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Tom Lesley has published 40 books in 2023, all with 100% positive reviews

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Re: Tom Lesley has published 40 books in 2023, all with 100% positive reviews

#41

Post by ChatGTP »

tivert wrote: post #36
dahart wrote: post #11

This was an inevitable outcome of ChatGPT/LLMS, no? I expect to see a lot more of this by a lot of different people. I feel like a ton of the examples I’ve seen to date are effectively regurgitating Stack Overflow (sometimes verbatim!) and in a kind of abstract way, I feel like this is exactly the same as someone opportunistically publishing a bunch of auto-generated books… publishing a model trained on a bunch of we…

This is actually a spin on an existing git-rich-quick scam ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=biYciU1uiUw ). Version 1.0 had people hiring low cost ghostwriters for hundreds of dollars to bang out a book on some SEO topic. Now you use the same playbook with "AI," with far less upfront cost.

Playboy? I think you meant “playbook”?

Re: Tom Lesley has published 40 books in 2023, all with 100% positive reviews

#42

Post by makk »

ChatGTP wrote: post #41
tivert wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is actually a spin on an existing git-rich-quick scam ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=biYciU1uiUw ). Version 1.0 had people hiring low cost ghostwriters for hundreds of dollars to bang out a book on some SEO topic. Now you use the same playbook with "AI," with far less upfront cost.

Playboy? I think you meant “playbook”?

Maybe the playbook is in Playboy?

Re: Tom Lesley has published 40 books in 2023, all with 100% positive reviews

#43

Post by Bedon292 »

emehex wrote: post #13

Curiously most of the books have 31 reviews. And for those that have written reviews all of the Reviewers have names with the capitalization: "John smith", "First last".

I noticed the same. A good chunk of them also have 28.

Re: Tom Lesley has published 40 books in 2023, all with 100% positive reviews

#44

Post by mkl95 »

rcarr wrote: post #34
mkl95 wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

More positive reviews = more sales. They are not just uninterested in dealing with fake reviews, their algorithms reward products with positive reviews regardless of their authenticity. Of course if you report it, they eventually deal with it, as long as it is required by some law.

Only if they’re taking a very short term perspective. If the customer is left feeling like they’re consistently getting scammed, they will stop shopping at Amazon and take their money elsewhere. I highly, highly doubt Amazon is letting these through the net on purpose.

There's a threshold they have to respect to avoid damaging their own reputation. It's exactly the same thing Google do by offering misleading results to increase traffic and engagement. Google are just a bit more elegant about it.

Re: Tom Lesley has published 40 books in 2023, all with 100% positive reviews

#45

Post by Turing_Machine »

ccleve wrote: post #12

All the books have approximately the same number of reviews. Is Amazon completely uninterested in dealing with fake reviews?

These days they seem largely uninterested in even stopping the sale of counterfeit high-dollar physical goods.

Seems like "Lesley" should get himself a Midjourney account to go along with thhe ChatGPT account, because his covers kinda suck.

Re: Tom Lesley has published 40 books in 2023, all with 100% positive reviews

#46

Post by Turing_Machine »

low_tech_love wrote: post #10

So many questions: Are these books copyright by Tom Lesley, ChatGPT, OpenAI, ...? Should he share the money with OpenAI, or with the internet? Do we need to update the definitions of plagiarism? So it goes.

OpenAI (ChatGPT, DALL-E, etc.) explicitly assigns their rights to anything generated by their systems to the user.

> OpenAI hereby assigns to you all its right, title and interest in and to Output. This means you can use Content for any purpose, including commercial purposes such as sale or publication, if you comply with these Terms.

Re: Tom Lesley has published 40 books in 2023, all with 100% positive reviews

#48

Post by squarefoot »

low_tech_love wrote: post #29
azubinski wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh no, that's not all. There are also fake positive reviews. Now everything is really great!

The funny part is that he didn't even care to generate a different number of reviews for each book, or to add a few 4's in just to make it more realistic. He used the exact same number of reviews for many books, and all are full 5's!

That would be the result if it was automated, such as either a script or the AI itself instructed to write books on various subjects, selling them on Amazon, and then reviewing them. I don't see what can be done to stop this trend since it's 100% certain it will become ubiquitous.

Re: Tom Lesley has published 40 books in 2023, all with 100% positive reviews

#49

Post by tivert »

ChatGTP wrote: post #41
tivert wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is actually a spin on an existing git-rich-quick scam ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=biYciU1uiUw ). Version 1.0 had people hiring low cost ghostwriters for hundreds of dollars to bang out a book on some SEO topic. Now you use the same playbook with "AI," with far less upfront cost.

Playboy? I think you meant “playbook”?

> Playboy? I think you meant “playbook”?

Yes, I've corrected it.

Re: Tom Lesley has published 40 books in 2023, all with 100% positive reviews

#50

Post by slowmovintarget »

low_tech_love wrote: post #10

So many questions: Are these books copyright by Tom Lesley, ChatGPT, OpenAI, ...? Should he share the money with OpenAI, or with the internet? Do we need to update the definitions of plagiarism? So it goes.

Technically, text written by ChatGPT can't be subject to copyright, even if said "Tom Lesley" tweaked them.
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