Someone Used AI to Write an Unauthorized Biography of Me | Hacker News Reader

Someone Used AI to Write an Unauthorized Biography of Me

nytimes.com

44 pointsigonvalue66 comments

> "Two business school professors, curious about A.I. books and whether anyone actually likes them, gathered data about 10 million books published on Amazon over the last five years. They found that the number of e-books published per month had tripled since the release of ChatGPT, to more than 300,000 at the end of last year, from around 100,000 in 2022. (Amazon said that its internal metrics did not show that level of growth, but would not share its figures.). Because romance sells, the professors thought it would be the genre most susceptible to A.I. intervention, but instead it was nonfiction — a term that should probably be used loosely in this context. While A.I.-assisted books received lower customer ratings than human-made ones, they deemed A.I.’s entry into the market a positive development, because the books were selling, if modestly. As economists, they told me, they’re less concerned with literary quality or customer satisfaction than revenue growth and market expansion."

One of the writers, Bill Johns, age 70, a retired cyber security consultant:

> "Mr. Johns now has 445 books for sale on Amazon. He orders a paperback copy of each one and keeps them on four rotating white bookshelves that are crowded awkwardly next to a couch in his living room. They all feature a photo of him in a serious dark suit — which is A.I. generated. “It was either that or put on a suit and take selfies,” he said."

> As economists, they told me, they’re less concerned with literary quality or customer satisfaction than revenue growth and market expansion.

As a human, I am concerned with these economists.

Don't be. They are maximizing economy, at the cost of everything else. If anything, they are _perfect_ economists.

Economics has long recognized the distinction between GDP and value creation, but not everyone in a field is going to produce the best work.

Intangibles and unpaid work get ignored not because they cannot be included but because doing so is harder.

In fairness, we haven't heard in these economists' own words what their position is and it's possible that it's more nuanced than the author gives them credit for. (There's the quote about Fifty Shades but that's making a more defensible point and doesn't get into the "customer satisfaction" thing.)

I think they’re saying if AI text is causing people to buy (and presumably read) more, that’s a good thing.

As in, if these marginal readers actually prefer AI texts, what does that say about human writing?

It tells you that human attention can be gamed.

Sure, and I feel something for the authors who are in it to write a high-quality novel.

For the authors who are in it for the game, writing bottom of the barrel airport checkout line garbage, they were already trying to game people’s attention and they lost to a robot.

The existence of someone buying AI slop and being okay with it isn't the same as losing to a robot. Unless you mean losing that specific sale, but they're not outselling human authors yet, and it's not clear they will until their quality improves immensely.

I do mean losing that specific sale. I’m also referring to the economists who saw an increase in sales.

This means there are marginal readers who previously didn’t buy any book but now buy AI slop books, or buy slop books in addition to human ones.

> This means there are marginal readers who previously didn’t buy any book but now buy AI slop books, or buy slop books in addition to human ones.

The former would be interesting, but seems unlikely. The later seems much more likely, since they’re already in the habit of buying books.

> I do mean losing that specific sale. I’m also referring to the economists who saw an increase in sales.

The sales of most of the books talked about in the article are minuscule, and the best selling one sucked so bad Amazon pulled it.

> This means there are marginal readers who previously didn’t buy any book but now buy AI slop books, or buy slop books in addition to human ones.

I don't think that's happening. It's tricking customers in to buying books no fully-informed person would buy. That amounts to either redirecting sales away from better quality books, or having people waste their money on something doesn't really exist, only "technically" exists (a slop book even the author didn't read is only technically a book, but not really a book).

This is <sarcasm>good</sarcasm>. It should eventually make writing not a viably profitable career for anyone also. How the heck will people ever stand out and not just be grey goo? How will anyone know what is good versus garbage?

Would publishers be willing to go to the level of pulling a Milli Vanilli where they hire people to make appearances as the author? Or would a litmus test to see if an author has attended any book signings be valid?

That sounds like a cost of doing business so the question is whether using this method increases profit more than any other.

