9 ms·

Scammy AI-Generated Books Are Flooding Amazon

143 points by Anon84 3y ago

pona-a 3y ago
Having disabled Google's personalized ads, I did see many "get rich quick (now with AI" schemes that promoted the production of this kind of spam. I think the quickest and simplest way to at least lower the acceleration on this mass spam is for Google to actually vet their ads, especially non-English ones.
- dukeyukey 3y ago
  I get a lot of this stuff on YouTube, only with higher production value. AI for automating anything related to get-rich-quick.
ThalesX 3y ago
The crypto bros turned to AI bros. I have a close friend that fits the profile and he's now a distinguished author of multiple books published on Amazon.
- spookybones 3y ago
  Is he actually profiting?
  - greg_V 3y ago
    if he's selling his method to dupes, he must be
  - ThalesX 3y ago
    Not really; very small number of sales, but his effort is minimal. He also uses pseudonyms.
- superkuh 3y ago
  Exactly. Speculators are gonna speculate. Most of the worst aspects of cryptocurrency were done by normal con artists with absolutely no interest in touching a blockchain. When that was no longer quite as popular they just switched to whatever new thing was popular that the public couldn't understand.
spookybones 3y ago
Youtube is becoming flooded with influencers showing you how to do it and promising massive imaginary profits. Same for AI generated Etsy designs, copywriting gigs, and various other things.
- nerdjon 3y ago
  Not just YouTube, but every social media platform seems to be spammed by it. I feel like I am seeing these stupid ads almost every hour now. A ton of people jumping on the bandwagon promising insane profits from AI. But if you thought for more than 1 second, if they themselves could make this much profit why would they be trying to convince other people to do it. The reality is they are likely the ones making any money by building up a following making these promises.
  - datadrivenangel 3y ago
    The secret to getting rich is selling people the secret to getting rich.
  - tivert 3y ago
    > But if you thought for more than 1 second, if they themselves could make this much profit why would they be trying to convince other people to do it. Often times this stuff is scams that stopped working, so the scammers pivot to selling the non-working scam to others. There was a YouTube video a couple years ago that exposed the scam of a couple of twins that were selling SEO'd bottom-of-the-barrel ghostwritten books on Amazon. Instead of using generative AI, they used the cheapest possible online ghostwriters. Apparently Amazon got wise and banned them, so they pivoted to selling their "system." Edit: here's the video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=biYciU1uiUw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=biYciU1uiUw "Contrepreneurs: The Mikkelsen Twins"
  - herval 3y ago
    > The reality is they are likely the ones making any money by building up a following making these promises. The typical scheme that gets people rich since "Rich dad, poor dad", but now it's exponentially easier to do. It's crazy
photon_collider 3y ago
As platforms become flooded with AI-generated garbage, I wonder how people will be able to find meaningful content. Are there going to be a new set of AI tools for content curation? It just seems like this will only spark a new AI-driven arms race.
- bnpxft 3y ago
  The old fashion way, friends. I only have so much time in the day. I can only consume so much content. I don't need AI or machine learning to filter a firehose of content. My friends provide a human scale stream of recommendation that I trust much more than a profit driven algorithm.
  - lancesells 3y ago
    Yes, and if you don't have friends go to a library or a known subreddit (for now) or forum (for now). Also, stop using Amazon for delivery of said content as they are part of the issue.
- ActionHank 3y ago
  The sanest would be to enforce a labelling policy with a user report mechanism and a user opt-out filter. That said this won't happen and platforms will shift from metrics like views to things like number of uploads or "shares" to show "growth".
- gshubert17 3y ago
  I think that individuals who care about meaningful, non-deceitful content, will have to create their own parallel net in which content can be sanity-checked and fact-checked. Fast, free, or fact: pick any two. The current internet is fast and free, but is increasingly non-factual. An alternative emphasizing meaningful facts and observations will almost necessarily be slower. We might even be able to use pressed bleached dead trees as a backup medium.
- oneshtein 3y ago
  The answer is AI-based reviewers and moderators.
lxgr 3y ago
