6 ms·

Amazon Is Being Flooded with Books Written Entirely by AI

59 points by redbell 3y ago

ftxbro 3y ago
Maybe it means books weren't all that important and they should indeed have been blog posts all along, like on substack. For example as Sam Bankman-Fried has said: "I think, if you wrote a book, you f---ed up, and it should have been a six-paragraph blog post."
- coffeebeqn 3y ago
  Sure let’s take life advice from Sam Bankman-Fried
- caconym_ 3y ago
  > I think, if you wrote a book, you f---ed up, and it should have been a six-paragraph blog post. pardon my french but this is one of the dumbest fucking things i've ever read which makes complete sense given where it's coming from but christ almighty nobody should be taking this crap to heart.
- deathgripsss 3y ago
  Ah yes SBF, the paragon of intellect. Edit: I just saw your username... Fuck me
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- musicale 3y ago
  Nice one. Username checks out. ;-) Though I have read a few non-fiction books that probably could have been condensed into a single chapter. Unfortunately there doesn't seem to be much of a market for mini-books like that. For that matter, I've also read fantasy novels that were longer than the entire Lord of the Rings and might have been better as a shorter novella.
- frob 3y ago
  I cannot tell if I'm the victim of Poe's law right now. If this is satire, it is brilliant. If it's not, I highly suggest taking a long hard look in the mirror.
jimmygrapes 3y ago
It has felt this way to me for years now, really. Somewhere in the last decade or so the top X of almost any genre I enjoy (which spans a large range of fiction) has been... lackluster. Not just in the hipster contrarian sense of "popular therefore bad" but also the lists of books touted as "critics adore this obscure gem" and crowd-sourced "most read/reviewed" and all in between. Certainly a few standouts here and there. For me the primary issue has been the words, the lexicon, the cadence; it's flat. Seems like writers have learned to write and learned what's right, they've been writing and not reading. There's not much exploration of the form, it's all so grammatically correct. Maybe it's the fault of the editors or typesetters, if those still exist. It's boring, either way. Secondly it's the themes. Struggle and oppression have always been plot drivers, but it seems like a vast majority of works published in the last decade are just slight variations on "oppressed person struggles to exist within the System, then finds a way to overcome; The End." The Hero's Journey highly compressed, lossily. Luckily there are hundreds of years and countless intriguing novels written before all this, more than I could ever hope to read in my lifetime. Maybe this is what it is like to age: to recognize truly that nothing is new under the sun; so, go forth by going back, seek that which was once new in its time.
- progend 3y ago
  There seems to be a singular style that most modern authors use. It’s probably to gain maximum readership. Also I wonder how often top selling authors use a ghost writer.
- wrp 3y ago
  > ...the top X of almost any genre I enjoy (which spans a large range of fiction) has been... lackluster. I read an article a few years ago from a literary editor complaining how MFA programs had made his job harder. He said his job used to be sorting a few gems out of a mountain of rubbish, but now he has the more time consuming task of sorting through a mountain of mediocre work. His point was that MFA programs can teach you how to not be awful, but not make you great.
- treeman79 3y ago
  LitRPG category suffers a lot from this. A number of good series. Then tons of ones that are basically. I wake up in a new world. I punched a rabbit. I gained a level. I walk 10 feet. Walking got a skill level. Oh good I got that walking level just in time to not die to a snake. I gain a level in poison resist. … I punched a a dragon and gained a level. Oh crap, umm a plot. Yeah. Let’s add one in last chapter so there is some reason to have a sequel. That’ll be 15 dollars for Audible download.
sourcecodeplz 3y ago
Whatever, there are tens of thousands of amazing books since before 10-20 years ago. Not to mention project Gutenberg.
NBJack 3y ago
Spotify is facing a similar crisis. AI generated songs being listened to by bots, presumably to generate money. https://cointelegraph.com/news/spotify-reportedly-deletes-thousands-of-ai-generated-songs https://cointelegraph.com/news/spotify-reportedly-deletes-th...
- nr2x 3y ago
  Love it.
- chii 3y ago
  if the song is being listened to, and thus generate money, is there any real reason for removing them?
  - sjs7007 3y ago
    It's being listened to by bots on loop instead of multiple user accounts. So effectively revenue/user is going down with this I'd guess.
  - xcdzvyn 3y ago
    Not for as long as advertisers are onboard, which wouldn't be very long if they don't curb it.
  - mock-possum 3y ago
    It’s being listened to by bots. Advertisers are paying for their ads to be listened to by humans.
- hoseja 3y ago
  Very Žižkian.
- dTal 3y ago
  Seems to me like it's the listening bots that are the problem, rather than the AI-generated music? And presumably, fraudulent listening bots were a problem well before now. I suppose there's a case for removal if the only listeners were bots...
theage 3y ago
