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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

#101

Post by qzw »

yamtaddle wrote: post #74
satellites wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I fell for this once when I was a newer developer. I bought a book on my Kindle about Ruby on Rails, thinking it might be more insightful or accessible than the Rails docs. But every chapter was literally just copy/pasted from the Rails docs (which are free).

Like 3/4 of Amazon's listings for classic books are Print on Demand scams that exist to trick people buying books as gifts, who don't know what they're looking at and don't know to watch out for this sort of thing. Just Project Gutenberg text automatically sent to the printer, no manual typesetting or clean-up or any actual care put into it. They're just garbage, literally. Pure waste.

It’s a huge shame too because it shouldn’t be that hard for Amazon to filter it out. It’s not like there isn’t a database of these classic works, at least the ~2000 most popular ones that must account for 95+% of searches. If only they had the economic incentive to do so.

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

#102

Post by nuancebydefault »

cdelsolar wrote: post #79
gtirloni wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even here on HN, people are using ChatGPT to write replies. You can spot it by the very verbose answers that don't say anything meaningful. Someone else commented here that AI would raise the noise level everywhere and I unfortunately have to agree.

[flagged]

Somehow, my pattern recognizer lit up with this structure:

- I understand that... however...

- some general knowledge

- That being said...

Without even interpreting what the comment is, just feels a bit orchestrated.

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

#103

Post by layer8 »

kube-system wrote: post #89
layer8 wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> software cannot be assigned ownership of copyright. More precisely, only human works are subject to copyright. The law simply doesn’t apply to works by animals, AIs, or anything else, even when they are as creative as a human.

However, a human can use animals or AIs (or anything they want) as a tool in their human created work.

Yes, but copyright requires the human to have significant original input into the work for it to be eligible. The human can’t just delegate to the animal or AI.

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

#104

Post by Kokouane »

kcorbitt wrote: post #85
cdelsolar wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

While LLMs can be prompted to write in many different styles, especially if you allow them to edit a text over multiple passes, the default "voice" of ChatGPT is surprisingly recognizable. For instance, the comment I'm replying to was clearly GPT-generated.

I agree that the parent is clearly GPT-generated, but was it 3.5 or 4? I notice substantially improved human-like writing in GPT-4 that will probably be hard to detect. Even the current AI detectors struggle (although they have gotten pretty good at detecting 3.5 writing)

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

#105

Post by qzw »

low_tech_love wrote: post #25
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".

Yes, all very sophisticated. Surely even the best trained AIs at this small company called Amazon couldn't possibly detect such exploits!

You mean Alexa? She’s too busy playing the wrong song for me on my Echo to deal with such trivialities.

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

#106

Post by kube-system »

layer8 wrote: post #103
kube-system wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

However, a human can use animals or AIs (or anything they want) as a tool in their human created work.

Yes, but copyright requires the human to have significant original input into the work for it to be eligible. The human can’t just delegate to the animal or AI.

The degree to which a human has to be creative is very minimal. As SCOTUS said in Feist v. Rural:

> "the requisite level of creativity is extremely low; even a slight amount will suffice"

Literally throwing paint at a canvas is enough to suffice.

Arranging the prerequisite conditions and coaxing a monkey into taking a selfie is probably enough as well (as long as you don't hire PETA's dumb lawyers who want to argue for assignment of the copyright to the monkey)

There's not really enough information to determine whether this author would qualify. We don't know how much editing he did if any, nor have we seen these specific cases tested in a court yet.

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

#107

Post by asddubs »

ilamont wrote: post #71

Search YouTube for ChatGPT and KDP (Amazon's self-publishing platform) and you'll see hundreds of videos that show how its done, often with ridiculous promises of thousands of dollars per month in "passive income." Some have even started using Midjourney for the covers or kids books illustrations. The YouTubers are often pumping expensive "masterclasses" to suckers looking to make an easy buck. Amazon does not nothin…

The folding ideas video on these "masterclasses" is really good.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=biYciU1uiUw

This is about using underpaid ghostwriters to write the books, but obviously using AI is just the next logical step. The funny thing is that even before people were using AI, this sort of thing obviously did not work

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

#108

Post by jruohonen »

azubinski wrote: post #18

So, the future is now! Now anyone lazy enough (to even not remove the phrase "As an AI language model I can't..." from the generated text) can "write books". And these "books" will be fundamentally plagiarism and a bunch of trivia by design. Isn't that wonderful? It certainly is wonderful!

Wonderful indeed! I don't mind other people making money, but this thing is getting out of hands:

https://www.businessinsider.com/chatgpt-courses-instruction-...

Not only have YouTubers found the same "business model", but now there are also people "educating" other people to "write" e-books and use image generators for book covers. Of course, you get also the AI generated promotion material with these courses.

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

#109

Post by throwaway049 »

Amazon then recommended me the almost-as-prolific Caroline Manta. She's either a real person, or the scammer went to trouble of putting up a LinkedIn profile saying she's looking for web design work. I feel sorry for anyone who didn't know better handing over real money for this trash.

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

#110

Post by qzw »

absoluteunit1 wrote: post #15

This is comedy From one review: “ One paragraph starts with "As an AI language model I can't....". Unfortunately we don't have an AI who can correct a book written by an AI. Fortunately I can send it back.” Sauce: https://www.amazon.com/product-reviews/B0BWVH451G/ref=acr_dp...

Ok, free SAAS idea: scan your AI generated text for telltale signs! $9/mo Pro, $59/mo Business, $499/mo Enterprise. Shouldn’t take more than a few lines of shell script.
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