8 ms·

A journey into Kindle AI slop hell

178 points by didgeoridoo 2y ago

refulgentis 2y ago
I can't help thinking there's a huge opportunity for discussing this side of AI in a more principled way. When something (i.e. AI) is this viscerally annoying, it's tempting to slip into this style of discussion, I get it. But it's......hard to read even when you agree and smile along the way. "The brief bio read: A little girl with blue eyes and blonde hair leads her friends on a healthy eating mission, culminating in the creation of a neighborhood farmer’s market. Okay. Sort of Triumph of the Will: Bedtime Story for Kids and Adults." (for context, Triumph of the Will is the name of a famous Nazi Germany-produced propaganda documentary) To flesh it out a bit more with examples, to make it clear it's not cherry-picking: - "What generative models are being used? What kinds of prompts are generating these texts? I don’t know. I’m not a virgin. As I said, I have a child." (virgin really is a complete non-sequitor here, unless the idea is only virgins use ChatGPT?) - "But I did want to read about my nice Nazi Youth friend and her farmer’s market journey" - "More importantly, what is a bedtime story for kids and adults? I am an adult. A bedtime story for an adult is just a real book. I read real books. Or at least, I used to? Basically, did Kindle think I was stupid now?"
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- lelandfe 2y ago
  Have you read many articles from sleep deprived mothers about AI? I appreciated her delirious candor, personally.
  - refulgentis 2y ago
    Apologies, I didn't mean we should silence sleep-deprived mothers. At best, inartful, on my part that it came across that way. I don't think I've ever consciously used pregnancy status/post-partum status, or sleep deprivation, as a prism for analyzing - to my knowledge, I've never used it unconciously either, but I'm faced with the distinct possibility I have, given thats how it came across here. It just sort of ripped me out of smiling and enjoying the article the reading to hear blonde hair and blue eyes = Nazi propaganda: I have the same (though, little hair left :P ), and little kids in the family who are. After the virgin reference I scrolled around to check if there was a layer joke where the article was written/edited by AI, thus demonstrating another layer of inappropriate references beyond the "bedtime story for kids and adults" Then you start thinking "gee...AI art and 'bedtime story for kids and adults' SEO ads...Then my mind starts whirring on "maybe this is good because GenAI makes the monopoly incumbents look horribly bad, mindlessly selling programmatic content to me with programmatic ads on hardware I paid for" - and then I realized that's probably not what the author intended a reader to start thinking, so there's probably another way to poke at this
    - lelandfe 2y ago
      You didn’t come off as wanting this silenced - I just mean that I liked having a different voice on HN. We see a lot of arch, academic analysis here. Loopy, sometimes crass mom encounters AI books was a fun share from OP. I bet you can imagine what her reaction might be if she read this thread :)
- torginus 2y ago
  Honestly these AI books seem to be full of the saccharine sweet uber-PC toxic positivity that AI companies think what a 'safe' and 'aligned' AI should sound like. This is the main reason why I gave up on using ChatGPT for creative brainstorming.
- TheOtherHobbes 2y ago
  The problem isn't the AI. The problem is the content distribution systems that corporations have created. AI just happens to make it easier to game+automate some of their systems for instant wins. Ultimately it's the entitled "I need money fuck you" attitude that enshittifies everything neoliberalism touches, with a toxic blend of desperation (some people really do need the money) and boundless narcissistic opportunism. Tech has become enmeshed in that, and is a major enabler and amplifier of it. It doesn't have to be, but it's where we are now.
  - A4ET8a8uTh0 2y ago
    As always, the problem is people.
- thaumasiotes 2y ago
  > virgin really is a complete non-sequit[u]r here, unless the idea is only virgins use ChatGPT? The idea is pretty explicit, if you just read the immediately following paragraph: >> I mean I literally could not find the book again. All versions of A Girl’s Quest for Healthy Eating appeared to have vanished, as though it never existed in the first place. (Is Amazon deleting these spammy books as fast as they can be generated? Again, I don’t know. Stop asking me questions for dorks.)
  - refulgentis 2y ago
    I wanted to give a little charity, thank you for making clear that I shouldn't.
- dannyobrien 2y ago
  It actually occurred to me that this style of writing feels mass-generated at this point: it's the default mannerist tone if you were going to knock out a fairly surface assessment of a new online phenomenon. Not that there's anything wrong with that! Max Read was one of the people who defined that tone in the 2010s[1], so I'm pretty sure that's what people come to his substack to read. But I must admit, my meta-snark was whispering all through this piece: "Maybe it would have saved time to just type 'Here are some titles of things I have been advertised on Kindle, please knock out 800 words on them in the American Internet Journalist House Style". [1] https://web.archive.org/web/20140429233811/http://www.cision.com/us/2014/03/max-read-takes-reins-at-gawker/ https://web.archive.org/web/20140429233811/http://www.cision...