This is DAY ONE of the content explosion. People will soon learn they can skip the middlemen and generate yourself any niche theme at all. The story gen a.i. are only going to get better day by day. If you must have new published books (allegedly human authored, edited, and curated for cultural relevancy) you will almost have to use your own a.i. anyway. You'll need to trust it to summarize the work or "human" reviews, detect/fix repulsive flaws, and get/generate any recommendations according to your satisfaction.
- jstarfish 3y ago
  > People will soon learn they can skip the middlemen and generate yourself any niche theme at all. It's funny to see early Stable Diffusion threads go from "lol we have the power to see EVERYBODY naked" to "ok this is boring now" over the course of just two years. A sandwich you make yourself never tastes as good as one made by someone else. When you know exactly how it was constructed, by the time you take a bite you already know what to expect. Nothing is left to the imagination. There's no thrill of having your expectations challenged and discovering new flavors. (The best tasting sandwich is the one you steal from the workplace refrigerator. Then, the thrill is in the chase.)
  - theage 3y ago
    True if you are fiddling with the whole work. No one would expect to find that entertaining immediately after generation - maybe a year out after you forget it. For now the prompts are deliberate creations of mind but in due time they could be largely auto generated (perhaps even blurred from the user) like feathers in a cap you collect and never have to look at. They will learn how to surprise us to a delightful degree with levers that don't reveal all the magic.
briga 3y ago
One day an AI will write a brilliant book. It will write something as good as the most competent and insightful human writer out there. And it will write a thousand more. The problem is that for every good book there will be a thousand bad books. What good is a good book if no one has time to discover it and read it? No one has time to get through all the good books written by humans, why are we worried about books written by AI? Since the Gutenberg days there has never been a shortage of written material to be digested. For hundreds of years there has been way more written material than any one person could read in a lifetime. So the problem has been to pick out what is most worth reading out of the millions of books you could be reading instead. The situation now is no different, except that we should have stricter standards on what information we allow into our heads. There will always be value in a well-curated library (will AIs curate the libraries too?)
- tetris11 3y ago
  Who will curate though. Before the internet you'd read a book based on a recommendation from a friend, a sibling, a trusted figure. Now, in this increasingly isolating world, we get recommendations from small subreddits, maybe a HN post, and of course the subconscious prompting of adverts that seep through our filters. An AI could be the writer and recommender in all those modern scenarios. Will this mean we revert back to listening to our friends and family over online opinion? Probably not, because they're no less exposed than we are to online recomendation creep.
  - giardini 3y ago
    What is needed is a ChatGPT-based editor!
    - just_boost_it 3y ago
      And maybe some ChatGPT readers so we have an audience that can read at scale.
- nly 3y ago
  There was a recent episode of the "The Last Leg" here in the UK where they announced they would be slipping in an AI produced joke in to the show, and revealed it at the end. Not going to lie, i didn't spot it.
jasfi 3y ago
What matters if that if they aren't very good, or contain glaring mistakes, they will receive really bad ratings.
- quantified 3y ago
  The GPT-generated ratings will be flattering and numerous. I suppose some ratings bots will be deployed negatively. Really good negative reviews could be entertaining.
  - jasfi 3y ago
    That is going to be the new threat. There will be bots that can sign-up for new accounts and pass the 'are you human' test. The only defense left is credit card or government ID verification.
Borrible 3y ago
Pondering an AI book blurb expander/review reverse engineerer Take the blurb and some reviews of a book you're interested in, feed it to an AI, and let it write your own version. Could be fun. Of, course a lot of blurbs and reviews have nothing to to with the book in question...
- dr_whom 3y ago
  I doubt it but that would be nice.
gumballindie 3y ago
Scams, fakes, counterfeits. Amazon is the alibaba of the west. Hopefully randomly generated books will be the straw that breaks the camel’s back.
interleave 3y ago
The flood began years ago with low-priced ghostwriting services. I'd venture to say that most of the non-fiction ebooks, and especially the best-sellers for Kindle, are published by multi-nom-de-plume "grindset" publishers. In 2017, a 10,000-word "booklet" on any non-fiction topic cost $200. That usually took about ten days from order to completion. The content was pretty much the same you'd now get via LLMs.
- Ekaros 3y ago
  Sometimes I browse books for Kindle and sort by cheapest. And see some entire multi-book series for a few dollars... Either you get volume, or you had to produce those very cheaply to it make any sense at all.

