominating all those mediums - the top youtube channels now are repeaters, the top tiktok channels are fake accounts copying the content, there's layers of "reactors" (they call themselves that) that add absolutely no value, but polute the whole timeline, and so on. This is mostly a newer phenomenon - as if the internet is quickly turning into a multimedia version of the mail system - it'll snuff out actual creativity/usefulness and slowly decay into spam spam spam spam.
If I'm the kinda guy who's into the hustle, and I can hustle $800/mo (or similar) out of the government with no effort, a) why wouldn't I also keep up my other hustles, and, b) why do you expect that the cost of living won't rise to meet there new level of basic income?
That's a completely fair point and it's why I don't really think UBI is the answer. But, what is the answer? I don't think anyone has this figured out yet. Capitalism is by far the best system we've come up with but I just don't know what happens when/if AGI happens. And maybe it won't ever happen but I'd rather be brainstorming about what to do if it does happen now than wait until it's too late.
Hardly surprising. Ever since the barrier to production/publication/distribution was dropped to very low (15ish? years ago) the SNR on available books has been terrible. LLMs are making the 1st part even lower effort, at least for trash, so the noise is going to increase by an order of magnitude at least.
Current discoverability outside people-you-actually know seems to be in a nosedive, so it's hard to see this getting better any time soon.
The crypto bros turned to AI bros. I have a close friend that fits the profile and he's now a distinguished author of multiple books published on Amazon.
Exactly. Speculators are gonna speculate. Most of the worst aspects of cryptocurrency were done by normal con artists with absolutely no interest in touching a blockchain. When that was no longer quite as popular they just switched to whatever new thing was popular that the public couldn't understand.
We recently got duped buying an AI generated book about native plants on amazon. The cover page was low-res and the information contained within was wrong. All of the citations given in the back of the book were non-existant. When we tried to return it they just gave our money back.
I tried Kindle Unlimited a few years ago, and the amount of scammy trash on there was staggering. I can't imagine how much worse it must be in the ChatGPT era.
We've seen this with the Chrome Web Store. With a flat $5 fee, and a limit to how many extensions each account could publish, that was probably pretty effective.
Maybe it would help here too?
What other alternatives could mitigate the problem?
I logged in on Flickr for the first time in a decade or so and some of my contacts who are still using it are now uploading Midjourney images ad infinitum.
Ban pseudonyms. The big issue here is that people are publishing under pseudonyms, meaning it isn't easy to simply block all output from a specific author. If you posting poor quality AI content means potential customers _permanently_ remove you from the pool they buy from, then people will think pretty hard about it, and still put in the effort to proof read the AI stuff they're selling. AI isn't the problem, lack of effort is. If you use AI to draft a story you wrote as dot points, then go through and edit it to improve it? Awesome, im happy to read it. Derivative low effort content is not it though.
Exactly. In the 1990s there was a lot of grumbling by older artists used to pen and paper about how Photoshop and Illustrator and the like were evil and were only capable of creating cookie-cutter art with no "soul" (and going back even farther I remember reading articles by old journalists who decried the advent of the word processor and claimed that the limitations of typewriters made them better writers because they had to think what they wanted to write before typing it rather than endlessly edit what they wrote afterwards).
I think the arguments of "well people didn't like photoshop/cameras/the printing press/etc" is kind of a lazy excuse that ignores the actual criticism being leveled at generative AI systems. AI has removed basically all effort required to just create an image or generate some text. It does take effort to either discern the good from the bad or edit the output using some expertise enough for the content to reach a "professional" level, but that's kind of beside the point. These systems break the creative economy and have a really negative effect on online communities dedicated to these skills. There's a lot of spam in these online spaces that's being put there by low effort amateurs that don't even realize how shit they are. It increases the signal to noise and requires more effort on the part of community members in discerning truth from fiction. The maintainers of curl just discussed this problem with respect to their bug bounty program. Bad reports are still bad reports, but it takes more effort to tell them apart now.
Add that to the fact that these systems are built by scraping work without permission and these turn into headwinds that push people away from creative pursuit. Rather than bringing new people into these communities, the people who actually know what they're doing just get trampled by the uninformed.
None of these dynamics really exist with photoshop. While photoshop has tools that can speed up the artistic process, you need a base understanding of how to illustrate to actually use it effectively. It's truly a tool, as opposed to a slot machine you just give a prompt to.
But Photoshop itself is adding generative AI tools, because the simple fact is just typing in a prompt into Midjourney or whatever isn't going to result in a professional quality image. You'll get weird hands, too many arms, etc. So Adobe has the idea that you use generative AI as a starting point after which someone with artistic skills will need to improve it. Just like with any other tool in Photoshop.
As for the "scraping" issue -- that is a boring sideshow that will be decided by lawyers -- is it fair use or not? Your or my opinion on that whether it "should be" is irrelevant. But even if the courts decide that training generative AI on data the trainer doesn't have permission to is illegal, this wouldn't "stop generative AI" as many seem to think. For example, Adobe is training its models only on public domain works and works it has the rights to.
> Your or my opinion on that whether it "should be" is irrelevant.
