26 ms·

Fake Books

937 points by tybulewicz 4y ago

sposeray 4y ago
M4v3R 4y ago
We knew it was coming once GPT-3 was released, but I personally didn’t think it will come so fast in a form of printed books. I wonder how hard would it be to train a model that given a longer passage of text could tell with a high certainty that it’s machine generated?
- number6 4y ago
  Then you might run into the problem that chess has right now: if you happen to write in a style a GPT-3 trained model would write you will be declared a fraud. You might argue, who writes in a style of said model? Obviously: The corpus of data that trained the model. If you are one of them part of your writing ends up in there. Maybe writing styles are transformed to be more in line with GPT-3 trained models, lets face it. AI writes good prose and people will read more and more generated content and thus adept the style.
  - akiselev 4y ago
    How long until we’re training models to “style transfer” text using a latent space that doesn’t distort meaning (too much) ala stable difussion?
    - nonrandomstring 4y ago
      "Photoshop for text" was the title of a HN post here just a few days ago. Many commenters delighted at the idea of being able to highlight a passage, pull down a menu and "Rewrite Style -> Ernest Hemingway". Nice people generally only see the immediate utility of a tool in front of them. It takes a certain mind-set to see the other "weaponised" implications.
- patrakov 4y ago
  We knew it was coming once "Rooter: A Methodology for the Typical Unification of Access Points and Redundancy" was published back in 2005 (!!!) as a proof that peer review in certain "scientific" conferences and journals does not really exist. This article is a machine-generated nonsense generated by SCIgen. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SCIgen https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SCIgen for more details. Edit: Russian wikipedia article on that article contains references to even earlier, pre-computer, cases, as early as 1965, when meaningless texts or talks got published in scientific journals or conference proceedings. See https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/Корчеватель_(статья) https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/Корчеватель_(статья) and also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_scholarly_publishing_stings https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_scholarly_publishing_s...
deviation 4y ago
#1 on HN and no comments? I'm curious how the ranking system here works... Posts with the greatest # of upvotes per minute?
- andirk 4y ago
  Amazon review bots upvoting HN articles about themselves?
  - kristopolous 4y ago
    I wonder if it's a few keywords in there. Let me try. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33313447 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33313447 let's see what happens. It got 7 points and then flagged. Then again maybe this is a bad test. Perhaps just reposting the above story in a way to dissuade human upvoters would be the right approach. Then I'd have to withhold it for a couple hours and reveal it later
    - andirk 4y ago
      Good effort. Could just be some tech bro picking stuff sometimes. Whatever it is, I find the content some of the best on the net. Like and subscribe.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- wallmountedtv 4y ago
  It got published about 30 minutes ago. And has gotten a lot of likes early on, pushing it up.
- dang 4y ago
  See How are stories ranked? in https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html. Note that "number of comments" is not a factor. It's common on HN for submissions to get upvoted before comments come in. It's a good sign, actually, if people aren't rushing to post reflexive things. Good comments are reflective, which means they happen after people have had time to process information—such as by reading an article. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33303565 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33303565 https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sort=byDate&type=comment&query=reflective%20reflex%20by:dang https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...
jgaa 4y ago
I think the problem is < fake books and > Amazons fundamentally broken reviews system. Seems like the fake review bots are a lot smarter than the anti-measures applied by Amazon. And the fun part is that both parties are probably running on AWS ;)
- a3w 4y ago
  I think the problem is [bra] fake books and [ket] Amazons... I think the problem is [left] fake books and [Quote sign] Amazons... Okay, on the third try I read less and more. Still, it felt ugly.
  - thr0wnawaytod4y 4y ago
    I thought it's just a fancy way to write (something and) something more important.
    - thaumasiotes 4y ago
      It took me two tries too; my first guess was "I think the problem is not as bad as fake books and worse than Amazon's fundamentally broken review system", but that didn't make sense. The symbols < and > are being used as substitutes for the English words "less" and "more", which is not conventional at all, but is related enough to the actual meaning of the symbols that given context and a lot of effort, you can get there. I wouldn't recommend copying the notation; it conflicts pretty badly with the ordinary use of < and >.
andirk 4y ago
ML-generated content can be pretty funny. This is more an example of Amazon being a garbage distributor of crap; this is an example of fraud. I hope there's a followup of what punishments happen with such a grift from one the world's largest companies.
- fullstackchris 4y ago
  Writing a book about NFTs (IMO a fraud based market in the first place) with it being full of lies is, as the author said, hardly a crime. It's just unethical. Amazon isn't going to read every letter of every book that it sells, so it's hardly their fault either.
  - andirk 4y ago
    Should Target make sure their products are what they claim to be? If the book was subpar, oh well. If the book is loren ipsum [0], then that's fraud and should be followed up on. But people love Amazon so they can do whatever they want. [0] https://hipsum.co/ https://hipsum.co/
  - hot_gril 4y ago
    Amazon's fault would come from displaying fake reviews for so long, if anything.
freediver 4y ago
The 'book factory business oppportunity' trend spotted in the article is explored in depth in this excellent Dan Olson video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=biYciU1uiUw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=biYciU1uiUw It is a great and informative watch.
gzer0 4y ago
This has been a concern of mine for a while; I have also published absolute garbage just to see how far I can take it. I've published music under various pseudonyms, books underneath different pen-names... the list goes on. I've retracted such publications, but it is frightening if one person like myself had the curiosity to try, what is already out there, and, what a well-funded nation-state actor could do. ---- Post-truth, like post-modernism, does not mean an absolute absence of truth, but a decline in confidence in common knowledge, making your own truth the center of your life, rather than a set of values shared by a community. We now believe that our own truth is somehow better than the "centralized" or "official" truth. We are now free from the institutions and authorities that controlled the truth. But this is an illusion, because the very definition of truth requires trust in something other than you. [1] https://www.reddit.com/r/philosophy/comments/j5gyp5/the_search_for_truth_in_a_posttruth_society/ https://www.reddit.com/r/philosophy/comments/j5gyp5/the_sear...
- coldtea 4y ago
  >and, what a well-funded nation-state actor could do. Release crap books nobody will read, or fill Soundcloud with bad music?
  - RF_Savage 4y ago
    I think NKRFZ had a video about a weird genre of pro-war fiction that is published en mass in Russia and promoted quite alot, but which does not really sell.
    - coldtea 4y ago
      Pro-war fiction? That's like the standard movie for several decades from Rambo to Michael Bay's epics and Top Gun Maverick, and in movie form that has far wider appeal, 10000x the audiences, and is way more glamorous! "weird pro war fiction" would be very low in effectiveness...
      - oriolid 4y ago
tomglynch 4y ago
Has the same author published many other books?
- wallmountedtv 4y ago
  No.[1] Also their name "Matt Martin" is suspiciously generic, making it hard to search for other than the direct link given in the article to the Amazon listing. 1: https://www.amazon.com/Matt-Martin/e/B09R7QSRN8/ https://www.amazon.com/Matt-Martin/e/B09R7QSRN8/
tommica 4y ago
Its a scary concept - internet and books being nothing but generated content is going to be a sad world.
- colordrops 4y ago
  Or maybe people will start paying attention to references and provenance, and start looking into sources of information - maybe even more widespread use of cryptographic signatures. Misinformation has always been out there, and so there are tools to deal with it. Perhaps now is our chance to make these tools wide spread.
  - gzer0 4y ago
    In an ideal world, I would hope for your statement to be correct. However, our society has changed the value of recognizing duty to recognizing choice. As long as individuals are aware of the choice they are making, they are justified. The fear of truth is caused by the following dilemma: either you choose for yourself or someone else will choose for you. Because of this fear, choosing correctly becomes less important than choosing freely. The choice is justified by the idea of inner truth, in which the role of subjective experiences can outweigh the role of objective experiences. A choice is not justified just because it is a choice. But without an objective criterion of correction, every choice is irrelevant, because the subjective criterion is also a choice. It can be changed to justify each of the choices, however inconsistent and contradictory they may be. To say that everything is valid is to say that fact checking is a farce. The loss of discernment is an unexpected result of the emancipation of reason.
    - protontorpedo 4y ago
      I'm pretty sure this comment was generated by a language model. If that's the case, congratulations.
      - marcosdumay 4y ago
        At the 20th Century, when we got a book from some philosopher entirely written on this style, we didn't have to wonder that. Those were simpler times.
TaylorAlexander 4y ago
I think there’s a good chance it was ghost written by a content farm for someone who wanted to publish a book in a popular category to make a quick buck. I recently learned that this is a soft-scam technique advocated for by a couple of guys called the Mikkelson Twins. They say you can make money by publishing audiobooks on audible by finding a popular topic on audible, then hiring a ghost writing service to write your book, then hire a voice actor to record it, publish it on audible, and then you too can become fabulously wealthy as the Mikkelson Twins claim to be. Except what the Mikkelson Twins actually make money on is selling you on a “money making course” where they tell you to do the above. So there’s all kinds of people trying to follow this method out there, it seems. This excellent video [1] from Dan Olson at Folding Ideas is in my opinion a fascinating deep dive in to this whole scam. I don’t want to spoil everything in the video, but Dan does an exceptional job exploring how this ghost writing works, and why it produces the kind of nonsense writing that looks like GPT-3 but is actually being done by an overworked human who is trying to write an entire novel in three weeks or so on a topic they haven’t had time to properly research. [1] https://youtu.be/biYciU1uiUw https://youtu.be/biYciU1uiUw
- andreyk 4y ago
  I've watched the video as well and wholeheartedly agree! His 'Line Goes Up' documentary about crypto is also exceptional; very critical but in educated and actually nuanced ways (https://youtu.be/YQ_xWvX1n9g https://youtu.be/YQ_xWvX1n9g).
  - masklinn 4y ago
    If you haven’t gone through the entire Olsonverse yet, don’t sleep on “in search of a flat earth”. That was my gateway video to Folding Ideas and it remains stellar.
    - TaylorAlexander 4y ago
      That was my first too! Really wonderful creator and I did find myself going through his whole back catalog after that! And I agree with the comment upstream, “Line Goes Up” is a masterpiece.
warbler73 4y ago
Wow! Fantastic article. With AI generated stuff I expect we are going to see 99% of the book market saturated with generated nonsense, then collapse as a market for lemons.
