A journey into Kindle AI slop hell
maxread.substack.com
maxread.substack.com
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).
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.
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.
By far the worst offender of the bunch was Lin Carter's Under the Green Star - in which the sickly protagonist has his mind transported into a body of a powerful hero of legend, in a faraway realm, and rescues a beautiful princess who falls madly in love with him - at which point the teenage boy pandering became so unbearable, that I had to put the book down. This is exactly the tier wher most RR books stand at.
Other books, such as the Elric books by Moorcock, or Leiber's Fafhrd books would still qualify as genre fiction, but have far more depth and nuance to them and I thoroughly enjoyed reading them.
I wonder, what other sites are there for online fiction?
I only know of Wattpad, which seems to largerly focus on romance for teenage girls, and AO3, which seems to focus on smut/fanfiction.
While all 3 sites have hidden gems, it's too much of a bother for me to wade through the typical faire to bother looking for them.
There is also Your Lie In April. Not a fantasy or reincarnation. There are few other exceptional ones here and there.
I think I know the reason for this - shonen is a relentless popularity contest, where magazines only feature the most popular works and will quickly drop your series once it starts losing readers.
The way to consistently stay on top is to appeal to the biggest demographic - that is shonen battle/isekai fans by making your stuff to be exactly like the other stuff.
But doing so makes you lose the readers who were interested in the thing that made your manga unique in the first place. And after a time, these people will stop reading the publication altogether, skewing fan demographics even more towards genre fiction, making it even more impossible to create something unique.
I have seen this happen multiple times.
Japanese companies starting to send copyright claims against fan translations probably opened the door for Chinese, Korean, and English web novels like that.
(In case anyone is looking for recommendations, Mother of Learning is the best all-around, Delve is probably my favorite, and Worth the Candle is incredible if you can stomach how much of a crapsack world the protagonist is dragged through)
- bog standard isekai - isekai with numbers, but it's more of a horror story, at least for book 1
- hope - which actually isn't isekai, nor litrpg, but still fantasy about a young protag
- death by chocolate - a detective cyberpunk story
I don't think the phenomenon is young people these days, so much as every online fiction site slowly narrowing in on one subgenre over everything else, and Royal Road's being trashy power fantasies.
I'm on a discord where authors discuss these things, and they talk a lot about the RR community and the hoops they need to jump through to match that specific group's specific tastes, because it's one of the niches where the money is right now.
Yes, but it's not just young people.
>The genre seems to have crossed over from Asian culture, with many novels being translations of Chinese/Korean ones.
You can basically trace a lot of the web novel versions back to anime/manga/light novels. (Maybe the reason is that in Asia these are also web novel, eg Shousetsuka ni Narou.)
However, this kind of a genre is and was popular in the west independently of that. Edgar Rice Burroughs wrote A Princess of Mars in 1912. It hits onto most of the same ideas these more modern stories do.
like the site was created for and named after isekai, you're gonna get a lot of it
Other platforms will have other types of serials. I just don’t know them off the top of my head. My wife reads a romance serial somewhere else.
and they seem to seamlessly run into another genre called haremlit where the main character easily collects partners left and right.
Now I tend to shy away from kindle unlimited and books with warnings about "unconventional relationships" (in my experience both mostly mean poor writing quality)
If anyone has their own tips for picking not-a-waste-of-time books, I'd like to know.
One is using a tool to create a new artwork, one is using a tool for plagiarism.
Is it "new artwork", though? That's the big question. I would say both are tools for plagiarism.
And now, DeviantArt is collapsing, as artists flee, and content is being dominated by automated generative AI spamming out content.
Now, I understand the frustration of someone able to see something in their head and is unable to put it into drawing. Storywriting is already an all-consuming discipline … but so is anything creative.
Considering the time and effort that goes into writing a book, if you value your own time, and work, this should be a no-brainer.
Fast-forward 5 years, and our attitude might be:
Hmmm, so you added an AI-generated image to your AI-generated slop "post", everybody knows "those" pages. Not gonna waste my time here.
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.
Boomers using Meta AI to create nonsensical images on Facebook and WhatsApp aren't complaining about it on social media.
First, you are on HN, a website full of entrepreneurs betting their savings on AI companies. "It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it" [1]. Remember that the CEO of OpenAI used to be the president of HN.
Second, remember NFTs? Bitcoin? Perhaps even MongoDB [2]? Tech lives and dies on hype and AI is the newest one. This too shall pass.
Not to undermine your point, the techbroism is strong here but facts are facts
> Because that's what scares me the most, what will happen with Nvidia.
What’s your concern? Ultimately if the bubble bursts, its stock price will fall, presumably. But, well, stock prices fall, life goes on.
I’m pretty sure the majority of people commenting here aren’t entrepreneurs.
