Tom Lesley has published 40 books in 2023, all with 100% positive reviews
amazon.com
amazon.com
From one review: “ One paragraph starts with "As an AI language model I can't....". Unfortunately we don't have an AI who can correct a book written by an AI. Fortunately I can send it back.”
Sauce:
https://www.amazon.com/product-reviews/B0BWVH451G/ref=acr_dp...
Yes, I've corrected it.
Literally the first sentence "Call me Ishmael" was translated as if the meaning was to tell Ishmael to call the story teller on the phone.
Someone else commented here that AI would raise the noise level everywhere and I unfortunately have to agree.
I've been doing that online for years! Does this mean ChatGPT be taking my hobby away?
I guess it's all about how people choose to use it. It's up to us to encourage responsible use and make sure we don't let AI-generated content overshadow genuine, thoughtful discussion. Who knows, maybe as the tech gets better, we'll see AI tools that can generate more concise and meaningful responses. Fingers crossed!
(this comment was generated by chatGPT)
Although, in all fairness, I have been known to write verbose answers that don't say anything meaningful, too, and I'm not a bot. I think.
> Don't worry, JohnFen. We still love you even if you're not sure whether you're a bot or not. After all, aren't we all just a bunch of biological machines running on meat-based neural networks?
Anything coming directly from a customer is probably refutable. For example, the incentives I normally see are on these little cards they include with the product encouraging reviews in exchange for a gift card or something similar. What's to stop a competitor from falsely reporting it using a fake incentive card they created?
Amazon could take your report then actually open the product and see if the incentive card is actually stored with every product. But that's a bigger task than just trusting the proof you sent in.
Order one themselves, open it up to see if it contains the card.
Maybe the two of you have different definitions of "irrefutable." If I say, "They ship packages with cards in them that offer a gift card in exchange for a five-start reviews," I would personally call the presence of such a gift card offer, irrefutable proof.
True, my testimony alone is not irrefutable proof, but let's compare to a science paper. It says they have proved that light's path can be bent by gravity. Well, science papers have included outright frauds before, so the paper in and of itself is not "irrefutable proof," but the claims within it can be refuted by attempting to replicate the experiment.
And so it is with the gift-card-offers. A single report or tens of thousands of reports are not irrefutable proof, but they explain how to replicate the result, and if Amazon choose to ignore these reports rather than attempt to replicate what they describe, that is on Amazon.
Ultimately, everything a customer reports can be faked. Businesses that ignore customer complaints because they might be faked, and do so when it "happens to" make them money to ignore customer reports... Are not suffering from being unable to prove that the reports are correct.
They are suffering from making too much money to want to know whether they are complicit in fraudulent behavious on the part of their partners.
Yes it is work to find out if the customer is describing an irrefutable way of discovering whether the customer is telling the truth. It is not the Universe's responsibility to make cracking down on fraud easy: It is Amazon's responsibility to organize their business around not making easy money at the expense of their customers, and if cracking down on fraud is too expensive, it is on Amazon to change their business model.
"It's too much work to crack down on fraud" ought to be rejected as an unacceptable thing to say about any business.
This suggests they wanted amazon to accept their "irrefutable proof".
I hate fake reviews. I'm not defending them. But the fact that literally every site of significant size that offers reviews struggles to control fake ones should be a clue that it isn't so easy to manage.
Just google/bing "{big site name} fake reviews" and you'll find this issue plagues everyone, not just amazon.
If it is too difficult to prevent your customers from being defrauded when they do business with you, find another business model.
No business has an inalienable right to exist, much less an inalienable right to choose whatever business model they like and then shrug their shoulders at whether they are complicit in crimes against their own customers.
Nobody ordered Amazon to allow other merchants on their platform. Nobody told Amazon that comingling goods with third parties was an acceptable way to cut their costs and become more "efficient" at a business.
They chose to do these things, and it is on them to find a way to stop stealing from their customers, or face criticism from people like me.
I do not accept "It is too hard to police fraud" as an excuse for making money from fraud. I also do not accept "everybody's doing it" as an excuse.
Sadly technology has gotten so good that it has actually gotten bad.