b450 2y ago
> This week’s edition is a guest post about spooky Kindle A.I. slop from Leah Beckmann, an L.A.-based screenwriter and journalist and Chief Kindle Bullshit Correspondent for Read Max. I had to reread this a couple times before understanding that the guest post - not the A.I. slop - was from Leah Beckmann.
- gcp123 2y ago
  Agreed. First couple paragraphs of the post had me like, wtf am I reading right now? Threw the article into Claude and had it succinctly summarize the key ideas the author was trying to convey. Thankful for the clarity that provided and time it saved me.
- rustcleaner 2y ago
  >This week’s edition is a guest post from Leah Beckmann about spooky Kindle A.I. slop, an L.A.-
Analemma_ 2y ago
I'm getting more and more convinced that tech people are living in a dangerous bubble re: the generative AI boom. I've been talking to people outside this bubble, and the unanimous response to all the "exciting" AI developments of the last ~3 years has been that their experience of generative AI has been purely negative with no upsides whatsoever. All they see is the content slop, the shitty search results, degraded experiences in e.g. customer service, and so on. And it's starting to alarm me that nobody in tech appears to care about this and is just going "damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead". That kind of arrogant dismissal of popular mood and forcing unwanted change on people is how resentment and revolution happen.
- minimaxir 2y ago
  Unfortunately, the anti-AI discourse is a vocal minority in the grand scheme of things. As long as engagement metrics are up and the marginal benefits outweigh the marginal costs, the AI slop will continue. Boomers using Meta AI to create nonsensical images on Facebook and WhatsApp aren't complaining about it on social media.
  - ks2048 2y ago
    I'm not sure its Boomers who create these images. It's Boomers who reply "Amen" to a pictures of six-fingered Jesus wrapped in an American flag. (Actually I'm not quite sure - maybe it's just mostly bots replying to other bots...?)
    - Maken 2y ago
      It's all bots. Humans are hidden in the margins of modern internet.
  - rchaud 2y ago
    Boomers aren't making them. They are the captive audience in Facebook groups. I predict that around October, the content on those pages will switch to political stuff (at least for American audiences).
- 2y ago
timetraveller26 2y ago
AI was a mistake
- hosh 2y ago
  I don't know if it is a mistake, but it's certainly the genie we let out of the bottle. If anything, we're seeing the acceleration of what happens when we have a world view that is founded upon exploitation, be that the land or the people.
- unraveller 2y ago
  It makes fantasy novels more fantastic and you're complaining? Just ask to see the author's daily github contribution stats next time.
- rldjbpin 2y ago
  before you go back, which AI stocks will help us ride the wave in the near future? /s
lelandfe 2y ago
> Is Amazon cutting out the author middle man and using A.I. and user data to generate books on its own? Amazon has done just this elsewhere: https://techcrunch.com/2022/11/29/amazons-alexa-ai-animated-kids-stories-echo-show/ https://techcrunch.com/2022/11/29/amazons-alexa-ai-animated-... By the by, I’ve enjoyed my Kindle a whole lot more since turning on its airplane mode. I connect to WiFi to sync new books to it, but don’t give my Amazon overlords other opportunities to present AI slop from the vaults.
- lawlessone 2y ago
  >Create with Alexa,” a new AI tool for kids that generates animated stories How soon until we find out it's child labour?.. on both ends.
  - wkat4242 2y ago
    Well most AIs are only a year or so old!
- ulysses1244 2y ago
  Fantastic quote from the article: “Is Amazon cutting out the author middle man and using A.I. and user data to generate books on its own? What generative models are being used? What kinds of prompts are generating these texts? I don’t know. I’m not a virgin. As I said, I have a child.”
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
- baxtr 2y ago
  I’m pretty relaxed about this. There is absolutely no consumer product whatsoever that amazon has nailed. Maybe Kindle, but that’s just a store window for them. Alexa is garbage, the fire phone a disaster, and so on.
- kalupa 2y ago
  dramatically improved battery life is also a side-effect of disabled wifi, too
wiml 2y ago
I've been getting these too — they've largely supplanted the plausibly-human-written glurge I used to get (mil-SF and disturbingly specific romance subgenres). I don't think I've given Amazon any reason to believe I'd want them, though. My guess is that these are just the highest-expected-profit books that Kindle has, and it's what you get if Kindle doesn't have a more specific signal for you.
- jabroni_salad 2y ago
  I guess my dozens of followed authors and infinitely expanding TBR list on goodreads that I regularly buy books and 15+ years of purchase history and ratings just can't be used as a signal, because my reccs are full of this nonsense too. Lately I've noticed that in self pub pulp land authors are trading shoutouts with each other without curation or discretion, but even those are self selecting to a higher degree of 'gives a shit' than what the algo reccs have been offering. I think it has been over a year since I found something off of the 'if you liked X' carousel and that used to be extremely reliable for me. And like I said, I'm reading pulp. I'm the kind of person who will see 'this is my first ever written work please be nice' as a synopsis and will read the first ten chapters just to see. There's plenty of decent trash around if I look for it but the robots only want me to have the soup at the bottom.
