Would improve both Amazon and YouTube significantly. I have basically stopped using them after seeing all LLM spam.
Having anti-counterfeit laws is vastly preferable to not having them. Counterfeiters do get busted, though you’re right that Amazon and the authorities could indeed do more.
I’d rather live in a world where at least some criminals are deterred from selling me a fake fire extinguisher that doesn’t work when my house is on fire.
2 books per week is still absolutely insane
That said it all, and literally the only thing that matters, because sales means demand, which means people find the works valuable.
If someone's just in it for the money, why wouldn't they slop it up?
I'm not saying that authors should mine clay, hand-carve the letters on a clay tablet, and fire it up in a kiln that they built themselves; but authorship requires intent.
She figured out a way to make a quick buck off gullible and uncaring people, and a market that has not been thoroughly saturated with slop yet. There's not much more to it.
A book was never a quality criteria.
The community, bestseller list (easy to manipulate) etc, were.
Its the same with the critisism about Steam and Indiegames.
It's the difference between a regular ocean wave and a tsunami. It's the difference between a person bumping into you and a being hitting by a speeding semi-truck. Scale is the problem with LLM garbage content.
Steam wants 100$ from you, tax documents etc.
After that, you make the initial review very cheap for you: YOu need to create a promovideo from ingame.
If this is still too much, you make a pre sampling phase. Everyone already developed a game gets more karma points and is easier found, everyone new has to earn their standing.
What does that mean? What defines a "legit writer" and who determines when they're saying "something real"?
All AI games are heavily bloated. Try cloning Factorio or Prison Architect. AI can make something that looks similar to such games, but the back end falls apart.
I have friends who keep showing me their new "games". I just see some version of Doom, but one that needs multiple GB of memory to accomplish what was commonplace in the 90s with a millionth as much headroom.
Have you actually read some of these garbage? If not, how do you decide it was garbage?
I did not only read 5G book about how bad it is, i also read the 5G spec book.
I read books about pendulum (different types of them too, like one with stones you can drop), tunnels and pendulum, energizing water, homeopathy (how you make it, the theory behind it).
Why?
Hell, look at the video games from the 1980s. Download the scans of any early gaming magazine or a MAME ROM archive. At least 50% of the games were derivative slop. Crappy movies and books were around for a 100 years too.
Volume matters lol..
This is worse for new entrants than either established developers or consumers, who will have to work harder to get their work recognized amidst the rising tide of slop.
Perhaps some conventions will develop similar to what I've seen on a smaller scale for fan artists releasing work online, where developers will provide some evidence of their development work in process to convince (human or AI) slop filters to let them pass.
But I wish I had some way to prove that. (Live writing? Git logs—but a lot of my chapters see a big first commit? Some kind of PGP web of trust thing?)
For one thing, the goal of writing for me is not to produce a book. The goal is to learn and help others learn. The goal is to make the most concise, best quality material that has ever been written on that topic for that audience. It's a lofty goal that I can't claim to achieve, but that's the target. LLMs appear to be light years away from being able to do so and are easily bested.
And, perhaps most importantly, writing is fun, relaxing, challenging, frustrating, rewarding, and human. Having an LLM write something for me is none of those things.
I wish AI would do my fucking dishes, though.
Like, the line between big artistic/creative efforts and other stuff is subjective and hard to trace, yes. I know the counter arguments here (“what if the book is an instruction manual?”, “what if someone’s labor of artisanal love is making sudoku puzzles?”), but sudoku vs story is like disagreements over “what counts as the Midwest”: you know very well that Antarctica isn’t in it, and that a sudoku book merits very different appreciation and artistic protectionism-from-AI than a story.
It’s fine to categorize things without having a rigorous definition of the category.
A lot of people use AI, some even are unlucky enough to post online before learning its a faux pas. Some few are oblivious enough to go for some time before realizing.
A select few decide that this is their opportunity to industrialize production of slop for profit. It seems that when platforms take steps to curb excesses like people posting thousands of products/posts/books/games/videos/whatever a day, the volume drops dramatically, because its these villains posting thousands of times a day that are responsible for most of the nonsense
and as with this woman, whenever they see a modicum of success extracting money from the commons, they immediately pivot to selling courses, so other malignant souls can clog up the shared processes of humanity with their crap too.
First it was "bot" accounts from low income countries posting and rating to skew the numbers, now you can do the same with actual bots. Drown the signal in a pool of noise until nobody believes anything any more and we return to the status quo from before personal computers.