- rjmunro 4y ago
  Depends what you mean by "99% of the book market". I'm sure the major publishers will not start publishing generated nonsense, and I suspect the small players self-publishing nonsense on Amazon will go away in time. Of course major publishers may be duped into unintentionally publishing AI generated or part AI generated content by bad authors, but if it's good enough to get through their editing processes, it will hopefully be non-nonsense.
ipeev 4y ago
What actually surprises me is that the author bought 11 paper books from Amazon about NFTs. You really need 11 books to understand or write about a single concept? It is a highly controversial ongoing topic. Those 11 books most likely become obsolete exactly on the day after they were written. Good catch on the one fake book! But I am surprised it was only one. Maybe the author started from that one and will write about the others later.
- seba_dos1 4y ago
  The author didn't want to "understand a single concept" this way, but rather, as they say themselves, "get familiar with the best-articulated arguments put forward by the proponents of this tech".
- HWR_14 4y ago
  The author bought 11 paper books because they wanted to make money posting a meta-review of the literature analyzing the arguments from all of them together. While they probably understood the points after a single book, they would have lacked the complete coverage (and the marketing hook). I would expect someone writing that to have read the 11 most popular books.
nextlevelwizard 4y ago
Off topic: Why is everything posted here all of a sudden begging for my email? It feels like every article I click after reading few sentences I get a box begging to sign up for some stupid ass mailing list as if after spending 10 seconds reading their words I had become a fan and absolutely needed more of their bullshit in my life. If I am interested in hearing more about you, I will find a way to subscribe to your shit otherwise all you manage to do is to get me frustrated and leave. This time I couldn't even get to reading, I opened the article and had to answer an IM. By the time I got back I was treated with full screen "Type your email to subscribe" box that couldn't even be dismissed without clicking small "Let me read first" link. Why is simple blog design such ass these days? Why can't I just read the content without being bombarded with pop ups, pop overs, and other crap that has nothing to do with the actual content?
- quickthrower2 4y ago
  Welcome to substack! “But it is better than medium!”
- nine_k 4y ago
  Have you tried paying? Publishers need food, too. So do some authors who write in a (semi)professional capacity and spend significant time writing.
  - nextlevelwizard 4y ago
    What are you on? Are you implying that these people are collecting emails to sell them? If your content is worth money you will make money, but most content is definitely not worth even my time.
- kwhitefoot 4y ago
  Have JavaScript off by default in uBlock. Substack is quite readable without JS; and no popups.
  - nextlevelwizard 4y ago
beardyw 4y ago
Time to produce a book about fake books ... click.
- beardyw 4y ago
  Seriously, I knew someone involved in "published as remainder" business in the 70s. First get good photos, pay someone to write some text, put on sale at inflated price, then put on sale at amazing discount.
jcynix 4y ago
Every so often in the last n years I stumbled over "books" which simply contain regurgitated wikipedia content. And, of course, all those web pages collecting amazon reviews which simulate product review pages. Or, before that, just link farms to products so people could collect referer compensation. All this is some form of spam, which simply uses search engines to spread instead of email. So the "books" reported here (while somehow "fascinating" just look like the next step of spam/scam evolution to me. And yes, I see that they are more problematic the "better" they get generated, because more people will think they are genuine works.
- femto 4y ago
  I wrote one of those books. That is, a Wikipedia article I largely wrote was plagiarised and published in a book by a scammer. Some time later my words on Wikipedia were tagged as having been plagiarised from the scammer's book. It was clear from wiki timestamps and publication dates what really happened, so it got fixed, but it's irritating that one needs to waste time on things like that (and as far as I know the book is still on Amazon).
  - jcynix 4y ago
    > as far as I know the book is still on Amazon I would have expected that. Amazon neither has the staff with expertise to investigate claims nor much interest in removing products that earn them a nice share. Knowledge is fungible nowadays, and in these cases of "fake books" its volatile too. It's the virtual gold rush on the Internet and companies which supply resources (ebook platforms, search engines, but hardware for crypto mining like graphics cards etc too) to those "miners" profit from what's going on.
    - hk__2 4y ago
      > I would have expected that. Amazon neither has the staff with expertise to investigate claims nor much interest in removing products that earn them a nice share If the book attributes its content to Wikipedia, it’s perfectly legal. The issue then becomes "should Amazon remove low-quality products from their website?" (and the underlying issue is "what does 'low-quality' mean?"), and the response is no because they want to act as a platform.
mypastself 4y ago
Alarmingly enough, not even the one- or two-star Amazon reviews caught the garbled nonsense, indicating that not even real people bothered to read the book in detail. I’m wondering if any person on the planet other than the author of the article read this best-selling book in its entirety. Because even the book’s purported author likely didn’t.
- smeagull 4y ago
  If you thought it was garbage, why would you continue to pour your time into reading it in detail? That's just silly. You throw it in the bin and move on with your life.
  - mypastself 4y ago
    Well, if you’re writing a review, you could at least warn other readers that the book contains nonsense.
    - jcynix 4y ago
      That would mean that the reviewer understood the topic and was capable of writing a proper critique? I'm a book lover who reads a lot of fiction and non-fiction and more often than not in the last few years I have the feeling that many reviews are generated by people who read a different book, or didn't understand the one the comment at all.
      - mypastself 4y ago
        Makes sense, I suppose. The reviewers of the book in question might then have read the part about chemotherapy “NFPs” and thought that the section is probably accurate and they just didn’t understand it, so they moved on. Which is alarming enough by itself.
- leobg 4y ago
  Well, if people don’t actually invest any time and effort into consuming the books they buy, then perhaps it is an inevitable adaptation on the part of authors to also not invest any time and effort into creating them. (The rise of Blinkist et. al. seems to support the idea that many people value being able to say that they have read a book much more highly than actually reading it.)
thih9 4y ago
Perhaps this book was written by the blog post author and this is an attempt at covert content marketing?
stingtao 4y ago
A book-formed content farm
sjamaan 4y ago
Isn't the "For Dummies" series some sort of trademark? I'm amazed they didn't get sued for using the name. Crap like this devalues the rest of the "for dummies" books.
- michaelt 4y ago
  Although the author shows the covers of 11 books, only one of them - "NFT for Beginners" - is full of GPT-3-looking nonsense. The "NFTs for Dummies" book is presumably not nonsense, or at least no more so than the subject matter demands.
- viridian 4y ago
  That book seems to be an actual for "dummies book", written by a doctor of business analytics who teaches at Santa Clara University, for what it's worth. She also authored "DeFi for dummies". If I had to read any of these books, there's a good chance that the for dummies one is the least bad of the 12, but odds are you are better off reading 0 of these books.
- jehb 4y ago
  > Crap like this devalues the rest of the "for dummies" books. I'd argue Wiley already did that themselves. They sell the Dummies brand to any company with a large checkbook. See: - https://www.intel.com/content/dam/support/us/en/programmable/support-resources/bulk-container/pdfs/literature/misc/fpgas-for-dummies-ebook.pdf https://www.intel.com/content/dam/support/us/en/programmable... - https://www.oracle.com/a/ocom/docs/oracle-cloud-erp-for-dummies.pdf https://www.oracle.com/a/ocom/docs/oracle-cloud-erp-for-dumm... - https://www.ibm.com/downloads/cas/GB8ZMQZ3 https://www.ibm.com/downloads/cas/GB8ZMQZ3
f311a 4y ago
Amazon is full of fake/generated/auto translated books in every category. Just search for any programming language and sort it by release date. I don't understand why they don't fix this problem. It's pretty easy to fix and all those sales don't generate a significant amount of revenue for Amazon considering the negative experience for clients. Such books are pretty easy to spot since the majority of reviews are written by people who have published more than hundreds of reviews.
- YurgenJurgensen 4y ago
  Going into full tinfoil hat territory: I wonder whether those products are the equivalent of the 'deliberate' spelling and grammatical errors we're all told end up in spam emails to pre-filter out people who probably won't fall for the scam. Amazon doesn't want customers who care about quality, because they leave bad reviews and have a higher return rate.
- marginalia_nu 4y ago
  Affects older books too. I've found books that were very obviously printed scans of library books, including dog-ears, missing pages and the odd pencil lines. https://www.marginalia.nu/shitty-book/pencil2.webp https://www.marginalia.nu/shitty-book/pencil2.webp https://www.marginalia.nu/shitty-book/fadeout.webp https://www.marginalia.nu/shitty-book/fadeout.webp https://www.marginalia.nu/shitty-book/pencil.webp https://www.marginalia.nu/shitty-book/pencil.webp Appears they're printing these on demand on essentially bleached office-grade paper. The orange tint is from the white balance being off. Seems to be related to the system of third party sellers. Every shop I'm aware of that uses this model has problems with this type of bait-and-switch bullshit.
  - thn-gap 4y ago
    I wonder if having a swarm of people buy these items, then returning them since they clearly don't match the expected result from the description, would hurt the sellers enough so they would stop doing this sort of scam.
    - 4y ago
_pgln 4y ago
> I soon discovered that all the books leaned on the same central argument: value is an inherent consequence of scarcity. My rebuttal to that was simple: it’s an exception, not a rule. My kids’ doodles are scarce, but in a gallery, they wouldn’t fetch much. Alas, while this made for a solid Twitter quip, it wasn’t enough for an in-depth post. Scarcity in economics refers to when the demand for a resource is greater than the supply of that resource. Your kids doodles aren't scarce because there is no demand for them. How did the author read 11 books on NFT's and not know this lol? The books must have been all very bad or the article author just skimmed thru them. Interesting article other than that tho.
- yosamino 4y ago
  > The books must have been all very bad or the article author just skimmed thru them. It seems that you have not even bothered to skim the article...
  - _pgln 4y ago
    How so? The author only mentions one of the books being bad.
Borrible 4y ago
Ah, remember those times when producing hundred of thousands of books was just a side-gig for a Professor of Management Science? And he didn't even faked it. https://singularityhub.com/2012/12/13/patented-book-writing-system-lets-one-professor-create-hundreds-of-thousands-of-amazon-books-and-counting/ https://singularityhub.com/2012/12/13/patented-book-writing-... https://patents.google.com/patent/US7266767B2/en https://patents.google.com/patent/US7266767B2/en https://www.icongrouponline.com/ https://www.icongrouponline.com/
em-bee 4y ago
the big question this raises is: how will this affect self publishing and the need for an actual publisher. i expect that publishers are able to avoid publishing junk like this and therefore are still able to offer some value. whereas self-publishing authors will have to fight to stand out on their own.
jcynix 4y ago
