Amazon lists book on Maui wildfires that was published days after fires started
goodereader.com
goodereader.com
the simplification/corruption of discussion through misuse of “ai” has been happening for decades. the shift is that now it is being used to shield humans from responsibility. that cannot be permitted.
humans did this.
But regardless of whether it’s LLM SEO or human SEO, a human decides to make fake pages about pickling dog biscuits because it was more important for them to make some money personally than for the search based internet to be anything but garbage. A human did that. The same humans that have been screwing everything up for everyone else for at least the last 10,000 years.
IMO I think this trend is just an acceleration and democratization of enshitification tools. But I think the future result is three fold:
1) dependence on automated algorithms to differentiate between garbage and quality is now demonstrably dead, while it just seemed dead before
2) open LLMs backed by information retrieval systems will be a much better tool for learning than a naked search engine
3) humans will need to curate lists of good material and depending and algorithms and automated information retrieval systems alone will be insufficient, and hence curated and editorialized directories will become the primary way of discovering human generated content of quality.
Looks like Yahoo was just 25 years too early!
If I think I make the best dog biscuits and I want to be found, then it’s not a “fake page” from my perspective — it’s just marketing and in a way I’m doing you a service because you’ll be happiest if you buy my dog biscuits.
And many of them will have good products/offer a good value, too?
Not necessarily, but even if so, the fact that all N million minus one of them incorrectly think they are the special one, results in the sea of crap we have today.
Another tough pill for marketers to please to swallow: Even IF the product is great, AND it's exactly what I need, AND I would be happy to buy it... I don't want to hear about it randomly throughout the day as I'm trying to live my life and do normal things other than "discovering products". I don't want to be actively or passively contacted uninvited by companies, even if I would be interested in their products. I'm not shopping. I don't want to hear about it.
granted, universities are decaying in much the same way as information access online.
I'm increasingly concerned about how regularly I'm seeing examples of entire framings of issues that serve to externalize responsibility. AI is a very fascinating, arguably unprecedented kind of tool. But it's just a tool, wielded by humans, to do the desired bidding of the humans, who are in complete control of that tool.
While this had been true for many previous tools (especially during the computer age), the fact that this tool evoked one particular human behavior - taking the intentional stance [0] - created many additional problems.
[0] https://www.amazon.com/Intentional-Stance-Daniel-C-Dennett/d...
perhaps you would like to argue for it.
I'm fine with humans using AI to write books if the humans are willing to attach their human name to their work.
The absense of a human name credited to the work makes it appear as though the human doesn't want to take responsibility for the AI's work.
I think that ship has sailed.
amazon could care. so could users of their products and services.
let’s see what happens.
We knew before how humans are and we still create tools that cause great damage if maliciously used.
bombs are just controlled explosions used for evil. but sometimes it benefits humanity to move mountains, and explosives make that easier.
a daunting task, but not insurmountable. oddly enough, language models could be utilized towards making this an easier problem to solve.
but you aren’t wrong, and the “books” on amazon are proof. misuse already rampant.
knew one of you had to be out there.
As in, whoever made this (using Ai) considers it a milestone in someway.
I can't have been OpenAi out of the box as it doesn't have the data, but it'd be quite easy to load in all the news articles about the situation to a custom model and then have it generate the book.
You could probably just ask GPT to come up with decent chapter headings for a book about a recent large wildfire and how it impacts climate change policy.
Then for each chapter heading give it a couple of pages of input info and ask it to write a chapter based on the content and the heading.
Bet it's a really bad book if this is even close to how it was made.
They range from books about trading to science fiction, erotica and books for children. Each book has a different made up author.
It really scares me what the informational space is going to look like.
If all else fails, publish a guide called "How to make money publishing on Amazon using AI" and charge bucks for it...
What's next ?
So are people dumping this junk to yield royalty payments through the Kindle Unlimited program? How does that work? Minutes read? Do you get paid just because some person downloaded something via the program, and if so how much? Time to fire up the text generator.
[1] - https://www.amazon.ca/Best-Sellers-Kindle-Store/zgbs/digital...
It's based on the number of words read, not minutes.
It can't be pure junk, or people wouldn't be reading enough of it to make it climb the charts.
https://www.vice.com/en/article/v7b774/ai-generated-books-of...
Using LLMs to make the books vaguely coherent instead of meaningless word salad adds a layer of plausible deniability which might make Amazon slower to notice what's going on.
https://kdp.amazon.com/en_US/help/topic/G201541130
I don't think this "book" filled the pages with loren ipsum, but it is entirely possible that they fed all of the available news stories into a language model such that someone actually sat there page flipping through chapters of decorated text.
But ultimately I think there is a stark difference between someone who actually paid $7 for an ebook, and someone who downloaded something on Kindle Unlimited and flipped through it. I am curious how KU influences the best seller charts numerically, which I can't find a clarification of.
Point being: if there's a way to game a system, people will game that system.
Amazon wouldn't do that because that would cost them more money (the payout to authors is based on that).
The authors would have an incentive to do that, but Amazon does their best to prevent it (again, because it costs them money).
I suspect that anything that rises to the best-seller level gets examined by Amazon very closely.
I think you’re vastly overestimating how much Amazon cares.