All of it is imported crap from Alibaba, of course, and Amazon sellers won't even bother customizing the images.
The degradation in quality has been astonishing.
> All of it is imported crap from Alibaba, of course, and Amazon sellers won't even bother customizing the images.
Which, by the way, is also the literal user experience of AliExpress or Taobao. You forgot to mention widely varying prices.
Whenever I see that (or any Chinese on the packaging), it's a clue to me to go look for the literal same item on AliExpress, usually for a significantly cheaper price (like $1.50 + $3 shipping vs $17, to give a recent example).
https://www.amazon.com/Portable-Emergency-Compatible-Re-Char...
Amazon 3P (third party) has essentially become what eBay was in the 90s except the crap is sometimes housed in the USA for faster delivery. Amazon doesn't care. It pretty much all fell apart after he separated from McKenzie and lost the way.
1. Anything less than 4.6 is probably junk. 2. Ignore the 4-5 star reviews, only read the 1-3 star reviews 3. Really read them. 4. A good product will still generally have 2-3% of reviews at 1 star. Less than 2% is a red flag, more than 4% is also a red flag.
Amazon does not nothing to shut down the YouTubers or the grifters publishing these books. Anything that adds friction or requires human intervention - whether it's policies with teeth or staff to issue takedowns - reduces the bottom line.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=biYciU1uiUw
This is about using underpaid ghostwriters to write the books, but obviously using AI is just the next logical step. The funny thing is that even before people were using AI, this sort of thing obviously did not work
Really opens your mind to the amount of grift and scams and shady stuff that happens online.
The amount of profit Amazon will make from “Tom Lesley” and the like is negligible compared to the actual long term reputational damage that low quality products do to their brand.
What would however be a big problem for Amazon is the marketplace becoming unusable and untrustworthy in the eye of users.
Seems like "Lesley" should get himself a Midjourney account to go along with thhe ChatGPT account, because his covers kinda suck.
"Okay, now playing '5 Minutes (B-B-B Bombing Mix)' by Bonzo Goes to Washington"
I wish folks like this would do a transparent web site on how much they made on the scam[1]
[1] It is a scam because we know ChatGPT will produce authoritative prose that is 100% provably not correct, so these aren't "books" so much as they are "printouts" being sold as books.
It’s also got a different author, and is four pages long. How is this stuff not being automatically detected and flagged for review?
like face the nation etc debates.
Need no reviews, just dedication...
... and automation.
Now anyone lazy enough (to even not remove the phrase "As an AI language model I can't..." from the generated text) can "write books". And these "books" will be fundamentally plagiarism and a bunch of trivia by design.
Isn't that wonderful?
It certainly is wonderful!
There are also fake positive reviews.
Now everything is really great!
https://www.businessinsider.com/chatgpt-courses-instruction-...
Not only have YouTubers found the same "business model", but now there are also people "educating" other people to "write" e-books and use image generators for book covers. Of course, you get also the AI generated promotion material with these courses.
The case/example mentioned is that a single image from image generation software cannot be copyrighted, but a series of related images being used to tell a story can be copyrighted, because it's a human carrying out the creative task.
[1] - https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2023/03/us-issues-guidan...
More precisely, only human works are subject to copyright. The law simply doesn’t apply to works by animals, AIs, or anything else, even when they are as creative as a human.
> "the requisite level of creativity is extremely low; even a slight amount will suffice"
Literally throwing paint at a canvas is enough to suffice.
Arranging the prerequisite conditions and coaxing a monkey into taking a selfie is probably enough as well (as long as you don't hire PETA's dumb lawyers who want to argue for assignment of the copyright to the monkey)
There's not really enough information to determine whether this author would qualify. We don't know how much editing he did if any, nor have we seen these specific cases tested in a court yet.
I think it will ultimately hinge on whether courts find the totality of the process to be creative enough to constitute a “modicum of creativity”
My prediction is that courts will eventually rule that something like writing a prompt is enough. I think too much would be upended to rule otherwise.