  - pocketarc 2y ago
    > I guess my dozens of followed authors and infinitely expanding TBR list on goodreads that I regularly buy books and 15+ years of purchase history and ratings just can't be used as a signal, because my reccs are full of this nonsense too. This is what I don't understand. There is SO much -good- data about us, but recommendations everywhere, by and large, are terrible. You'd think that with all the tracking, with all the pushback on privacy protections and whatnot, that we'd be getting -something- out of it. But I go to Amazon and it tells me "you just bought a printer? here's 10 more printers you might be interested in".
    - carlosjobim 2y ago
      There are two principal ways in which businesses make sales. Either by giving people what they want or need at a price they are happy to pay. These businesses don't need advertisement to drive demand, as word of mouth is such a powerful force. The other way is by using advertising. That's why normal consumers will never be shown an ad for any product or service that they would be interested in buying.
hosh 2y ago
Royal Road is one of the platforms for indie authors to publish serialized web novels. Many people use that to jump into a full time writing career -- successful new serials get on a ladder, paetrons get set up, and when enough chapters are written, they get edited and published to Kindle. The publication to Kindle Unlimited ends up with the books getting stubbed. In return though, you have a kind of presale so you know people like reading the work, and a sufficient fan base to appeal for support for a successful launch on KU. One of the things I've been seeing the authors reporting to their subscribers are people stealing that work by scraping the chapters, running it through LLM, and then publishing it on KU. Authors have been adding watermarks into the text, though I don't know how successful that is. (On the other hand, many authors use generative image AI to create covers, which has angered artists whose work has been sucked up by the generative AI machine).
- torginus 2y ago
  I really want to like Royalroad, as it's full of well-written stuff, made by clearly passionate and talented authors, but I can't help but notice that everything seems to some sort of Isekai/LitRPG/Progression novel where the protagonist fights anime-style battles and gets progressively more powerful, with sometimes numerical stats increasing, as presented by stat blocks in the story. This genre was completely unknown to me before I discovered RR, and I'm suprised how ubiquitous it is. Is this what young people want nowadays? The genre seems to have crossed over from Asian culture, with many novels being translations of Chinese/Korean ones.
  - TheOtherHobbes 2y ago
    That's genre fiction - a formula, with some reader-insert gratification. A site like RR is specifically aimed at readers who want those kinds of stories. Other fiction markets are the same. Mysteries, fantasy, thrillers, romance, all have their tropes and sub-tropes. Most don't have an RR equivalent because they're marketed through other communities, like TikTok for romance. Original fiction that doesn't follow strict genre rules and expectations is a very hard sell today - but I'm not sure that's ever been untrue.
NBJack 2y ago
I've tried to use generative text LLMs myself for story ideas, filling out backstory in characters, etc. No matter how good the model is, no matter how much context you supply or repeat, it will inevitably spiral down into some degree repetition and forgotten story beats. But hey, at least it's all technically grammatically correct. Most of the time. What disturbs me more is the thought of lost context in things like code, medical notes, and actually critical workflows.
- surfingdino 2y ago
  > But hey, at least it's all technically grammatically correct. Most of the time. Unless you use it to translate or feed it languages other than English. It's mostly crap.
- Aerroon 2y ago
  Yeah, I've tried the same thing. Even with very heavy handholding (I think typing it out myself might've been faster) the results were useless beyond a short story. I thought it was a skill issue though, because I hear others talk about it so much.
- Spivak 2y ago
