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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 rece

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.
planetsprite 4y ago
I get the feeling it was outsourced to a content farm, which outsourced itself to GPT-3
- smilespray 4y ago
  ...which then outsourced itself to GPT-2...
  - TaylorAlexander 4y ago
    GPT-3 is lounging on a beach somewhere while GPT-2 does all the hard work!
    - coldtea 4y ago
      or, judging from the usual IQ and age difference between those doing the actual work and their managers, probably the inverse...
  - kmeisthax 4y ago
    Given the way that OpenAI sources their training corpus and the amount of people using GPT-3 I would not be surprised if GPT-4 winds up getting trained on a large amount of GPT-3 output. Think about it - the best niche GPT-3 has is generating plausible spam. If you just need a lot of text, but you don't care about what it says[0], you're going to write it using the cheapest possible tool. OpenAI's training corpus is sourced through web crawls, so all of that spam is destined to get recycled back into the next generation of GPT. [0] For example, if you want to be able to post a bunch of political spam that looks like genuine comments on a web forum. See GPT-4chan[1] as a practical example of this. [1] A tweaked version of GPT-3 using 4chan's politics board as training corpus.
    - planetsprite 4y ago
      Same with most AI image generating models. In 10 years 99% of images on the internet will be AI generated. Would it not regressive for the models to train on their own outputs? Should regulation require AI generated media label itself, or is it the responsibility to train detectors which can intuit the difference between the models and reality better than humans can?
helsinkiandrew 4y ago
This is a brilliant (but very sad) video. The ghost writers get about $2500 for a 10,000 word book researched and written in a month. I guess this is cheaper than using GPT-3 and having to prune out the flights of fancy/complete nonsense that GPT-3 can sometimes generate.
- elefanten 4y ago
  10,000? Could it be 100,000? I have to write 10,000 words overnight occasionally in my role. If it’s $2500 for 10k words, maybe I should be ghostwriting…
  - mkl 4y ago
    What role do you have that requires that kind of output?
    - elefanten 4y ago
      Corporate strategy consulting. 1 day to write 5k-10k words on a topic you have to research from scratch is not uncommon. It's all within a broad field of expertise and a sector you're familiar with, but could be products / companies / deals you'd never heard of. I think the point here was that the ghostwriting is of really low quality. Overnight 10k reports are never groundbreaking or enlightening additions to human knowledge, but they need to be 90%+ accurate and polished enough to inform.
      - TeMPOraL 4y ago
        Are those 5k-10k words completely new, or are document templates part of this count? I know from experience (of on-line commenting; don't judge) this word count is entirely possible to achieve, but I can't imagine sustaining it long-term, as a part of a job.
        lupire 4y ago
        Rocket Lawyer (computerized legal doc-writing services) generates thousands of words per day, for one customer, on demand, easily. Just choose the templates and fill in your names and numbers.
derefr 4y ago
> 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. How do people still become wealthy selling "money making courses", when enough people have created "money making courses" that they are, themselves, a commodity?
- TaylorAlexander 4y ago
  You know the old saying: there's a sucker born every minute.
- hex4def6 4y ago
  What gets me is; if this was a money making opportunity, and it truly is as simple as they make it out to be, aren’t they literally creating their own competitors in this space by revealing their secret? I’m sure the argument is something like “the market is so vast, that helping others do the same won’t affect my income stream”, but that suggests The correct answer is to scale up, not populate the landscape with completion.
  - Joker_vD 4y ago
    The argument can also be that it actually benefits them by making other people richer and therefore, increasing the amount of their own customers (and the amount of money those customers are willing to spend). insert a random comment about how "market economy is not a zero-sum game"
    - derefr 4y ago
      As the recent dive in the British economy proves, increasing spending is not necessarily good for a market ;)
  - TaylorAlexander 4y ago
    Yes. It turns out that there’s a whole lot of aspects of their scheme that would turn off any informed rational person. But there’s enough people who fail that test to keep a constant flow of new customers buying in to their scheme.
pasdechance 4y ago
Absolutely agree with you.
moss2 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. The article literally says > My first theory was that the writing must have been outsourced to a content farm, where multiple individuals worked on portions of the text without caring to understand the context. But the explanation had a flaw: there’s nothing you can find on the internet if you search for “NFP chemotherapy” or “NTF Strategic Development Group”. The text didn’t merely describe a garbled version of our reality; it invented its own.
- coldtea 4y ago
  >The article literally says Yes, and the parent literally generalizes this one-off observation, puts it in context, and gives examples and even a source with a deep dive on the issue.
  - glenstein 4y ago
    I don't understand how you think this is responsive to the issue of fabrication. The article already considered the possibility of the human content farm and concluded it was unlikely on the basis of information that was completely fabricated. The fact that the commenter proceeded to generalize, show a link, etc is not responsive to that. A responsive answer would be along the lines of "well, a content farm might fabricate too because _____."
    - thom 4y ago
      "If you find that interesting, you might find this interesting" seems like a perfectly reasonable motivation for an HN comment. I think it's worth forgiving that and enjoying the broader horizons rather than treating HN threads as a way for lots of smart people to try and craft the most definitive statement about one narrow issue, while policing any deviation therefrom.
      - jefftk 4y ago
        > "If you find that interesting, you might find this interesting" seems like a perfectly reasonable motivation for an HN comment. But that's not the form of the comment. It begins with "I think there’s a good chance it was ghost written by a content farm"!
Cthulhu_ 4y ago
I suspect the first few chapters were well-written and researched with the rest slowly filling up with bulk filler; I find that with a lot of books, I read the first few chapters, get the gist of it and stop reading. I suspect a lot of people do that. That said, there's a few books in my library / to-read list that are great content cover to cover. Timeless classics, etc.
Kiro 4y ago
It's the same thing. Ghost writers are using GPT-3 (know this for a fact).
pretext 4y ago
It seems the aforementioned Mikkelson Twins are acting like meta-parasites: their scam is to sell the way how to scam somebody out of money.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
arbuge 4y ago
Homer Simpson's adage that "you're both right" might really apply in this case. Outsourcing to a content farm might very well result in lots of the text being rendered by GPT-3 and similar generative AIs. The two are certainly not mutually exclusive.

