5 ms·

I don't think it's that scary. I mean it's basically spam isn't it? The only thing new is the volume in which you can produce surface-level-indistinguishable sp

I don't think it's that scary. I mean it's basically spam isn't it? The only thing new is the volume in which you can produce surface-level-indistinguishable spam. It is now cheaper to produce lots of flowery, meaningless text that is full of definitions. I suspect that the future of literature is more concise and externally-meaningful writing. Amazon is a terrible marketplace insofar as the rating system isn't sybil proof. this crap slips through the cracks.

fullstackchris 4y ago
Yes, for now. But what will these models look like in something like 5-10 more years?
- colonwqbang 4y ago
  Well, what does it matter? What if a market develops for autogenerated junk literature. People can buy and read what they like best. Today a lot of literature is published that I might consider to be "junk". But there are people buying and reading it and enjoying it and that's fine. Maybe it could create a new genre of literature that is tailored to the reader's interests.
  - Eisenstein 4y ago
    But that 'junk' literature you are describing that people like isn't inherently designed to be deceitful in the sense that people who want something else are its target. When you replace 'catering to a certain audience by being good at doing something they want' with 'catering to a certain audience by being good at selling them something they don't want' then you have created a system in which supply and demand is no longer operating properly.
    - Dracophoenix 4y ago
      If the product is what's desired, why does the creator or the intent of the creator behind it matter? Danielle Steele has written same erotic story for decades and still sells millions. Hallmark makes the same kind of movie every Christmas involving a city girl tired of the city and a farm boy or lumberjack who wants to settle down. I don't see what's wrong with the next big erotic hit or regurgitated romance flick being composed and directed by an AI.
NikolaNovak 4y ago
I have not yet hacked a good way to search around it though. It presents a massive time sink for me (not to mention frustration) and is probably multiplied across the population. More and more, when I search for advice, review, explanation, solution, or description, I virtually exclusively get articles/websites/books/sources that at first glance (certainly as far as Google and Bing can tell) are exactly what I am looking for. It then takes several minutes of reading to realize the author (human or not, irrelevant) does not know more about topic than I do. Then I go down the next one on the list, etc. Quantity CAN make a difference. When there were few such sources, avoiding them was annoying but easy. Today, it's HARD. Tomorrow, it may be impossible with today's tools, and I don't know that we can win such a race.
- allochthon 4y ago
  For this reason, I have tended to rely more and more on recommendations from obviously real people these days, e.g., as found in comments on Reddit, or in the New York Times's Wirecutter. The challenge with this approach is that Reddit seems to be gamed more and more by industry and other PR "bots", which makes it hard to sift wheat from chaff. But if the subreddit is not on a controversial topic, it's still possible to find disinterested recommendations, or so it seems.
  - Angelore 4y ago
    Maybe the way to go forward would be something in the vein of a book club? Delegating such a monstrous task to one person will just bury them in the sea of information, so parallelization looks like a good compromise (meet up once a week/month and share worthwhile books you have found). Unfortunately, generation of garbage information can still far outpace such a system with few nodes...
    - lsc 4y ago
      We have a super-robust set of tools for this for fiction; I'm still chewing through the list generated by 'all Pulitzer prizes for fiction written during my lifetime' - and all of them have been quite good. ('the Orphan Master's Son' so far has been my least favorite, though it was still really quite good. And because these were chosen /at the time/ you get a glimpse into what people were thinking at the time. Mailer's "The Executioner's Song" was a wonderful book in it's own right, but I think was also a historical slice of 'the discourse' at the time.) For Movies, I find that Ebert aligns a lot with my taste. If he says it's good, it's really good. I mean, that doesn't help with recent movies, but there's more than enough of the old good stuff. (There's a lot to be said for consuming old media; it gives it time for critical opinion to stabilize. ) I mean, of course, all of these methods will leave out a lot of really good stuff. But... that's kind of the point; there's way more media than I can consume. There are professional reviewers that can give you more really good media than you could consume in a reasonable lifetime. I'm not quite halfway through the 'Pulitzer prizes awarded in my lifetime' list, and I've started a few years back. (I mean, I was 40 or so by the time I started, and so I had read a few of the books just 'cause they were popular books that people recommend. McCarthy's "The Road" is exactly the sort of thing I like, so I read it before on another person's recommendation. But still, like, you see some really great work outside your genre; I'm not normally a romance novel kinda guy, but Lurie's "Foreign Affairs" was absolutely beautiful, and absolutely not a thing I would have read without this project.) I haven't completely solved the problem for technical books, just 'cause people who have good up to date knowledge of an area have often built up that knowledge over time. they read some books but those books are long out of date, they've brought their skills up to date with mailing lists, which they then vet based on their knowledge of the reputation of the person posting. I mean, I think it's pretty easy for the non-perishables, "The C Programming Language" is a thing you should read if you work with computers. But which tomb on docker is up to date enough and pretty good? that can be a difficult question to answer, and is often answered based on the author's reputation for other technical work they do, which usually tells me something about the accuracy of the book, but doesn't tell me if it's well written or if it's up to date enough. (On the other hand, if you are well known for writing a big part of the subsystem I wanna learn, eh, I don't feel too bad about giving you money for a book even if I later decide that the book is not written in a way I find engaging, like, you earned it and I'll buy another book.) And... I dunno. often you can get sample chapters, and that gets you a pretty good idea of how engaging the writing is. I mean, one way to address it is to start at the base... "go read the gang of four design patterns books, and then use your knowledge of object orientedness to make sense of modern object-oriented configuration management systems" - which does make some sense. But still, I should spend the time to find the tech book awards that match up with my taste.
munificent 4y ago
> I mean it's basically spam isn't it? The only thing new is the volume in which you can produce surface-level-indistinguishable spam. An ocean is "basically water" but the experience of being alone in the middle of the ocean is fundamentally different from standing in a puddle.
crispyambulance 4y ago
The fake books in the OP article are all used in garbage NFT scams. They're intended to produce an air of legitimacy for whoever publishes them. Whether they're actually sold or not is meaningless. It's rather all about clickbaitability and their use as a "legitimacy-dressing" surrounding some scammers' call-to-action button. I think it is somewhat scary that these things can't just be instantly pulled from wherever they're marketed. They're just "tools-of-the-trade" for scammers. They serve no honest purpose.
- zoklet-enjoyer 4y ago
  I doubt it. Where's your proof?