59 points by redbell 3y ago

Maybe it means books weren't all that important and they should indeed have been blog posts all along, like on substack. For example as Sam Bankman-Fried has said: "I think, if you wrote a book, you f---ed up, and it should have been a six-paragraph blog post."

coffeebeqn 3y ago
Sure let’s take life advice from Sam Bankman-Fried
caconym_ 3y ago
> I think, if you wrote a book, you f---ed up, and it should have been a six-paragraph blog post. pardon my french but this is one of the dumbest fucking things i've ever read which makes complete sense given where it's coming from but christ almighty nobody should be taking this crap to heart.
deathgripsss 3y ago
Ah yes SBF, the paragon of intellect. Edit: I just saw your username... Fuck me
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
musicale 3y ago
Nice one. Username checks out. ;-) Though I have read a few non-fiction books that probably could have been condensed into a single chapter. Unfortunately there doesn't seem to be much of a market for mini-books like that. For that matter, I've also read fantasy novels that were longer than the entire Lord of the Rings and might have been better as a shorter novella.
frob 3y ago
I cannot tell if I'm the victim of Poe's law right now. If this is satire, it is brilliant. If it's not, I highly suggest taking a long hard look in the mirror.

jimmygrapes 3y ago

It has felt this way to me for years now, really. Somewhere in the last decade or so the top X of almost any genre I enjoy (which spans a large range of fiction) has been... lackluster. Not just in the hipster contrarian sense of "popular therefore bad" but also the lists of books touted as "critics adore this obscure gem" and crowd-sourced "most read/reviewed" and all in between. Certainly a few standouts here and there. For me the primary issue has been the words, the lexicon, the cadence; it's flat. Seems like writers have learned to write and learned what's right, they've been writing and not reading. There's not much exploration of the form, it's all so grammatically correct. Maybe it's the fault of the editors or typesetters, if those still exist. It's boring, either way. Secondly it's the themes. Struggle and oppression have always been plot drivers, but it seems like a vast majority of works published in the last decade are just slight variations on "oppressed person struggles to exist within the System, then finds a way to overcome; The End." The Hero's Journey highly compressed, lossily. Luckily there are hundreds of years and countless intriguing novels written before all this, more than I could ever hope to read in my lifetime. Maybe this is what it is like to age: to recognize truly that nothing is new under the sun; so, go forth by going back, seek that which was once new in its time.

progend 3y ago
There seems to be a singular style that most modern authors use. It’s probably to gain maximum readership. Also I wonder how often top selling authors use a ghost writer.
wrp 3y ago
> ...the top X of almost any genre I enjoy (which spans a large range of fiction) has been... lackluster. I read an article a few years ago from a literary editor complaining how MFA programs had made his job harder. He said his job used to be sorting a few gems out of a mountain of rubbish, but now he has the more time consuming task of sorting through a mountain of mediocre work. His point was that MFA programs can teach you how to not be awful, but not make you great.
treeman79 3y ago
LitRPG category suffers a lot from this. A number of good series. Then tons of ones that are basically. I wake up in a new world. I punched a rabbit. I gained a level. I walk 10 feet. Walking got a skill level. Oh good I got that walking level just in time to not die to a snake. I gain a level in poison resist. … I punched a a dragon and gained a level. Oh crap, umm a plot. Yeah. Let’s add one in last chapter so there is some reason to have a sequel. That’ll be 15 dollars for Audible download.

sourcecodeplz 3y ago

Whatever, there are tens of thousands of amazing books since before 10-20 years ago. Not to mention project Gutenberg.

NBJack 3y ago

Spotify is facing a similar crisis. AI generated songs being listened to by bots, presumably to generate money. https://cointelegraph.com/news/spotify-reportedly-deletes-thousands-of-ai-generated-songs https://cointelegraph.com/news/spotify-reportedly-deletes-th...

nr2x 3y ago
Love it.
chii 3y ago
if the song is being listened to, and thus generate money, is there any real reason for removing them?
- sjs7007 3y ago
  It's being listened to by bots on loop instead of multiple user accounts. So effectively revenue/user is going down with this I'd guess.
- xcdzvyn 3y ago
  Not for as long as advertisers are onboard, which wouldn't be very long if they don't curb it.
- mock-possum 3y ago
  It’s being listened to by bots. Advertisers are paying for their ads to be listened to by humans.
hoseja 3y ago
Very Žižkian.
dTal 3y ago
Seems to me like it's the listening bots that are the problem, rather than the AI-generated music? And presumably, fraudulent listening bots were a problem well before now. I suppose there's a case for removal if the only listeners were bots...