Removing book tours increases profit once people know your name.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JT_LeRoy#Exposure

Fewer and fewer author appearances are in person. Book signings are being limited more and more to the author's name and are done via pre-order, with the readings and chats done online (especially with well-known authors). Book tours are much more rare than they were. Book tours are expensive.

We are going to go back to human-only networks for filtering the garbage into a trusted set of recommendations. Maybe where the only music you can trust are local artists you can see live. Or where the books you read are from a friend-of-a-friend who knows the author. Maybe the world of tomorrow looks more like the world we left behind.

So the algorithmic system could potentially destroy itself.

Neat!

I think 100% of the books I've read in the last year have been recommendations from friends. This is kind of annoying as I'd like to be able to give them recommendations in return, but ... limited time.

I wish that I could doomscroll literature instead of short videos, but the economics apparently don't work out.

I used to recommend books to friends generally when I was young, then I started getting really specific about what books to recommend to whom as I got older. I wonder what stuff like this (and AI in general) will cause more of?

Knowing that some songs are by local artists who I could go see live doesn't tell me very much about the quality of the music, unfortunately. My friends recommending the music does though, assuming we have similar taste.

KDP now has a limit of 10 books per week to limit it unless you can convince them you're a legitimate publisher, and e.g. Draft2Digital does not submit ebooks to Amazon any more for the same reason. But you can still offer paperbacks via any number of third party providers that will be available via Amazon.

> One of the writers, Bill Johns, age 70, a retired cyber security consultant

This is crazy to me. You're 70! Just be retired and fuck off, stop actively making the world a worse place!

This is definitely the guy if anybody wants to peruse for themselves: https://www.amazon.com/stores/author/B0F2RNXR5R The most reviews I could find for any book was 6, most with 0. They cluster around 'dad' topics so I assume he selects the topics himself. I wonder how many he has actually read any substantial amount of. I'm always curious to what degree these people are conscious spammers vs koolaid drinkers. I find it funny that he considers it a ridiculous idea to have his picture actually taken once for an author photo lol.

Honest question, but since when were biographies ever _authorized_? I would assume you would simply inform the subject out of politeness if at all.

If a biography is authorized, then you can interview the subject, and in some cases those interviews provide a lot of the material. Walter Isaacson's biography of Steve Jobs was like this, for example.

In addition to the direct interview, there are other advantages of authorization that often allow the author a much deeper access to research the subject:

- Access to records, correspondence, and journals in the subject's possession

- explicit endorsement from the subject encourages their family, friends and colleagues to work with the author.

- Opportunities for the subject themselves to fact-check and contextualize the research.

That must be balanced against the fact that authorization also often provides the subject an opportunity to review the content, giving them a hand in crafting the narrative and/or suppressing unflattering details.

I know what you mean, but there is a reasonable distinction to be made especially for living persons. An "authorized" biography would be something like what Isaacson does, where they get exclusive access, anecdotes, and importantly confirmation or denial of certain facts or stories.

An "unauthorized" biography is not necessarily suspect but it is kind of a subgenre. Consider the difference between Isaacson's Musk biography and the work done by Kate and Ryan for Character Limit (https://www.amazon.com/Character-Limit-Elon-Destroyed-Twitte...) - not exactly a biography but the legwork is fundamentally different, reportorial or even adversarial where the narrative gets challenged, as opposed to accepted by the "authorized" Isaacson.

Authorized/unauthorized simply describes whether the subject works with the author or not. It's just the common terminology for it.

It's a very common thing. A very unscientific quick search in Google Books led me to the oldest example I could find in a minute or two being a mention in The Dublin Review in 1844 reviewing a book on the correspondence of Edmund Burke talking about the loss of material that would have been indispensable for an authorised biography. It's very unlikely to be remotely the oldest use of the term.

And that mention also gets to why authors often seek authorisation and why subjects often authorise them: Authors gain access to the subject and/or often their material, while the subject or their estates gains some control over how they are portrayed.

Technically, a wikipedia page of a [living] person is an unauthorized biography!

But we'd like to think the crowdsourced editing process gives it some more trustworthiness than a random person self-publishing a book

I think the appropriate solution here is a generous, well-advertised refund policy.