If an LLM reaches a sufficient capability that this can be achieved while maintaining a roughly comparable level of readability, then you'd have just completely legalized 'piracy by proxy'. And the same would come to every single medium from movies to software. This is going to make it an extremely difficult question to answer.
I expect what it come down to is determinism. LLMs are completely deterministic - same model + same input + same seed = same output. And so any seller will be obligated to retain any model composition/data, and any copyright holder of an input training item will have a copyright claim on any output item. In other words, you can only train on stuff you already have the copyright to, or rights to.
Exponential growth!
So ChatGPT? The book includes unvetted output that was copied verbatim (As an language model blablabla)
ChatGPT can't, legally speaking only humans are capable of claiming copyright. In the monkey selfie case a few years ago it was determined animals and machines can't claim copyright. In cases where there is no human author, the work is public domain.
If I made a drawing with one of those old plastic spirograph tools I'd never wonder if the copyright was mine or the spirograph's.
To me GPT is either very close to or already crosses that line.
> OpenAI hereby assigns to you all its right, title and interest in and to Output. This means you can use Content for any purpose, including commercial purposes such as sale or publication, if you comply with these Terms.
I didn't say that it did, just that OpenAI disclaims ALL rights (including, but not limited to copyright).
But what about, say, selling a coffee table art book. "Visions of the Future" - like 50 good quality scifi images with captions generated by, oh, Midjourney?
15-20% profit margin on a $20 print on demand book... Wouldn't do it myself but it doesn't feel wrong? I assume people would pay for that just for the art itself in a physical form, it doesn't have accuracy requirements or anything..
“Try banning items where every review is 5 stars and every reviewer has a middle name for some reason.” - me to the rescue.
As for recognizing the voice of AI: I asked AI to write its response in such a way that Stack Overflow's algorithm wouldn't detect it as AI. Fail!
There aren't many reviews, so I can't imagine too many people are buying these.
(I am not even mentioning the next step, to avoid seeding bad ideas.)
1. How did it get into the program?
2. Does it get paid a share everytime someone browses one of its books, before realizing it is a fake book?
Is it possible to prove (in a legal sense) that this content comes from chatgpt?
And obviously he did not really even attempt to hide anything. Whether it's legal or not: I don't think we have a clear, 100% obvious understanding of the consequences right now, but I'm pretty sure OpenAI couldn't care less. Suing people who use ChatGPT to publish meaningless books would surely not do them any good. Who else might care enough?
It is one of the reasons I don't see Copilot going anywhere. Any company that uses it can't assert ownership over their own IP, and if Copilot accidently reproduces a chunk of training data verbatim then someone else can.
The copying verbatim thing is valid though, although they have mitigations against that
Non-humans do not have copy rights from the things they create. However, humans have copy rights even when they use tools.
Just creating a book from ChatGPT is not against its terms of service, as “ OpenAI hereby assigns to you all its right, title and interest in and to Output. This means you can use Content for any purpose, including commercial purposes such as sale or publication, if you comply with these Terms.” What would be against the TOS is claiming that the output is human generated, so theoretically OpenAI could sue.
The courts have recently held that AI generated images are not copyrightable, so these “books” are basically just public domain content (where they aren’t directly copying existing human generated content). It’s not illegal to republish public domain content as your own.
The thing that might be straight up illegal here is the reviews. Those appear to be completely fake and probably constitute fraud.
How can it do that? ChatGPT isn't capable of owning or assigning copyright, because only humans can produce copyrighted works (or enter into copyright assignment contracts - typical in employment contracts), and ChatGPT isn't human.
It's giving you something that it doesn't own.
Where it gets entertaining is in Section 7. Indemnification; Disclaimer of Warranties; Limitations on Liability, which contains the following gem:
(a) Indemnity. You will defend, indemnify, and hold harmless us, our
affiliates, and our personnel, from and against any claims, losses, and
expenses (including attorneys’ fees) arising from or relating to your use
of the Services, including your Content, products or services you develop
or offer in connection with the Services, and your breach of these Terms
or violation of applicable law. [0]
Who says contract law isn't fun?
[0] https://openai.com/policies/terms-of-use
Edit: pedantic wordsmithing