  It's been surprisingly great for filling out parts of my D&D campaign. I wanted to have a cooking show style contest and needed a bunch of dishes to be the competition. Here's one of the results I got: Underdark Goulash: Ingredients: Drow's darkstone potatoes (akin to sweet potatoes but darker, and with a slightly bitter tang), glimmerstool mushrooms (glow in the dark and have a smoky flavor), sahuagin seaweed (a deep-sea plant with a salty taste), and roper spices (ground up, they have a robust, gamy flavor). Description: A hearty dish that pays homage to the unrelenting grit of an Underdark adventure. The darkstone potatoes and glimmerstool mushrooms provide a flavorsome base. The sahuagin seaweed's saltiness is reminiscent of the sea, while the roper spices add an unexpectedly pleasant gamey note. Much like an adventurer finding comfort in the dark caves, sometimes the most uncommon combinations lead to a profound satisfaction. And they're all this good, like what the hell? How is this thing so creative? And it got exactly the snobby pander to the judges tone I asked for. The AIs don't have any clue how to make a compelling narrative or interesting characters but for some reason it understands nouns. It comes up with really cool items, settings, shops, interior details that show-don't-tell details I'm looking for. And I can use it to bridge culture gaps when I want some diversity and want to faithfully represent a culture I don't really know — what clothing they would wear, how they would say things, what they would eat for an everyday lunch, different cultural touchstones or family dynamics.
nop_slide 2y ago
Hit up support and ask them to remove the lock screen ads, even if you didn't buy the "ad free" kindle support usually does it. It worked for me.
- mhx1138 2y ago
  I wish that worked on echo show. That thing is infuriating. Don’t get it unless you’re cool with ads in your home.
  - themadturk 2y ago
    I turn mine on at Christmas to act as a speaker for my phone, so we can listen to my choice of seasonal music during present-opening.
smusamashah 2y ago
A company grows big and then turns into shit and this cycle keeps repeating I guess. I love playing games. Ubisoft, EA (in particular) etc are now shit. How long do we have to enjoy Steam (and other Valve products) until it suffers the same fate? Or will it remain good until some influential boss leaves? I think while praising a business and getting excited we should have their average age in back of our minds.
- Aerroon 2y ago
  Probably until Steam becomes publicly traded.
- Maken 2y ago
  Steam can't stop recommending me this Banana game despite it obviously being nothing more than a printer of artificially limited inventory items. It's a scam and it has been running for days.
thaumasiotes 2y ago
> What else could this sick and twisted mind have cooked up? I wanted more. I clicked on Bette’s author page; this was the only title listed. Through the penumbral fog of half-sleep, squinting one-eyed at my phone, I googled, “a girls.quest for healthy watinf bette santinir.” Even the politely auto-corrected version yielded no meaningful results > And then things got spooky. When I opened my Kindle again, there, illuminated by the inoffensive whitish glow of my device, was an ad for A Girl’s Quest for Healthy Eating. Only, it was vaguely distorted. Like a spot-the-difference Highlights game, here was the same book with minor discrepancies. This cover featured several little girls, presumably all on healthy eating quests of their own. The page count was slightly different. And most distressing of all, the author's name: Bette Santinir. In other words, Santini plus R. Where had I seen this name before? Oh right: from one minute ago when I misspelled Santini, Santinir. > As the very editor of this Substack texted me, “If you didn’t have pics of this, I would think you were schizophrenic.” I really wish the supposed pictures had been included in the piece.
- crooked-v 2y ago
  The linked Reddit posts include other people seeing the same pattern, which seems to be to that the same AI-generated works are listed under many different slightly-differently-spelled author names, presumably to show up more in search ranks.
  - thaumasiotes 2y ago
    Forget whether it's true. We have here an essay that says, quite explicitly, "if I didn't have pictures of this, I would be called insane". It doesn't include any of the pictures. How does that happen? What's the right conclusion to draw from that?
    - lanstin 2y ago
      There were a bunch of photos of the kindle in question showing dodgy book names and cover art?
      - 2y ago
Sloppy 2y ago
Today I drifted in AI generated dread feeling that half of what I read (including this article) was AI generated -- maybe more since it included AI generated music. Was it due to my recent return from some number of days in the Oregon outback off the grid with no interweb pipes? I knew it was too short a time. I feel a great panicky need to run from an impending Matrix moment.
rednafi 2y ago
The intro section before the main article was worse than slop. Loved Leah’s writing otherwise.
beefnugs 2y ago
So after experiencing this nightmare she will still give her son a reading tablet someday?
hoseja 2y ago
>What kinds of prompts are generating these texts? >I don’t know. I’m not a virgin. As I said, I have a child. >But I did want to read about my nice Nazi Youth friend and her farmer’s market journey Are they capable of writing without snark?
- Havoc 2y ago
  I guess snark is their brand
Havoc 2y ago
AI is still pretty terrible at maintaining coherence over long texts.
rldjbpin 2y ago
amazon has another battle on ai-generated listings on their marketplace as it is (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38969417 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38969417). while highly unethical and a nuisance to navigate as a user, i respect the hustle compared to drop shipping bs people speak about on social media. the bottom line is that economically these are the parties most likely to find a way to filter out ai-generated content going forward. or they will die trying.