fullstackchris 4y ago

Yes, for now. But what will these models look like in something like 5-10 more years?

colonwqbang 4y ago
Well, what does it matter? What if a market develops for autogenerated junk literature. People can buy and read what they like best. Today a lot of literature is published that I might consider to be "junk". But there are people buying and reading it and enjoying it and that's fine. Maybe it could create a new genre of literature that is tailored to the reader's interests.
- Eisenstein 4y ago
  But that 'junk' literature you are describing that people like isn't inherently designed to be deceitful in the sense that people who want something else are its target. When you replace 'catering to a certain audience by being good at doing something they want' with 'catering to a certain audience by being good at selling them something they don't want' then you have created a system in which supply and demand is no longer operating properly.
  - Dracophoenix 4y ago
    If the product is what's desired, why does the creator or the intent of the creator behind it matter? Danielle Steele has written same erotic story for decades and still sells millions. Hallmark makes the same kind of movie every Christmas involving a city girl tired of the city and a farm boy or lumberjack who wants to settle down. I don't see what's wrong with the next big erotic hit or regurgitated romance flick being composed and directed by an AI.

NikolaNovak 4y ago

I have not yet hacked a good way to search around it though. It presents a massive time sink for me (not to mention frustration) and is probably multiplied across the population. More and more, when I search for advice, review, explanation, solution, or description, I virtually exclusively get articles/websites/books/sources that at first glance (certainly as far as Google and Bing can tell) are exactly what I am looking for. It then takes several minutes of reading to realize the author (human or not, irrelevant) does not know more about topic than I do. Then I go down the next one on the list, etc. Quantity CAN make a difference. When there were few such sources, avoiding them was annoying but easy. Today, it's HARD. Tomorrow, it may be impossible with today's tools, and I don't know that we can win such a race.