People aren't allowed to (not even defame) write about others? Amazon doesn't allow certain books? No, but I imagine most people who actually buy this kind of book (if anyone does) are expecting higher quality.

And on the off chance they're satisfied, everyone wins. Even the author, since apparently the biography is very flattering of her.

I stumbled across this recently - back in the 70s publishing houses were paying people to churn out book.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3nlbfZGFKuI

> Donald Rowland, a Suffolk author of nearly 200 books - written under more than 30 pseudonyms - has made a living out of his romantic fiction. Donald churns out more novels than anybody else in the county. He specialises in old-fashioned romance, his heroes and heroines are morally beyond reproach, there is no sex in his novels. The reason for his prolific output is simple - Donald is paid just fifty pounds per book.

Given that everything in the book is public information, it's hard to argue that any of this is strictly _illegal_, given the First Amendment. But it's definitely distasteful to write a book about a living individual without their consent (even though this does happen all the time; technically Wikipedia does this too).

Though that does raise an interesting point: what's the difference between writing a book about someone and asking ChatGPT "Tell me the biography of X"? It's the historical meaning and prestige of saying "I wrote a book", even though with Amazon, anyone can write a book and self-publish it.

> Eamon Duede, a philosopher of science at Purdue University and one of the authors of a paper called “Why Slop Matters,” said A.I. brought joy to people who wanted to create something that very few other people would find interesting — like images of their friends in historical scenes.

> “People get an enormous amount of enjoyment and satisfaction out of creating stuff if it’s low effort,” he said. People who want to be creative, but might not be very good at it, can turn to A.I. and find “a bunch of barriers removed.”

I think there needs to be a different frame with which to analyze this scenario. Yes, it's distasteful to sell a book about a living person without their consent. But who are we to deny people the enjoyment of entertaining themselves by researching, brainstorming, and publishing a document/report/book, whatever you want to call it?

I'm glad the author mentioned it in the article, but it's definitely a different world now.

> But it's definitely distasteful to write a book about a living individual without their consent (even though this does happen all the time; technically Wikipedia does this too).

I do wonder about what would happen if the LLM were to hallucinate negative facts about the person.

Like, if some asshat vibe-wrote a biography about me that claimed that I once kicked a sack full of puppies as a child, would I be able to sue the "author" for defamation? At least, would it even be worth it to pursue?

AI still images don't require a time investment from the viewer. Text and video slop is literally wasting hours of life from those who don't realize what they are consuming is devoid of redeeming value.

I'd love it if marketplaces just banned AI books entirely. I see zero value in it. If I want AI text I can just go to AI it and it'll print out a books worth of text anyway; if I'm searching for a book I want something written by a human. I have zero interest in giving money to grifters and spammers.

Incidentally, I feel like Cartoon Network predicted our current dystopian future like over a decade ago with one of their joke infomercials: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XQLdhVpLBVE . (It's funny at least!) Thought coins and hiding from bots.

If sloppy digital pollution is the state of things to come, I fear for our species.

People are allowed to reject things and we've seen the public around the world overwhelming reject LLMs, what SV + VC doesn't like are being told no (shocker). Honestly believe they would rather destroy the planet than be forced to help others, which tracks seeing what you hear coming out of the mouths of these supposed "leaders" (deeply anti-human + anti-democratic sentiment).

It's no wonder they are worried for their lives. The majority of the planet rightfully hate their guts.

Right now, most people are more than happy slurping in the slop. The push back is only in niche corners of the interwebs. Even the obvious issues with slop like "count the fingers" level of issues are being used for entertainment and embraced rather than rejection. So there's no real pressure to fix things with the slop generators. So many people are oblivious to the content they are consuming is slop or not bothered by it if they are told it is slop. So I'm really not buying your premise that "we've seen the public around the world overwhelming reject LLMs"

Who in slurping the slop here? Do you talk to people? I've been doing deep canvassing for the last 2 years. One common element seen across country are American's complete utter hatred of these companies.

Majority of artists hate it. Celebrities routinely comment how much they hate it. It's become a punchline to describe anything that sucks.