It's virtual evolution at work, i.e. spam evolution. It's the Internet Gold Rush (i.e. "make money fast" at work), which we have watched getting "more professional" in the last ten to twenty years. And because those companies which supply resources (ebook platforms, search engines, but also hardware for crypto mining like graphics cards etc) to those "virtual miners" profit from what's going on, we won't see that fixed in the upcoming years. Generating books instead of spam emails looks more professional so gullible people, who meanwhile (hopefully) did learn that the Nigerian prince isn't a prince, will buy such books (it's written in a book, and book writing is real work you know, so it must be true) to learn about all those fancy new concepts they hear about. It's actually not that different from all these ads you see, especially if you actually watch recent youtube ads. Due to the current "energy crisis" and the upcoming winter, I've seen videos advertising magical electric heaters, which will "recycle" 85% of the energy used for heating and thus will save you lots of money. It's simple physics that warm air coming out at the front of such a device will be sucked in at its back again, but there's nothing to "recycle" here, to somehow save energy. BTW, anybody interested in my upcoming book on quantum heating? Quantum heating will even earn you money, because it will generate certain energy efficient by-products which you can sell at your favourite online retailer ;-)
- TeMPOraL 4y ago
  > BTW, anybody interested in my upcoming book on quantum heating? Quantum heating will even earn you money, because it will generate certain energy efficient by-products which you can sell at your favourite online retailer ;-) As a seller of magic electric recycling heaters who you just bankrupted, let me repay you in kind: everyone, you can easily DIY this "quantum heating" thing: it's just an automated pipeline of GPT-3 to LeanPub and purchasing ads that show up in Quanta Magazine (hence "quantum"), where you run GPT-3 locally so you can keep your home warm with the heat generated by your PC.
- guerrilla 4y ago
  > "energy crisis" and the upcoming winter, Why do you put that in quotes? > I've seen videos advertising magical electric heaters, which will "recycle" 85% of the energy used for heating and thus will save you lots of money. It's simple physics that warm air coming out at the front of such a device will be sucked in at its back again, but there's nothing to "recycle" here, to somehow save energy. You sure they couldn't be talking about a heat pump which does have "above 100%" efficiency in a sense?
aaron695 4y ago
danwee 4y ago
Reminds me of the joke: > It's been months since I bought the book, "How to scam people online." It still hasn't arrived yet.
gexla 4y ago
Edit: Commented in wrong browser tab. Apologies.
- kuu 4y ago
  Where does this appear in the article? I think you're not answering the proper article or I am veeery confused
HyperLinear 4y ago
> " I soon discovered that all the books leaned on the same central argument: value is an inherent consequence of scarcity. My rebuttal to that was simple: it’s an exception, not a rule. My kids’ doodles are scarce, but in a gallery, they wouldn’t fetch much. " There isn't really a market for kids doodles, and with the barrier to entry being really low the supply is many orders of magnitude higher than the demand. So the central argument stays. Not a great start of the article this.
- bawolff 4y ago
  Which was precisely the author's point.
  - _pgln 4y ago
    No its not. Scarcity in economics refers to when the demand for a resource is greater than the supply of that resource. The kids doodles aren't scarce because there is little demand for them. On the other hand there is demand for NFT's (whether you think there should be or not). The comparison doesn't make any sense and just makes the author look dumb.
    - bawolff 4y ago
      The author wasn't responding to economists who were using the word in that sense, he was responding to bitcoin evangelists who often claim that the value in bitcoin comes from its limitted issue (without reference to demand). I have certainly heard bitcoin evangelists make such claims, so i really dont think it is a strawman argument. If you want to take the metaphor further, there is really no barrier to entry for starting a cryptocurrency and supply of cryptocurrencies in general far outstrip demand. So it is very similar to a kids doodle.
      - _pgln 4y ago
        > Late last year, at the peak of the non-fungible token (NFT) craze, I purchased about a dozen highest-rated NFT books on Amazon. I did this because I wanted to publish a balanced critique of NFTs; I figured the most honest approach would to get familiar with the best-articulated arguments put forward by the proponents of this tech. Its quite clear from the first few lines of the article that the author did not intend to debunk some silly claims but to respond to the best ones. Using a definition of scarcity that does not reference demand to write off NFT's entirely shows that the author has no idea what hes talking about. > If you want to take the metaphor further, there is really no barrier to entry for starting a cryptocurrency and supply of cryptocurrencies in general far outstrip demand. So it is very similar to a kids doodle. Yes, but people don't want just any cryptocurrency. They want Bitcoin, ethereum, etc whos demand is greater then the supply. So no its actually similar to a kids doodle.
coldtea 4y ago
>I soon discovered that all the books leaned on the same central argument: value is an inherent consequence of scarcity. My rebuttal to that was simple: it’s an exception, not a rule. My kids’ doodles are scarce, but in a gallery, they wouldn’t fetch much Well, how about "value is an inherent consequence of scarcity with respect to demand"?
- yason 4y ago
  Or to generalise, where supply and demand meet is called value.
  - viridian 4y ago
    The intersect of supply and demand is necessarily the price equilibrium. Value is only equal to price if the buyer and seller both have equal information and neither is operating under any sort of constraints that force certain market behavior. Your generality may often be true in certain contexts, but increasingly, one should operate under the assumption that the seller has a significant informational advantage over the buyer, and this advantage will be used to capture additional value.
- svnt 4y ago
  Author seems to understand supply and demand — they are making the point that the NFT perspective doesn’t include a rationale for demand.
  - coldtea 4y ago
    Demand doesn't need to have a rationale (in the sense of "real needs" or "utility value" or something of the like) to work in raising value. It just needs to exist!
    - svnt 4y ago
      Yes, but if the demand doesn’t establish itself in some other context that serves a narrative (whether cultural, material, tax shelter, or other) the dynamics of the underlying market tend to be in the realm of tulips and postage stamps.
pelasaco 4y ago
the book has 4 stars at Amazon. Positive reviews. It highlights another rabbit-hole: The fake reviews
- jbverschoor 4y ago
  So fake sellers are selling fake books, reviewed by fake reviewers, and they get fake crypto moneys, with which they can buy fake food, and live a fake life. Fake sounds very much like reality
  - pelasaco 4y ago
    exactly, sad reality. I'm so happy that I didn't jump in this bandwagon. I used to write a lot of bitcoin code, worked in some pools, fpga code, etc, etc.. always loved while it was some revolutionary stuff, but I gave up from that literally when I saw people that used to sell carpet, being announced as "Crypto experts".. from that moment, I knew that it was scam.
    - olalonde 4y ago
      The web attracted a lot of scammers and grifters during the dot-com bubble as well. The web was nonetheless revolutionary.
tkk23 4y ago
How is this different from email spam? People will stop trusting random sources for books. Established publishers will make sure that only vetted authors are able to access the market. The only problem is that it's difficult for new publishers and fringe authors to enter the market.
- Gigachad 4y ago
  Because you didn’t pay money to receive the email spam. I suppose the main detail is that many people will just eat the loss on a scam book and devalue their trust in Amazon rather than bothering to refund and return it.
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residualmind 4y ago
Even human-written content has become so bad it's sometimes hard to tell it apart from a Mark V. Shaney or Racter implementation. I mean, aren't our brains' language capabilites not just Markov chains on steroids, with billions and billions of inputs and weights? Why are we still using text-based content-generation algorithms? Can't we train some kind of AI to generate "good" fiction content? Like, for example, this: "Oh," said Lucy, peeping into the parlour, "is that our old friend, the fairy?" "Yes," said Mr. Bennet, looking up from his newspaper, "my sister has been entertaining you in the best way she can." "She has been telling me," said Mrs. Bennet, with a solemn laugh, "all about her doll's tea-party. I wish I had been there." "My dear," replied her husband, "I am certain that it has been her greatest enjoyment. And the little girl really seems to have had a very good time of it." "Not more so, I am afraid, than the other ladies. _They_ had none of the advantages of hearing the charming story.
- Gigachad 4y ago
  The generated content is all nonsensical babel when it’s asked to do more than give a definition for a word or concept. It’s grammatically correct but has no deeper meaning. And sure, some of the human written crap posted here is also meaningless blogspam.
- lethrowchuck 4y ago
  > I mean, aren't our brains' language capabilities not just Markov chains on steroids, with billions and billions of inputs and weights? The word "just" is doing a lot of heavy lifting here. Yes, our language capabilities are just Markov chains - the way engineering is just constrained nonlinear optimization and playing games is just tree traversal.
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jakub_g 4y ago
Not exactly the same though related: IIRC there's another scam on Amazon where people self-publish some ebooks which are clearly gibberish, put a massive price tag on it, and use hacked accounts to buy them. Very low effort and essentially free money, because no physical goods are involved. It's been discussed here a year ago or so.
Andrew_nenakhov 4y ago
A ghostwriter commissioned to write a book on some hot topic is, essentially, a poorly trained and badly optimized neural network.
- NaturalPhallacy 4y ago
  You're.... you're not wrong.
nix23 4y ago
I have a book from amazon (it's about a Seawolf submarine) the book is so bad, the story so lame, and the mix of themes (music-taste with a rescue), kind of artificial...it's almost comical and i bet it's mostly written by a AI who cobbled text together...an absolute low effort book.
zefhous 4y ago
A couple years ago we ordered an "on-demand" printed book from Amazon for an old public domain book. It came misprinted, with a book on "Mobile Solar Power" right in the middle of it. I took a look through it cause I thought it would actually interesting, and found it to be this type of fake book that looks to be instructional on the surface, but in reality is not actually educational in the least, and in fact dead wrong in many places. I posted a couple excerpts on Twitter here, 3-tweet thread. https://twitter.com/zefhous/status/1281679975339274241 https://twitter.com/zefhous/status/1281679975339274241
dEnigma 4y ago
Contrary to what the article says it IS possible to find information about NFP chemotherapy on the internet. E.g.: Of these patients, 44 were treated with HAIC and 20 with sorafenib. HAIC involved cisplatin (50 mg fine powder in 5-10 ml lipiodol) and a continuous infusion of 5-fluorouracil (FU) (1,500 mg/5 days), which is referred to as new 5-FU and cisplatin therapy (NFP). [1] [1] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/29285366/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/29285366/
- duskwuff 4y ago
  Correct. However, the "NFP" in that paper refers to a specific drug regimen, and bears no resemblance to the nonsensical dosing methodology described in the book. (I mean, come on, "Eastern methods of measurement"??)
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narahs 4y ago
And this is how publishers/publishing houses stand to gain a renewed relevance in a world of self publishing and digital platform technologies.
phtrivier 4y ago