Not just books. I remember seeing a "movie" on Amazon (not sure if it was Prime or some other service I was subscribed to). It was called "how to pronounce 'Stranger Things'", and the total length was about 10 seconds. I'll leave the plot to your imagination.
- whywhywhywhy 3y ago
  Noticed a trend on Amazon Prime where movies are allowed to have inaccurate dates. So it'll say (2023) but the second it starts you can tell it's 90s, 00s or even 70s. Really damages the perceived quality of the service when it can be gamed like that.
  - TylerE 3y ago
    I suspect what's happened there is the content provider has improperly filled out the metadata. Usually when something like that happens it's because they've set the release date to whenever it came out on $dominant_format (i.e. Bluray)
  - mcmcmc 3y ago
    Just wait til the ads start pumping in, the quality can only go up!
- tivert 3y ago
  > Not just books. I remember seeing a "movie" on Amazon (not sure if it was Prime or some other service I was subscribed to). It was called "how to pronounce 'Stranger Things'", and the total length was about 10 seconds. I'll leave the plot to your imagination. That's a really common genre of video on Youtube. If you Google "how to pronounce 'Stranger Things'", you'll find dozens, including this channel with separate videos for "How to pronounce Stranger Things" (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZygvdKNT15o https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZygvdKNT15o) AND "How to pronounce Stranger Things 3" (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mD4Zae1rOgY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mD4Zae1rOgY).
- wincy 3y ago
  Reminds me of when I was trying to figure out the pronunciation for “synedoche” and got this as the top YouTube results. https://youtu.be/v-n1vGeVIXo https://youtu.be/v-n1vGeVIXo
chankstein38 3y ago
It's "funny"... In a way I feel like AI is always stated as the problem here but isn't it people that are the problem? I mean, I get that you can't control what the entire population does but, AI is a powerful tool that enables a lot of incredible things we may have never imagined being possible before. And it's not even out of its infancy yet. But people are ruining it. Similarly, a decentralized currency or decentralized ledger is a pretty great idea for a lot of things. The execution could use work but there are a lot of benefits to that. But it ended up being a way for a bunch of bros to scam a quick buck and now it's a joke. I'm not here as some jaded blind fanboy or crypto bro. I legit just hate how people ruin everything for the rest of us. I want to be able to enjoy cool new tech and interesting new ways of achieving things or learning. I want to see innovation. But what we get is "everything is trash because people are trash and will do anything to get money"
- jprete 3y ago
  I blame AI because this was all 100% foreseeable. I also blame the people using AI to make trash, but hustlers gonna hustle and shitposters gonna shitpost. Until it's actually illegal to shit on the cultural commons of civilization, people are going to keep doing it.
dorkwood 3y ago
How do we know these books are AI generated? Because the startup "Reality Defender" said so? This feels like they're deliberately singling out trash books and calling them AI-generated to fit their bias. It doesn't seem fair, since the AI content I've generated myself has been better than any book I've ever read. In fact, it's inspired me to generate my first book, which I'll be publishing soon.
- toss1 3y ago
  I'm interested. Is this a work of fact or fiction? How much editing are you adding/subtracting to the content? How granular are your prompts (e.g., prompting for roughly each new paragraph, ~page, chapter, or larger)? How much are you finding you need to repeat/retry to get good output for your project?
  - dorkwood 3y ago
    I'm making non-fiction books that summarise historical events. No manual editing is necessary, as it automatically goes back through and cleans up any errors. I can't share my exact prompt style since I believe I've found a reliable way to generate these books en masse with minimal factual errors.
    - yvely 3y ago
      >I'm making non-fiction books If there are factually incorrect things to the books hallucinated by LLMs, they're not non-fiction. >...minimal factual errors This is still really bad when pretending to be a book portraying historical events...
- fourside 3y ago
  [dead]
- MSFT_Edging 3y ago
  What is with tech bros resenting art? If an AI generated book is better than any book you've ever read, you've probably only read garbage books. I'd be surprised if the book can follow a consistent plot rather than hallucinating characters halfway through.
nsypteras 3y ago
