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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

#121

Post by INGSOCIALITE »

spaceman_2020 wrote: post #115
jamesgill wrote: post #59

Amazon reviews were exploited and devalued years ago. I don't mean there aren't genuine reviews; I mean they've been gamed to the point that they don't really matter anymore. Amazon knows this.

Unless you know the category or have a trusted brand, Amazon has become absolutely junk. Search for something where you likely won't know any trusted brands (such as car covers) and you'll get 200 results with exactly the same picture but random brand names. All of it is imported crap from Alibaba, of course, and Amazon sellers won't even bother customizing the images. The degradation in quality has been astonishing.

This is what saddens me. These dropship sellers don’t even buy one item that they are selling to test, try out, take pictures, etc. they just use the alibaba pics and let it rip. It’s all so tiresome at this point

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

#122

Post by spaceman_2020 »

gtirloni wrote: post #69
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…

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.

Yeah, I've noticed the same thing, and it can be pretty annoying when people use ChatGPT to generate those long-winded replies that don't actually add much value. But on the flip side, I've seen cases where AI-generated content can actually be super helpful.

I guess it's all about how people choose to use it. It's up to us to encourage responsible use and make sure we don't let AI-generated content overshadow genuine, thoughtful discussion. Who knows, maybe as the tech gets better, we'll see AI tools that can generate more concise and meaningful responses. Fingers crossed!

(this comment was generated by chatGPT)

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

#123

Post by spaceman_2020 »

nuancebydefault wrote: post #102
cdelsolar wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[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.

I genuinely feel that chatGPT has been neutered. It used to be much better at writing like a human given the right prompt.

Now I can't get it to write like one at all.

Which makes me wonder what they're using the non-neutered chatGPT for...

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

#124

Post by AlecSchueler »

stonemetal12 wrote: post #80
AlecSchueler wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't there a difference between a monkey taking a picture (no human author involved) and a person using a tool (ChatGPT) to help them realise their original work? If I made a drawing with one of those old plastic spirograph tools I'd never wonder if the copyright was mine or the spirograph's.

Sure, even though photos are machine made, Humans claim copyright because they had artistic input on composition and framing. Between fully AI generated stuff, and human artistic input prompts causing output there is a line where the results go from copyrightable to not copyrightable. The question is where is that line, legally. To me GPT is either very close to or already crosses that line.

I feel like I have to wrestle with GPT to get the output I'm imagining a lot more than I ever have done with a camera.

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

#125

Post by cdelsolar »

Kokouane wrote: post #104
kcorbitt wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)

whatever was at the ChatGPT page, lol

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

#126

Post by lnsru »

spaceman_2020 wrote: post #116
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…

I highly encourage everyone online to visit BlackHatWorld forum at least once. Really opens your mind to the amount of grift and scams and shady stuff that happens online.

LinkedIn is already full of tax reduction and early retirement advisors. No need to go to BlackHatWorld forum.

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

#127

Post by jabl »

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.

A funny thing that made the rounds on social media over here a few years ago was somebody buying a translated copy of Moby Dick. Turned out it was evidently translated by Google translate or some similar service, and it was atrocious.

Literally the first sentence "Call me Ishmael" was translated as if the meaning was to tell Ishmael to call the story teller on the phone.

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

#128

Post by nuancebydefault »

spaceman_2020 wrote: post #123
nuancebydefault wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I genuinely feel that chatGPT has been neutered. It used to be much better at writing like a human given the right prompt. Now I can't get it to write like one at all. Which makes me wonder what they're using the non-neutered chatGPT for...

It could be that our pattern recognizers are outsmarting the AI after a while. In the beginning noone noticed the difference and now anything written by AI has a bit of fake/dusted off feel to it. I'm sure the next generation will outsmart us again.

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

#129

Post by justusthane »

qzw wrote: post #105
low_tech_love wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

"Hey Siri, timer five minutes"

"Okay, now playing '5 Minutes (B-B-B Bombing Mix)' by Bonzo Goes to Washington"

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

#130

Post by foobarbecue »

jamesgill wrote: post #59

Amazon reviews were exploited and devalued years ago. I don't mean there aren't genuine reviews; I mean they've been gamed to the point that they don't really matter anymore. Amazon knows this.

I find reviewmeta.com helps a lot. Having said that, it doesn't work on these "Tom Lesley" books because they only have fake ratings, no reviews (fake or otherwise).
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