"90% of everything is crap" ; but, now, 'everything' is computer-generated, and therefore, infinite. I'll let mathematicians study the convergence, while physicists conclude that "everything is crap", give up and get a beer, and software engineers go back to fixing the other 90%.
DoneWithAllThat 4y ago
I find it to be pretty obviously ML generated. As in even the parts about NFTs are written in a style that is patently obviously not authored by a human. I’m sure the difference will become less noticeable over time but for now AI-authored prose is easy to spot.
krosaen 4y ago
A lot of this hinges on fake reviews. It seems like it should be a solvable problem, but then I read about things like scammers going so far as to actually order their bogus products to real addresses of unsuspecting people (not caring what the confused recipients do with it) just so they can get a "verified purchase" review. Maybe they get caught, but by then, the damage is done. I bought an electric leaf blower off amazon a couple years ago - the reviews seemed authentic and it seemed like the obvious one to buy. The thing had the power of like two hair dryers - I took the time to write a negative review but by then the product no longer seemed to be listed.
adriantiral 4y ago
NotYourLawyer 4y ago
It reads like a lot of the auto-generated content / Amazon affiliate link farms that google ranks so highly when I search for product reviews. Everything is awful online nowadays.
Roark66 4y ago
I disagree with the author on the below: >With GPT-3, we now have an infinitely-scalable technology that is years away from being able to enrich our lives, but is already more than capable of drowning out all remnants of authentic content on the internet. And because you can leverage this to earn money or sway opinions, that outcome is probably hard to avoid. I can't speak for GPT-3 specifically as I haven't spent enough time with it, but it's open equivalent Bloom is very useful today. Author says it is far from being able to "enrich our lives". I think otherwise. The whole "AI revolution" definitely did enrich my life. It renewed my passion for programming in general. The possibilities are truly endless. From translation, to content summarisation and search. Then it is only a step away from enriching other people's lives with products that make them more productive, help them in execution of mundane tasks etc. I think AIs like bloom will in not to distant time allow us to fix the Internet to how it was before all the shitty content generation replaced genuine content in Google for example. Also, there is a huge potential to improve our understanding of what it means to think and understand complex concepts. For the very first time we have something that comes very close to such understanding. Something that doesn't have feelings, it can be cut, modified, transformed and studied in myriad of different ways. Also, believe me when I say the next AI revolution will be with models like Bloom that will be able to run on the edge. This is currently impossible due to their size, but it is very likely we'll find methods to optimise them significantly. Then there is potential application of such models to decision making. I bet there is ongoing research in that field right now. Addressing the negative side, "ability to generate garbage content that looks good". The ability has already existed for advanced adversaries. Hostile nations can simply employ people to "generate content". Smaller players have lots of other (inferior) tools. Their content doesn't have to fool people most of the time. It just has to fool various algorithms. Even without advanced AI models the search engines and social networks have been loosing badly in this fight. Existence of those tools will improve the bad actors capabilities, but it will also give good actors the chance to innovate with something new.
jollyllama 4y ago
Any chance that it's at least partially non-english speakers using bad translator/thesaurus app output?
- duskwuff 4y ago
  No. The wording and grammar is fine; the problem is that the ideas being expressed with those words are nonsense.
ajot 4y ago
Totally unrelated to TFA, but to the (great, in my opinion) author: here's[0] an older prepping guide for non-crazy people. I understand that the author has published a book recently about the topic. [0] https://lcamtuf.coredump.cx/prep/index-old.shtml https://lcamtuf.coredump.cx/prep/index-old.shtml
AaronBBrown 4y ago
Clicked expecting this to be about the history (https://officialrealbook.com/history/ https://officialrealbook.com/history/) of jazz fake books, which eventually evolved into the Real Book!
Tade0 4y ago
This is nothing new really. The Bogdanoff brothers, before their time as rulers of France and the crypto world with a fair, but iron fist gained notoriety by publishing works which were largely gibberish: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bogdanov_affair https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bogdanov_affair NFTs and the like were especially fascinating because it was a game of rock-paper-scissors in terms of cunning, meaning someone could be so cunning that they appeared gullible to those ostensibly one level of craftiness higher, so you never knew if someone was shilling something because they were that gullible or that cunning.
- acdha 4y ago
  It’s new in the sense that it’s never been easier to do at scale. The Bogdanov scandal was novel in part because that kind of thing was uncommon. We appear to rapidly be entering an era where the opposite is true, and it seems highly dangerous to have misleading information be universally available at lower cost.
scyclow 4y ago
Am I the only one who thinks that reading all the "highest rated" NFT books on Amazon in an attempt to write a good-faith critique is hilarious?
garyrob 4y ago
I would like to mention the concept of "Soulbound Tokens" as a way of attacking this problem. This is the subject of a paper this year by Vitalik Buterin (founder of Ethereum), E. Glen Weyl (economist/researcher at Microsoft Research) and Puja Ohlhaver. Here's the abstract: """ Web3 today centers around expressing transferable, financialized assets, rather than encoding social relationships of trust. Yet many core economic activities—such as uncollateralized lending and building personal brands—are built on persistent, non-transferable relationships. In this paper, we illustrate how non-transferable “soulbound” tokens (SBTs) representing the commitments, credentials, and affiliations of “Souls” can encode the trust networks of the real economy to establish provenance and reputation. More importantly, SBTs enable other applications of increasing ambition, such as community wallet recovery, sybil-resistant governance, mechanisms for decentralization, and novel markets with decomposable, shared rights. We call this richer, pluralistic ecosystem “Decentralized Society” (DeSoc)—a co-determined sociality, where Souls and communities come together bottom-up, as emergent properties of each other to co-create plural network goods and intelligences, at a range of scales. Key to this sociality is decomposable property rights and enhanced governance mechanisms—such as quadratic funding discounted by correlation scores—that reward trust and cooperation while protecting networks from capture, extraction, and domination. With such augmented sociality, web3 can eschew today’s hyper-financialization in favor of a more transformative, pluralist future of increasing returns across social distance. """ Here's the paper: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4105763 https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4105763
- aaronharnly 4y ago
  I honestly can’t tell if this abstract is also GPT-3 generated.
  - nullc 4y ago
    https://archive.org/details/EtherealVerses https://archive.org/details/EtherealVerses
    - ilyt 4y ago
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jerf 4y ago
One of the things that has kept me out of the cryptocurrency space is that when their advocates discuss value, they speak in pure nonsense. A big part of that problem is that value is very difficult to discuss. On the one hand you have the classic goldbug that insists that gold has "intrinsic value", which is some sort of platonic ideal thing that gold simply ambiently has and defies any attempt to nail down what it grounds out in. On the other hand you have cryptocurrency advocates claiming that all value is arbitrary and/or based entirely on scarcity. In that context, observing that my kid's doodles are scarce but not valuable is not a cute tweet; it is a complete and utter demolishing of the argument. (I think one of the things education can accidentally (mis)teach is that short arguments are always worthless and arguments must always be long. This is false. A good grounding in mathematics can help with internalizing this. It is completely possible to demolish entire massive argument edifices in 10-20 of the correct words, and the fact that the "other side" has deployed literally hundreds of thousands of words does not make them right if the foundation is rotten.) Value is intrinsically a dynamic process. It grounds out in human desires, which are intrinsically temporal, variable, and fickle, and this makes a lot of people uncomfortable as they seek either a more solid or a more completely ethereal/arbitrary base. However, there is no other sensible way to think about value, however complex and ever-shifting this may be, and it is neither mathematically solid, nor an amorphous vapor of no consequence subject to one strong person's Nietzschian will.
- mbar84 4y ago
  Sounds like you might become a fan of the Austrian School theory of subjective value and (in the context of Crypto currency) of Mises's regression theorem of money. https://consultingbyrpm.com/blog/2014/03/on-bitcoin-and-ludwig-von-mises-regression-theorem.html https://consultingbyrpm.com/blog/2014/03/on-bitcoin-and-ludw...
- ted_bunny 4y ago
  "Mathemetics" Is this the regurgitative didactic method I keep hearing about?
  - jerf 4y ago
    Ah yes, sorry, fixed. Meant to spell "mathememetics" correctly.
parentheses 4y ago
There will come a time when only experts on a given topic will be able to separate fact from fiction. I would expect that AI will get good at internally consistent content _first_, so this work would make sense on its own even if it’s nonsense in actuality. Talk about bubbles.
apitman 4y ago
It's crazy to think that the internet may have already peaked, at least in certain ways. 5 years ago I could Google anything and was confident (maybe more than I should have been) of getting close to the best answer, whether looking for a product recommendation or just general knowledge. That confidence has seriously eroded the past couple years. That said, I'm optimistic that we can keep finding solutions to new problems. Maybe it wouldn't be so bad to make purchasing decisions closer to the way we used to, by asking our friends what they recommend. That's essentially how appending " reddit" to a google search works today, but even that is vulnerable to manipulation. I'm hoping that social media of the future builds in better tools for polling our network for recommendations, and for incentivizing us to respond to our friends' queries.
- allochthon 4y ago
  I'm hoping that eventually we'll get around the idea of a crowd-sourced search engine (mostly manually curated) maintained in the manner of Wikipedia, backed by a solid user reputation system to dissuade spammers. This will import Wikipedia's serious flaws. But I'm hopefully that they can gradually be mitigated.
  - disqard 4y ago
    A lot of the underpinnings of such a manually-curated knowledge base did exist in the early 2000s, in the form of Yahoo! Directory. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yahoo!_Directory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yahoo!_Directory
    - allochthon 4y ago
      Yeah, that's actually related to what I'm thinking of. The idea is a crowd-sourced and well-executed iteration on the old Yahoo! directory. https://blog.digraph.app/2020-06-13-democratization-of-search.html https://blog.digraph.app/2020-06-13-democratization-of-searc...
      - disqard 4y ago
peter303 4y ago
Submit GPT-3 written journal articles to vanity journals. They deserve each other.
B1FF_PSUVM 4y ago
"Spam begets (strong) AI" was my guess a few years ago. Of course it will be full-cycle, and we already have (weak) AI begotten spam.
masswerk 4y ago
So the important question is: are ML-models ready for influencer deals? ;-)
angry_octet 4y ago
Why have I not received GPT generated spam yet? Something that looks like a genuine email, but is fundamentally nonsense but with a link to click?