You don't need the rest of this sentence. They are. Almost everyone I talk to in the Valley of Silicon speaks of broad trends in... I mean, anything really, in how people use technology, in what people need cars for, in what people eat, in what goods typically cost, genuinely any topic of sufficient breadth that escapes the technology itself, as though they have not been on planet earth since roughly 2009. It is astonishing how well insulated from common concerns tech workers are, which is probably how we got shit like Juicero, an incredibly overbuilt, over-spec, ludicrously designed wifi-connected machine to squeeze a fucking bag. And it explains a bunch of their other incredibly stupid ideas, like e-scooters.
This is why, I am sorry, but I simply do not put a lot of stock (literally, and metaphorically) into the opinions of SV's elites. That's like, a bubble in a damn bubble. That's a bubbled subset of people who haven't had a normal experience of being human for who knows how long, inside a bubble of people who largely do not share the same reality as me.
Bringing it back to what I was replying to: you are absolutely right about the common folk's experience with AI. It's an annoying thing being shoved into tons of products they use, that seemingly no one asked for, that doesn't work. And it's a massive, 400 foot tall neon sign, telling them that big tech doesn't give a fuck about them, what they want, or anything else besides sign up for the subscription dumbass.
I (one of the SV tech workers you mention) was recently in rural Georgia for a cousin’s wedding, where I was shocked to learn that many people in the area considered the previous presidential election to have been stolen. I wanted to scream “you need to get out of your bubble!”
Tell that to the schoolchildren who excitedly use AI to do all the busywork for them.
The problem starts happening when you shoehorn it into a bunch of shit for the sake of it, where it adds no value and often even degrades it. Like what everyone is now doing with AI. Especially Microsoft.
It's great for some stuff, like making summaries. It's not GenAI and if we try to use it as such (as Nadella is doing) the bubble will burst sooner rather than later and that's bad for the tech community as a whole. I find the journey super interesting however from a personal tech interest point of view and I love playing with it locally. But I'm not blind to its glaring limitations and I don't care whether it makes money or not, I'm just into it for the tech. It's the money boys that keep blowing good stuff up.
We need an investor class that just wants to get their 50 pounds a year to maintain the country estate, not one that wants to vacuum up 80% of the economy in short term speculative bubbles.
So that investment class certainly is out there, but it's not really in places like California, New York, Florida etc. Those areas and the industries spawned in them are dominated by the profit obsessed social pariahs.
Of course money and investments are a major aspect but it's never about how much money you can make, all the pursuits are profitable, but it's about how much importance and control they will generate.
Most Tech, Crypto, AI, anything like that, if it gets shut down tomorrow, the impacts are minimal and easily mitigated. People involved lose money, but everyone else carries on, possibly somewhat inconvenienced. If a regional cold storage facility, railroad, pipeline, quarry, or container yard decides to shut down you have real impacts that start to get serious quickly.
I don't see revolution on the cards. Maybe a giant market correction once the hype wears off and pension funds figure out that throwing more H100 GPUs into the mix isn't going to make AGI happen any faster, and that there there's no real road to profitability for startups making shitty genAI chatbots, images and music.
But I understand lots of people are very annoyed by it and with things like this, reasonably so. The problem that revolution only comes from desperation, not annoyance. If health care, rents, the experience of flying and traffic, global warming and so-forth hasn't produced a revolution, generative AI won't.
And this situation is pretty much what has brought-about the present "death by a thousand paper-cuts" world.
What actual problems are we solving for these people?
The hubris of forcing all social interactions to take place in big tech walled gardens that want to replace you with A.I. is titillating.
Amazon has done just this elsewhere: 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.
How soon until we find out it's child labour?.. on both ends.
“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.”
Maybe Kindle, but that’s just a store window for them. Alexa is garbage, the fire phone a disaster, and so on.
https://www.billboard.com/pro/spotify-removed-thousands-song...
I had to reread this a couple times before understanding that the guest post - not the A.I. slop - was from Leah Beckmann.
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.
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".
The market doesn't need the flood of this AI garbage as it will make these books utterly impossible to discover and drown the low end in excrement, driving away 'guilty pleasure' readers such as me and you.
Amazon recommendations have always been borderline useless at best, even before they became a drop-shipping crap hub.
It worked for me.
> 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.
Thousands upon thousands of real books exist with multiple cover art options.
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.
Unless you use it to translate or feed it languages other than English. It's mostly crap.
I thought it was a skill issue though, because I hear others talk about it so much.
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.
/s
I think while praising a business and getting excited we should have their average age in back of our minds.
"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?"
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
I bet you can imagine what her reaction might be if she read this thread :)
This is the main reason why I gave up on using ChatGPT for creative brainstorming.
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.
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.)
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...
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.
>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?
Loved Leah’s writing otherwise.