No it isn't, because many folks live in democracies, and this is a decision that should actually be made and implemented into new law, instead of leaving it to courts to try to apply some outdated laws to a situation they could not possibly have been written for.
I wasn't passing judgement on the merit of AI-generated content, but rather asking how we might reliably show and tell that content was not generated by AI.
Oh wait, I did call it "AI-generated crap", but I am open to the idea that not all AI content is crap.
It's "funny"... In a way I feel like AI is always stated as the problem here but isn't it people that are the problem?
I mean, I get that you can't control what the entire population does but, AI is a powerful tool that enables a lot of incredible things we may have never imagined being possible before. And it's not even out of its infancy yet. But people are ruining it.
Similarly, a decentralized currency or decentralized ledger is a pretty great idea for a lot of things. The execution could use work but there are a lot of benefits to that. But it ended up being a way for a bunch of bros to scam a quick buck and now it's a joke.
I'm not here as some jaded blind fanboy or crypto bro. I legit just hate how people ruin everything for the rest of us. I want to be able to enjoy cool new tech and interesting new ways of achieving things or learning. I want to see innovation. But what we get is "everything is trash because people are trash and will do anything to get money"
I blame AI because this was all 100% foreseeable. I also blame the people using AI to make trash, but hustlers gonna hustle and shitposters gonna shitpost. Until it's actually illegal to shit on the cultural commons of civilization, people are going to keep doing it.
How do we know these books are AI generated? Because the startup "Reality Defender" said so? This feels like they're deliberately singling out trash books and calling them AI-generated to fit their bias. It doesn't seem fair, since the AI content I've generated myself has been better than any book I've ever read. In fact, it's inspired me to generate my first book, which I'll be publishing soon.
There was a flood of low-quality fully-human-produced books before and now there's an additional flood of low-quality AI-produced books, and for anyone with a little bit of experience with reading indie books _or_ self-publishing them, the AI books are extremely easy to spot.
If you're generating AI content that's better than any book you've ever read, in the _current_ state of what's available, I'd suggest reading some different books.
I believe we'll find a balance, as with anything. There will always be people publishing junk, including AI-generated junk. But many authors will learn to use AI to supplement their work and produce a high-quality product.
3.5 has, or had, a particular style. No matter what the story, it had a cheerily up-beat ending. The invading aliens learned the errors of their ways and then everyone celebrated. Dracula, Winnie-the-Pooh, and Sherlock teamed up to fight crime.
4 is somewhat more interesting, and I've seen worse from actual humans, but… roll a d6, and on a 1-5 it's terrible, roll a 6 and you get something that's 90% fantastic and 10% just a bit off. For example, this story: https://github.com/BenWheatley/Fiction/blob/main/The%20Silen...
I like it, but if I really examine the thing, the details don't quite line up right. The humans were supposedly primitive, yet "[t]heir cruisers absorbed salvos that would've shattered lesser vessels"?
And sure, there are a million oddities like this in "proper" fiction[0]; but this… still feels like Stable Diffusion in text form. It's cool, it's a technological marvel, it's still, ineffably, not quite right.
[0] Even ignoring that the top speed in the pilot episode should've gotten them home in 7 years rather than 70, Voyager had a bajillion ways to get home sooner — for example, putting the crew in stasis so they didn't age, going at a normal speed, and then using any of the time machines Starfleet keeps tripping over.
OK, so the things you don't like about it are effable rather than ineffable, but none of what you say changes that I do, in fact, like it[1].
To me, it's fine that it has no named characters, no dialog. One of the most grating things in plots with aliens is the names, no matter if they're American names like the spiders in A Deepness in the Sky, or the Star Trek pattern giving us random apostrophes and internal capitalisation, where "Q'ting'pAh" could easily be either Klingon or Vulcan.
[1] Not all of the output of 4, like I said it's mostly bad, but that I like this particular result.
> no matter if they're American names like the spiders in A Deepness in the Sky
This is a bit of a tangent, but: you missed an important point in that book with some broad implications. Those weren't the spiders' names, those were the translators' deliberately humanized names for the spiders.
(And, to bring the discussion back home: no language model would have ever come up with a clever narrative trick like this.)
I'm making non-fiction books that summarise historical events. No manual editing is necessary, as it automatically goes back through and cleans up any errors.
I can't share my exact prompt style since I believe I've found a reliable way to generate these books en masse with minimal factual errors.
Since you are working in the space maybe you probably know more about this than most of us.
Are there any AI generated books out there that have found an audience and built a fan base?
I don't doubt that it's going to happen but I'm skeptical if we are all that close.
There are some very successful authors out there that many would say are awful, so that's why I asked for books with a fan base rather than good books.
Every once in a while I'll start a session with the AI where I'll just sort of interactively make a story with it and I quite enjoy the process, but the end result is not generally very good as a story.
It might be fun to do a choose-your-own-adventure (CYOA) style of story. Those were never high literature to begin with and most of the fun was seeing where new paths went. An AI-based CYOA could be much more dynamic.
It is. Just tell chat gpt you want to do one and it'll come up with one. It's very polly-anna-ish and eager to please though, so don't expect a lot of drama or tension.
