14 ms·
Tom Lesley has published 40 books in 2023, all with 100% positive reviews
- low_tech_love 4y agoThat is, all 100% positive reviews except this one, obviously: https://www.amazon.com/product-reviews/B0BWVH451G/ref=acr_dp_hist_1?ie=UTF8&filterByStar=one_star&reviewerType=all_reviews#reviews-filter-bar https://www.amazon.com/product-reviews/B0BWVH451G/ref=acr_dp...
- PaulHoule 4y agoIt's what you expect but most of these books are under "Kindle Unlimited" where people's expectation for quality is probably low (I didn't pay for this particular book so why complain about it?) I've been concerned a long time that the "buffet model" (going back to cable TV) leads to declining quality.
- sammitrovic 4y agoOk, this is funny
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- JustSomeNobody 4y agoThis can't be bringing in much more than beer money, though, right? There aren't many reviews, so I can't imagine too many people are buying these.
- low_tech_love 4y agoI guess not, but considering he can "write" 10 books a month, it might be worth it anyway...?
- _the_inflator 4y agoThere is a whole industry called "Low Content Books (on Amazon)". In short, this resembles hosting a somewhat successful blog.
- bdcravens 4y agoI thought Low Content Books were more like journals and the like using on-demand printing.
- mdp2021 4y agoIt would create * an inflation in the offer; * a staggering amount of noise; * a bubble that would conclude with the creation of services like "Instant book generator". (I am not even mentioning the next step, to avoid seeding bad ideas.)
- minton 4y agoIt seems like the title should mention that these books were largely written by ChatGPT or some other LLM.
- low_tech_love 4y agoYes, my idea was to leave the conclusion to the reader. :) But obviously, yes.
- htag 4y agoPeople seem to be failing the Turing Test in all sorts of new and exciting ways.
- low_tech_love 4y agoSo many questions: Are these books copyright by Tom Lesley, ChatGPT, OpenAI, ...? Should he share the money with OpenAI, or with the internet? Do we need to update the definitions of plagiarism? So it goes.
- somenameforme 4y agoThis [1] is, to my knowledge, the latest word on who'd own the copyright. And the answer is most likely the author, with the second most likely candidate being nobody. In a nutshell, "AI" generated content itself cannot be copyrighted since the process is carried out by software instead of a human, and software cannot be assigned ownership of copyright. However, material that is sufficiently recombined in a 'creative way' can be copyrighted. The case/example mentioned is that a single image from image generation software cannot be copyrighted, but a series of related images being used to tell a story can be copyrighted, because it's a human carrying out the creative task. [1] - https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2023/03/us-issues-guidance-on-copyrighting-ai-assisted-artwork/ https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2023/03/us-issues-guidan...
- layer8 4y ago> software cannot be assigned ownership of copyright. More precisely, only human works are subject to copyright. The law simply doesn’t apply to works by animals, AIs, or anything else, even when they are as creative as a human.
- kube-system 4y agoHowever, a human can use animals or AIs (or anything they want) as a tool in their human created work.
- layer8 4y agoYes, but copyright requires the human to have significant original input into the work for it to be eligible. The human can’t just delegate to the animal or AI.
- dahart 4y agoThis was an inevitable outcome of ChatGPT/LLMS, no? I expect to see a lot more of this by a lot of different people. I feel like a ton of the examples I’ve seen to date are effectively regurgitating Stack Overflow (sometimes verbatim!) and in a kind of abstract way, I feel like this is exactly the same as someone opportunistically publishing a bunch of auto-generated books… publishing a model trained on a bunch of web sites is effectively re-publishing these web sites with a different interface.
- low_tech_love 4y agoIt is the same, yes. Right now the way I see it is that we are off-loading noise generation from humans to AIs; it's not that noise didn't exist before, it's just probably going to come more frequently and in a less-recognizable way.
- tivert 4y agoThis is actually a spin on an existing git-rich-quick scam (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=biYciU1uiUw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=biYciU1uiUw). Version 1.0 had people hiring low cost ghostwriters for hundreds of dollars to bang out a book on some SEO topic. Now you use the same playbook with "AI," with far less upfront cost.
- ChatGTP 4y agoPlayboy? I think you meant “playbook”?
- makk 4y agoMaybe the playbook is in Playboy?
- muststopmyths 4y agoThey did have great articles
- tivert 4y ago
- ccleve 4y agoAll the books have approximately the same number of reviews. Is Amazon completely uninterested in dealing with fake reviews?