I'm pretty sure the ads displayed on my Kindle are all for AI generated children's books lately. It's actually kind of fun looking at them to find the AI generated artifacts (e.g little girl building snowman has three fingers, etc.) Not sure who's actually buying these things...
- freedomben 3y ago
  The other day I saw an advert for a "course" that teaches you how to capitalize on the "AI gold rush" by using AI to write and sell ebooks. It's the new get-rich quick idea I guess
  - johnyzee 3y ago
    I know a relatively successful author and screenwriter. Said person is abondoning their current projects, because apparently their friend is very successful selling books on Amazon, produced with the help of AI. The friend will, apparently, teach them how they, too, can tap into this market. This conversation over Christmas dinner set off so many red flags, that I could only bite my tongue and nod.
    - freedomben 3y ago
      This pains me so much, I can't even imagine how that had to have felt :-( I sure hope this blows over quickly.
- the__alchemist 3y ago
  Inaccurate finger counts are a staple of manmade children's material as well!
  - solardev 3y ago
    Maybe the AI learned that children prefer inaccurate fingers.
- infecto 3y ago
marban 3y ago
I logged in on Flickr for the first time in a decade or so and some of my contacts who are still using it are now uploading Midjourney images ad infinitum.
hosh 3y ago
The indie authors whose work I read on Royal Road (and similar sites) have been posting about how their work would get scraped and modified by AI before being published on Amazon.
sonicanatidae 3y ago
[flagged]
nurettin 3y ago
Next: Make $5,000-$10,000 a week selling AI spam detectors!
riley333 3y ago
There are so many reasons why this is happening and I personally think it's only tangentially related to AI. The internet has now become the home of "hustle culture" and is no longer serving the purpose of why it was first created. Covid only accelerated this trend as people began to look for other ways to generate income online. Just look at the Gamestop and AMC amateur stock trading craze or the explosion of flipping sneakers or Pokemon cards for income. A huge percentage of the internet consists solely of people looking to make a quick buck and/or establish some channel of passive income. The internet itself has been redefined as this weird vehicle for capitalism because we're careening towards a weird transitionary period in history as the rise of AI takes hold. The only thing that can solve this is UBI or some kind of shared equity system where huge megacorps primarily operated by AI generate trillions and trillions of dollars in wealth that needs to be distributed to the populace somehow. Godspeed as we enter this new age.
- argiopetech 3y ago
  If I'm the kinda guy who's into the hustle, and I can hustle $800/mo (or similar) out of the government with no effort, a) why wouldn't I also keep up my other hustles, and, b) why do you expect that the cost of living won't rise to meet there new level of basic income?
  - riley333 3y ago
    That's a completely fair point and it's why I don't really think UBI is the answer. But, what is the answer? I don't think anyone has this figured out yet. Capitalism is by far the best system we've come up with but I just don't know what happens when/if AGI happens. And maybe it won't ever happen but I'd rather be brainstorming about what to do if it does happen now than wait until it's too late.
- herval 3y ago
  idk why you're getting downvoted, but I kinda feel the same too. I've been gradually abandoning all social media sites bc it's all hustlers and fake antics (fake news, fake tiktok 'hidden cameras', fake articles, fake everything!), vying for a second of fame to sell you on something. The fact that it's 99% video also compounds it, I feel like
akeck 3y ago
This may end up pushing Amazon into a pay-to-play model for publishing. :-/
- quintonish 3y ago
  We've seen this with the Chrome Web Store. With a flat $5 fee, and a limit to how many extensions each account could publish, that was probably pretty effective. Maybe it would help here too? What other alternatives could mitigate the problem?
dawnerd 3y ago
Not just Amazon either. Barnes & Noble are starting to see them pop up as well. Luckily it's online only for now but the problem is spreading. If you look for coloring books on Amazon it's basically all AI generated.
JR1427 3y ago
What are the best ways to signal that your content is not AI-generated crap? Will we need to come up with a way to authenticate non-AI content?
- pavel_lishin 3y ago
  > What are the best ways to signal that your content is not AI-generated crap? Publish it prior to 2022.
  - Scoundreller 3y ago
    Cue the “photoshop artists aren’t real artists” cries
    - jhbadger 3y ago
