10 ms·

Update on KDP Title Creation Limits

219 points by ilamont 3y ago

adamredwoods 3y ago
>> We require you to inform us of AI-generated content (text, images, or translations) when you publish a new book or make edits to and republish an existing book through KDP. AI-generated images include cover and interior images and artwork. You are not required to disclose AI-assisted content.
- hiidrew 3y ago
  Their distinction: >AI-generated: We define AI-generated content as text, images, or translations created by an AI-based tool. If you used an AI-based tool to create the actual content (whether text, images, or translations), it is considered "AI-generated," even if you applied substantial edits afterwards. AI-assisted: If you created the content yourself, and used AI-based tools to edit, refine, error-check, or otherwise improve that content (whether text or images), then it is considered "AI-assisted" and not “AI-generated.” Similarly, if you used an AI-based tool to brainstorm and generate ideas, but ultimately created the text or images yourself, this is also considered "AI-assisted" and not “AI-generated.” It is not necessary to inform us of the use of such tools or processes. https://kdp.amazon.com/en_US/help/topic/G200672390#aicontent:~:text=AI%2Dgenerated%3A%20We,tools%20or%20processes https://kdp.amazon.com/en_US/help/topic/G200672390#aicontent....
  - prvc 3y ago
    Allowing the use of tools to modify the contents erases any clear distinction between the categories.
- pcl 3y ago
  This is really interesting. I imagine that AI-generated art / illustrations for books mostly-text is a pretty compelling thing for authors, for all the same reasons that AI-generated text is of value for non-authors. I wonder how this line will work out in practice.
campbel 3y ago
Gee, I sure hope people don't just lie about it...
- skepticATX 3y ago
  It doesn’t matter. It’s garbage content and immediately recognizable as being AI generated. It is absolutely possible to write a good article or even a good book with AI, but at least for now it’s just as hard, if not harder, than doing it without AI. But of course people trying to make a quick buck won’t put in the required effort, and they likely don’t even have the ability to create great or even good content.
  - tyingq 3y ago
    >It is absolutely possible to write a good article or even a good book with AI, but at least for now it’s just as hard, if not harder, than doing it without AI. How hard is it though, to create a shitty book with AI, that Amazon can't detect was written with AI?
  - duskwuff 3y ago
    > It’s garbage content and immediately recognizable as being AI generated. It's also recognizable by its sheer volume. An "author" who submits several new books every day is clearly not doing their own writing. The AI publishing scam relies on volume -- they can't possibly win on quality, but they're hoping to make up for that by putting so many garbage books on the market that buyers can't find anything else.
    - atrus 3y ago
      I'm not sure. Ghostwriting exists, and a person (or organization) with enough money could easily pay enough ghostwriters to output at a more than human pace.
      - duskwuff 3y ago
        Even at their most prolific, a ghostwritten author still probably wouldn't publish more than one or two books a month. Beyond that point, you're just competing with yourself. (For instance, young adult series like Goosebumps, The Baby-Sitters Club, or Animorphs typically published a book every month or two.) Publishing multiple books per day is out of the question. That's beyond even what's reasonable for an editor to skim through and rubber-stamp.
ilamont 3y ago
See also: "Tom Lesley has published 40 books in 2023, all with 100% positive reviews" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35687868 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35687868
- ritzaco 3y ago
  I remember that one - interestingly the amazon link it goes to shows only 3 books now, all that look real, not the 40 that I remember seeing before. So I guess Amazon is doing something even though I regularly hear complaints from authors that they allow blatant piracy all the time
  - phh 3y ago
    Possibly it's the author removing them at the first one star rating to keep their author score high?
  - bragr 3y ago
    >shows only 3 books now Those appear to be by different authors with similar names: https://www.amazon.com/s?k=%22tom+lesley%22 https://www.amazon.com/s?k=%22tom+lesley%22
  - kmeisthax 3y ago
    Amazon has no reason to give a shit about piracy on KDP: they make money either way. But having a load of AI generated garbage on your platform makes it far less valuable. You want your stolen books to actually be good. :P
willio58 3y ago