- mkl95 4y agoMore positive reviews = more sales. They are not just uninterested in dealing with fake reviews, their algorithms reward products with positive reviews regardless of their authenticity. Of course if you report it, they eventually deal with it, as long as it is required by some law.
- rcarr 4y agoOnly if they’re taking a very short term perspective. If the customer is left feeling like they’re consistently getting scammed, they will stop shopping at Amazon and take their money elsewhere. I highly, highly doubt Amazon is letting these through the net on purpose.
- armitron 4y agoIt doesn't seem like they care. For the last coupe of years, their packing of books for mailing has been so bad (end result that the books one received would be severely damaged) that I've stopped buying books from Amazon altogether (I'd already stopped buying anything but books due to bad reviews and scams). Most of my friends/work colleagures have done the same.
- mkl95 4y agoThere's a threshold they have to respect to avoid damaging their own reputation. It's exactly the same thing Google do by offering misleading results to increase traffic and engagement. Google are just a bit more elegant about it.
- foobarian 4y agoAmazon has a huge range of products for sale, and it is easy to get a feel for what works better there than not. At the end of the day all the reviews and UI doesn't matter as much as that it can actually ship for free and arrive in 1 or 2 days, and that returns are as easy as giving the item to a clerk at a store (no rewrapping or shipping fees needed). This is their only competitive advantage IMO.
- emehex 4y agoCuriously most of the books have 31 reviews. And for those that have written reviews all of the Reviewers have names with the capitalization: "John smith", "First last".
- low_tech_love 4y agoYes, all very sophisticated. Surely even the best trained AIs at this small company called Amazon couldn't possibly detect such exploits!
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- qzw 4y agoYou mean Alexa? She’s too busy playing the wrong song for me on my Echo to deal with such trivialities.
- justusthane 4y ago"Hey Siri, timer five minutes" "Okay, now playing '5 Minutes (B-B-B Bombing Mix)' by Bonzo Goes to Washington"
- Bedon292 4y agoI noticed the same. A good chunk of them also have 28.
- absoluteunit1 4y agoThis is comedy From one review: “ One paragraph starts with "As an AI language model I can't....". Unfortunately we don't have an AI who can correct a book written by an AI. Fortunately I can send it back.” Sauce: https://www.amazon.com/product-reviews/B0BWVH451G/ref=acr_dp_hist_1?ie=UTF8&filterByStar=one_star&reviewerType=all_reviews#reviews-filter-bar https://www.amazon.com/product-reviews/B0BWVH451G/ref=acr_dp...
- low_tech_love 4y agoYeah, that was the review that triggered me to search the author up. :)
- jruohonen 4y agoThis is golden. Just as I expected this LLM craze to go down.
- campbel 4y agoGrifters gonna grift.
- qzw 4y agoOk, free SAAS idea: scan your AI generated text for telltale signs! $9/mo Pro, $59/mo Business, $499/mo Enterprise. Shouldn’t take more than a few lines of shell script.
- azubinski 4y agoSo, the future is now! Now anyone lazy enough (to even not remove the phrase "As an AI language model I can't..." from the generated text) can "write books". And these "books" will be fundamentally plagiarism and a bunch of trivia by design. Isn't that wonderful? It certainly is wonderful!
- azubinski 4y agoOh no, that's not all. There are also fake positive reviews. Now everything is really great!
- low_tech_love 4y agoThe funny part is that he didn't even care to generate a different number of reviews for each book, or to add a few 4's in just to make it more realistic. He used the exact same number of reviews for many books, and all are full 5's!
- squarefoot 4y agoThat would be the result if it was automated, such as either a script or the AI itself instructed to write books on various subjects, selling them on Amazon, and then reviewing them. I don't see what can be done to stop this trend since it's 100% certain it will become ubiquitous.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- jruohonen 4y agoWonderful indeed! I don't mind other people making money, but this thing is getting out of hands: https://www.businessinsider.com/chatgpt-courses-instruction-academic-lucrative-side-hustle-2023-4?r=US&IR=T https://www.businessinsider.com/chatgpt-courses-instruction-... Not only have YouTubers found the same "business model", but now there are also people "educating" other people to "write" e-books and use image generators for book covers. Of course, you get also the AI generated promotion material with these courses.
- _the_inflator 4y agoIf you want to learn more about this business model, search for "Low Content Books (on Amazon)".
- mkl95 4y agoSome tree was chopped to print this garbage. Think about it.
- anderspitman 4y agoA huge step forward honestly. Way more efficient than proof of work at wasting resources.