      Exactly. In the 1990s there was a lot of grumbling by older artists used to pen and paper about how Photoshop and Illustrator and the like were evil and were only capable of creating cookie-cutter art with no "soul" (and going back even farther I remember reading articles by old journalists who decried the advent of the word processor and claimed that the limitations of typewriters made them better writers because they had to think what they wanted to write before typing it rather than endlessly edit what they wrote afterwards).
      - __loam 3y ago
        I think the arguments of "well people didn't like photoshop/cameras/the printing press/etc" is kind of a lazy excuse that ignores the actual criticism being leveled at generative AI systems. AI has removed basically all effort required to just create an image or generate some text. It does take effort to either discern the good from the bad or edit the output using some expertise enough for the content to reach a "professional" level, but that's kind of beside the point. These systems break the creative economy and have a really negative effect on online communities dedicated to these skills. There's a lot of spam in these online spaces that's being put there by low effort amateurs that don't even realize how shit they are. It increases the signal to noise and requires more effort on the part of community members in discerning truth from fiction. The maintainers of curl just discussed this problem with respect to their bug bounty program. Bad reports are still bad reports, but it takes more effort to tell them apart now. Add that to the fact that these systems are built by scraping work without permission and these turn into headwinds that push people away from creative pursuit. Rather than bringing new people into these communities, the people who actually know what they're doing just get trampled by the uninformed. None of these dynamics really exist with photoshop. While photoshop has tools that can speed up the artistic process, you need a base understanding of how to illustrate to actually use it effectively. It's truly a tool, as opposed to a slot machine you just give a prompt to.
ska 3y ago
Hardly surprising. Ever since the barrier to production/publication/distribution was dropped to very low (15ish? years ago) the SNR on available books has been terrible. LLMs are making the 1st part even lower effort, at least for trash, so the noise is going to increase by an order of magnitude at least. Current discoverability outside people-you-actually know seems to be in a nosedive, so it's hard to see this getting better any time soon.
Scoundreller 3y ago
Been a similar thing on ebay and Amazon for a while for technical topics. Pretty sure it’s just a bunch of journal articles patched together, each one as a chapter.
avandekleut 3y ago
We recently got duped buying an AI generated book about native plants on amazon. The cover page was low-res and the information contained within was wrong. All of the citations given in the back of the book were non-existant. When we tried to return it they just gave our money back.
arp242 3y ago
> Amazon in September limiting authors to uploading a maximum of three books to its store each day. Why not 3 books a month? Or even a few a year? Even extremely prolific authors rarely write more than a few books a year. This is a ludicrous rate-limit that seems designed to not actually do much (so Amazon can still get their commission) while giving the appearance that it does. It's hard to take this in good faith.
Aloisius 3y ago
It feels like Amazon has been a willing participant when it comes to seedy vendors flooding their marketplace with crap for a while now. They made a token effort to curtail some AI spam by limiting how many self-published books you can upload per day to 3, but that's still laughably high.
- Casteil 3y ago
  100% Real question is whether they'll start making their own 'AmazonBasics' branded AI-generated dogshit, just like they do to undercut/displace successful 3rd party products.
  - herval 3y ago
    This is so going to happen. 100% margin for the kindle content
- ska 3y ago
  > It feels like Amazon has been a willing participant color me surprised.
anon373839 3y ago
I tried Kindle Unlimited a few years ago, and the amount of scammy trash on there was staggering. I can't imagine how much worse it must be in the ChatGPT era.
RecycledEle 3y ago
I hope that AI allows Amazon to determine who put years into writing a book, and who is a spammer. (Amazon refused to let me publish my books.)
ACV001 3y ago
Remember - Amazon is a marketplace. They don't care what they sell as long as the sales go on. I stopped ordering books from amazon after I got some poorly printed (by amazon), blurry books. The problem is that amazon will not tell you if it is print on demand or a real book.