It seems Amazon cares more about polluting search results in Kindle than polluting the search results in their own e-commerce business. I think low-effort books generated by AI are much less detrimental than sketchy physical products being shipped to your door in 2 days or less.
- crooked-v 3y ago
  It's probably about volume rather than quality. Sketchy copycat product lines are still hard limited by the number of factories and shipping operations in existence, while sketchy AI-generated books can easily keep growing exponentially in number for a while.
el_benhameen 3y ago
This doesn’t seem surprising. Half of my YouTube ads these days are for some kind of AI+Kindle-based get rich quick scheme.
- NotYourLawyer 3y ago
  [flagged]
japhyr 3y ago
It'll be interesting to see where this goes. Amazon has had ML-generated garbage books for years now, and I assume they haven't taken them down because they make money even when they sell garbage. Maybe there's so much garbage coming in now that they finally have to do something about it? I feel for people trying to learn about technical topics, who aren't aware enough of this issue to avoid buying ML-generated books with high ratings from fake reviews. The intro programming market is full of these scam books.
- harles 3y ago
  > … I assume they haven't taken them down because they make money even when they sell garbage. I’d be surprised if this is the case. The money they make is probably a rounding error compared even just to other Kindle sales. Much more likely is that they haven’t seen it as a big enough problem - and I’m willing to bet it’s increased multiple orders of magnitude recently.
- throe37848 3y ago
  I knew guy who made "generated" text books in 2010. He would absorb several articles, and loosely stitch them into chapters with some computer scripts and from memory. In a week he would produce 400 pages on new subject. It was mostly coherent and factual (it kept references). Usually it was the only book on market about given subject (like rare disease). Current auto generated garbage is very different.
  - plagiarist 3y ago
    I wouldn't even consider that generated. That's like where useful content and copyright infringement overlap on a Venn diagram.
    - Karellen 3y ago
      > That's like where useful content and copyright infringement overlap on a Venn diagram. That sounds like a description of LLM-generated content to me ;-)
Supply5411 3y ago
While not exactly the same, the invention of the printing press caused a lot of controversy with the Catholic Church. With the printing press, people could mass produce and spread information relatively easily. I'm sure a lot of it was considered "low quality" (also heretical)[1]. Seems like we're going through similar growing pains now. Yes I know it's different, but it rhymes. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Index_Librorum_Prohibitorum https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Index_Librorum_Prohibitorum
- dougmwne 3y ago
  I really dislike the comparison. The printing press democratized knowledge. The LLM destroys it. LLM output is perfect white noise. Enough of it will drown out all signal. And the worst part is that it’s impossible to distinguish it from real human output. I mean think about it. Amazon had to stop publishing BOOKS because it can no longer separate the signal from the noise. The printing press was the birth of knowledge for the people and the LLM is the death.
  - vosper 3y ago
    > The printing press democratized knowledge That's true, but it also allowed protestant "heretics" to propagate an idea that caused a permanent schism with the Catholic church, which led to centuries of wars that killed who-knows-how-many people, up to recent times with Northern Ireland. (Or something like that, my history's fuzzy, but I think that's generally right?)
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
    - b112 3y ago
      I thought it was a king wanting a divorce, and as he couldn't get it from the catholic church, created his own.
      - mmcdermott 3y ago
corethree 3y ago
How do we even know this entire comment thread isn't polluted with AI? Maybe it doesn't matter. The quality of the work matters more than the process of actualization.
- quickthrower2 3y ago
  In a practical sense: AI generated stuff is crappy and often subtly wrong and it can be generated faster than human generated content. So it becomes untenable to even search for good information.
  - corethree 3y ago
    Then it's good for fiction. Lots of demand for fiction.
- DookieBiscuit 3y ago
  [dead]
Almondsetat 3y ago
Livestreams where artists show their creative process and use the streaming platform to immediately sell the thing they produced, just to prove it had human origins. This is the future
- edgarvaldes 3y ago
  We have realtime filters, avatars, translators, TTS, etc. Soon, all of this will be "good enough" to mimic the proposed solution.
- SketchySeaBeast 3y ago
  You're only kicking the can down the road.
gz5 3y ago