937 points by tybulewicz 4y ago

We knew it was coming once GPT-3 was released, but I personally didn’t think it will come so fast in a form of printed books. I wonder how hard would it be to train a model that given a longer passage of text could tell with a high certainty that it’s machine generated?

number6 4y ago
Then you might run into the problem that chess has right now: if you happen to write in a style a GPT-3 trained model would write you will be declared a fraud. You might argue, who writes in a style of said model? Obviously: The corpus of data that trained the model. If you are one of them part of your writing ends up in there. Maybe writing styles are transformed to be more in line with GPT-3 trained models, lets face it. AI writes good prose and people will read more and more generated content and thus adept the style.
- akiselev 4y ago
  How long until we’re training models to “style transfer” text using a latent space that doesn’t distort meaning (too much) ala stable difussion?
  - nonrandomstring 4y ago
    "Photoshop for text" was the title of a HN post here just a few days ago. Many commenters delighted at the idea of being able to highlight a passage, pull down a menu and "Rewrite Style -> Ernest Hemingway". Nice people generally only see the immediate utility of a tool in front of them. It takes a certain mind-set to see the other "weaponised" implications.
patrakov 4y ago
We knew it was coming once "Rooter: A Methodology for the Typical Unification of Access Points and Redundancy" was published back in 2005 (!!!) as a proof that peer review in certain "scientific" conferences and journals does not really exist. This article is a machine-generated nonsense generated by SCIgen. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SCIgen https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SCIgen for more details. Edit: Russian wikipedia article on that article contains references to even earlier, pre-computer, cases, as early as 1965, when meaningless texts or talks got published in scientific journals or conference proceedings. See https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/Корчеватель_(статья) https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/Корчеватель_(статья) and also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_scholarly_publishing_stings https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_scholarly_publishing_s...

deviation 4y ago

#1 on HN and no comments? I'm curious how the ranking system here works... Posts with the greatest # of upvotes per minute?

andirk 4y ago
Amazon review bots upvoting HN articles about themselves?
- kristopolous 4y ago
  I wonder if it's a few keywords in there. Let me try. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33313447 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33313447 let's see what happens. It got 7 points and then flagged. Then again maybe this is a bad test. Perhaps just reposting the above story in a way to dissuade human upvoters would be the right approach. Then I'd have to withhold it for a couple hours and reveal it later
  - andirk 4y ago
    Good effort. Could just be some tech bro picking stuff sometimes. Whatever it is, I find the content some of the best on the net. Like and subscribe.
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wallmountedtv 4y ago
It got published about 30 minutes ago. And has gotten a lot of likes early on, pushing it up.
dang 4y ago
See How are stories ranked? in https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html. Note that "number of comments" is not a factor. It's common on HN for submissions to get upvoted before comments come in. It's a good sign, actually, if people aren't rushing to post reflexive things. Good comments are reflective, which means they happen after people have had time to process information—such as by reading an article. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33303565 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33303565 https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sort=byDate&type=comment&query=reflective%20reflex%20by:dang https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...

jgaa 4y ago

I think the problem is < fake books and > Amazons fundamentally broken reviews system. Seems like the fake review bots are a lot smarter than the anti-measures applied by Amazon. And the fun part is that both parties are probably running on AWS ;)

a3w 4y ago
I think the problem is [bra] fake books and [ket] Amazons... I think the problem is [left] fake books and [Quote sign] Amazons... Okay, on the third try I read less and more. Still, it felt ugly.
- thr0wnawaytod4y 4y ago
  I thought it's just a fancy way to write (something and) something more important.
  - thaumasiotes 4y ago
    It took me two tries too; my first guess was "I think the problem is not as bad as fake books and worse than Amazon's fundamentally broken review system", but that didn't make sense. The symbols < and > are being used as substitutes for the English words "less" and "more", which is not conventional at all, but is related enough to the actual meaning of the symbols that given context and a lot of effort, you can get there. I wouldn't recommend copying the notation; it conflicts pretty badly with the ordinary use of < and >.

andirk 4y ago

ML-generated content can be pretty funny. This is more an example of Amazon being a garbage distributor of crap; this is an example of fraud. I hope there's a followup of what punishments happen with such a grift from one the world's largest companies.

fullstackchris 4y ago
Writing a book about NFTs (IMO a fraud based market in the first place) with it being full of lies is, as the author said, hardly a crime. It's just unethical. Amazon isn't going to read every letter of every book that it sells, so it's hardly their fault either.
- andirk 4y ago
  Should Target make sure their products are what they claim to be? If the book was subpar, oh well. If the book is loren ipsum [0], then that's fraud and should be followed up on. But people love Amazon so they can do whatever they want. [0] https://hipsum.co/ https://hipsum.co/
- hot_gril 4y ago
  Amazon's fault would come from displaying fake reviews for so long, if anything.

freediver 4y ago

The 'book factory business oppportunity' trend spotted in the article is explored in depth in this excellent Dan Olson video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=biYciU1uiUw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=biYciU1uiUw It is a great and informative watch.

gzer0 4y ago

This has been a concern of mine for a while; I have also published absolute garbage just to see how far I can take it. I've published music under various pseudonyms, books underneath different pen-names... the list goes on. I've retracted such publications, but it is frightening if one person like myself had the curiosity to try, what is already out there, and, what a well-funded nation-state actor could do. ---- Post-truth, like post-modernism, does not mean an absolute absence of truth, but a decline in confidence in common knowledge, making your own truth the center of your life, rather than a set of values shared by a community. We now believe that our own truth is somehow better than the "centralized" or "official" truth. We are now free from the institutions and authorities that controlled the truth. But this is an illusion, because the very definition of truth requires trust in something other than you. [1] https://www.reddit.com/r/philosophy/comments/j5gyp5/the_search_for_truth_in_a_posttruth_society/ https://www.reddit.com/r/philosophy/comments/j5gyp5/the_sear...

coldtea 4y ago
>and, what a well-funded nation-state actor could do. Release crap books nobody will read, or fill Soundcloud with bad music?
- RF_Savage 4y ago
  I think NKRFZ had a video about a weird genre of pro-war fiction that is published en mass in Russia and promoted quite alot, but which does not really sell.
  - coldtea 4y ago
    Pro-war fiction? That's like the standard movie for several decades from Rambo to Michael Bay's epics and Top Gun Maverick, and in movie form that has far wider appeal, 10000x the audiences, and is way more glamorous! "weird pro war fiction" would be very low in effectiveness...
    - oriolid 4y ago

tomglynch 4y ago

Has the same author published many other books?

wallmountedtv 4y ago
No.[1] Also their name "Matt Martin" is suspiciously generic, making it hard to search for other than the direct link given in the article to the Amazon listing. 1: https://www.amazon.com/Matt-Martin/e/B09R7QSRN8/ https://www.amazon.com/Matt-Martin/e/B09R7QSRN8/

tommica 4y ago

Its a scary concept - internet and books being nothing but generated content is going to be a sad world.

colordrops 4y ago
Or maybe people will start paying attention to references and provenance, and start looking into sources of information - maybe even more widespread use of cryptographic signatures. Misinformation has always been out there, and so there are tools to deal with it. Perhaps now is our chance to make these tools wide spread.
- gzer0 4y ago
  In an ideal world, I would hope for your statement to be correct. However, our society has changed the value of recognizing duty to recognizing choice. As long as individuals are aware of the choice they are making, they are justified. The fear of truth is caused by the following dilemma: either you choose for yourself or someone else will choose for you. Because of this fear, choosing correctly becomes less important than choosing freely. The choice is justified by the idea of inner truth, in which the role of subjective experiences can outweigh the role of objective experiences. A choice is not justified just because it is a choice. But without an objective criterion of correction, every choice is irrelevant, because the subjective criterion is also a choice. It can be changed to justify each of the choices, however inconsistent and contradictory they may be. To say that everything is valid is to say that fact checking is a farce. The loss of discernment is an unexpected result of the emancipation of reason.
  - protontorpedo 4y ago
    I'm pretty sure this comment was generated by a language model. If that's the case, congratulations.
    - marcosdumay 4y ago
      At the 20th Century, when we got a book from some philosopher entirely written on this style, we didn't have to wonder that. Those were simpler times.

TaylorAlexander 4y ago

I think there’s a good chance it was ghost written by a content farm for someone who wanted to publish a book in a popular category to make a quick buck. I recently learned that this is a soft-scam technique advocated for by a couple of guys called the Mikkelson Twins. They say you can make money by publishing audiobooks on audible by finding a popular topic on audible, then hiring a ghost writing service to write your book, then hire a voice actor to record it, publish it on audible, and then you too can become fabulously wealthy as the Mikkelson Twins claim to be. Except what the Mikkelson Twins actually make money on is selling you on a “money making course” where they tell you to do the above. So there’s all kinds of people trying to follow this method out there, it seems. This excellent video [1] from Dan Olson at Folding Ideas is in my opinion a fascinating deep dive in to this whole scam. I don’t want to spoil everything in the video, but Dan does an exceptional job exploring how this ghost writing works, and why it produces the kind of nonsense writing that looks like GPT-3 but is actually being done by an overworked human who is trying to write an entire novel in three weeks or so on a topic they haven’t had time to properly research. [1] https://youtu.be/biYciU1uiUw https://youtu.be/biYciU1uiUw

andreyk 4y ago
I've watched the video as well and wholeheartedly agree! His 'Line Goes Up' documentary about crypto is also exceptional; very critical but in educated and actually nuanced ways (https://youtu.be/YQ_xWvX1n9g https://youtu.be/YQ_xWvX1n9g).
- masklinn 4y ago
  If you haven’t gone through the entire Olsonverse yet, don’t sleep on “in search of a flat earth”. That was my gateway video to Folding Ideas and it remains stellar.
  - TaylorAlexander 4y ago
    That was my first too! Really wonderful creator and I did find myself going through his whole back catalog after that! And I agree with the comment upstream, “Line Goes Up” is a masterpiece.

warbler73 4y ago

Wow! Fantastic article. With AI generated stuff I expect we are going to see 99% of the book market saturated with generated nonsense, then collapse as a market for lemons.