143 points by Anon84 3y ago

Having disabled Google's personalized ads, I did see many "get rich quick (now with AI" schemes that promoted the production of this kind of spam. I think the quickest and simplest way to at least lower the acceleration on this mass spam is for Google to actually vet their ads, especially non-English ones.

dukeyukey 3y ago
I get a lot of this stuff on YouTube, only with higher production value. AI for automating anything related to get-rich-quick.

ThalesX 3y ago

The crypto bros turned to AI bros. I have a close friend that fits the profile and he's now a distinguished author of multiple books published on Amazon.

spookybones 3y ago
Is he actually profiting?
- greg_V 3y ago
  if he's selling his method to dupes, he must be
- ThalesX 3y ago
  Not really; very small number of sales, but his effort is minimal. He also uses pseudonyms.
superkuh 3y ago
Exactly. Speculators are gonna speculate. Most of the worst aspects of cryptocurrency were done by normal con artists with absolutely no interest in touching a blockchain. When that was no longer quite as popular they just switched to whatever new thing was popular that the public couldn't understand.

spookybones 3y ago

Youtube is becoming flooded with influencers showing you how to do it and promising massive imaginary profits. Same for AI generated Etsy designs, copywriting gigs, and various other things.

nerdjon 3y ago
Not just YouTube, but every social media platform seems to be spammed by it. I feel like I am seeing these stupid ads almost every hour now. A ton of people jumping on the bandwagon promising insane profits from AI. But if you thought for more than 1 second, if they themselves could make this much profit why would they be trying to convince other people to do it. The reality is they are likely the ones making any money by building up a following making these promises.
- datadrivenangel 3y ago
  The secret to getting rich is selling people the secret to getting rich.
- tivert 3y ago
  > But if you thought for more than 1 second, if they themselves could make this much profit why would they be trying to convince other people to do it. Often times this stuff is scams that stopped working, so the scammers pivot to selling the non-working scam to others. There was a YouTube video a couple years ago that exposed the scam of a couple of twins that were selling SEO'd bottom-of-the-barrel ghostwritten books on Amazon. Instead of using generative AI, they used the cheapest possible online ghostwriters. Apparently Amazon got wise and banned them, so they pivoted to selling their "system." Edit: here's the video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=biYciU1uiUw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=biYciU1uiUw "Contrepreneurs: The Mikkelsen Twins"
- herval 3y ago
  > The reality is they are likely the ones making any money by building up a following making these promises. The typical scheme that gets people rich since "Rich dad, poor dad", but now it's exponentially easier to do. It's crazy

photon_collider 3y ago

As platforms become flooded with AI-generated garbage, I wonder how people will be able to find meaningful content. Are there going to be a new set of AI tools for content curation? It just seems like this will only spark a new AI-driven arms race.

bnpxft 3y ago
The old fashion way, friends. I only have so much time in the day. I can only consume so much content. I don't need AI or machine learning to filter a firehose of content. My friends provide a human scale stream of recommendation that I trust much more than a profit driven algorithm.
- lancesells 3y ago
  Yes, and if you don't have friends go to a library or a known subreddit (for now) or forum (for now). Also, stop using Amazon for delivery of said content as they are part of the issue.
ActionHank 3y ago
The sanest would be to enforce a labelling policy with a user report mechanism and a user opt-out filter. That said this won't happen and platforms will shift from metrics like views to things like number of uploads or "shares" to show "growth".
gshubert17 3y ago
I think that individuals who care about meaningful, non-deceitful content, will have to create their own parallel net in which content can be sanity-checked and fact-checked. Fast, free, or fact: pick any two. The current internet is fast and free, but is increasingly non-factual. An alternative emphasizing meaningful facts and observations will almost necessarily be slower. We might even be able to use pressed bleached dead trees as a backup medium.
oneshtein 3y ago
The answer is AI-based reviewers and moderators.