I think we will see tidal waves of 'not-so-good' AI-generated content. Not that AI can't generate or help generate 'good' content, but it will be faster and cheaper to generate 'not-so-good'. These waves will mainly be in places in which we are the product. And those waves could make those places close to uninhabitable for folks who don't want to slosh through the waves of noise to find the signal. And in turn that perhaps enables a stronger business model for high quality content islands (regardless of how the content is generated) - e.g. we will be more willing to pay directly for high quality content with dollars instead of time. In that scenario, AI could be a_good_thing in helping to spin a flywheel for high quality content.
- rwmj 3y ago
  Assuming not too many people die eating mushrooms while we're waiting: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/sep/01/mushroom-pickers-urged-to-avoid-foraging-books-on-amazon-that-appear-to-be-written-by-ai https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/sep/01/mushroom-...
  - hinkley 3y ago
    Common foraging rhetoric is that you need two independent sources asserting that a wild food is edible. Ones that cite neither each other or the same chain of citations. And preferably a human who says, "I've been eating these for years and no problems." or scientists who did recent blood work to make sure you aren't destroying your organs by eating [1]. In a world with fake books, it would be quite easy for two books to contain the same misinformation or mis-identification (how many times have I found the wrong plant in a google image search? More times than I care to count). Two fake books putting the wrong mushroom picture next to a mushroom because they were contiguous on some other page and you have dead people. [1] In the ten years since I started working with indigenous plants, wild ginger (asarum caudatum), has gone from quasi-edible to medicinal to don't eat. More studies show subtler wear and tear on the organs (wikipedia lists it as carcinogenic!) and it is recommended now that you don't eat them at all, even for medicinal purposes. I'm not sure I own a foraging or native species book younger than 5 years, and many are older.
cellu 3y ago
Why do people read contemporary books is something I can’t really get my head around. There’re so many classics to keep people busy for life - and are 100% guaranteed to be insightful and pleasurable.
- bwb 3y ago
  Contemporary books are just new classics. It is like asking why read :)
- rustymonday 3y ago
  Should people stop telling new stories? A century from now the best books of today will be classics. Books can act as a time capsule of a certain time and place and mode of life. And that has value.
- OfSanguineFire 3y ago
  There’s a distinct demographic in the contemporary-fiction-reading community, as can be seen in corners of Goodreads or Instagram, that demands new fiction to tell the stories of groups not covered, or supposedly unfairly covered, in that classic literature: LGBT, BIPOC, the working class, etc. In fact, they might even deny that the classics are “insightful and pleasurable” due to these social concerns.
  - timeagain 3y ago
    That’s really weird. People are making all kinds of books and stories. And stories are relevant to their time. The matrix wouldn’t be written in 1900, a tale of two cities wouldn’t be written in 1200, … It is true though that if you have a culturally diverse set of friends and are open to their experiences and opinions, a lot of “the classics” start to smell bad. Imagine being black and reading Grapes of Wrath. You might think the situation of the main characters as humorous or infantile, considering how relatively fortunate they are.
- Baeocystin 3y ago
  What's the name of the law where the longer something has already been around, the longer it will likely stay around in the future? I've found that it definitely applies to books. Starting at a ~20 year horizon is a surprisingly good filter for quality.
harles 3y ago
The title of this story doesn’t seem to match the content. This seems like a proactive move to prevent individual publishers from spamming many many submissions - and even then, they’re willing to make exceptions. > While we have not seen a spike in our publishing numbers, in order to help protect against abuse, we are lowering the volume limits we have in place on new title creations. Very few publishers will be impacted by this change and those who are will be notified and have the option to seek an exception.
dzink 3y ago
Strategically, AI generated content is a boon for platforms like Amazon. 1. The more content there is, the more you can't reliably get good stuff without reviews, the more centralized distribution platforms with reviews and rankings are needed. 2. Even if people are making fake books for money laundering, Amazon gets a cut of all sales, laundered or not. Just like Yahoo's directory once upon a time though, and Movie theaters, the party gets ruined when most people learn they can use AI to generate custom stories at home and/or converse with the characters and interact in far more ways than currently possible. Content is going from king to commodity.