allochthon 4y ago
For this reason, I have tended to rely more and more on recommendations from obviously real people these days, e.g., as found in comments on Reddit, or in the New York Times's Wirecutter. The challenge with this approach is that Reddit seems to be gamed more and more by industry and other PR "bots", which makes it hard to sift wheat from chaff. But if the subreddit is not on a controversial topic, it's still possible to find disinterested recommendations, or so it seems.
- Angelore 4y ago
  Maybe the way to go forward would be something in the vein of a book club? Delegating such a monstrous task to one person will just bury them in the sea of information, so parallelization looks like a good compromise (meet up once a week/month and share worthwhile books you have found). Unfortunately, generation of garbage information can still far outpace such a system with few nodes...
  - lsc 4y ago
    We have a super-robust set of tools for this for fiction; I'm still chewing through the list generated by 'all Pulitzer prizes for fiction written during my lifetime' - and all of them have been quite good. ('the Orphan Master's Son' so far has been my least favorite, though it was still really quite good. And because these were chosen /at the time/ you get a glimpse into what people were thinking at the time. Mailer's "The Executioner's Song" was a wonderful book in it's own right, but I think was also a historical slice of 'the discourse' at the time.) For Movies, I find that Ebert aligns a lot with my taste. If he says it's good, it's really good. I mean, that doesn't help with recent movies, but there's more than enough of the old good stuff. (There's a lot to be said for consuming old media; it gives it time for critical opinion to stabilize. ) I mean, of course, all of these methods will leave out a lot of really good stuff. But... that's kind of the point; there's way more media than I can consume. There are professional reviewers that can give you more really good media than you could consume in a reasonable lifetime. I'm not quite halfway through the 'Pulitzer prizes awarded in my lifetime' list, and I've started a few years back. (I mean, I was 40 or so by the time I started, and so I had read a few of the books just 'cause they were popular books that people recommend. McCarthy's "The Road" is exactly the sort of thing I like, so I read it before on another person's recommendation. But still, like, you see some really great work outside your genre; I'm not normally a romance novel kinda guy, but Lurie's "Foreign Affairs" was absolutely beautiful, and absolutely not a thing I would have read without this project.) I haven't completely solved the problem for technical books, just 'cause people who have good up to date knowledge of an area have often built up that knowledge over time. they read some books but those books are long out of date, they've brought their skills up to date with mailing lists, which they then vet based on their knowledge of the reputation of the person posting. I mean, I think it's pretty easy for the non-perishables, "The C Programming Language" is a thing you should read if you work with computers. But which tomb on docker is up to date enough and pretty good? that can be a difficult question to answer, and is often answered based on the author's reputation for other technical work they do, which usually tells me something about the accuracy of the book, but doesn't tell me if it's well written or if it's up to date enough. (On the other hand, if you are well known for writing a big part of the subsystem I wanna learn, eh, I don't feel too bad about giving you money for a book even if I later decide that the book is not written in a way I find engaging, like, you earned it and I'll buy another book.) And... I dunno. often you can get sample chapters, and that gets you a pretty good idea of how engaging the writing is. I mean, one way to address it is to start at the base... "go read the gang of four design patterns books, and then use your knowledge of object orientedness to make sense of modern object-oriented configuration management systems" - which does make some sense. But still, I should spend the time to find the tech book awards that match up with my taste.

munificent 4y ago

> I mean it's basically spam isn't it? The only thing new is the volume in which you can produce surface-level-indistinguishable spam. An ocean is "basically water" but the experience of being alone in the middle of the ocean is fundamentally different from standing in a puddle.

crispyambulance 4y ago

The fake books in the OP article are all used in garbage NFT scams. They're intended to produce an air of legitimacy for whoever publishes them. Whether they're actually sold or not is meaningless. It's rather all about clickbaitability and their use as a "legitimacy-dressing" surrounding some scammers' call-to-action button. I think it is somewhat scary that these things can't just be instantly pulled from wherever they're marketed. They're just "tools-of-the-trade" for scammers. They serve no honest purpose.

zoklet-enjoyer 4y ago
I doubt it. Where's your proof?