7 ms·
Amazon lists book on Maui wildfires that was published days after fires started
- netsharc 3y agoMakes me think of Borges' Library of Babel, but a shit version of it .. https://archive.org/details/TheLibraryOfBabel/mode/1up https://archive.org/details/TheLibraryOfBabel/mode/1up
- Pompidou 3y agoPierre Menard would write this new version.
- llm_nerd 3y agoWould "bestseller" be influenced by people grabbing this BookSpam through Kindle Unlimited? It looks like the bulk of the Kindle best sellers[1] are available through unlimited, and I have to think Amazon counts that as equivalent to a sale, even though it would largely be people who grab low grade junk like this that they would never have paid for traditionally. So are people dumping this junk to yield royalty payments through the Kindle Unlimited program? How does that work? Minutes read? Do you get paid just because some person downloaded something via the program, and if so how much? Time to fire up the text generator. [1] - https://www.amazon.ca/Best-Sellers-Kindle-Store/zgbs/digital-text https://www.amazon.ca/Best-Sellers-Kindle-Store/zgbs/digital...
- chiefalchemist 3y ago"Seller" definitely seems to be a misnomer here. That said, I'm not so sure it's out of line with publisher tradition as units shipped is often used to hype (alleged) demand. The music industry had the same problem (along with payola). The more things stay the same, the more we really don't change.
- Turing_Machine 3y ago> How does that work? Minutes read? It's based on the number of words read, not minutes. It can't be pure junk, or people wouldn't be reading enough of it to make it climb the charts.
- llm_nerd 3y agoAh, okay that is interesting. https://kdp.amazon.com/en_US/help/topic/G201541130 https://kdp.amazon.com/en_US/help/topic/G201541130 I don't think this "book" filled the pages with loren ipsum, but it is entirely possible that they fed all of the available news stories into a language model such that someone actually sat there page flipping through chapters of decorated text. But ultimately I think there is a stark difference between someone who actually paid $7 for an ebook, and someone who downloaded something on Kindle Unlimited and flipped through it. I am curious how KU influences the best seller charts numerically, which I can't find a clarification of.
- mikro2nd 3y agoHow hard would it be to write a script that downloads books and "reads" them -- i.e. exercises the Kindle app (say on a desktop-alike) -- giving Amazon plausible excuse to say "n words read"? Point being: if there's a way to game a system, people will game that system.
- Turing_Machine 3y ago> giving Amazon plausible excuse to say "n words read"? Amazon wouldn't do that because that would cost them more money (the payout to authors is based on that). The authors would have an incentive to do that, but Amazon does their best to prevent it (again, because it costs them money). I suspect that anything that rises to the best-seller level gets examined by Amazon very closely.
- ornornor 3y ago> I suspect that anything that rises to the best-seller level gets examined by Amazon very closely. I think you’re vastly overestimating how much Amazon cares. See their physical goods store: it’s also a race to the bottom with zero oversight whatsoever (commingling, counterfeits, used/returned/dirty items sold as new…) I don’t see why the virtual books store would be any different. Amazon wrote the proverbial book on enshitification/race to the bottom :(
- boppo1 3y agoThis might be better with a title that indicates the red flags are about Amazon's quality assurance. Initially I thought it was a post along the lines of a "How could a book be ready so fast unless the wildfires were planned??" kind of conspiracy theory.
- ghaff 3y agoYou either have gatekeepers--publishers, agents--who bring some level of quality control or you throw all that out the window in service of democratizing access. Not that they would, but Amazon could absolutely only accept books from legit publishers but can you imagine the howls of protest here were they to do so?
- nottorp 3y agoTbh I think self publishing is going to die because of LLMs. You won't dare to get a book that wasn't curated by someone in a few years.
- ghaff 3y agoI'm not at all sure you're wrong. Or at least there may increasingly need to be some reputational authority whether it's as a person's real-life identity or authoritative third parties. You sure can't trust reviews or self-written puffery. If one is cynical enough, it's easy to imagine shifting back to a world where you have a relatively small number of (more-or-less) trusted media outlets you have to subscribe to, some big publishers, and everything else is sort of hit-and-miss and most people won't bother with.