I'm sorry but force feeding something that is deeply unpopular ain't working. If it was, companies like OpenAI + Anthropic wouldn't be trying to so hard to expand their fill of corporate welfare.

You're in a bubble, like most of tech.

Man, did you miss the mark with that shot. I defiantly do not use AI. So much so that my job may be in jeopardy for refusing to use it. I hate these companies with every fiber of my being. I've been through multiple industry changing "new things" that was going to be the end of my career, and not one has worked. If AI is the one that ends my career in tech, then so be it.

If they hate these companies why is usage of llms increasing so much?

Artists are the wrong people to ask. Ask non-artists and non friends of artists how they feel about being able to generate images on command.

> and we've seen the public around the world overwhelming reject LLMs

Have we?

Where do you see people rejecting them?

Sure, the immediate response is have you been paying attention at all to the data center buildouts and the responses by US civilians? If you can't even acknowledge how Americans are already turning to active resistance of these buildouts + the attempts to assassinate leaders of these technology companies, you are quite behind the plot my friend.

Refusing data centers is a truly bipartisan issue where you even have say republican activists in Texas [1] vowing to vote for Talerico because of his anti-AI stances. It's definitely the easiest layup if you're running for office this cycle.

There's a book that recently came out that discusses these stories in detail:

https://www.upress.umn.edu/9781517917739/techno-negative/

You can only harass, poison, and kill a population for so long before they break then fight back. It's only going to get worse too as communities are making life even harder for people already on the knife's edge.

This is all easily preventable too but we see how tech leaders respond to being told no or forced to pay taxes to provide welfare services to communities.

[1] https://therealnews.com/data-centers-are-not-a-red-state-or-...

And yet a huge proportion of people are using LLMs daily.

That people don't want data centers in their back yard does not translate to opposition to LLMs. Anyone who hopes it is will be setting themselves up for disappointment when people keep using them.

How do data centers poison and kill people?

I expect I'll get a lot of hate for this, and potentially deservedly so, but I've been doing something similar since late last year when Opus came out.

> Because romance sells, the professors thought it would be the genre most susceptible to A.I. intervention, but instead it was nonfiction...

I've been working mostly in erotica but have shifted to some nonfiction series lately.

I stopped for a while, but Fable and GPT 5.6 Sol have reinvigorated me.

I use Claude Code and other CLIs to manage the process, create first drafts, covers, research, etc. I heavily edit most things before I publish it.

The first question is probably one of profitability. So far I have made a little over $40, compared to probably $800 in AI subscription fees. So from that point of view it's been an absolute disaster.

If anyone is curious, I'd be happy to talk about any of it.

Why?

What internal drive moves you forward?

What sense of ownership/pride do you feel when you consider one of your works as "done"?

What would you do differently, if you were back at the starting block and had a budget of $800 to spend on writing nonfiction?

It started as a bit of curiosity: Can AI write good fiction? Can I create a process that produces better fiction? Will Anthropic even let me write porn? How do different models do?

It was another outlet to explore using AI outside of my 9-5 programming. I've experimented with building custom agents to write stories, custom memory storage methods, custom workflows, etc. I've also used AI to write content management systems and experiment with that.

Like with software, even if "slop", there's a particular joy to having an idea come to life very very quickly. I can start with a premise, a character, a few scene ideas, and get a workable draft.

For some of my ideas (outside of erotica), there are no books that I can find that cover what I'm interested in. So in another sense it's like using AI to do research for my own enjoyment, but I'm also tightening it up and publishing it.

> What sense of ownership/pride do you feel when you consider one of your works as "done"?

It's diminished compared to things I've done completely by myself. But it's non-zero and it's positive. I've actually shipped products rather than sitting on them, and there's joy and pride in that.

But I do still put a lot of work into it, both on the software side managing it, but also manually hand-editing it. I rewrite things until it doesn't feel like AI to me, even if I also use AI to make some of those edits.

> What would you do differently, if you were back at the starting block and had a budget of $800 to spend on writing nonfiction?

The lessons are very similar to other lessons on here around software projects.