rjmunro 4y ago
Depends what you mean by "99% of the book market". I'm sure the major publishers will not start publishing generated nonsense, and I suspect the small players self-publishing nonsense on Amazon will go away in time. Of course major publishers may be duped into unintentionally publishing AI generated or part AI generated content by bad authors, but if it's good enough to get through their editing processes, it will hopefully be non-nonsense.

ipeev 4y ago

What actually surprises me is that the author bought 11 paper books from Amazon about NFTs. You really need 11 books to understand or write about a single concept? It is a highly controversial ongoing topic. Those 11 books most likely become obsolete exactly on the day after they were written. Good catch on the one fake book! But I am surprised it was only one. Maybe the author started from that one and will write about the others later.

seba_dos1 4y ago
The author didn't want to "understand a single concept" this way, but rather, as they say themselves, "get familiar with the best-articulated arguments put forward by the proponents of this tech".
HWR_14 4y ago
The author bought 11 paper books because they wanted to make money posting a meta-review of the literature analyzing the arguments from all of them together. While they probably understood the points after a single book, they would have lacked the complete coverage (and the marketing hook). I would expect someone writing that to have read the 11 most popular books.

nextlevelwizard 4y ago

Off topic: Why is everything posted here all of a sudden begging for my email? It feels like every article I click after reading few sentences I get a box begging to sign up for some stupid ass mailing list as if after spending 10 seconds reading their words I had become a fan and absolutely needed more of their bullshit in my life. If I am interested in hearing more about you, I will find a way to subscribe to your shit otherwise all you manage to do is to get me frustrated and leave. This time I couldn't even get to reading, I opened the article and had to answer an IM. By the time I got back I was treated with full screen "Type your email to subscribe" box that couldn't even be dismissed without clicking small "Let me read first" link. Why is simple blog design such ass these days? Why can't I just read the content without being bombarded with pop ups, pop overs, and other crap that has nothing to do with the actual content?

quickthrower2 4y ago
Welcome to substack! “But it is better than medium!”
nine_k 4y ago
Have you tried paying? Publishers need food, too. So do some authors who write in a (semi)professional capacity and spend significant time writing.
- nextlevelwizard 4y ago
  What are you on? Are you implying that these people are collecting emails to sell them? If your content is worth money you will make money, but most content is definitely not worth even my time.
kwhitefoot 4y ago
Have JavaScript off by default in uBlock. Substack is quite readable without JS; and no popups.
- nextlevelwizard 4y ago

beardyw 4y ago

Time to produce a book about fake books ... click.

beardyw 4y ago
Seriously, I knew someone involved in "published as remainder" business in the 70s. First get good photos, pay someone to write some text, put on sale at inflated price, then put on sale at amazing discount.

jcynix 4y ago

Every so often in the last n years I stumbled over "books" which simply contain regurgitated wikipedia content. And, of course, all those web pages collecting amazon reviews which simulate product review pages. Or, before that, just link farms to products so people could collect referer compensation. All this is some form of spam, which simply uses search engines to spread instead of email. So the "books" reported here (while somehow "fascinating" just look like the next step of spam/scam evolution to me. And yes, I see that they are more problematic the "better" they get generated, because more people will think they are genuine works.

femto 4y ago
I wrote one of those books. That is, a Wikipedia article I largely wrote was plagiarised and published in a book by a scammer. Some time later my words on Wikipedia were tagged as having been plagiarised from the scammer's book. It was clear from wiki timestamps and publication dates what really happened, so it got fixed, but it's irritating that one needs to waste time on things like that (and as far as I know the book is still on Amazon).
- jcynix 4y ago
  > as far as I know the book is still on Amazon I would have expected that. Amazon neither has the staff with expertise to investigate claims nor much interest in removing products that earn them a nice share. Knowledge is fungible nowadays, and in these cases of "fake books" its volatile too. It's the virtual gold rush on the Internet and companies which supply resources (ebook platforms, search engines, but hardware for crypto mining like graphics cards etc too) to those "miners" profit from what's going on.
  - hk__2 4y ago
    > I would have expected that. Amazon neither has the staff with expertise to investigate claims nor much interest in removing products that earn them a nice share If the book attributes its content to Wikipedia, it’s perfectly legal. The issue then becomes "should Amazon remove low-quality products from their website?" (and the underlying issue is "what does 'low-quality' mean?"), and the response is no because they want to act as a platform.

mypastself 4y ago

Alarmingly enough, not even the one- or two-star Amazon reviews caught the garbled nonsense, indicating that not even real people bothered to read the book in detail. I’m wondering if any person on the planet other than the author of the article read this best-selling book in its entirety. Because even the book’s purported author likely didn’t.

smeagull 4y ago
If you thought it was garbage, why would you continue to pour your time into reading it in detail? That's just silly. You throw it in the bin and move on with your life.
- mypastself 4y ago
  Well, if you’re writing a review, you could at least warn other readers that the book contains nonsense.
  - jcynix 4y ago
    That would mean that the reviewer understood the topic and was capable of writing a proper critique? I'm a book lover who reads a lot of fiction and non-fiction and more often than not in the last few years I have the feeling that many reviews are generated by people who read a different book, or didn't understand the one the comment at all.
    - mypastself 4y ago
      Makes sense, I suppose. The reviewers of the book in question might then have read the part about chemotherapy “NFPs” and thought that the section is probably accurate and they just didn’t understand it, so they moved on. Which is alarming enough by itself.
leobg 4y ago
Well, if people don’t actually invest any time and effort into consuming the books they buy, then perhaps it is an inevitable adaptation on the part of authors to also not invest any time and effort into creating them. (The rise of Blinkist et. al. seems to support the idea that many people value being able to say that they have read a book much more highly than actually reading it.)

thih9 4y ago

Perhaps this book was written by the blog post author and this is an attempt at covert content marketing?

stingtao 4y ago

A book-formed content farm

sjamaan 4y ago

Isn't the "For Dummies" series some sort of trademark? I'm amazed they didn't get sued for using the name. Crap like this devalues the rest of the "for dummies" books.

michaelt 4y ago
Although the author shows the covers of 11 books, only one of them - "NFT for Beginners" - is full of GPT-3-looking nonsense. The "NFTs for Dummies" book is presumably not nonsense, or at least no more so than the subject matter demands.
viridian 4y ago
That book seems to be an actual for "dummies book", written by a doctor of business analytics who teaches at Santa Clara University, for what it's worth. She also authored "DeFi for dummies". If I had to read any of these books, there's a good chance that the for dummies one is the least bad of the 12, but odds are you are better off reading 0 of these books.
jehb 4y ago
> Crap like this devalues the rest of the "for dummies" books. I'd argue Wiley already did that themselves. They sell the Dummies brand to any company with a large checkbook. See: - https://www.intel.com/content/dam/support/us/en/programmable/support-resources/bulk-container/pdfs/literature/misc/fpgas-for-dummies-ebook.pdf https://www.intel.com/content/dam/support/us/en/programmable... - https://www.oracle.com/a/ocom/docs/oracle-cloud-erp-for-dummies.pdf https://www.oracle.com/a/ocom/docs/oracle-cloud-erp-for-dumm... - https://www.ibm.com/downloads/cas/GB8ZMQZ3 https://www.ibm.com/downloads/cas/GB8ZMQZ3

f311a 4y ago

Amazon is full of fake/generated/auto translated books in every category. Just search for any programming language and sort it by release date. I don't understand why they don't fix this problem. It's pretty easy to fix and all those sales don't generate a significant amount of revenue for Amazon considering the negative experience for clients. Such books are pretty easy to spot since the majority of reviews are written by people who have published more than hundreds of reviews.

YurgenJurgensen 4y ago
Going into full tinfoil hat territory: I wonder whether those products are the equivalent of the 'deliberate' spelling and grammatical errors we're all told end up in spam emails to pre-filter out people who probably won't fall for the scam. Amazon doesn't want customers who care about quality, because they leave bad reviews and have a higher return rate.
marginalia_nu 4y ago
Affects older books too. I've found books that were very obviously printed scans of library books, including dog-ears, missing pages and the odd pencil lines. https://www.marginalia.nu/shitty-book/pencil2.webp https://www.marginalia.nu/shitty-book/pencil2.webp https://www.marginalia.nu/shitty-book/fadeout.webp https://www.marginalia.nu/shitty-book/fadeout.webp https://www.marginalia.nu/shitty-book/pencil.webp https://www.marginalia.nu/shitty-book/pencil.webp Appears they're printing these on demand on essentially bleached office-grade paper. The orange tint is from the white balance being off. Seems to be related to the system of third party sellers. Every shop I'm aware of that uses this model has problems with this type of bait-and-switch bullshit.
- thn-gap 4y ago
  I wonder if having a swarm of people buy these items, then returning them since they clearly don't match the expected result from the description, would hurt the sellers enough so they would stop doing this sort of scam.
  - 4y ago

_pgln 4y ago

> I soon discovered that all the books leaned on the same central argument: value is an inherent consequence of scarcity. My rebuttal to that was simple: it’s an exception, not a rule. My kids’ doodles are scarce, but in a gallery, they wouldn’t fetch much. Alas, while this made for a solid Twitter quip, it wasn’t enough for an in-depth post. Scarcity in economics refers to when the demand for a resource is greater than the supply of that resource. Your kids doodles aren't scarce because there is no demand for them. How did the author read 11 books on NFT's and not know this lol? The books must have been all very bad or the article author just skimmed thru them. Interesting article other than that tho.

yosamino 4y ago
> The books must have been all very bad or the article author just skimmed thru them. It seems that you have not even bothered to skim the article...
- _pgln 4y ago
  How so? The author only mentions one of the books being bad.