- blibble 3y ago
  amazon's reviews and rating are completely garbage and have been for some time
fuddle 3y ago
About time, YouTube is full of videos about making eBook's with ChatGPT. e.g "Free Course: How I Made $200,000 With ChatGPT eBook Automation at 20 Years Old" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Annsf5QgFF8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Annsf5QgFF8
hinkley 3y ago
How do we... I'm not entirely sure how to word this question. How do we make sure that most of the people we talk to are at least humans if not necessarily the person we expect them to be? And I'm not saying that like a cartoonish bad guy in a movie who hates artificial intelligence and augmented humans. How do I not get inundated by AI that's good at trolling. How do I keep the social groups I belong to from being trolled? These questions keep drawing me back to the concept of Web of Trust we tried to build with PGP for privacy reasons. Unless I've solicited it, I really only want to talk to entities that pass a Turing Test. I'd also like it if someone actively breaking the law online were actually affected by the deterrence of law enforcement, instead of being labeled a glitch or a bug in software that can't be arrested, or even detained. It feels like I want to talk to people I know to be human (friends, famous people - who might actually be interns posing as their boss online), and people they know to be human, and people those people suspect to be human. I have long term plans to set up a Wiki for a hobby of mine, and I keep getting wrapped around the axle trying to figure out how to keep signup from being oppressive and keep bots from turning me into an SEO farm.
- timeagain 3y ago
  This is only a problem for someone terminally online. The vast majority of people talk to their friends and coworkers in person.
  - invalidptr 3y ago
    This is a problem for anyone who is not actively vigilant about the information they consume. A family member (who I would not describe as "terminally online") came to me today in a panic talking about how some major event had just occurred and how social order was beginning to collapse. I quickly glanced at the headlines on a few major news outlets and realized that they just saw some incendiary content designed to elicit that reaction. I calmed them down and walked them through a process they could use to evaluate information like that in the future, and they were a little embarrassed. The concern isn't necessarily for you. It's for the large swaths of people who are less equipped to filter through noise like this.
  - 3y ago
freediver 3y ago
This is just a tip of the iceberg, compared to what we are heading into with the web. Very concerning. I would go long the value of genuine human writing, aka the 'small web'.
cogman10 3y ago
Here's a pretty good article about the problem with AI generated books. "AI Is Coming For Your Children" [1] [1] https://shatterzone.substack.com/p/ai-is-coming-for-your-children https://shatterzone.substack.com/p/ai-is-coming-for-your-chi...
neilv 3y ago
This sounds like a commendable move by Amazon. I especially like the idea of requiring disclosure of use of "AI".
bern4444 3y ago
It seem that as a society we are coming to realize that enabling anyone to do anything on their own and at anytime isn't the best of ideas. Verifiability and authenticity matter and are valuable. Amazon has long had a problem of fake reviews. This issue with kindle books seems an extension of that. Massive centralized platforms like Amazon makes fraud more likely and is bad for the consumer. The "decentralization" that we need as a society is not in the form of any crypto based technical capability but simply for the size of the massive players to be reduced so competition can reemerge and give consumers more options on where and how to spend their dollars. Other E-book stores may just pop up that develop relationships with publishers and disallow independent publishing if amazon were forced to be broken up. I hope the FTC can begin finding a strategy to force some of these massive corporations to split making it more likely for there to be more competition.
ggm 3y ago
Mushroom picking guides on AI "what could possibly go wrong"
idomajid 3y ago
Finally, I hope those garbage books will slightly decrease from there.
pseingatl 3y ago
If KDP required an ISBN it would cut down on the garbage books. In the US at least, ISBN's cost money.
- fragmede 3y ago
  they're not that much but you can just get an Australian one for free
unmole 3y ago
So, what are the actual limits?