Like with game development, don't spend your time on the engine. I'd spend less time building scaffolding and structure software.

I'd also be more patient and wait for weekly resets instead of bumping up to the higher tier.

I'd also stick to fewer projects more closely until completion -- I have a queue of about 80 some books to go through before I can publish them.

And then I'd say spend more time on the marketing side of things.

I take such a joy in putting words together that I cannot imagine even thinking about doing something like this.

It's easy, you just have to hate the human experience. It's not hard to connect the dots either when you have noted friend of Epstein, Peter Thiel, openly struggling on whether the human race should exist or not.

Which group of leaders do tech workers at big tech look up to again?

I don't hate the human experience. My volunteering here to talk about it is in service of understanding, what I think of as a key component of the human experience.

My experiments with AI writing are additive. Nothing I do with AI prevents human writers from writing.

I do think there's an argument that AI floods the field and makes human writing harder to find, and overall diminishes the commons.

But I want to provide value and am trying to with my experiments. The market will decide over time.

How much fact checking do you do on the research AI does?

I have the same problem in this project as I do at work: how do you verify the output?

Human review is the bottleneck at my office. I think software will be more and more AI written but also more and more AI validated.

For my nonfiction series, I have attempted adversarial agent fact checking, and I rerun it with newer models as they come out.

So: little human review of citations. I didn't expect this thread to shine on me favorably, but perhaps it's interesting to some.

> So far I have made a little over $40, compared to probably $800 in AI subscription fees.

> If anyone is curious, I'd be happy to talk about any of it.

So you've spent $750 to publish AI slop.

I guess my question is... why? Why are you doing this? Like, what do you get out of it?

There's a preconception that all AI generated content is slop. But it's really a spectrum, just like with human generated content.

I take an iterative process where I get to experiment with the technology, building agent harnesses, building workflows and processes, adversarial critiquing, and of course I spend a good amount of time hand editing.

Everything I've published I find sincerely good and to have value. My most recent book (~200 pages), published last week, has been read exactly one time and has one 5 star review. So right now it's not a commercial success, but I both enjoyed making the book and I think I made a reader happy. That's joyful to me.

That book took probably 12-16 hours of work from me. Writing it by hand would have taken me weeks, if I had the skill to do it, which I don't. But I do have the skill to shape a draft into something nice to read.

So, why? It's fun to create. It's fun to publish. I think I'm providing value. I'm learning about writing and editing and I'm learning about how to best use AI.

I don’t really get the appeal of using A.I. to write books. It’s a useful research and editorial tool that still requires thoughtful operation. But have it do the writing? It’s too shallow.

I use it to check the spelling and grammas of everything I post on my comedy newsletter[0]. As an ESL speaker, I do need some help with those areas. But the edits it typically recommends are just awful. Hyphen and em dash galore. A/B comparison and analogies that mimic the term “load-bearing”. I have to be extra careful to not let any of that slop slip through. At this point, I’m looking to work with a human editor. The AI is clearly showing not being up to par for it. At least in my experience.

[0] https://open.substack.com/pub/yelluwcomedy/p/the-free-and-wi...

Anything written by AI should, at the very least, be filed under fiction.

What if we all collectively decided to AI-slop our own auto-biographies here?

It won't stop the Slop-pocalypse, but at least, then, we're funneling some of that money back to ourselves.

If a person's going to buy some vibe-coded slop about me, at least let it be my vibe-coded slop about me.

Couldn't find a discussion yet on Wikipedia about how slop books with ISBNs and publishers are more authoritative sources than primary sources by the letter of its rules, but I expect there'll be one by the time I finish popping a bag of popcorn

Brave search is returning secondary sources, not primary sources, for several serious real life topics in the last weeks it seems.. I mean Law and Medicine.. what is that about?

Unsurprisingly, Wikipedia does not take this position, and is in fact pretty skeptical of self-published and especially AI-generated work. Its guidelines do say that "books published by respected publishing houses" are more likely to be reliable sources, but that's obviously different from having an ISBN, and of course such books are not AI-generated.

The primary sources thing is a different matter; primary and secondary sources serve different purposes.

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