178 points by didgeoridoo 2y ago

I can't help thinking there's a huge opportunity for discussing this side of AI in a more principled way. When something (i.e. AI) is this viscerally annoying, it's tempting to slip into this style of discussion, I get it. But it's......hard to read even when you agree and smile along the way. "The brief bio read: A little girl with blue eyes and blonde hair leads her friends on a healthy eating mission, culminating in the creation of a neighborhood farmer’s market. Okay. Sort of Triumph of the Will: Bedtime Story for Kids and Adults." (for context, Triumph of the Will is the name of a famous Nazi Germany-produced propaganda documentary) To flesh it out a bit more with examples, to make it clear it's not cherry-picking: - "What generative models are being used? What kinds of prompts are generating these texts? I don’t know. I’m not a virgin. As I said, I have a child." (virgin really is a complete non-sequitor here, unless the idea is only virgins use ChatGPT?) - "But I did want to read about my nice Nazi Youth friend and her farmer’s market journey" - "More importantly, what is a bedtime story for kids and adults? I am an adult. A bedtime story for an adult is just a real book. I read real books. Or at least, I used to? Basically, did Kindle think I was stupid now?"

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
lelandfe 2y ago
Have you read many articles from sleep deprived mothers about AI? I appreciated her delirious candor, personally.
- refulgentis 2y ago
  Apologies, I didn't mean we should silence sleep-deprived mothers. At best, inartful, on my part that it came across that way. I don't think I've ever consciously used pregnancy status/post-partum status, or sleep deprivation, as a prism for analyzing - to my knowledge, I've never used it unconciously either, but I'm faced with the distinct possibility I have, given thats how it came across here. It just sort of ripped me out of smiling and enjoying the article the reading to hear blonde hair and blue eyes = Nazi propaganda: I have the same (though, little hair left :P ), and little kids in the family who are. After the virgin reference I scrolled around to check if there was a layer joke where the article was written/edited by AI, thus demonstrating another layer of inappropriate references beyond the "bedtime story for kids and adults" Then you start thinking "gee...AI art and 'bedtime story for kids and adults' SEO ads...Then my mind starts whirring on "maybe this is good because GenAI makes the monopoly incumbents look horribly bad, mindlessly selling programmatic content to me with programmatic ads on hardware I paid for" - and then I realized that's probably not what the author intended a reader to start thinking, so there's probably another way to poke at this
  - lelandfe 2y ago
    You didn’t come off as wanting this silenced - I just mean that I liked having a different voice on HN. We see a lot of arch, academic analysis here. Loopy, sometimes crass mom encounters AI books was a fun share from OP. I bet you can imagine what her reaction might be if she read this thread :)
torginus 2y ago
Honestly these AI books seem to be full of the saccharine sweet uber-PC toxic positivity that AI companies think what a 'safe' and 'aligned' AI should sound like. This is the main reason why I gave up on using ChatGPT for creative brainstorming.
TheOtherHobbes 2y ago
The problem isn't the AI. The problem is the content distribution systems that corporations have created. AI just happens to make it easier to game+automate some of their systems for instant wins. Ultimately it's the entitled "I need money fuck you" attitude that enshittifies everything neoliberalism touches, with a toxic blend of desperation (some people really do need the money) and boundless narcissistic opportunism. Tech has become enmeshed in that, and is a major enabler and amplifier of it. It doesn't have to be, but it's where we are now.
- A4ET8a8uTh0 2y ago
  As always, the problem is people.
thaumasiotes 2y ago
> virgin really is a complete non-sequit[u]r here, unless the idea is only virgins use ChatGPT? The idea is pretty explicit, if you just read the immediately following paragraph: >> I mean I literally could not find the book again. All versions of A Girl’s Quest for Healthy Eating appeared to have vanished, as though it never existed in the first place. (Is Amazon deleting these spammy books as fast as they can be generated? Again, I don’t know. Stop asking me questions for dorks.)
- refulgentis 2y ago
  I wanted to give a little charity, thank you for making clear that I shouldn't.
dannyobrien 2y ago
It actually occurred to me that this style of writing feels mass-generated at this point: it's the default mannerist tone if you were going to knock out a fairly surface assessment of a new online phenomenon. Not that there's anything wrong with that! Max Read was one of the people who defined that tone in the 2010s[1], so I'm pretty sure that's what people come to his substack to read. But I must admit, my meta-snark was whispering all through this piece: "Maybe it would have saved time to just type 'Here are some titles of things I have been advertised on Kindle, please knock out 800 words on them in the American Internet Journalist House Style". [1] https://web.archive.org/web/20140429233811/http://www.cision.com/us/2014/03/max-read-takes-reins-at-gawker/ https://web.archive.org/web/20140429233811/http://www.cision...