lxgr 3y ago

Not just books. I remember seeing a "movie" on Amazon (not sure if it was Prime or some other service I was subscribed to). It was called "how to pronounce 'Stranger Things'", and the total length was about 10 seconds. I'll leave the plot to your imagination.

whywhywhywhy 3y ago
Noticed a trend on Amazon Prime where movies are allowed to have inaccurate dates. So it'll say (2023) but the second it starts you can tell it's 90s, 00s or even 70s. Really damages the perceived quality of the service when it can be gamed like that.
- TylerE 3y ago
  I suspect what's happened there is the content provider has improperly filled out the metadata. Usually when something like that happens it's because they've set the release date to whenever it came out on $dominant_format (i.e. Bluray)
- mcmcmc 3y ago
  Just wait til the ads start pumping in, the quality can only go up!
tivert 3y ago
> Not just books. I remember seeing a "movie" on Amazon (not sure if it was Prime or some other service I was subscribed to). It was called "how to pronounce 'Stranger Things'", and the total length was about 10 seconds. I'll leave the plot to your imagination. That's a really common genre of video on Youtube. If you Google "how to pronounce 'Stranger Things'", you'll find dozens, including this channel with separate videos for "How to pronounce Stranger Things" (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZygvdKNT15o https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZygvdKNT15o) AND "How to pronounce Stranger Things 3" (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mD4Zae1rOgY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mD4Zae1rOgY).
wincy 3y ago
Reminds me of when I was trying to figure out the pronunciation for “synedoche” and got this as the top YouTube results. https://youtu.be/v-n1vGeVIXo https://youtu.be/v-n1vGeVIXo

chankstein38 3y ago

It's "funny"... In a way I feel like AI is always stated as the problem here but isn't it people that are the problem? I mean, I get that you can't control what the entire population does but, AI is a powerful tool that enables a lot of incredible things we may have never imagined being possible before. And it's not even out of its infancy yet. But people are ruining it. Similarly, a decentralized currency or decentralized ledger is a pretty great idea for a lot of things. The execution could use work but there are a lot of benefits to that. But it ended up being a way for a bunch of bros to scam a quick buck and now it's a joke. I'm not here as some jaded blind fanboy or crypto bro. I legit just hate how people ruin everything for the rest of us. I want to be able to enjoy cool new tech and interesting new ways of achieving things or learning. I want to see innovation. But what we get is "everything is trash because people are trash and will do anything to get money"

jprete 3y ago
I blame AI because this was all 100% foreseeable. I also blame the people using AI to make trash, but hustlers gonna hustle and shitposters gonna shitpost. Until it's actually illegal to shit on the cultural commons of civilization, people are going to keep doing it.

dorkwood 3y ago

How do we know these books are AI generated? Because the startup "Reality Defender" said so? This feels like they're deliberately singling out trash books and calling them AI-generated to fit their bias. It doesn't seem fair, since the AI content I've generated myself has been better than any book I've ever read. In fact, it's inspired me to generate my first book, which I'll be publishing soon.

toss1 3y ago
I'm interested. Is this a work of fact or fiction? How much editing are you adding/subtracting to the content? How granular are your prompts (e.g., prompting for roughly each new paragraph, ~page, chapter, or larger)? How much are you finding you need to repeat/retry to get good output for your project?
- dorkwood 3y ago
  I'm making non-fiction books that summarise historical events. No manual editing is necessary, as it automatically goes back through and cleans up any errors. I can't share my exact prompt style since I believe I've found a reliable way to generate these books en masse with minimal factual errors.
  - yvely 3y ago
    >I'm making non-fiction books If there are factually incorrect things to the books hallucinated by LLMs, they're not non-fiction. >...minimal factual errors This is still really bad when pretending to be a book portraying historical events...
fourside 3y ago
[dead]
MSFT_Edging 3y ago
What is with tech bros resenting art? If an AI generated book is better than any book you've ever read, you've probably only read garbage books. I'd be surprised if the book can follow a consistent plot rather than hallucinating characters halfway through.

