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Comment by Jblx2 | Hacker News Reader

I started reading and at about the half-way point, I decided to search for "AI", "LLM", "generative", which all came up blank. At that point I closed the tab and headed back here. #1 reason I would be very skeptical of purchasing a book published in 2026 is AI. Unfortunately, you need to overcome a pretty big hump in convincing me that there was no AI involved in authoring.

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I don't necessarily mind reading AI generated content. But the bar you need to clear is: why would I read (or watch or play) what you generate with AI compared to me just directly asking the AI?

To be clear: this isn't meant as a rhetorical question. There are AI generated works I'm happy to consume. It's meant as a real bar that you can clear. But it's also non-trivial, and the goalposts are moving as AI becomes better and easier to use.

This is the bar with other works as well. If you would hire it buy anything that’s just a mindless AI dump, why not use your $5/mo GPT sub?

Especially with the current rate of progress, you asking ChatGPT today probably means you'll get a way better answer than whatever the author got using a model from last year.

This, and the fact that GPT is writing for you personally. A text written to persuade a publisher, or to manipulate Google results, has the deck stacked hard against it vs. asking even a cheap AI that can size you up personally.

I agree with you in principle, but I think this ignores the reality. Many nonfiction categories are overrun by self-published AI slop generated at an industrial scale by hustlers in low-CoL countries, never as much as proofread by a human. So yes, in theory, good AI-assisted books may exist. But in practice, they're more or less guaranteed to be drowned out because they take much longer to produce (and are written only if the author has something to say).

I'm not sure the low cost of living of the guy who kicks off the AI generation still makes much of a difference?

This might have been more important when the human still had to invest quite a few hours.

In any case, why do we care about the cost of living of the author? Notionally, my adopted home of Singapore is one of the highest cost of living countries on earth, but I'm not sure that makes me nor my AI slop any better? Especially I don't think my output is any better than before I moved to Singapore.

> I'm not sure the low cost of living of the guy who kicks off the AI generation still makes much of a difference? ... In any case, why do we care about the cost of living of the author?

It seems like you're trying to catch me doing secret racism or something like that, but I'm just stating the facts. They appear to overwhelmingly live in places where you can get very rich if you publish 100 books a month and make $100 on each. They don't operate in the shadows, they share tips and photos of their pads and cars on social media. Many of them say they live in India and so forth.

There is a lot of curation and editing that go into AI generated content. Like if you just use an AI to write from a prompt, you’ll just get slop (vibe writing), but if you plan it, review the bullet points, delete and add points that make the narrative stronger, have it sketch some writing out after you are happy with what it is covering, then rewrite that because LLMs have absolutely no sense for word rhythm.

This is logical, but it’s also a lemon market. You don’t know the author, editor and publisher did anything of the sort, unless you’re the sort of person who doesn’t need the book. But if you do see an LLMism, it’s a strong sign of cost-cutting.

LLMisms are almost universally results of using a narrow set of mainstream offerings from Anthropic and Openai. Even Muse Spark has style much less "sloppy" than Claude et al, let alone Chinese LLMs. I mean yes, they have their own tics, but if you don know them you won't even notice.

But I do know them, and so do you, and they’re signs of cost cutting partly for the reason you mention. They’re the careless, basic “no-brainer” choice of models, plus a lack of editing, or a very light “edit” in which obvious, even famous tics are left in. (Many real editors would clean up writers’ tics.) So it’s possible care was put into it, but tics visibility is evidence against it and not evidence for it. If your text does pass and educated readers don’t see it, it’s a consequence of care and intent, which is what we’re really asking for.

If done right you couldn’t tell either way, and you probably wouldn’t care. The point of writing is to get a message out to the reader as efficiently as possible, don’t waste their time. The writer ensures that, AI is just a tool at that point. The problem with vibe writing with AI is that AI has no sense about wasting the reader’s time.

We should just be judging writing by its quality. There were always bad writers who wrote like LLMs or worse. It takes a lot of practice to write well.

Nothing has really changed: bad writers using AI will still be bad writers. Good writers using AI, with some effort put into learning how to use it, can benefit a lot from it in terms of (at least) writing good content faster.

Nice, now add slackers and non-writers to the equation.

Nothing changes, bad writing is just more uniform.

Look, you're must not saying anything. "If done right ... you probably wouldn’t care". Yes, correct. It's done bad, so I don't like it, and the visible slack is a sign of slack. Would you like to push back in some way for some reason? What's the call to action here?

My pushback is that AI can be used for writing, and the results will depend on the person using it. It’s like a type writer doesn’t make anyone a great writer either, but it improve their legibility at least.

I think if you read a little bit further in the article you would find that this attitude is exactly why the author believes there is a collapse in non-fiction book.

> The collapse of nonfiction is [...] a massive breakdown in the social fabric of trusting education, expertise, or any authority

People don't want to read non-fiction because they don't trust the people writing it.

Honestly most non fiction books title sound like linkedin posts and have been for decades even before linkedin was a thing.

I didn't wait for AI to lose trust in people writing them, they are just all mostly repulsive.

Yeah, frankly, this doesn't make sense to me. Has the author checked any nonfiction categories on Amazon recently? In many categories, 80-90% of all new releases are obvious AI slop. And even for non-self-published releases, about 20-30% previews get flagged as AI by Pangram, compared to roughly 0% pre-2023.

I don't buy (new) nonfiction because it now feels like playing Minesweeper.

Likewise. I'm only interested in books that were either published before 2024, or are by authors I respect (e.g. Patterson & Hennessy), or by respectable academic publishers (e.g. Cambridge University Press). I used not to be so picky.

It also presents a bit of chicken & egg for new authors: nobody knows them, and now few will risk it, so they stay unknown. They must pursue other avenues to gain traction; far more than was needed a few years ago.

The deluge of AI books on Amazon has really been quite amazing. Between them and the higher risk of poorly-printed books, I don't buy from Amazon anymore. Now it's always direct from publishers.

Shouldn't that hit nonfiction and fiction equally?

Why would that be the case? Fiction books are already imaginary, so it makes less of a difference whether it is human-imaginary or reshuffled-by-LLM-imaginary. Non-fiction I expect to not be hallucinated-out-of-the-ether.

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