- squigglydonut 3y agoDeath to money at all cost. Demand quality. Demand the truth. Let fake products die.
- isoprophlex 3y agoAs an AI language model trained on data from before September 2021, I haven’t personally read this book, but based on its features and customer reviews, I can confidently give it a five-star rating.
- mensetmanusman 3y agoWe wanted the singularity, but all we got was an AI powered post truth world.
- h2odragon 3y agoIt might be amusing to contrast the last week's media coverage with the book: how well did their AI do at predicting what got said?
- catchnear4321 3y agoit isn’t amusing. the “book” claimed six people died. the death toll is over 100. like the fifteen year old that was found holding their dog. the comparison is in the link that you must not have finished reading.
- h2odragon 3y agoI mean a more deatailed comparison, not just he full text of the book but gather up however many hundreds of articles have been published too; and then do a textual analysis to see just how much variance there can be. if my use of the word "amusing" offends; i apologize; I am not a sensitive person in that way and frequently do that. Nothing about this tragedy is amusing. The predicable banal venality of people's responses, on the other hand, is. If you can't laugh at people jumping to profit of tragedy like the author of this book, what can you do? Despair?
- catchnear4321 3y agooh there are many more options than laughter.
- nottorp 3y agoIt might be except LLMs don't predict, they parrot or at best summarize.
- catchnear4321 3y agohumans. humans did this. not an ai. not some cold machine. cold humans. the simplification/corruption of discussion through misuse of “ai” has been happening for decades. the shift is that now it is being used to shield humans from responsibility. that cannot be permitted. humans did this.
- cj 3y agoIf humans did it, the least they could do is attribute it to their real name rather than a pseudonym. I'm fine with humans using AI to write books if the humans are willing to attach their human name to their work. The absense of a human name credited to the work makes it appear as though the human doesn't want to take responsibility for the AI's work.
- Turing_Machine 3y agoPeople have been using pseudonyms and ghostwriters for centuries. I think that ship has sailed.
- catchnear4321 3y agoyou know dr stones won’t be doing that. taking credit for these works. this is purely for profit. not celebrity. amazon could care. so could users of their products and services. let’s see what happens.
- fnordpiglet 3y agoThis is what baffles me about the discussions on AI making the search based experience of the web worse. Worse? Have you searched for anything in the last 10 years? It’s just awful SEO garbage - at least the LLM SEO garbage might actually tell you how to pickle dog biscuits, while the human generated garbage just meticulously structures the text to imply they might tell you while they actually can’t because the don’t actually know. But regardless of whether it’s LLM SEO or human SEO, a human decides to make fake pages about pickling dog biscuits because it was more important for them to make some money personally than for the search based internet to be anything but garbage. A human did that. The same humans that have been screwing everything up for everyone else for at least the last 10,000 years. IMO I think this trend is just an acceleration and democratization of enshitification tools. But I think the future result is three fold: 1) dependence on automated algorithms to differentiate between garbage and quality is now demonstrably dead, while it just seemed dead before 2) open LLMs backed by information retrieval systems will be a much better tool for learning than a naked search engine 3) humans will need to curate lists of good material and depending and algorithms and automated information retrieval systems alone will be insufficient, and hence curated and editorialized directories will become the primary way of discovering human generated content of quality. Looks like Yahoo was just 25 years too early!
- pard68 3y agoWhether real or perceived, this highlights why I buy almost everything I need in a physical store; there is an implicit statement that the product is good enough for the store owner to carry. (I also avoid chain stores, I basically only shop at small, locally owned businesses... and Aldi :D )
- jacquesm 3y agoThat is a very astute observation. Bookstores curate based on what they expect to sell and they take on risk when they order books ahead of those sales. But that also is a bit of a self-fulfilling prophesy: you can not buy books they don't have for sale. And more than once I've bought a book that had been re-priced multiple times. We even had bookstores in NL that would carry leftover stock from other bookstores (notably: De Slegte, where I spent many hours sifting through the stacks looking for gems).