theage 3y ago

This is DAY ONE of the content explosion. People will soon learn they can skip the middlemen and generate yourself any niche theme at all. The story gen a.i. are only going to get better day by day. If you must have new published books (allegedly human authored, edited, and curated for cultural relevancy) you will almost have to use your own a.i. anyway. You'll need to trust it to summarize the work or "human" reviews, detect/fix repulsive flaws, and get/generate any recommendations according to your satisfaction.

jstarfish 3y ago
> People will soon learn they can skip the middlemen and generate yourself any niche theme at all. It's funny to see early Stable Diffusion threads go from "lol we have the power to see EVERYBODY naked" to "ok this is boring now" over the course of just two years. A sandwich you make yourself never tastes as good as one made by someone else. When you know exactly how it was constructed, by the time you take a bite you already know what to expect. Nothing is left to the imagination. There's no thrill of having your expectations challenged and discovering new flavors. (The best tasting sandwich is the one you steal from the workplace refrigerator. Then, the thrill is in the chase.)
- theage 3y ago
  True if you are fiddling with the whole work. No one would expect to find that entertaining immediately after generation - maybe a year out after you forget it. For now the prompts are deliberate creations of mind but in due time they could be largely auto generated (perhaps even blurred from the user) like feathers in a cap you collect and never have to look at. They will learn how to surprise us to a delightful degree with levers that don't reveal all the magic.

briga 3y ago

One day an AI will write a brilliant book. It will write something as good as the most competent and insightful human writer out there. And it will write a thousand more. The problem is that for every good book there will be a thousand bad books. What good is a good book if no one has time to discover it and read it? No one has time to get through all the good books written by humans, why are we worried about books written by AI? Since the Gutenberg days there has never been a shortage of written material to be digested. For hundreds of years there has been way more written material than any one person could read in a lifetime. So the problem has been to pick out what is most worth reading out of the millions of books you could be reading instead. The situation now is no different, except that we should have stricter standards on what information we allow into our heads. There will always be value in a well-curated library (will AIs curate the libraries too?)

tetris11 3y ago
Who will curate though. Before the internet you'd read a book based on a recommendation from a friend, a sibling, a trusted figure. Now, in this increasingly isolating world, we get recommendations from small subreddits, maybe a HN post, and of course the subconscious prompting of adverts that seep through our filters. An AI could be the writer and recommender in all those modern scenarios. Will this mean we revert back to listening to our friends and family over online opinion? Probably not, because they're no less exposed than we are to online recomendation creep.
- giardini 3y ago
  What is needed is a ChatGPT-based editor!
  - just_boost_it 3y ago
    And maybe some ChatGPT readers so we have an audience that can read at scale.
nly 3y ago
There was a recent episode of the "The Last Leg" here in the UK where they announced they would be slipping in an AI produced joke in to the show, and revealed it at the end. Not going to lie, i didn't spot it.

jasfi 3y ago

What matters if that if they aren't very good, or contain glaring mistakes, they will receive really bad ratings.

quantified 3y ago
The GPT-generated ratings will be flattering and numerous. I suppose some ratings bots will be deployed negatively. Really good negative reviews could be entertaining.
- jasfi 3y ago
  That is going to be the new threat. There will be bots that can sign-up for new accounts and pass the 'are you human' test. The only defense left is credit card or government ID verification.

Borrible 3y ago

Pondering an AI book blurb expander/review reverse engineerer Take the blurb and some reviews of a book you're interested in, feed it to an AI, and let it write your own version. Could be fun. Of, course a lot of blurbs and reviews have nothing to to with the book in question...

dr_whom 3y ago
I doubt it but that would be nice.

gumballindie 3y ago

Scams, fakes, counterfeits. Amazon is the alibaba of the west. Hopefully randomly generated books will be the straw that breaks the camel’s back.

interleave 3y ago

The flood began years ago with low-priced ghostwriting services. I'd venture to say that most of the non-fiction ebooks, and especially the best-sellers for Kindle, are published by multi-nom-de-plume "grindset" publishers. In 2017, a 10,000-word "booklet" on any non-fiction topic cost $200. That usually took about ten days from order to completion. The content was pretty much the same you'd now get via LLMs.

Ekaros 3y ago
Sometimes I browse books for Kindle and sort by cheapest. And see some entire multi-book series for a few dollars... Either you get volume, or you had to produce those very cheaply to it make any sense at all.