Borrible 4y ago

Ah, remember those times when producing hundred of thousands of books was just a side-gig for a Professor of Management Science? And he didn't even faked it. https://singularityhub.com/2012/12/13/patented-book-writing-system-lets-one-professor-create-hundreds-of-thousands-of-amazon-books-and-counting/ https://singularityhub.com/2012/12/13/patented-book-writing-... https://patents.google.com/patent/US7266767B2/en https://patents.google.com/patent/US7266767B2/en https://www.icongrouponline.com/ https://www.icongrouponline.com/

em-bee 4y ago

the big question this raises is: how will this affect self publishing and the need for an actual publisher. i expect that publishers are able to avoid publishing junk like this and therefore are still able to offer some value. whereas self-publishing authors will have to fight to stand out on their own.

jcynix 4y ago

It's virtual evolution at work, i.e. spam evolution. It's the Internet Gold Rush (i.e. "make money fast" at work), which we have watched getting "more professional" in the last ten to twenty years. And because those companies which supply resources (ebook platforms, search engines, but also hardware for crypto mining like graphics cards etc) to those "virtual miners" profit from what's going on, we won't see that fixed in the upcoming years. Generating books instead of spam emails looks more professional so gullible people, who meanwhile (hopefully) did learn that the Nigerian prince isn't a prince, will buy such books (it's written in a book, and book writing is real work you know, so it must be true) to learn about all those fancy new concepts they hear about. It's actually not that different from all these ads you see, especially if you actually watch recent youtube ads. Due to the current "energy crisis" and the upcoming winter, I've seen videos advertising magical electric heaters, which will "recycle" 85% of the energy used for heating and thus will save you lots of money. It's simple physics that warm air coming out at the front of such a device will be sucked in at its back again, but there's nothing to "recycle" here, to somehow save energy. BTW, anybody interested in my upcoming book on quantum heating? Quantum heating will even earn you money, because it will generate certain energy efficient by-products which you can sell at your favourite online retailer ;-)

TeMPOraL 4y ago
> BTW, anybody interested in my upcoming book on quantum heating? Quantum heating will even earn you money, because it will generate certain energy efficient by-products which you can sell at your favourite online retailer ;-) As a seller of magic electric recycling heaters who you just bankrupted, let me repay you in kind: everyone, you can easily DIY this "quantum heating" thing: it's just an automated pipeline of GPT-3 to LeanPub and purchasing ads that show up in Quanta Magazine (hence "quantum"), where you run GPT-3 locally so you can keep your home warm with the heat generated by your PC.
guerrilla 4y ago
> "energy crisis" and the upcoming winter, Why do you put that in quotes? > I've seen videos advertising magical electric heaters, which will "recycle" 85% of the energy used for heating and thus will save you lots of money. It's simple physics that warm air coming out at the front of such a device will be sucked in at its back again, but there's nothing to "recycle" here, to somehow save energy. You sure they couldn't be talking about a heat pump which does have "above 100%" efficiency in a sense?

aaron695 4y ago

danwee 4y ago

Reminds me of the joke: > It's been months since I bought the book, "How to scam people online." It still hasn't arrived yet.

gexla 4y ago

Edit: Commented in wrong browser tab. Apologies.

kuu 4y ago
Where does this appear in the article? I think you're not answering the proper article or I am veeery confused

HyperLinear 4y ago

> " I soon discovered that all the books leaned on the same central argument: value is an inherent consequence of scarcity. My rebuttal to that was simple: it’s an exception, not a rule. My kids’ doodles are scarce, but in a gallery, they wouldn’t fetch much. " There isn't really a market for kids doodles, and with the barrier to entry being really low the supply is many orders of magnitude higher than the demand. So the central argument stays. Not a great start of the article this.

bawolff 4y ago
Which was precisely the author's point.
- _pgln 4y ago
  No its not. Scarcity in economics refers to when the demand for a resource is greater than the supply of that resource. The kids doodles aren't scarce because there is little demand for them. On the other hand there is demand for NFT's (whether you think there should be or not). The comparison doesn't make any sense and just makes the author look dumb.
  - bawolff 4y ago
    The author wasn't responding to economists who were using the word in that sense, he was responding to bitcoin evangelists who often claim that the value in bitcoin comes from its limitted issue (without reference to demand). I have certainly heard bitcoin evangelists make such claims, so i really dont think it is a strawman argument. If you want to take the metaphor further, there is really no barrier to entry for starting a cryptocurrency and supply of cryptocurrencies in general far outstrip demand. So it is very similar to a kids doodle.
    - _pgln 4y ago
      > Late last year, at the peak of the non-fungible token (NFT) craze, I purchased about a dozen highest-rated NFT books on Amazon. I did this because I wanted to publish a balanced critique of NFTs; I figured the most honest approach would to get familiar with the best-articulated arguments put forward by the proponents of this tech. Its quite clear from the first few lines of the article that the author did not intend to debunk some silly claims but to respond to the best ones. Using a definition of scarcity that does not reference demand to write off NFT's entirely shows that the author has no idea what hes talking about. > If you want to take the metaphor further, there is really no barrier to entry for starting a cryptocurrency and supply of cryptocurrencies in general far outstrip demand. So it is very similar to a kids doodle. Yes, but people don't want just any cryptocurrency. They want Bitcoin, ethereum, etc whos demand is greater then the supply. So no its actually similar to a kids doodle.

coldtea 4y ago

yason 4y ago
Or to generalise, where supply and demand meet is called value.
- viridian 4y ago
  The intersect of supply and demand is necessarily the price equilibrium. Value is only equal to price if the buyer and seller both have equal information and neither is operating under any sort of constraints that force certain market behavior. Your generality may often be true in certain contexts, but increasingly, one should operate under the assumption that the seller has a significant informational advantage over the buyer, and this advantage will be used to capture additional value.
svnt 4y ago
Author seems to understand supply and demand — they are making the point that the NFT perspective doesn’t include a rationale for demand.
- coldtea 4y ago
  Demand doesn't need to have a rationale (in the sense of "real needs" or "utility value" or something of the like) to work in raising value. It just needs to exist!
  - svnt 4y ago
    Yes, but if the demand doesn’t establish itself in some other context that serves a narrative (whether cultural, material, tax shelter, or other) the dynamics of the underlying market tend to be in the realm of tulips and postage stamps.

pelasaco 4y ago

the book has 4 stars at Amazon. Positive reviews. It highlights another rabbit-hole: The fake reviews

jbverschoor 4y ago
So fake sellers are selling fake books, reviewed by fake reviewers, and they get fake crypto moneys, with which they can buy fake food, and live a fake life. Fake sounds very much like reality
- pelasaco 4y ago
  exactly, sad reality. I'm so happy that I didn't jump in this bandwagon. I used to write a lot of bitcoin code, worked in some pools, fpga code, etc, etc.. always loved while it was some revolutionary stuff, but I gave up from that literally when I saw people that used to sell carpet, being announced as "Crypto experts".. from that moment, I knew that it was scam.
  - olalonde 4y ago
    The web attracted a lot of scammers and grifters during the dot-com bubble as well. The web was nonetheless revolutionary.

tkk23 4y ago

How is this different from email spam? People will stop trusting random sources for books. Established publishers will make sure that only vetted authors are able to access the market. The only problem is that it's difficult for new publishers and fringe authors to enter the market.

Gigachad 4y ago
Because you didn’t pay money to receive the email spam. I suppose the main detail is that many people will just eat the loss on a scam book and devalue their trust in Amazon rather than bothering to refund and return it.

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residualmind 4y ago

Even human-written content has become so bad it's sometimes hard to tell it apart from a Mark V. Shaney or Racter implementation. I mean, aren't our brains' language capabilites not just Markov chains on steroids, with billions and billions of inputs and weights? Why are we still using text-based content-generation algorithms? Can't we train some kind of AI to generate "good" fiction content? Like, for example, this: "Oh," said Lucy, peeping into the parlour, "is that our old friend, the fairy?" "Yes," said Mr. Bennet, looking up from his newspaper, "my sister has been entertaining you in the best way she can." "She has been telling me," said Mrs. Bennet, with a solemn laugh, "all about her doll's tea-party. I wish I had been there." "My dear," replied her husband, "I am certain that it has been her greatest enjoyment. And the little girl really seems to have had a very good time of it." "Not more so, I am afraid, than the other ladies. _They_ had none of the advantages of hearing the charming story.

Gigachad 4y ago
The generated content is all nonsensical babel when it’s asked to do more than give a definition for a word or concept. It’s grammatically correct but has no deeper meaning. And sure, some of the human written crap posted here is also meaningless blogspam.
lethrowchuck 4y ago
> I mean, aren't our brains' language capabilities not just Markov chains on steroids, with billions and billions of inputs and weights? The word "just" is doing a lot of heavy lifting here. Yes, our language capabilities are just Markov chains - the way engineering is just constrained nonlinear optimization and playing games is just tree traversal.

deleted 4y ago

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jakub_g 4y ago

Not exactly the same though related: IIRC there's another scam on Amazon where people self-publish some ebooks which are clearly gibberish, put a massive price tag on it, and use hacked accounts to buy them. Very low effort and essentially free money, because no physical goods are involved. It's been discussed here a year ago or so.

Andrew_nenakhov 4y ago

A ghostwriter commissioned to write a book on some hot topic is, essentially, a poorly trained and badly optimized neural network.

NaturalPhallacy 4y ago
You're.... you're not wrong.

nix23 4y ago

I have a book from amazon (it's about a Seawolf submarine) the book is so bad, the story so lame, and the mix of themes (music-taste with a rescue), kind of artificial...it's almost comical and i bet it's mostly written by a AI who cobbled text together...an absolute low effort book.

zefhous 4y ago

A couple years ago we ordered an "on-demand" printed book from Amazon for an old public domain book. It came misprinted, with a book on "Mobile Solar Power" right in the middle of it. I took a look through it cause I thought it would actually interesting, and found it to be this type of fake book that looks to be instructional on the surface, but in reality is not actually educational in the least, and in fact dead wrong in many places. I posted a couple excerpts on Twitter here, 3-tweet thread. https://twitter.com/zefhous/status/1281679975339274241 https://twitter.com/zefhous/status/1281679975339274241

dEnigma 4y ago

Contrary to what the article says it IS possible to find information about NFP chemotherapy on the internet. E.g.: Of these patients, 44 were treated with HAIC and 20 with sorafenib. HAIC involved cisplatin (50 mg fine powder in 5-10 ml lipiodol) and a continuous infusion of 5-fluorouracil (FU) (1,500 mg/5 days), which is referred to as new 5-FU and cisplatin therapy (NFP). [1] [1] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/29285366/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/29285366/

duskwuff 4y ago
Correct. However, the "NFP" in that paper refers to a specific drug regimen, and bears no resemblance to the nonsensical dosing methodology described in the book. (I mean, come on, "Eastern methods of measurement"??)

deleted 4y ago

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narahs 4y ago

And this is how publishers/publishing houses stand to gain a renewed relevance in a world of self publishing and digital platform technologies.

phtrivier 4y ago

"90% of everything is crap" ; but, now, 'everything' is computer-generated, and therefore, infinite. I'll let mathematicians study the convergence, while physicists conclude that "everything is crap", give up and get a beer, and software engineers go back to fixing the other 90%.