- Turing_Machine 3y ago> they take on risk when they order books ahead of those sales I think this varies by country, but in the United States most books are "returnable", meaning that the publisher gives you full credit if you return them. In addition, publishers often don't require payment of the invoice for quite some time after the books have been received. There's little or no risk involved, other than the opportunity cost of not having the shelf space for something else. That's for hardcovers. For paperbacks and periodicals, often the publisher only requires tearing off the front cover and returning that. The bookseller is supposed to destroy the rest of the publication, but unscrupulous ones often launder these so-called "stripped books" through third-party brokers.
- jacquesm 3y agoSo, consignment sales. That makes sense I guess and would obviate a part of the GPs reasoning, though there still is risk involved in that the stores would have to figure out how they allocate their other scarce resource: space.
- o1y32 3y ago
- albert_e 3y agoYou are an AI assistant that writes full length e-books based on HN top stories. Today let's write and publish an e-book titled "Maui fire burns down the Amazon: How AI spam reduced the once mighty bookstore to ashes."
- NotGMan 3y ago"Miles Stones" -> Milestones
- Turing_Machine 3y agoThere have been people capable of similar feats long before LLMs were developed. Walter B. Gibson (who wrote many of the stories featuring The Shadow) boasted of cranking out up to 10,000 words per day. He reportedly had typewriters in every room of his house, with a story in progress on each one. In his peak year, he produced 1,680,000 words - roughly 24 full-length novels. That was in the days of typewriters, snail mail, physical printing pressess, and truck distribution. Putting something in the Kindle Store takes less than five minutes, and it's for sale world-wide within a day. I'll bet Gibson could've churned out a quickie on the Maui fires within two days, if he'd had any way to get it on the market that fast. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walter_B._Gibson https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walter_B._Gibson
- jacquesm 3y agoI write very fast but that is seriously impressive. Wow. My record is a 25 page single spaced report in two marathon days. I also took the week off after that. The customer was in a hurry and we made it work but normally it goes quite a bit slower than that. When writing fiction I guess it is a bit easier, you are not going to be raked over the coals for some subtle contradiction. But still that is a massive output.
- mikro2nd 3y agoHave to say that when writing fiction (and taking that seriously) my output slows down by a very significant factor. It's not the physical act of writing that takes time, but the time needed to think about the scene, characters, etc. I've said before that I never realised that writing (fiction) is a performance art. The performance might all be solely in your own head, but it's as real as any, and harder, because it has to make sense on the written page, in light of all that's been written before it and has yet to be written after. eta: Writing fiction I consider myself doing really well if I achieve 500 words in an hour. Non-fiction? 1000 is quite easily done.
- jacquesm 3y agoThat's interesting. And it makes intuitive sense: when the facts are what they are there isn't much that you can do other than to translate those facts into good prose and to try to accentuate that which is important and to de-emphasize that which is not. But when you are constructing a whole world from first principles or when you have to imagine a series of events that have to be plausible it gets harder. My job is mostly constrained to avoid writing fiction! I have never tried my hand at writing fiction, so I probably should shut up about that :) At the same time, I told / tell my kids bedtime stories that I pull out of my fantasy at the drop of a hat and they can go on for as long or as short as I want. But those are not to be compared to anything novel (or even novella) sized. 15 minutes tops.
- benjamoon 3y agoThe author is Dr. Miles Stones, Miles Stone! Milestone!! As in, whoever made this (using Ai) considers it a milestone in someway. I can't have been OpenAi out of the box as it doesn't have the data, but it'd be quite easy to load in all the news articles about the situation to a custom model and then have it generate the book.
- hhh 3y agoWhy couldn't it have been OpenAI's GPT-3.5/4 if you just give it context?
- benjamoon 3y agoYeah, I'm giving them too much credit and I was presuming you'd want to collect every piece of content written (news articles mainly) and that would be the context, but it'd be too much data for a prompt and probably not needed to create a book. I was thinking the book would actually be full of real world data and real commentary etc. You could probably just ask GPT to come up with decent chapter headings for a book about a recent large wildfire and how it impacts climate change policy. Then for each chapter heading give it a couple of pages of input info and ask it to write a chapter based on the content and the heading. Bet it's a really bad book if this is even close to how it was made.