219 points by ilamont 3y ago

>> We require you to inform us of AI-generated content (text, images, or translations) when you publish a new book or make edits to and republish an existing book through KDP. AI-generated images include cover and interior images and artwork. You are not required to disclose AI-assisted content.

hiidrew 3y ago
Their distinction: >AI-generated: We define AI-generated content as text, images, or translations created by an AI-based tool. If you used an AI-based tool to create the actual content (whether text, images, or translations), it is considered "AI-generated," even if you applied substantial edits afterwards. AI-assisted: If you created the content yourself, and used AI-based tools to edit, refine, error-check, or otherwise improve that content (whether text or images), then it is considered "AI-assisted" and not “AI-generated.” Similarly, if you used an AI-based tool to brainstorm and generate ideas, but ultimately created the text or images yourself, this is also considered "AI-assisted" and not “AI-generated.” It is not necessary to inform us of the use of such tools or processes. https://kdp.amazon.com/en_US/help/topic/G200672390#aicontent:~:text=AI%2Dgenerated%3A%20We,tools%20or%20processes https://kdp.amazon.com/en_US/help/topic/G200672390#aicontent....
- prvc 3y ago
  Allowing the use of tools to modify the contents erases any clear distinction between the categories.
pcl 3y ago
This is really interesting. I imagine that AI-generated art / illustrations for books mostly-text is a pretty compelling thing for authors, for all the same reasons that AI-generated text is of value for non-authors. I wonder how this line will work out in practice.

campbel 3y ago

Gee, I sure hope people don't just lie about it...

skepticATX 3y ago
It doesn’t matter. It’s garbage content and immediately recognizable as being AI generated. It is absolutely possible to write a good article or even a good book with AI, but at least for now it’s just as hard, if not harder, than doing it without AI. But of course people trying to make a quick buck won’t put in the required effort, and they likely don’t even have the ability to create great or even good content.
- tyingq 3y ago
  >It is absolutely possible to write a good article or even a good book with AI, but at least for now it’s just as hard, if not harder, than doing it without AI. How hard is it though, to create a shitty book with AI, that Amazon can't detect was written with AI?
- duskwuff 3y ago
  > It’s garbage content and immediately recognizable as being AI generated. It's also recognizable by its sheer volume. An "author" who submits several new books every day is clearly not doing their own writing. The AI publishing scam relies on volume -- they can't possibly win on quality, but they're hoping to make up for that by putting so many garbage books on the market that buyers can't find anything else.
  - atrus 3y ago
    I'm not sure. Ghostwriting exists, and a person (or organization) with enough money could easily pay enough ghostwriters to output at a more than human pace.
    - duskwuff 3y ago
      Even at their most prolific, a ghostwritten author still probably wouldn't publish more than one or two books a month. Beyond that point, you're just competing with yourself. (For instance, young adult series like Goosebumps, The Baby-Sitters Club, or Animorphs typically published a book every month or two.) Publishing multiple books per day is out of the question. That's beyond even what's reasonable for an editor to skim through and rubber-stamp.

ilamont 3y ago

See also: "Tom Lesley has published 40 books in 2023, all with 100% positive reviews" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35687868 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35687868

ritzaco 3y ago
I remember that one - interestingly the amazon link it goes to shows only 3 books now, all that look real, not the 40 that I remember seeing before. So I guess Amazon is doing something even though I regularly hear complaints from authors that they allow blatant piracy all the time
- phh 3y ago
  Possibly it's the author removing them at the first one star rating to keep their author score high?
- bragr 3y ago
  >shows only 3 books now Those appear to be by different authors with similar names: https://www.amazon.com/s?k=%22tom+lesley%22 https://www.amazon.com/s?k=%22tom+lesley%22
- kmeisthax 3y ago
  Amazon has no reason to give a shit about piracy on KDP: they make money either way. But having a load of AI generated garbage on your platform makes it far less valuable. You want your stolen books to actually be good. :P

willio58 3y ago

It seems Amazon cares more about polluting search results in Kindle than polluting the search results in their own e-commerce business. I think low-effort books generated by AI are much less detrimental than sketchy physical products being shipped to your door in 2 days or less.