b450 2y ago

> This week’s edition is a guest post about spooky Kindle A.I. slop from Leah Beckmann, an L.A.-based screenwriter and journalist and Chief Kindle Bullshit Correspondent for Read Max. I had to reread this a couple times before understanding that the guest post - not the A.I. slop - was from Leah Beckmann.

gcp123 2y ago
Agreed. First couple paragraphs of the post had me like, wtf am I reading right now? Threw the article into Claude and had it succinctly summarize the key ideas the author was trying to convey. Thankful for the clarity that provided and time it saved me.
rustcleaner 2y ago
>This week’s edition is a guest post from Leah Beckmann about spooky Kindle A.I. slop, an L.A.-

Analemma_ 2y ago

I'm getting more and more convinced that tech people are living in a dangerous bubble re: the generative AI boom. I've been talking to people outside this bubble, and the unanimous response to all the "exciting" AI developments of the last ~3 years has been that their experience of generative AI has been purely negative with no upsides whatsoever. All they see is the content slop, the shitty search results, degraded experiences in e.g. customer service, and so on. And it's starting to alarm me that nobody in tech appears to care about this and is just going "damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead". That kind of arrogant dismissal of popular mood and forcing unwanted change on people is how resentment and revolution happen.

minimaxir 2y ago
Unfortunately, the anti-AI discourse is a vocal minority in the grand scheme of things. As long as engagement metrics are up and the marginal benefits outweigh the marginal costs, the AI slop will continue. Boomers using Meta AI to create nonsensical images on Facebook and WhatsApp aren't complaining about it on social media.
- ks2048 2y ago
  I'm not sure its Boomers who create these images. It's Boomers who reply "Amen" to a pictures of six-fingered Jesus wrapped in an American flag. (Actually I'm not quite sure - maybe it's just mostly bots replying to other bots...?)
  - Maken 2y ago
    It's all bots. Humans are hidden in the margins of modern internet.
- rchaud 2y ago
  Boomers aren't making them. They are the captive audience in Facebook groups. I predict that around October, the content on those pages will switch to political stuff (at least for American audiences).
2y ago

timetraveller26 2y ago

AI was a mistake

hosh 2y ago
I don't know if it is a mistake, but it's certainly the genie we let out of the bottle. If anything, we're seeing the acceleration of what happens when we have a world view that is founded upon exploitation, be that the land or the people.
unraveller 2y ago
It makes fantasy novels more fantastic and you're complaining? Just ask to see the author's daily github contribution stats next time.
rldjbpin 2y ago
before you go back, which AI stocks will help us ride the wave in the near future? /s

lelandfe 2y ago

> Is Amazon cutting out the author middle man and using A.I. and user data to generate books on its own? Amazon has done just this elsewhere: https://techcrunch.com/2022/11/29/amazons-alexa-ai-animated-kids-stories-echo-show/ https://techcrunch.com/2022/11/29/amazons-alexa-ai-animated-... By the by, I’ve enjoyed my Kindle a whole lot more since turning on its airplane mode. I connect to WiFi to sync new books to it, but don’t give my Amazon overlords other opportunities to present AI slop from the vaults.

lawlessone 2y ago
>Create with Alexa,” a new AI tool for kids that generates animated stories How soon until we find out it's child labour?.. on both ends.
- wkat4242 2y ago
  Well most AIs are only a year or so old!
ulysses1244 2y ago
Fantastic quote from the article: “Is Amazon cutting out the author middle man and using A.I. and user data to generate books on its own? What generative models are being used? What kinds of prompts are generating these texts? I don’t know. I’m not a virgin. As I said, I have a child.”
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
baxtr 2y ago
I’m pretty relaxed about this. There is absolutely no consumer product whatsoever that amazon has nailed. Maybe Kindle, but that’s just a store window for them. Alexa is garbage, the fire phone a disaster, and so on.
kalupa 2y ago
dramatically improved battery life is also a side-effect of disabled wifi, too

wiml 2y ago

I've been getting these too — they've largely supplanted the plausibly-human-written glurge I used to get (mil-SF and disturbingly specific romance subgenres). I don't think I've given Amazon any reason to believe I'd want them, though. My guess is that these are just the highest-expected-profit books that Kindle has, and it's what you get if Kindle doesn't have a more specific signal for you.

