Amazon Is Being Flooded with Books Written Entirely by AI
futurism.com
futurism.com
For me the primary issue has been the words, the lexicon, the cadence; it's flat. Seems like writers have learned to write and learned what's right, they've been writing and not reading. There's not much exploration of the form, it's all so grammatically correct. Maybe it's the fault of the editors or typesetters, if those still exist. It's boring, either way.
Secondly it's the themes. Struggle and oppression have always been plot drivers, but it seems like a vast majority of works published in the last decade are just slight variations on "oppressed person struggles to exist within the System, then finds a way to overcome; The End." The Hero's Journey highly compressed, lossily.
Luckily there are hundreds of years and countless intriguing novels written before all this, more than I could ever hope to read in my lifetime. Maybe this is what it is like to age: to recognize truly that nothing is new under the sun; so, go forth by going back, seek that which was once new in its time.
I read an article a few years ago from a literary editor complaining how MFA programs had made his job harder. He said his job used to be sorting a few gems out of a mountain of rubbish, but now he has the more time consuming task of sorting through a mountain of mediocre work. His point was that MFA programs can teach you how to not be awful, but not make you great.
I suspect it has something to do with a few factors (just speculation):
1. Publishers / writers taking the safe route to content creation: using formulaic storytelling to generate "likely" successes (the pop music effect). They're treating writing more as a product than art.
2. Creative writing as a medium no longer attracts the best and brightest, who instead go into other expressive forms that are more on trend / current (movies, tv, video games, digital art, music, programming, etc).
3. People's attention spans are shorter, and novelty is not perceived as being rewarded (this is related to the first point)
4. A culture that is increasingly trending toward narcissism due to the effects of social media, pop culture, and more broken homes. People aren't writing for the sake of expression or art so much as to get attention and win prizes.
5. (Ties in with 1 and 3) An increasingly garbage information landscape full of click-bait and vapid content optimized for algorithms and views. This information landscape creeps into the culture at every level, I believe (to varying degrees)
It is ironic, and a poignant observation, that AI writing is nearly indistinguishable from much of the existing user-written content. I tend to agree, and blame that on the fact that in the past ten years, people have become intellectually lazy (perhaps for the above reasons?) and are really just parrots and synthesizers themselves.
That’ll be 15 dollars for Audible download.
(I have read and enjoyed a couple of LitRPGs)
First hour or so of HWFM was a little rough, but then it hit its stride and here I am 9 audible credits later, ready for the 10th to be out. Was entertained the whole way through.
IMO J. Zachary Pike has better writing technique, but hasn't released as much. I'm presuming the extra polish costs more time to author.
With the latest flood of look alikes I think we can save our time by just using AI to summarize.
Seems like there was a golden age and relatability to movies that was lost at some stage.
Same for music, there is technically good music happening. But I find the reliability and warmth harder to come by.
My room mates were watching these insanely CGI heavy action films about 5-10 years back and cheering. I could never get it .
It's like the fiction publishing industry had this technology for 10-20 years already.
Since the Gutenberg days there has never been a shortage of written material to be digested. For hundreds of years there has been way more written material than any one person could read in a lifetime. So the problem has been to pick out what is most worth reading out of the millions of books you could be reading instead. The situation now is no different, except that we should have stricter standards on what information we allow into our heads. There will always be value in a well-curated library (will AIs curate the libraries too?)
An AI could be the writer and recommender in all those modern scenarios. Will this mean we revert back to listening to our friends and family over online opinion? Probably not, because they're no less exposed than we are to online recomendation creep.
So the inevitable end result of this will be that all content will be AI generated as soon as the quality becomes - not great, competent or insightful, but just good enough to make money in the immediate short term. And this will be the case for all forms of media.
The situation is exactly the same as it was before as far as you or I are concerned.
More books are released every day than any of us can keep up with. More books have been published (and lost to time) than we can even account for.
There's more competition now, but the amount of attention you or I have to give to discovery has not changed. Like when competing restaurants open across the street from yours, it just means authors need to work harder to entice people to buy from them instead of Jimmy Pesto.
(In the case of Amazon, they're doing it through astroturfed reviews...)
Not going to lie, i didn't spot it.
If you must have new published books (allegedly human authored, edited, and curated for cultural relevancy) you will almost have to use your own a.i. anyway. You'll need to trust it to summarize the work or "human" reviews, detect/fix repulsive flaws, and get/generate any recommendations according to your satisfaction.
It's funny to see early Stable Diffusion threads go from "lol we have the power to see EVERYBODY naked" to "ok this is boring now" over the course of just two years.
A sandwich you make yourself never tastes as good as one made by someone else. When you know exactly how it was constructed, by the time you take a bite you already know what to expect. Nothing is left to the imagination. There's no thrill of having your expectations challenged and discovering new flavors.
(The best tasting sandwich is the one you steal from the workplace refrigerator. Then, the thrill is in the chase.)
For now the prompts are deliberate creations of mind but in due time they could be largely auto generated (perhaps even blurred from the user) like feathers in a cap you collect and never have to look at. They will learn how to surprise us to a delightful degree with levers that don't reveal all the magic.
https://cointelegraph.com/news/spotify-reportedly-deletes-th...
I'd venture to say that most of the non-fiction ebooks, and especially the best-sellers for Kindle, are published by multi-nom-de-plume "grindset" publishers.
In 2017, a 10,000-word "booklet" on any non-fiction topic cost $200. That usually took about ten days from order to completion. The content was pretty much the same you'd now get via LLMs.
Either you get volume, or you had to produce those very cheaply to it make any sense at all.
Of, course a lot of blurbs and reviews have nothing to to with the book in question...
I suppose some ratings bots will be deployed negatively. Really good negative reviews could be entertaining.
pardon my french but this is one of the dumbest fucking things i've ever read which makes complete sense given where it's coming from but christ almighty nobody should be taking this crap to heart.
Though I have read a few non-fiction books that probably could have been condensed into a single chapter. Unfortunately there doesn't seem to be much of a market for mini-books like that.
For that matter, I've also read fantasy novels that were longer than the entire Lord of the Rings and might have been better as a shorter novella.