Except with a surveillance apparatus that would've made the soviets jealous.
TV is a perfect example of this: you only have so much screen time to allocate to the news, so which subjects do you "curate"?
I bet LLMs would love to curate the internet for us from all of that slop.
> "The South African now heads an operation that has trained several hundred people in her method"
There's just no way you can claim "oh no, I have a full creative process in place to produced something considered", whilst turning out an unreadable quantity of books.
This is the most disturbing snippet about AI I've read in the past few weeks.
Do people actually return books they don't like? I don't but maybe it's a thing. Or is it her trying to convince herself the books are actually good, or at least not rubbish? Which is putting the bar low anyway.
For books I'm not sure, assuming that the author actually have a story to tell, but is just lacking the skills to write a book, I don't know that I think you can justify calling it a grift when they're trying to write that book using AI. 370 books however.... Is she really that imaginative?
There's a hell of a difference between having an AI help you write a fictional story that you've planned out and dreamed about for years, but just didn't have the skills to write and then pumping out 20 books a month. There's no way those were have been edited and read by one person.
But now with AI they're just easy to mass produce I guess. What's funny is there were authors doing this with like gpt-4o and seemingly selling a bunch. I can't imagine they were very good but the people yearn for them.
But 370 in just over a year and a half is crazy work lol. Also a lot of RSA is anti-ai so seeing a woman earning like 60 times the annual average selling slop must be upsetting.
> She has sold more than one million books, by her own estimate, in digital, print and audio formats, earning more than $1 million so far this year.
> The South African now heads an operation that has trained several hundred people in her method and is preparing to launch software for AI authors called Authorythm.
She has not broken any laws nor done anything scummy; what she has done is studied the system and hacked it to her ends: a true hacker in the HN sense of the word.
Now, I hate AI slop as much as anyone can hate it, but if society is so insensitive to actual quality that it will reward slop to the tune of a million dollars, the problem lies with that, not her.
And to her credit, it is not like she is one-shotting books with a single prompt: she has a structured process starting from a human outline and ideas, plus human review at the end.
A lot of coders are using almost exactly the same approach, and it seems to be bearing fruit.
Very true, but perhaps beyond my rapidly expanding misanthropy I can also dislike the process that feeds it. I don’t see it any differently than people disliking companies that push unhealthy and addictive foods, or drug pushers, or any other potential societal malignancy.
Just because we can make the thing and people will buy it doesn’t mean we should make the thing. And the more people that adopt the “lowest common denominator” production process the more we rob ourselves of the joy of creation itself.
If the society is so dumb that it does not deserve to survive, then so be it.
Are you up for that line of thought?
People aren't returning the bad Temu products, it's not worth the trouble, could be the same with these books, assuming they are cheap enough.
First, the societal view on HN-approved hackers is not always positive.
Second, society is bad at recognising systemic problems, that doesn't mean they aren't problems. Something with short term gain for long term harm is a particular problem for our society to handle.
> It is not like she is one-shotting books with a single prompt
It's not clear where she gets the original concept - maybe it's an original idea - fine. But maybe that's another few prompts. Which would make her little more than a meat proxy.
> she has a structured process starting from a human outline and ideas
It's not massively complicated though is it.
> plus human review at the end.
Yeah, it's the proofreaders having to work through hundreds of pages of slop I'm bothered about. Even if you assume the latest models are awesome it's not like this is Astra/frontier output is it?
Complicated enough that very few people have award winning stories. Not even books - you can write 5 great pages and get relatively well known. But apparently it's not that easy.
Too many people, once they understand that pseudo-tricky or smart folks can freely abuse stupid or naive or temporarily "crippled" people, go on to do exactly that.
It just lowers all maxima, consequentially lowering quality of output and quality of evolution in those buckets, including the quality of rare events.
Few people care about those very special tears of disillusionment and guilt they will shed on their death bed.
Drug-induced forced laughter and pseudo-dominance over sabotaged and vulnerable reign superior in minds that fully outsourced "consciousness" to certain value systems.
Ask yourself: when do non-functioning people on the spectrum, or people suffering from later stage Dementia and Alzheimer's et al feel most "conscious" ... that's a consciousness you can't outsource.
What exactly is the matter with cheap stuff? Isn't it every buyer's dream to get the stuff they want good, fast and cheap?
That was beautiful. Thanks