jabroni_salad 2y ago
I guess my dozens of followed authors and infinitely expanding TBR list on goodreads that I regularly buy books and 15+ years of purchase history and ratings just can't be used as a signal, because my reccs are full of this nonsense too. Lately I've noticed that in self pub pulp land authors are trading shoutouts with each other without curation or discretion, but even those are self selecting to a higher degree of 'gives a shit' than what the algo reccs have been offering. I think it has been over a year since I found something off of the 'if you liked X' carousel and that used to be extremely reliable for me. And like I said, I'm reading pulp. I'm the kind of person who will see 'this is my first ever written work please be nice' as a synopsis and will read the first ten chapters just to see. There's plenty of decent trash around if I look for it but the robots only want me to have the soup at the bottom.
- pocketarc 2y ago
  > I guess my dozens of followed authors and infinitely expanding TBR list on goodreads that I regularly buy books and 15+ years of purchase history and ratings just can't be used as a signal, because my reccs are full of this nonsense too. This is what I don't understand. There is SO much -good- data about us, but recommendations everywhere, by and large, are terrible. You'd think that with all the tracking, with all the pushback on privacy protections and whatnot, that we'd be getting -something- out of it. But I go to Amazon and it tells me "you just bought a printer? here's 10 more printers you might be interested in".
  - carlosjobim 2y ago
    There are two principal ways in which businesses make sales. Either by giving people what they want or need at a price they are happy to pay. These businesses don't need advertisement to drive demand, as word of mouth is such a powerful force. The other way is by using advertising. That's why normal consumers will never be shown an ad for any product or service that they would be interested in buying.

hosh 2y ago

Royal Road is one of the platforms for indie authors to publish serialized web novels. Many people use that to jump into a full time writing career -- successful new serials get on a ladder, paetrons get set up, and when enough chapters are written, they get edited and published to Kindle. The publication to Kindle Unlimited ends up with the books getting stubbed. In return though, you have a kind of presale so you know people like reading the work, and a sufficient fan base to appeal for support for a successful launch on KU. One of the things I've been seeing the authors reporting to their subscribers are people stealing that work by scraping the chapters, running it through LLM, and then publishing it on KU. Authors have been adding watermarks into the text, though I don't know how successful that is. (On the other hand, many authors use generative image AI to create covers, which has angered artists whose work has been sucked up by the generative AI machine).

torginus 2y ago
I really want to like Royalroad, as it's full of well-written stuff, made by clearly passionate and talented authors, but I can't help but notice that everything seems to some sort of Isekai/LitRPG/Progression novel where the protagonist fights anime-style battles and gets progressively more powerful, with sometimes numerical stats increasing, as presented by stat blocks in the story. This genre was completely unknown to me before I discovered RR, and I'm suprised how ubiquitous it is. Is this what young people want nowadays? The genre seems to have crossed over from Asian culture, with many novels being translations of Chinese/Korean ones.
- TheOtherHobbes 2y ago
  That's genre fiction - a formula, with some reader-insert gratification. A site like RR is specifically aimed at readers who want those kinds of stories. Other fiction markets are the same. Mysteries, fantasy, thrillers, romance, all have their tropes and sub-tropes. Most don't have an RR equivalent because they're marketed through other communities, like TikTok for romance. Original fiction that doesn't follow strict genre rules and expectations is a very hard sell today - but I'm not sure that's ever been untrue.

NBJack 2y ago

I've tried to use generative text LLMs myself for story ideas, filling out backstory in characters, etc. No matter how good the model is, no matter how much context you supply or repeat, it will inevitably spiral down into some degree repetition and forgotten story beats. But hey, at least it's all technically grammatically correct. Most of the time. What disturbs me more is the thought of lost context in things like code, medical notes, and actually critical workflows.

surfingdino 2y ago
> But hey, at least it's all technically grammatically correct. Most of the time. Unless you use it to translate or feed it languages other than English. It's mostly crap.
Aerroon 2y ago
Yeah, I've tried the same thing. Even with very heavy handholding (I think typing it out myself might've been faster) the results were useless beyond a short story. I thought it was a skill issue though, because I hear others talk about it so much.
Spivak 2y ago
It's been surprisingly great for filling out parts of my D&D campaign. I wanted to have a cooking show style contest and needed a bunch of dishes to be the competition. Here's one of the results I got: Underdark Goulash: Ingredients: Drow's darkstone potatoes (akin to sweet potatoes but darker, and with a slightly bitter tang), glimmerstool mushrooms (glow in the dark and have a smoky flavor), sahuagin seaweed (a deep-sea plant with a salty taste), and roper spices (ground up, they have a robust, gamy flavor). Description: A hearty dish that pays homage to the unrelenting grit of an Underdark adventure. The darkstone potatoes and glimmerstool mushrooms provide a flavorsome base. The sahuagin seaweed's saltiness is reminiscent of the sea, while the roper spices add an unexpectedly pleasant gamey note. Much like an adventurer finding comfort in the dark caves, sometimes the most uncommon combinations lead to a profound satisfaction. And they're all this good, like what the hell? How is this thing so creative? And it got exactly the snobby pander to the judges tone I asked for. The AIs don't have any clue how to make a compelling narrative or interesting characters but for some reason it understands nouns. It comes up with really cool items, settings, shops, interior details that show-don't-tell details I'm looking for. And I can use it to bridge culture gaps when I want some diversity and want to faithfully represent a culture I don't really know — what clothing they would wear, how they would say things, what they would eat for an everyday lunch, different cultural touchstones or family dynamics.

