7 ms·

"authors"

by _Algernon_ 1y ago

"authors"

janmo 1y ago
After vibe coding now we get vibe books
- exe34 1y ago
  I have a feeling Neal Asher is doing this now. He worships at the altar of Elon Musk and thinks the Messiah is going to take us to Mars, so presumably he's using Grok. His novels are getting less memorable with each release.
  - AStonesThrow 1y ago
    So you are saying that Dr. Wernher von Braun's unpublished novel is still memorable: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Mars:_A_Technical_Tale#The_%22Elon%22 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Mars:_A_Technical_Tale...
alwa 1y ago
Whose reaction to being caught being sloppy is, puzzlingly, to scramble for the righteous ground of victimhood… > Faris said she’d faced a wave of harassment online after the incident and has taken a step back from social media. “I’ve been caught in a situation where people have rushed to condemn without offering the benefit of the doubt,” she said. “And while many were quick to accuse me of knowingly using AI, very few stopped to consider how devastating it was for me to find out that my own work had been altered without my knowledge or consent.”
- sandspar 1y ago
  That's pretty typical of unethical people. Folk psychology knows it as DARVO (an acronym for "deny, attack, reverse victim & offender"). It's common among abusers and cheaters and other people like that. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DARVO https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DARVO
- perching_aix 1y ago
  I might be just impressionable and naive, but if this is a false narrative, apart from me just finding it rather believable, it's also a surprisingly falsifiable one: > According to Faris, she gave two people she’d met in a writing group access to the Google Doc where Rogue Souls lived to help with final revisions and to hunt for typos. She said one of them used AI to fix sentences without her knowledge. “I want to be clear: I never approved the use of AI and I condemn it because [of the usual talking points...] She could just publish the Google Docs document for people to review the edit history of. Not a Google Workspaces whiz, but my impression is that edit history is immutably retained, so unless one could reasonably speculate Google being in on the con, this would conclusively prove (support) her version of the story, particularly if the timelines work out. I wonder if she'd also have a legal case against the person who made the change.
pphysch 1y ago
Is a mid-century paperback author, who published several books a year (100+ over their career) with the same plot, less of an "author" than someone who publishes a handful of original works over their career? Literary slop long predates AI.
- dvfjsdhgfv 1y ago
  True, but as usual the differentiator is the scale.
- bee_rider 1y ago
  There are good authors and bad authors. But if you ask for a book to be made, maybe suggest some little changes, you are an editor. If you don’t even check it closely enough to remove all the AI prompts, you are a sort of bad editor.
- WalterBright 1y ago
  I read that many prolific authors don't write their books. They write an outline, and have a paid staff of writers fill it in, without credit. It's a business like those assembly line Kinkade paintings. (I actually have one of them on the wall, and like it.) In high school, I decided to read all the James Bond novels. After reading about 8 of them, I realized they all had the same plot, and abandoned that project.
  - api 1y ago
    Most truly original art and literature doesn’t sell well, or if it does it’s a slow burn where sales very gradually creep up. Often popularity is achieved after the artist’s death. The way to make money is to find a schtick that works and repeat and market it. There’s a funny Behind the Bastards podcast episode on Kinkade, who apparently was kind of an asshole IRL.
  - levocardia 1y ago
    Indeed. Even before LLMs you could hire a cheap ghostwriter on upwork. Or even better, hire one to write the outline, another to flesh out the outline into a book, and a third to proof it. Get a cover on fiverr and upload. Then rinse and repeat. Fiction, nonfiction, doesn't matter. Whatever sells. Amazon's KDP program had to institute (very modest) upload limits for this reason. People were turning capital into a deluge of slop books -- hundreds per day in some cases. As usual, the real money is in selling courses that "teach" people how to do this technique.

"authors"

janmo 1y ago

After vibe coding now we get vibe books

exe34 1y ago
I have a feeling Neal Asher is doing this now. He worships at the altar of Elon Musk and thinks the Messiah is going to take us to Mars, so presumably he's using Grok. His novels are getting less memorable with each release.
- AStonesThrow 1y ago
  So you are saying that Dr. Wernher von Braun's unpublished novel is still memorable: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Mars:_A_Technical_Tale#The_%22Elon%22 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Mars:_A_Technical_Tale...

alwa 1y ago

Whose reaction to being caught being sloppy is, puzzlingly, to scramble for the righteous ground of victimhood… > Faris said she’d faced a wave of harassment online after the incident and has taken a step back from social media. “I’ve been caught in a situation where people have rushed to condemn without offering the benefit of the doubt,” she said. “And while many were quick to accuse me of knowingly using AI, very few stopped to consider how devastating it was for me to find out that my own work had been altered without my knowledge or consent.”

sandspar 1y ago
That's pretty typical of unethical people. Folk psychology knows it as DARVO (an acronym for "deny, attack, reverse victim & offender"). It's common among abusers and cheaters and other people like that. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DARVO https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DARVO
perching_aix 1y ago
I might be just impressionable and naive, but if this is a false narrative, apart from me just finding it rather believable, it's also a surprisingly falsifiable one: > According to Faris, she gave two people she’d met in a writing group access to the Google Doc where Rogue Souls lived to help with final revisions and to hunt for typos. She said one of them used AI to fix sentences without her knowledge. “I want to be clear: I never approved the use of AI and I condemn it because [of the usual talking points...] She could just publish the Google Docs document for people to review the edit history of. Not a Google Workspaces whiz, but my impression is that edit history is immutably retained, so unless one could reasonably speculate Google being in on the con, this would conclusively prove (support) her version of the story, particularly if the timelines work out. I wonder if she'd also have a legal case against the person who made the change.

pphysch 1y ago

Is a mid-century paperback author, who published several books a year (100+ over their career) with the same plot, less of an "author" than someone who publishes a handful of original works over their career? Literary slop long predates AI.

dvfjsdhgfv 1y ago
True, but as usual the differentiator is the scale.
bee_rider 1y ago
There are good authors and bad authors. But if you ask for a book to be made, maybe suggest some little changes, you are an editor. If you don’t even check it closely enough to remove all the AI prompts, you are a sort of bad editor.
WalterBright 1y ago
I read that many prolific authors don't write their books. They write an outline, and have a paid staff of writers fill it in, without credit. It's a business like those assembly line Kinkade paintings. (I actually have one of them on the wall, and like it.) In high school, I decided to read all the James Bond novels. After reading about 8 of them, I realized they all had the same plot, and abandoned that project.
- api 1y ago
  Most truly original art and literature doesn’t sell well, or if it does it’s a slow burn where sales very gradually creep up. Often popularity is achieved after the artist’s death. The way to make money is to find a schtick that works and repeat and market it. There’s a funny Behind the Bastards podcast episode on Kinkade, who apparently was kind of an asshole IRL.
- levocardia 1y ago
  Indeed. Even before LLMs you could hire a cheap ghostwriter on upwork. Or even better, hire one to write the outline, another to flesh out the outline into a book, and a third to proof it. Get a cover on fiverr and upload. Then rinse and repeat. Fiction, nonfiction, doesn't matter. Whatever sells. Amazon's KDP program had to institute (very modest) upload limits for this reason. People were turning capital into a deluge of slop books -- hundreds per day in some cases. As usual, the real money is in selling courses that "teach" people how to do this technique.