nsypteras 3y ago

I'm pretty sure the ads displayed on my Kindle are all for AI generated children's books lately. It's actually kind of fun looking at them to find the AI generated artifacts (e.g little girl building snowman has three fingers, etc.) Not sure who's actually buying these things...

freedomben 3y ago
The other day I saw an advert for a "course" that teaches you how to capitalize on the "AI gold rush" by using AI to write and sell ebooks. It's the new get-rich quick idea I guess
- johnyzee 3y ago
  I know a relatively successful author and screenwriter. Said person is abondoning their current projects, because apparently their friend is very successful selling books on Amazon, produced with the help of AI. The friend will, apparently, teach them how they, too, can tap into this market. This conversation over Christmas dinner set off so many red flags, that I could only bite my tongue and nod.
  - freedomben 3y ago
    This pains me so much, I can't even imagine how that had to have felt :-( I sure hope this blows over quickly.
the__alchemist 3y ago
Inaccurate finger counts are a staple of manmade children's material as well!
- solardev 3y ago
  Maybe the AI learned that children prefer inaccurate fingers.
infecto 3y ago

marban 3y ago

I logged in on Flickr for the first time in a decade or so and some of my contacts who are still using it are now uploading Midjourney images ad infinitum.

hosh 3y ago

The indie authors whose work I read on Royal Road (and similar sites) have been posting about how their work would get scraped and modified by AI before being published on Amazon.

sonicanatidae 3y ago

[flagged]

nurettin 3y ago

Next: Make $5,000-$10,000 a week selling AI spam detectors!

riley333 3y ago

There are so many reasons why this is happening and I personally think it's only tangentially related to AI. The internet has now become the home of "hustle culture" and is no longer serving the purpose of why it was first created. Covid only accelerated this trend as people began to look for other ways to generate income online. Just look at the Gamestop and AMC amateur stock trading craze or the explosion of flipping sneakers or Pokemon cards for income. A huge percentage of the internet consists solely of people looking to make a quick buck and/or establish some channel of passive income. The internet itself has been redefined as this weird vehicle for capitalism because we're careening towards a weird transitionary period in history as the rise of AI takes hold. The only thing that can solve this is UBI or some kind of shared equity system where huge megacorps primarily operated by AI generate trillions and trillions of dollars in wealth that needs to be distributed to the populace somehow. Godspeed as we enter this new age.

argiopetech 3y ago
If I'm the kinda guy who's into the hustle, and I can hustle $800/mo (or similar) out of the government with no effort, a) why wouldn't I also keep up my other hustles, and, b) why do you expect that the cost of living won't rise to meet there new level of basic income?
- riley333 3y ago
  That's a completely fair point and it's why I don't really think UBI is the answer. But, what is the answer? I don't think anyone has this figured out yet. Capitalism is by far the best system we've come up with but I just don't know what happens when/if AGI happens. And maybe it won't ever happen but I'd rather be brainstorming about what to do if it does happen now than wait until it's too late.
herval 3y ago
idk why you're getting downvoted, but I kinda feel the same too. I've been gradually abandoning all social media sites bc it's all hustlers and fake antics (fake news, fake tiktok 'hidden cameras', fake articles, fake everything!), vying for a second of fame to sell you on something. The fact that it's 99% video also compounds it, I feel like

akeck 3y ago

This may end up pushing Amazon into a pay-to-play model for publishing. :-/

quintonish 3y ago
We've seen this with the Chrome Web Store. With a flat $5 fee, and a limit to how many extensions each account could publish, that was probably pretty effective. Maybe it would help here too? What other alternatives could mitigate the problem?

dawnerd 3y ago

Not just Amazon either. Barnes & Noble are starting to see them pop up as well. Luckily it's online only for now but the problem is spreading. If you look for coloring books on Amazon it's basically all AI generated.