nop_slide 2y ago

Hit up support and ask them to remove the lock screen ads, even if you didn't buy the "ad free" kindle support usually does it. It worked for me.

mhx1138 2y ago
I wish that worked on echo show. That thing is infuriating. Don’t get it unless you’re cool with ads in your home.
- themadturk 2y ago
  I turn mine on at Christmas to act as a speaker for my phone, so we can listen to my choice of seasonal music during present-opening.

smusamashah 2y ago

A company grows big and then turns into shit and this cycle keeps repeating I guess. I love playing games. Ubisoft, EA (in particular) etc are now shit. How long do we have to enjoy Steam (and other Valve products) until it suffers the same fate? Or will it remain good until some influential boss leaves? I think while praising a business and getting excited we should have their average age in back of our minds.

Aerroon 2y ago
Probably until Steam becomes publicly traded.
Maken 2y ago
Steam can't stop recommending me this Banana game despite it obviously being nothing more than a printer of artificially limited inventory items. It's a scam and it has been running for days.

thaumasiotes 2y ago

> What else could this sick and twisted mind have cooked up? I wanted more. I clicked on Bette’s author page; this was the only title listed. Through the penumbral fog of half-sleep, squinting one-eyed at my phone, I googled, “a girls.quest for healthy watinf bette santinir.” Even the politely auto-corrected version yielded no meaningful results > And then things got spooky. When I opened my Kindle again, there, illuminated by the inoffensive whitish glow of my device, was an ad for A Girl’s Quest for Healthy Eating. Only, it was vaguely distorted. Like a spot-the-difference Highlights game, here was the same book with minor discrepancies. This cover featured several little girls, presumably all on healthy eating quests of their own. The page count was slightly different. And most distressing of all, the author's name: Bette Santinir. In other words, Santini plus R. Where had I seen this name before? Oh right: from one minute ago when I misspelled Santini, Santinir. > As the very editor of this Substack texted me, “If you didn’t have pics of this, I would think you were schizophrenic.” I really wish the supposed pictures had been included in the piece.

crooked-v 2y ago
The linked Reddit posts include other people seeing the same pattern, which seems to be to that the same AI-generated works are listed under many different slightly-differently-spelled author names, presumably to show up more in search ranks.
- thaumasiotes 2y ago
  Forget whether it's true. We have here an essay that says, quite explicitly, "if I didn't have pictures of this, I would be called insane". It doesn't include any of the pictures. How does that happen? What's the right conclusion to draw from that?
  - lanstin 2y ago
    There were a bunch of photos of the kindle in question showing dodgy book names and cover art?
    - 2y ago

Sloppy 2y ago

Today I drifted in AI generated dread feeling that half of what I read (including this article) was AI generated -- maybe more since it included AI generated music. Was it due to my recent return from some number of days in the Oregon outback off the grid with no interweb pipes? I knew it was too short a time. I feel a great panicky need to run from an impending Matrix moment.

rednafi 2y ago

The intro section before the main article was worse than slop. Loved Leah’s writing otherwise.

beefnugs 2y ago

So after experiencing this nightmare she will still give her son a reading tablet someday?

hoseja 2y ago

>What kinds of prompts are generating these texts? >I don’t know. I’m not a virgin. As I said, I have a child. >But I did want to read about my nice Nazi Youth friend and her farmer’s market journey Are they capable of writing without snark?

Havoc 2y ago
I guess snark is their brand

Havoc 2y ago

AI is still pretty terrible at maintaining coherence over long texts.

rldjbpin 2y ago

amazon has another battle on ai-generated listings on their marketplace as it is (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38969417 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38969417). while highly unethical and a nuisance to navigate as a user, i respect the hustle compared to drop shipping bs people speak about on social media. the bottom line is that economically these are the parties most likely to find a way to filter out ai-generated content going forward. or they will die trying.