- RcouF1uZ4gsC 3y agoHonestly, from a moral standpoint, I really don’t see much difference between this and the way the News industry monetizes tragedy. Often there are hot but very incorrect takes. Many times articles are heavily based on a few Tweets. If other people want to use AI to do their own monetizing, I really don’t see a lot of moral issues that.
- akudha 3y agoWait, what? Isn’t this similar to saying “your honor, my neighbor does unethical things, so I do too”. I don’t trust any big media these days, precisely because they lie, misrepresent, hide and blatantly engage in propaganda. I am not alone in not trusting the big media publications, a big chunk of population doesn’t trust either. This is not good for the society. “If I don’t do this, someone else is gonna do it” or “someone is doing already, so what’s the big deal if I do it too?” is a very weak argument for doing bad things
- tkgally 3y agoInspired by this discussion, I decided to see if I could get Anthropic’s Claude 2 to write a similar book about an ongoing news event—the tropical storm that is (as I write) approaching Southern California. It did very well—good enough to be published, I think, as long as nobody checks the facts. Here is the result: https://www.gally.net/temp/20230820hilarystorybyclaude2.html https://www.gally.net/temp/20230820hilarystorybyclaude2.html
- steelframe 3y ago> It did very well—good enough to be published, I think, as long as nobody checks the facts. After subjecting myself to actually reading that, I wouldn't expect it to do well once somebody also checks the prose. On every iteration and in every variation of generative textual production tech I've seen so far, I'm increasingly encouraged with the thought that the only writers who will be negatively impacted are the ones who really should be.
- ornornor 3y agoI read the first few paragraphs, it read pretty decent to me. Certainly not prize winning writing but not a word soup either.
- b800h 3y agoThis is where a decent competitor to Amazon can find a real opening. "A human tests each of the products that we sell"
- sp332 3y agoReview sites probably shouldn’t mix with merchant sites.
- Kerb_ 3y agoWell, they already are given the massive amount of affiliate driven review sites and rating systems on the merchant sites.
- nerdponx 3y agoA local book store
- dylan604 3y agoWho is that human? Is it a singular person? Is that person paid by the store that has incentives to promote an inferior product with higher margins than a better product for less margin? So many questions which leads me to one of my own…what do I find as a reputable reviewer? At this point in the game, I have so little faith in reviewers, I don’t know how to answer that honestly. Even a site dedicated to “honest” reviews would immediately be suspect in my mind. How are they making money? Who is paying for the items they are reviewing? These types of questions are the ones that always give me pause in accepting credentials
- jjtheblunt 3y agoMaybe the human is an Amazon Mechanical Turk, ironically.
- samstave 3y ago>Who is that human? exactly. I worked at FB and commuted with some folks on the CP/dismal/abuse review team (they reviewed contnet flagged for all sorts of crazy shit) It was disturbing.... I wouldnt want to be that human, nor know those humans as well - there is a lot of dark content that makes ignorance bliss - both from knowing the content and knowing the humans (even the mods) around it... yuck
- TheCaptain4815 3y agoI know the SEO battle on the Amazon search results is very cut throat, with existing entities taking a loss for weeks/months to establish their 1-3 ranking. I never expected somewhat similar SEO optimization for books, I always figured there were more checks.
- ThalesX 3y agoSomeone I know (former crypto bro) wrote and published on Amazon, maybe 8 books this last month. GPT for text, Midjourney for some graphics. They range from books about trading to science fiction, erotica and books for children. Each book has a different made up author. It really scares me what the informational space is going to look like.
- Jason_Protell 3y agoIs anyone buying them?
- ThalesX 3y agoNot really. Last I talked to him he mentioned less than 10 sales. His plan is to optimize based on sales and double down on some areas.
- samstave 3y agocan you share a link I am really interested in the outcome.
- netsharc 3y agoI wonder if he bought and read a guide about how to do it. If all else fails, publish a guide called "How to make money publishing on Amazon using AI" and charge bucks for it...
- peterleiser 3y agoSounds like a "race to the bottom" on quality of information and content. Has crypto bro considered putting their efforts into a real job or a real company instead of shortcuts that ultimately are a net negative to society? They'll likely be more successful and probably even feel better about themselves.
- reportgunner 3y agoMLM -> crypto -> NFT -> AI What's next ?