crooked-v 3y ago
It's probably about volume rather than quality. Sketchy copycat product lines are still hard limited by the number of factories and shipping operations in existence, while sketchy AI-generated books can easily keep growing exponentially in number for a while.

el_benhameen 3y ago

This doesn’t seem surprising. Half of my YouTube ads these days are for some kind of AI+Kindle-based get rich quick scheme.

NotYourLawyer 3y ago
[flagged]

japhyr 3y ago

It'll be interesting to see where this goes. Amazon has had ML-generated garbage books for years now, and I assume they haven't taken them down because they make money even when they sell garbage. Maybe there's so much garbage coming in now that they finally have to do something about it? I feel for people trying to learn about technical topics, who aren't aware enough of this issue to avoid buying ML-generated books with high ratings from fake reviews. The intro programming market is full of these scam books.

harles 3y ago
> … I assume they haven't taken them down because they make money even when they sell garbage. I’d be surprised if this is the case. The money they make is probably a rounding error compared even just to other Kindle sales. Much more likely is that they haven’t seen it as a big enough problem - and I’m willing to bet it’s increased multiple orders of magnitude recently.
throe37848 3y ago
I knew guy who made "generated" text books in 2010. He would absorb several articles, and loosely stitch them into chapters with some computer scripts and from memory. In a week he would produce 400 pages on new subject. It was mostly coherent and factual (it kept references). Usually it was the only book on market about given subject (like rare disease). Current auto generated garbage is very different.
- plagiarist 3y ago
  I wouldn't even consider that generated. That's like where useful content and copyright infringement overlap on a Venn diagram.
  - Karellen 3y ago
    > That's like where useful content and copyright infringement overlap on a Venn diagram. That sounds like a description of LLM-generated content to me ;-)

Supply5411 3y ago

While not exactly the same, the invention of the printing press caused a lot of controversy with the Catholic Church. With the printing press, people could mass produce and spread information relatively easily. I'm sure a lot of it was considered "low quality" (also heretical)[1]. Seems like we're going through similar growing pains now. Yes I know it's different, but it rhymes. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Index_Librorum_Prohibitorum https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Index_Librorum_Prohibitorum

dougmwne 3y ago
I really dislike the comparison. The printing press democratized knowledge. The LLM destroys it. LLM output is perfect white noise. Enough of it will drown out all signal. And the worst part is that it’s impossible to distinguish it from real human output. I mean think about it. Amazon had to stop publishing BOOKS because it can no longer separate the signal from the noise. The printing press was the birth of knowledge for the people and the LLM is the death.
- vosper 3y ago
  > The printing press democratized knowledge That's true, but it also allowed protestant "heretics" to propagate an idea that caused a permanent schism with the Catholic church, which led to centuries of wars that killed who-knows-how-many people, up to recent times with Northern Ireland. (Or something like that, my history's fuzzy, but I think that's generally right?)
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - b112 3y ago
    I thought it was a king wanting a divorce, and as he couldn't get it from the catholic church, created his own.
    - mmcdermott 3y ago

corethree 3y ago

How do we even know this entire comment thread isn't polluted with AI? Maybe it doesn't matter. The quality of the work matters more than the process of actualization.

quickthrower2 3y ago
In a practical sense: AI generated stuff is crappy and often subtly wrong and it can be generated faster than human generated content. So it becomes untenable to even search for good information.
- corethree 3y ago
  Then it's good for fiction. Lots of demand for fiction.
DookieBiscuit 3y ago
[dead]

Almondsetat 3y ago

Livestreams where artists show their creative process and use the streaming platform to immediately sell the thing they produced, just to prove it had human origins. This is the future

edgarvaldes 3y ago
We have realtime filters, avatars, translators, TTS, etc. Soon, all of this will be "good enough" to mimic the proposed solution.
SketchySeaBeast 3y ago
You're only kicking the can down the road.