See their physical goods store: it’s also a race to the bottom with zero oversight whatsoever (commingling, counterfeits, used/returned/dirty items sold as new…) I don’t see why the virtual books store would be any different.
Amazon wrote the proverbial book on enshitification/race to the bottom :(
They care because every fake Kindle Unlimited read comes out of Amazon's pocket. Directly.
That's entirely different from the situation with counterfeit merchandise, where Amazon gets its cut anyway.
The more things stay the same, the more we really don't change.
If one is cynical enough, it's easy to imagine shifting back to a world where you have a relatively small number of (more-or-less) trusted media outlets you have to subscribe to, some big publishers, and everything else is sort of hit-and-miss and most people won't bother with.
And slightly off topic -- libraries (both public libraries and university libraries) can sometimes be exactly opposite of this. Whenever I see people say "find a book from your local public library" I know they never been to one and carefully check out the catalog themselves. New books don't arrive on the shelves until several months or a year later, and libraries rarely get rid of outdated books that teach you to learn Windows 7 or C# 6.0.
I think this varies by country, but in the United States most books are "returnable", meaning that the publisher gives you full credit if you return them. In addition, publishers often don't require payment of the invoice for quite some time after the books have been received. There's little or no risk involved, other than the opportunity cost of not having the shelf space for something else.
That's for hardcovers. For paperbacks and periodicals, often the publisher only requires tearing off the front cover and returning that. The bookseller is supposed to destroy the rest of the publication, but unscrupulous ones often launder these so-called "stripped books" through third-party brokers.
https://www.gally.net/temp/20230820hilarystorybyclaude2.html
After subjecting myself to actually reading that, I wouldn't expect it to do well once somebody also checks the prose. On every iteration and in every variation of generative textual production tech I've seen so far, I'm increasingly encouraged with the thought that the only writers who will be negatively impacted are the ones who really should be.
"A human tests each of the products that we sell"
exactly. I worked at FB and commuted with some folks on the CP/dismal/abuse review team (they reviewed contnet flagged for all sorts of crazy shit)
It was disturbing.... I wouldnt want to be that human, nor know those humans as well - there is a lot of dark content that makes ignorance bliss - both from knowing the content and knowing the humans (even the mods) around it...
yuck
1. Poor technical execution. 2. You can just go buy the product on Amazon for cheaper anyway, with faster and free shipping.
Walter B. Gibson (who wrote many of the stories featuring The Shadow) boasted of cranking out up to 10,000 words per day.
He reportedly had typewriters in every room of his house, with a story in progress on each one.
In his peak year, he produced 1,680,000 words - roughly 24 full-length novels.
That was in the days of typewriters, snail mail, physical printing pressess, and truck distribution.
Putting something in the Kindle Store takes less than five minutes, and it's for sale world-wide within a day.
I'll bet Gibson could've churned out a quickie on the Maui fires within two days, if he'd had any way to get it on the market that fast.
eta: Writing fiction I consider myself doing really well if I achieve 500 words in an hour. Non-fiction? 1000 is quite easily done.
I have never tried my hand at writing fiction, so I probably should shut up about that :) At the same time, I told / tell my kids bedtime stories that I pull out of my fantasy at the drop of a hat and they can go on for as long or as short as I want. But those are not to be compared to anything novel (or even novella) sized. 15 minutes tops.
When I was an analyst, my benchmark was about 2,000 "memo grade" words per day--typically mixed in with some phone calls, etc. More carefully constructed reports etc. took longer especially if research were involved.
Pages 31 Words 17212 Characters 97347 Characters excluding spaces 80354
Unfortunately I can not find exact statistics on the writing activity. So that's roughly within the ballpark of your maximum. I was pretty happy with this particular report and so was the customer, but to do that kind of thing sustainably would be beyond me.
Edit: and, more so because this was before COVID and that hit me pretty hard.
But this book in question is a full length novel published in -1 days.
It's apparently been removed, so I can't get a word count.
Your opinion.
Gibson was an outlier, but not an "extreme" outlier. Isaac Asimov wrote over 500 books in his lifetime, all of which were of reasonable quality. Enid Blyton wrote over 800 books. Barbara Cartland wrote 700. R.L. Stine is well over 400 and still writing. There are many others.
Today let's write and publish an e-book titled "Maui fire burns down the Amazon: How AI spam reduced the once mighty bookstore to ashes."
the “book” claimed six people died. the death toll is over 100.
like the fifteen year old that was found holding their dog.
the comparison is in the link that you must not have finished reading.
if my use of the word "amusing" offends; i apologize; I am not a sensitive person in that way and frequently do that. Nothing about this tragedy is amusing.
The predicable banal venality of people's responses, on the other hand, is. If you can't laugh at people jumping to profit of tragedy like the author of this book, what can you do? Despair?
Often there are hot but very incorrect takes. Many times articles are heavily based on a few Tweets.
If other people want to use AI to do their own monetizing, I really don’t see a lot of moral issues that.
I don’t trust any big media these days, precisely because they lie, misrepresent, hide and blatantly engage in propaganda. I am not alone in not trusting the big media publications, a big chunk of population doesn’t trust either. This is not good for the society.
“If I don’t do this, someone else is gonna do it” or “someone is doing already, so what’s the big deal if I do it too?” is a very weak argument for doing bad things