- saulpw 4y agoThey're ebooks. So no trees chopped. Just oil burnt.
- mkl95 4y agoTop comment has a link to a video of a dead tree version.
- thih9 4y agoIs it legal to publish books with content copied from chatgpt output? Is it possible to prove (in a legal sense) that this content comes from chatgpt?
- low_tech_love 4y agoVery good question; the original review that prompted (pun intended) me to search the author up certainly proves that at least one of his books are from ChatGPT: https://www.amazon.com/product-reviews/B0BWVH451G/ref=acr_dp_hist_1?ie=UTF8&filterByStar=one_star&reviewerType=all_reviews#reviews-filter-bar https://www.amazon.com/product-reviews/B0BWVH451G/ref=acr_dp... And obviously he did not really even attempt to hide anything. Whether it's legal or not: I don't think we have a clear, 100% obvious understanding of the consequences right now, but I'm pretty sure OpenAI couldn't care less. Suing people who use ChatGPT to publish meaningless books would surely not do them any good. Who else might care enough?
- inetsee 4y agoThe Copyright Office has decreed that AI generated content cannot be Copyrighted. If these books have a copyright listing then they are a violation of the rules. I doubt if the "author" is at risk for legal repurcussions, beyond not being able to sue for copyright violation.
- stonemetal12 4y agoI have yet to see a legal argument that says the output of ChatGPT is free from derivative works claims. So you can't assert ownership of the output, but that doesn't mean someone else can't assert rights on the grounds of derivative works. It is one of the reasons I don't see Copilot going anywhere. Any company that uses it can't assert ownership over their own IP, and if Copilot accidently reproduces a chunk of training data verbatim then someone else can.
- circuit10 4y agoI doubt many codebases are 100% generated by Copilot with no human input, and it’s not like having some Copilot snippets in your code is going to invalidate the copyright on the whole thing… I think that’s like being worried that writing parts of a book in a public domain font is going to invalidate the copyright on it The copying verbatim thing is valid though, although they have mitigations against that
- sixhobbits 4y agoI wrote some more thoughts based on this at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35688499 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35688499
- AraceliHarker 4y agoEven if an AI could write a Zadie Smith-esque novel, or a Steven Pinker-esque science book, I wouldn't want to pay a dollar for that.
- orbital-decay 4y agoNonsense book scams is a time-tested Amazon tradition. I just hope that the gibberish won't contaminate the free/pirate archives (which are much harder to profit from).
- birdyrooster 4y agoTom Lesley is a pseudonym for Martin Shkreli or some other person hiding their identity.
- jamesgill 4y agoAmazon reviews were exploited and devalued years ago. I don't mean there aren't genuine reviews; I mean they've been gamed to the point that they don't really matter anymore. Amazon knows this.
- HPsquared 4y agoOf all products, a book written by an LLM raises the "fake review suspicion" index in my mind.
- ajonit 4y agoTrue that. It is so bad that once I sent a irrefutable proof of the seller incentivising reviews, Amazon didn’t take any action at all.
- camhart 4y ago> irrefutable proof Anything coming directly from a customer is probably refutable. For example, the incentives I normally see are on these little cards they include with the product encouraging reviews in exchange for a gift card or something similar. What's to stop a competitor from falsely reporting it using a fake incentive card they created? Amazon could take your report then actually open the product and see if the incentive card is actually stored with every product. But that's a bigger task than just trusting the proof you sent in.
- willcipriano 4y ago> What's to stop a competitor from falsely reporting it using a fake incentive card they created? Order one themselves, open it up to see if it contains the card.
- camhart 4y ago> Amazon could take your report then actually open the product and see if the incentive card is actually stored with every product. But that's a bigger task than just trusting the proof you sent in.
- xupybd 4y agoAre they purchasing all the positive reviews?
- ilamont 4y agoSearch YouTube for ChatGPT and KDP (Amazon's self-publishing platform) and you'll see hundreds of videos that show how its done, often with ridiculous promises of thousands of dollars per month in "passive income." Some have even started using Midjourney for the covers or kids books illustrations. The YouTubers are often pumping expensive "masterclasses" to suckers looking to make an easy buck. Amazon does not nothing to shut down the YouTubers or the grifters publishing these books. Anything that adds friction or requires human intervention - whether it's policies with teeth or staff to issue takedowns - reduces the bottom line.