gz5 3y ago

I think we will see tidal waves of 'not-so-good' AI-generated content. Not that AI can't generate or help generate 'good' content, but it will be faster and cheaper to generate 'not-so-good'. These waves will mainly be in places in which we are the product. And those waves could make those places close to uninhabitable for folks who don't want to slosh through the waves of noise to find the signal. And in turn that perhaps enables a stronger business model for high quality content islands (regardless of how the content is generated) - e.g. we will be more willing to pay directly for high quality content with dollars instead of time. In that scenario, AI could be a_good_thing in helping to spin a flywheel for high quality content.

rwmj 3y ago
Assuming not too many people die eating mushrooms while we're waiting: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/sep/01/mushroom-pickers-urged-to-avoid-foraging-books-on-amazon-that-appear-to-be-written-by-ai https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/sep/01/mushroom-...
- hinkley 3y ago
  Common foraging rhetoric is that you need two independent sources asserting that a wild food is edible. Ones that cite neither each other or the same chain of citations. And preferably a human who says, "I've been eating these for years and no problems." or scientists who did recent blood work to make sure you aren't destroying your organs by eating [1]. In a world with fake books, it would be quite easy for two books to contain the same misinformation or mis-identification (how many times have I found the wrong plant in a google image search? More times than I care to count). Two fake books putting the wrong mushroom picture next to a mushroom because they were contiguous on some other page and you have dead people. [1] In the ten years since I started working with indigenous plants, wild ginger (asarum caudatum), has gone from quasi-edible to medicinal to don't eat. More studies show subtler wear and tear on the organs (wikipedia lists it as carcinogenic!) and it is recommended now that you don't eat them at all, even for medicinal purposes. I'm not sure I own a foraging or native species book younger than 5 years, and many are older.

cellu 3y ago

Why do people read contemporary books is something I can’t really get my head around. There’re so many classics to keep people busy for life - and are 100% guaranteed to be insightful and pleasurable.

bwb 3y ago
Contemporary books are just new classics. It is like asking why read :)
rustymonday 3y ago
Should people stop telling new stories? A century from now the best books of today will be classics. Books can act as a time capsule of a certain time and place and mode of life. And that has value.
OfSanguineFire 3y ago
There’s a distinct demographic in the contemporary-fiction-reading community, as can be seen in corners of Goodreads or Instagram, that demands new fiction to tell the stories of groups not covered, or supposedly unfairly covered, in that classic literature: LGBT, BIPOC, the working class, etc. In fact, they might even deny that the classics are “insightful and pleasurable” due to these social concerns.
- timeagain 3y ago
  That’s really weird. People are making all kinds of books and stories. And stories are relevant to their time. The matrix wouldn’t be written in 1900, a tale of two cities wouldn’t be written in 1200, … It is true though that if you have a culturally diverse set of friends and are open to their experiences and opinions, a lot of “the classics” start to smell bad. Imagine being black and reading Grapes of Wrath. You might think the situation of the main characters as humorous or infantile, considering how relatively fortunate they are.
Baeocystin 3y ago
What's the name of the law where the longer something has already been around, the longer it will likely stay around in the future? I've found that it definitely applies to books. Starting at a ~20 year horizon is a surprisingly good filter for quality.

harles 3y ago

The title of this story doesn’t seem to match the content. This seems like a proactive move to prevent individual publishers from spamming many many submissions - and even then, they’re willing to make exceptions. > While we have not seen a spike in our publishing numbers, in order to help protect against abuse, we are lowering the volume limits we have in place on new title creations. Very few publishers will be impacted by this change and those who are will be notified and have the option to seek an exception.