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.

planetsprite 4y ago

I get the feeling it was outsourced to a content farm, which outsourced itself to GPT-3

smilespray 4y ago
...which then outsourced itself to GPT-2...
- TaylorAlexander 4y ago
  GPT-3 is lounging on a beach somewhere while GPT-2 does all the hard work!
  - coldtea 4y ago
    or, judging from the usual IQ and age difference between those doing the actual work and their managers, probably the inverse...
- kmeisthax 4y ago
  Given the way that OpenAI sources their training corpus and the amount of people using GPT-3 I would not be surprised if GPT-4 winds up getting trained on a large amount of GPT-3 output. Think about it - the best niche GPT-3 has is generating plausible spam. If you just need a lot of text, but you don't care about what it says[0], you're going to write it using the cheapest possible tool. OpenAI's training corpus is sourced through web crawls, so all of that spam is destined to get recycled back into the next generation of GPT. [0] For example, if you want to be able to post a bunch of political spam that looks like genuine comments on a web forum. See GPT-4chan[1] as a practical example of this. [1] A tweaked version of GPT-3 using 4chan's politics board as training corpus.
  - planetsprite 4y ago
    Same with most AI image generating models. In 10 years 99% of images on the internet will be AI generated. Would it not regressive for the models to train on their own outputs? Should regulation require AI generated media label itself, or is it the responsibility to train detectors which can intuit the difference between the models and reality better than humans can?

helsinkiandrew 4y ago

This is a brilliant (but very sad) video. The ghost writers get about $2500 for a 10,000 word book researched and written in a month. I guess this is cheaper than using GPT-3 and having to prune out the flights of fancy/complete nonsense that GPT-3 can sometimes generate.