- asddubs 4y agoThe folding ideas video on these "masterclasses" is really good. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=biYciU1uiUw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=biYciU1uiUw This is about using underpaid ghostwriters to write the books, but obviously using AI is just the next logical step. The funny thing is that even before people were using AI, this sort of thing obviously did not work
- adolph 4y agoThat is perfect. Say there is something topical approaching which will might require output of [ A | B | ... ]. Just prompt output for all possible outcomes and press publish on the ones that match the actual outcome (in this member of the multiverse).
- spaceman_2020 4y agoI highly encourage everyone online to visit BlackHatWorld forum at least once. Really opens your mind to the amount of grift and scams and shady stuff that happens online.
- lnsru 4y agoLinkedIn is already full of tax reduction and early retirement advisors. No need to go to BlackHatWorld forum.
- janalsncm 4y ago
- blueridge 4y agoMy hope is that the AI content flood will fuel a real revival of literary journals and print magazines full of thoughtful essays and serious book reviews.
- dzonga 4y agoand face 2 face discussion forums. like face the nation etc debates.
- asimjalis 4y agoFor whatever it’s worth according to Publisher Rocket the books are making single digits per month.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- throwaway049 4y agoAmazon then recommended me the almost-as-prolific Caroline Manta. She's either a real person, or the scammer went to trouble of putting up a LinkedIn profile saying she's looking for web design work. I feel sorry for anyone who didn't know better handing over real money for this trash.
- jon-wood 4y agoI searched for a Kindle book I wanted to read the other night. The results that came up were the book in question, and a book titled “The Book’s Title: eBook”, with exactly the same cover, for 10% of the price. It’s also got a different author, and is four pages long. How is this stuff not being automatically detected and flagged for review?
- ChuckMcM 4y agoIt is an interesting hack, buy 5 star reviews and use ChatGPT to write books. Amazon "print on demand" service to make physical books for you. I wish folks like this would do a transparent web site on how much they made on the scam[1] [1] It is a scam because we know ChatGPT will produce authoritative prose that is 100% provably not correct, so these aren't "books" so much as they are "printouts" being sold as books.
- jsdwarf 4y agoHm... The back cover of the data mesh book reads: "Data Mesh: Architecting Data Infrastructure for Agility and Innovation with Data Mesh" is a groundbreaking book that presents a new paradigm for managing data at scale. Written by Zhamak Dehghani, a software engineer and thought leader at ThoughtWorks, the book ..."
- ycombiredd 4y agoShe is the author of the O’Reilly Data Mesh book, but I don’t think it has that as its title.
- AlbertCory 4y agoTom Lesley! The man's a writing machine. I wonder if we can get him to do an Author Q&A. As for recognizing the voice of AI: I asked AI to write its response in such a way that Stack Overflow's algorithm wouldn't detect it as AI. Fail!
- capitainenemo 4y agoSo obviously what he's doing is unethical. The quality of the information is pretty bad... But what about, say, selling a coffee table art book. "Visions of the Future" - like 50 good quality scifi images with captions generated by, oh, Midjourney? 15-20% profit margin on a $20 print on demand book... Wouldn't do it myself but it doesn't feel wrong? I assume people would pay for that just for the art itself in a physical form, it doesn't have accuracy requirements or anything..
- VincentEvans 4y ago“If only there was a way to somehow detect all this spam and garbage on out platform” - Amazon’s tenured principal engineers with 500k salaries, probably. “Try banning items where every review is 5 stars and every reviewer has a middle name for some reason.” - me to the rescue.
- hgsgm 4y agoFor the Kindle Unlimited: 1. How did it get into the program? 2. Does it get paid a share everytime someone browses one of its books, before realizing it is a fake book?
- dacoinminster 4y agoI accidentally fell for one of these AI-written books a few weeks ago, when I bought a book for work. It appears I'm still the only negative review: https://www.amazon.com/gp/customer-reviews/R3FM33XXWCEZV5?ref=pf_ov_at_pdctrvw_srp https://www.amazon.com/gp/customer-reviews/R3FM33XXWCEZV5?re...
- low_tech_love 4y agoAt least it seems this author only wrote this book, and he seems like a legit person if you click on his name. For all I know Tom Lesley doesn't even exist.
- Borrible 4y agoHa, rookie! Need no reviews, just dedication... ... and automation. https://openlibrary.org/authors/OL539875A/Philip_M._Parker https://openlibrary.org/authors/OL539875A/Philip_M._Parker
- data_janitor 3y agoSo in the future we will have AI generated material that gets parsed by AI summarisation and tldr type apps where does the human fit in again?