dzink 3y ago

Strategically, AI generated content is a boon for platforms like Amazon. 1. The more content there is, the more you can't reliably get good stuff without reviews, the more centralized distribution platforms with reviews and rankings are needed. 2. Even if people are making fake books for money laundering, Amazon gets a cut of all sales, laundered or not. Just like Yahoo's directory once upon a time though, and Movie theaters, the party gets ruined when most people learn they can use AI to generate custom stories at home and/or converse with the characters and interact in far more ways than currently possible. Content is going from king to commodity.

blibble 3y ago
amazon's reviews and rating are completely garbage and have been for some time

fuddle 3y ago

About time, YouTube is full of videos about making eBook's with ChatGPT. e.g "Free Course: How I Made $200,000 With ChatGPT eBook Automation at 20 Years Old" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Annsf5QgFF8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Annsf5QgFF8

hinkley 3y ago

How do we... I'm not entirely sure how to word this question. How do we make sure that most of the people we talk to are at least humans if not necessarily the person we expect them to be? And I'm not saying that like a cartoonish bad guy in a movie who hates artificial intelligence and augmented humans. How do I not get inundated by AI that's good at trolling. How do I keep the social groups I belong to from being trolled? These questions keep drawing me back to the concept of Web of Trust we tried to build with PGP for privacy reasons. Unless I've solicited it, I really only want to talk to entities that pass a Turing Test. I'd also like it if someone actively breaking the law online were actually affected by the deterrence of law enforcement, instead of being labeled a glitch or a bug in software that can't be arrested, or even detained. It feels like I want to talk to people I know to be human (friends, famous people - who might actually be interns posing as their boss online), and people they know to be human, and people those people suspect to be human. I have long term plans to set up a Wiki for a hobby of mine, and I keep getting wrapped around the axle trying to figure out how to keep signup from being oppressive and keep bots from turning me into an SEO farm.

timeagain 3y ago
This is only a problem for someone terminally online. The vast majority of people talk to their friends and coworkers in person.
- invalidptr 3y ago
  This is a problem for anyone who is not actively vigilant about the information they consume. A family member (who I would not describe as "terminally online") came to me today in a panic talking about how some major event had just occurred and how social order was beginning to collapse. I quickly glanced at the headlines on a few major news outlets and realized that they just saw some incendiary content designed to elicit that reaction. I calmed them down and walked them through a process they could use to evaluate information like that in the future, and they were a little embarrassed. The concern isn't necessarily for you. It's for the large swaths of people who are less equipped to filter through noise like this.
- 3y ago

freediver 3y ago

This is just a tip of the iceberg, compared to what we are heading into with the web. Very concerning. I would go long the value of genuine human writing, aka the 'small web'.

cogman10 3y ago

Here's a pretty good article about the problem with AI generated books. "AI Is Coming For Your Children" [1] [1] https://shatterzone.substack.com/p/ai-is-coming-for-your-children https://shatterzone.substack.com/p/ai-is-coming-for-your-chi...

neilv 3y ago

This sounds like a commendable move by Amazon. I especially like the idea of requiring disclosure of use of "AI".

bern4444 3y ago

It seem that as a society we are coming to realize that enabling anyone to do anything on their own and at anytime isn't the best of ideas. Verifiability and authenticity matter and are valuable. Amazon has long had a problem of fake reviews. This issue with kindle books seems an extension of that. Massive centralized platforms like Amazon makes fraud more likely and is bad for the consumer. The "decentralization" that we need as a society is not in the form of any crypto based technical capability but simply for the size of the massive players to be reduced so competition can reemerge and give consumers more options on where and how to spend their dollars. Other E-book stores may just pop up that develop relationships with publishers and disallow independent publishing if amazon were forced to be broken up. I hope the FTC can begin finding a strategy to force some of these massive corporations to split making it more likely for there to be more competition.

ggm 3y ago

Mushroom picking guides on AI "what could possibly go wrong"

idomajid 3y ago

Finally, I hope those garbage books will slightly decrease from there.

pseingatl 3y ago

If KDP required an ISBN it would cut down on the garbage books. In the US at least, ISBN's cost money.

fragmede 3y ago
they're not that much but you can just get an Australian one for free

unmole 3y ago

So, what are the actual limits?