elefanten 4y ago
10,000? Could it be 100,000? I have to write 10,000 words overnight occasionally in my role. If it’s $2500 for 10k words, maybe I should be ghostwriting…
- mkl 4y ago
  What role do you have that requires that kind of output?
  - elefanten 4y ago
    Corporate strategy consulting. 1 day to write 5k-10k words on a topic you have to research from scratch is not uncommon. It's all within a broad field of expertise and a sector you're familiar with, but could be products / companies / deals you'd never heard of. I think the point here was that the ghostwriting is of really low quality. Overnight 10k reports are never groundbreaking or enlightening additions to human knowledge, but they need to be 90%+ accurate and polished enough to inform.
    - TeMPOraL 4y ago
      Are those 5k-10k words completely new, or are document templates part of this count? I know from experience (of on-line commenting; don't judge) this word count is entirely possible to achieve, but I can't imagine sustaining it long-term, as a part of a job.
      - lupire 4y ago
        Rocket Lawyer (computerized legal doc-writing services) generates thousands of words per day, for one customer, on demand, easily. Just choose the templates and fill in your names and numbers.

derefr 4y ago

> 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. How do people still become wealthy selling "money making courses", when enough people have created "money making courses" that they are, themselves, a commodity?

TaylorAlexander 4y ago
You know the old saying: there's a sucker born every minute.
hex4def6 4y ago
What gets me is; if this was a money making opportunity, and it truly is as simple as they make it out to be, aren’t they literally creating their own competitors in this space by revealing their secret? I’m sure the argument is something like “the market is so vast, that helping others do the same won’t affect my income stream”, but that suggests The correct answer is to scale up, not populate the landscape with completion.
- Joker_vD 4y ago
  The argument can also be that it actually benefits them by making other people richer and therefore, increasing the amount of their own customers (and the amount of money those customers are willing to spend). insert a random comment about how "market economy is not a zero-sum game"
  - derefr 4y ago
    As the recent dive in the British economy proves, increasing spending is not necessarily good for a market ;)
- TaylorAlexander 4y ago
  Yes. It turns out that there’s a whole lot of aspects of their scheme that would turn off any informed rational person. But there’s enough people who fail that test to keep a constant flow of new customers buying in to their scheme.

pasdechance 4y ago

Absolutely agree with you.

moss2 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. The article literally says > My first theory was that the writing must have been outsourced to a content farm, where multiple individuals worked on portions of the text without caring to understand the context. But the explanation had a flaw: there’s nothing you can find on the internet if you search for “NFP chemotherapy” or “NTF Strategic Development Group”. The text didn’t merely describe a garbled version of our reality; it invented its own.

coldtea 4y ago
>The article literally says Yes, and the parent literally generalizes this one-off observation, puts it in context, and gives examples and even a source with a deep dive on the issue.
- glenstein 4y ago
  I don't understand how you think this is responsive to the issue of fabrication. The article already considered the possibility of the human content farm and concluded it was unlikely on the basis of information that was completely fabricated. The fact that the commenter proceeded to generalize, show a link, etc is not responsive to that. A responsive answer would be along the lines of "well, a content farm might fabricate too because _____."
  - thom 4y ago
    "If you find that interesting, you might find this interesting" seems like a perfectly reasonable motivation for an HN comment. I think it's worth forgiving that and enjoying the broader horizons rather than treating HN threads as a way for lots of smart people to try and craft the most definitive statement about one narrow issue, while policing any deviation therefrom.
    - jefftk 4y ago
      > "If you find that interesting, you might find this interesting" seems like a perfectly reasonable motivation for an HN comment. But that's not the form of the comment. It begins with "I think there’s a good chance it was ghost written by a content farm"!

Cthulhu_ 4y ago

I suspect the first few chapters were well-written and researched with the rest slowly filling up with bulk filler; I find that with a lot of books, I read the first few chapters, get the gist of it and stop reading. I suspect a lot of people do that. That said, there's a few books in my library / to-read list that are great content cover to cover. Timeless classics, etc.

Kiro 4y ago

It's the same thing. Ghost writers are using GPT-3 (know this for a fact).

pretext 4y ago

It seems the aforementioned Mikkelson Twins are acting like meta-parasites: their scam is to sell the way how to scam somebody out of money.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

arbuge 4y ago

Homer Simpson's adage that "you're both right" might really apply in this case. Outsourcing to a content farm might very well result in lots of the text being rendered by GPT-3 and similar generative AIs. The two are certainly not mutually exclusive.