JR1427 3y ago

What are the best ways to signal that your content is not AI-generated crap? Will we need to come up with a way to authenticate non-AI content?

pavel_lishin 3y ago
> What are the best ways to signal that your content is not AI-generated crap? Publish it prior to 2022.
- Scoundreller 3y ago
  Cue the “photoshop artists aren’t real artists” cries
  - jhbadger 3y ago
    Exactly. In the 1990s there was a lot of grumbling by older artists used to pen and paper about how Photoshop and Illustrator and the like were evil and were only capable of creating cookie-cutter art with no "soul" (and going back even farther I remember reading articles by old journalists who decried the advent of the word processor and claimed that the limitations of typewriters made them better writers because they had to think what they wanted to write before typing it rather than endlessly edit what they wrote afterwards).
    - __loam 3y ago
      I think the arguments of "well people didn't like photoshop/cameras/the printing press/etc" is kind of a lazy excuse that ignores the actual criticism being leveled at generative AI systems. AI has removed basically all effort required to just create an image or generate some text. It does take effort to either discern the good from the bad or edit the output using some expertise enough for the content to reach a "professional" level, but that's kind of beside the point. These systems break the creative economy and have a really negative effect on online communities dedicated to these skills. There's a lot of spam in these online spaces that's being put there by low effort amateurs that don't even realize how shit they are. It increases the signal to noise and requires more effort on the part of community members in discerning truth from fiction. The maintainers of curl just discussed this problem with respect to their bug bounty program. Bad reports are still bad reports, but it takes more effort to tell them apart now. Add that to the fact that these systems are built by scraping work without permission and these turn into headwinds that push people away from creative pursuit. Rather than bringing new people into these communities, the people who actually know what they're doing just get trampled by the uninformed. None of these dynamics really exist with photoshop. While photoshop has tools that can speed up the artistic process, you need a base understanding of how to illustrate to actually use it effectively. It's truly a tool, as opposed to a slot machine you just give a prompt to.

ska 3y ago

Hardly surprising. Ever since the barrier to production/publication/distribution was dropped to very low (15ish? years ago) the SNR on available books has been terrible. LLMs are making the 1st part even lower effort, at least for trash, so the noise is going to increase by an order of magnitude at least. Current discoverability outside people-you-actually know seems to be in a nosedive, so it's hard to see this getting better any time soon.

Scoundreller 3y ago

Been a similar thing on ebay and Amazon for a while for technical topics. Pretty sure it’s just a bunch of journal articles patched together, each one as a chapter.

avandekleut 3y ago

We recently got duped buying an AI generated book about native plants on amazon. The cover page was low-res and the information contained within was wrong. All of the citations given in the back of the book were non-existant. When we tried to return it they just gave our money back.

arp242 3y ago

> Amazon in September limiting authors to uploading a maximum of three books to its store each day. Why not 3 books a month? Or even a few a year? Even extremely prolific authors rarely write more than a few books a year. This is a ludicrous rate-limit that seems designed to not actually do much (so Amazon can still get their commission) while giving the appearance that it does. It's hard to take this in good faith.

Aloisius 3y ago

It feels like Amazon has been a willing participant when it comes to seedy vendors flooding their marketplace with crap for a while now. They made a token effort to curtail some AI spam by limiting how many self-published books you can upload per day to 3, but that's still laughably high.

Casteil 3y ago
100% Real question is whether they'll start making their own 'AmazonBasics' branded AI-generated dogshit, just like they do to undercut/displace successful 3rd party products.
- herval 3y ago
  This is so going to happen. 100% margin for the kindle content
ska 3y ago
> It feels like Amazon has been a willing participant color me surprised.

anon373839 3y ago

I tried Kindle Unlimited a few years ago, and the amount of scammy trash on there was staggering. I can't imagine how much worse it must be in the ChatGPT era.

RecycledEle 3y ago

I hope that AI allows Amazon to determine who put years into writing a book, and who is a spammer. (Amazon refused to let me publish my books.)

ACV001 3y ago

Remember - Amazon is a marketplace. They don't care what they sell as long as the sales go on. I stopped ordering books from amazon after I got some poorly printed (by amazon), blurry books. The problem is that amazon will not tell you if it is print on demand or a real book.