DoneWithAllThat 4y ago

I find it to be pretty obviously ML generated. As in even the parts about NFTs are written in a style that is patently obviously not authored by a human. I’m sure the difference will become less noticeable over time but for now AI-authored prose is easy to spot.

krosaen 4y ago

A lot of this hinges on fake reviews. It seems like it should be a solvable problem, but then I read about things like scammers going so far as to actually order their bogus products to real addresses of unsuspecting people (not caring what the confused recipients do with it) just so they can get a "verified purchase" review. Maybe they get caught, but by then, the damage is done. I bought an electric leaf blower off amazon a couple years ago - the reviews seemed authentic and it seemed like the obvious one to buy. The thing had the power of like two hair dryers - I took the time to write a negative review but by then the product no longer seemed to be listed.

adriantiral 4y ago

NotYourLawyer 4y ago

It reads like a lot of the auto-generated content / Amazon affiliate link farms that google ranks so highly when I search for product reviews. Everything is awful online nowadays.

Roark66 4y ago

I disagree with the author on the below: >With GPT-3, we now have an infinitely-scalable technology that is years away from being able to enrich our lives, but is already more than capable of drowning out all remnants of authentic content on the internet. And because you can leverage this to earn money or sway opinions, that outcome is probably hard to avoid. I can't speak for GPT-3 specifically as I haven't spent enough time with it, but it's open equivalent Bloom is very useful today. Author says it is far from being able to "enrich our lives". I think otherwise. The whole "AI revolution" definitely did enrich my life. It renewed my passion for programming in general. The possibilities are truly endless. From translation, to content summarisation and search. Then it is only a step away from enriching other people's lives with products that make them more productive, help them in execution of mundane tasks etc. I think AIs like bloom will in not to distant time allow us to fix the Internet to how it was before all the shitty content generation replaced genuine content in Google for example. Also, there is a huge potential to improve our understanding of what it means to think and understand complex concepts. For the very first time we have something that comes very close to such understanding. Something that doesn't have feelings, it can be cut, modified, transformed and studied in myriad of different ways. Also, believe me when I say the next AI revolution will be with models like Bloom that will be able to run on the edge. This is currently impossible due to their size, but it is very likely we'll find methods to optimise them significantly. Then there is potential application of such models to decision making. I bet there is ongoing research in that field right now. Addressing the negative side, "ability to generate garbage content that looks good". The ability has already existed for advanced adversaries. Hostile nations can simply employ people to "generate content". Smaller players have lots of other (inferior) tools. Their content doesn't have to fool people most of the time. It just has to fool various algorithms. Even without advanced AI models the search engines and social networks have been loosing badly in this fight. Existence of those tools will improve the bad actors capabilities, but it will also give good actors the chance to innovate with something new.

jollyllama 4y ago

Any chance that it's at least partially non-english speakers using bad translator/thesaurus app output?

duskwuff 4y ago
No. The wording and grammar is fine; the problem is that the ideas being expressed with those words are nonsense.

ajot 4y ago

Totally unrelated to TFA, but to the (great, in my opinion) author: here's[0] an older prepping guide for non-crazy people. I understand that the author has published a book recently about the topic. [0] https://lcamtuf.coredump.cx/prep/index-old.shtml https://lcamtuf.coredump.cx/prep/index-old.shtml

AaronBBrown 4y ago

Clicked expecting this to be about the history (https://officialrealbook.com/history/ https://officialrealbook.com/history/) of jazz fake books, which eventually evolved into the Real Book!

Tade0 4y ago

This is nothing new really. The Bogdanoff brothers, before their time as rulers of France and the crypto world with a fair, but iron fist gained notoriety by publishing works which were largely gibberish: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bogdanov_affair https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bogdanov_affair NFTs and the like were especially fascinating because it was a game of rock-paper-scissors in terms of cunning, meaning someone could be so cunning that they appeared gullible to those ostensibly one level of craftiness higher, so you never knew if someone was shilling something because they were that gullible or that cunning.

acdha 4y ago
It’s new in the sense that it’s never been easier to do at scale. The Bogdanov scandal was novel in part because that kind of thing was uncommon. We appear to rapidly be entering an era where the opposite is true, and it seems highly dangerous to have misleading information be universally available at lower cost.

scyclow 4y ago

Am I the only one who thinks that reading all the "highest rated" NFT books on Amazon in an attempt to write a good-faith critique is hilarious?

garyrob 4y ago

I would like to mention the concept of "Soulbound Tokens" as a way of attacking this problem. This is the subject of a paper this year by Vitalik Buterin (founder of Ethereum), E. Glen Weyl (economist/researcher at Microsoft Research) and Puja Ohlhaver. Here's the abstract: """ Web3 today centers around expressing transferable, financialized assets, rather than encoding social relationships of trust. Yet many core economic activities—such as uncollateralized lending and building personal brands—are built on persistent, non-transferable relationships. In this paper, we illustrate how non-transferable “soulbound” tokens (SBTs) representing the commitments, credentials, and affiliations of “Souls” can encode the trust networks of the real economy to establish provenance and reputation. More importantly, SBTs enable other applications of increasing ambition, such as community wallet recovery, sybil-resistant governance, mechanisms for decentralization, and novel markets with decomposable, shared rights. We call this richer, pluralistic ecosystem “Decentralized Society” (DeSoc)—a co-determined sociality, where Souls and communities come together bottom-up, as emergent properties of each other to co-create plural network goods and intelligences, at a range of scales. Key to this sociality is decomposable property rights and enhanced governance mechanisms—such as quadratic funding discounted by correlation scores—that reward trust and cooperation while protecting networks from capture, extraction, and domination. With such augmented sociality, web3 can eschew today’s hyper-financialization in favor of a more transformative, pluralist future of increasing returns across social distance. """ Here's the paper: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4105763 https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4105763

aaronharnly 4y ago
I honestly can’t tell if this abstract is also GPT-3 generated.
- nullc 4y ago
  https://archive.org/details/EtherealVerses https://archive.org/details/EtherealVerses
  - ilyt 4y ago

deleted 4y ago

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jerf 4y ago

One of the things that has kept me out of the cryptocurrency space is that when their advocates discuss value, they speak in pure nonsense. A big part of that problem is that value is very difficult to discuss. On the one hand you have the classic goldbug that insists that gold has "intrinsic value", which is some sort of platonic ideal thing that gold simply ambiently has and defies any attempt to nail down what it grounds out in. On the other hand you have cryptocurrency advocates claiming that all value is arbitrary and/or based entirely on scarcity. In that context, observing that my kid's doodles are scarce but not valuable is not a cute tweet; it is a complete and utter demolishing of the argument. (I think one of the things education can accidentally (mis)teach is that short arguments are always worthless and arguments must always be long. This is false. A good grounding in mathematics can help with internalizing this. It is completely possible to demolish entire massive argument edifices in 10-20 of the correct words, and the fact that the "other side" has deployed literally hundreds of thousands of words does not make them right if the foundation is rotten.) Value is intrinsically a dynamic process. It grounds out in human desires, which are intrinsically temporal, variable, and fickle, and this makes a lot of people uncomfortable as they seek either a more solid or a more completely ethereal/arbitrary base. However, there is no other sensible way to think about value, however complex and ever-shifting this may be, and it is neither mathematically solid, nor an amorphous vapor of no consequence subject to one strong person's Nietzschian will.

mbar84 4y ago
Sounds like you might become a fan of the Austrian School theory of subjective value and (in the context of Crypto currency) of Mises's regression theorem of money. https://consultingbyrpm.com/blog/2014/03/on-bitcoin-and-ludwig-von-mises-regression-theorem.html https://consultingbyrpm.com/blog/2014/03/on-bitcoin-and-ludw...
ted_bunny 4y ago
"Mathemetics" Is this the regurgitative didactic method I keep hearing about?
- jerf 4y ago
  Ah yes, sorry, fixed. Meant to spell "mathememetics" correctly.

parentheses 4y ago

There will come a time when only experts on a given topic will be able to separate fact from fiction. I would expect that AI will get good at internally consistent content _first_, so this work would make sense on its own even if it’s nonsense in actuality. Talk about bubbles.

apitman 4y ago

It's crazy to think that the internet may have already peaked, at least in certain ways. 5 years ago I could Google anything and was confident (maybe more than I should have been) of getting close to the best answer, whether looking for a product recommendation or just general knowledge. That confidence has seriously eroded the past couple years. That said, I'm optimistic that we can keep finding solutions to new problems. Maybe it wouldn't be so bad to make purchasing decisions closer to the way we used to, by asking our friends what they recommend. That's essentially how appending " reddit" to a google search works today, but even that is vulnerable to manipulation. I'm hoping that social media of the future builds in better tools for polling our network for recommendations, and for incentivizing us to respond to our friends' queries.

allochthon 4y ago
I'm hoping that eventually we'll get around the idea of a crowd-sourced search engine (mostly manually curated) maintained in the manner of Wikipedia, backed by a solid user reputation system to dissuade spammers. This will import Wikipedia's serious flaws. But I'm hopefully that they can gradually be mitigated.
- disqard 4y ago
  A lot of the underpinnings of such a manually-curated knowledge base did exist in the early 2000s, in the form of Yahoo! Directory. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yahoo!_Directory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yahoo!_Directory
  - allochthon 4y ago
    Yeah, that's actually related to what I'm thinking of. The idea is a crowd-sourced and well-executed iteration on the old Yahoo! directory. https://blog.digraph.app/2020-06-13-democratization-of-search.html https://blog.digraph.app/2020-06-13-democratization-of-searc...
    - disqard 4y ago

peter303 4y ago

Submit GPT-3 written journal articles to vanity journals. They deserve each other.

B1FF_PSUVM 4y ago

"Spam begets (strong) AI" was my guess a few years ago. Of course it will be full-cycle, and we already have (weak) AI begotten spam.

masswerk 4y ago

So the important question is: are ML-models ready for influencer deals? ;-)

angry_octet 4y ago

Why have I not received GPT generated spam yet? Something that looks like a genuine email, but is fundamentally nonsense but with a link to click?