Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Scammy AI-Generated Books Are Flooding Amazon

wired.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 114 posts

Re: Scammy AI-Generated Books Are Flooding Amazon

#51

Post by riley333 »

argiopetech wrote: post #41
riley333 wrote: post #35

There are so many reasons why this is happening and I personally think it's only tangentially related to AI. The internet has now become the home of "hustle culture" and is no longer serving the purpose of why it was first created. Covid only accelerated this trend as people began to look for other ways to generate income online. Just look at the Gamestop and AMC amateur stock trading craze or the explosion of flippi…

If I'm the kinda guy who's into the hustle, and I can hustle $800/mo (or similar) out of the government with no effort, a) why wouldn't I also keep up my other hustles, and, b) why do you expect that the cost of living won't rise to meet there new level of basic income?

That's a completely fair point and it's why I don't really think UBI is the answer. But, what is the answer? I don't think anyone has this figured out yet. Capitalism is by far the best system we've come up with but I just don't know what happens when/if AGI happens. And maybe it won't ever happen but I'd rather be brainstorming about what to do if it does happen now than wait until it's too late.

Re: Scammy AI-Generated Books Are Flooding Amazon

#52

Post by ben_w »

FiddlerClamp wrote: post #46
ben_w wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

3.5 has, or had, a particular style. No matter what the story, it had a cheerily up-beat ending. The invading aliens learned the errors of their ways and then everyone celebrated. Dracula, Winnie-the-Pooh, and Sherlock teamed up to fight crime. 4 is somewhat more interesting, and I've seen worse from actual humans, but… roll a d6, and on a 1-5 it's terrible, roll a 6 and you get something that's 90% fantastic and 10%…

It's got no dialog, no characters, no real scenes. It's a summary of a plot, not a story.

OK, so the things you don't like about it are effable rather than ineffable, but none of what you say changes that I do, in fact, like it[1].

To me, it's fine that it has no named characters, no dialog. One of the most grating things in plots with aliens is the names, no matter if they're American names like the spiders in A Deepness in the Sky, or the Star Trek pattern giving us random apostrophes and internal capitalisation, where "Q'ting'pAh" could easily be either Klingon or Vulcan.

[1] Not all of the output of 4, like I said it's mostly bad, but that I like this particular result.

Re: Scammy AI-Generated Books Are Flooding Amazon

#53

Post by dageshi »

mvc wrote: post #40
nonameiguess wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you consume in terms of content? Thinking back on my weekly viewing/reading habits from the past year, I've read William Gibson, watched a whole lot of BBC Earth nature docs, FX primetime television, and live sports from the NFL. Those names, brands that have been established for decades, are how I curate. I feel reasonably certain BBC and FX will continue serving valuable content for the foreseeable future.…

> I feel reasonably certain BBC will continue serving valuable content for the foreseeable future. I hope so but there are forces in the UK (and I suppose outside it) who see the BBC as "unfair" competition and will continually attempt to defund/destroy it.

The bigger risk frankly is that people watch so little they no longer pay the license fee because it makes no financial sense to do so.

I haven't watched terrestrial tv in a decade or more, pretty sure there's a generation of UK kids who will never bother because youtube/twitch/netflix is better as far as they're concerned.

Re: Scammy AI-Generated Books Are Flooding Amazon

#54

Post by mcmcmc »

whywhywhywhy wrote: post #12
lxgr wrote: post #8

Not just books. I remember seeing a "movie" on Amazon (not sure if it was Prime or some other service I was subscribed to). It was called "how to pronounce 'Stranger Things'", and the total length was about 10 seconds. I'll leave the plot to your imagination.

Noticed a trend on Amazon Prime where movies are allowed to have inaccurate dates. So it'll say (2023) but the second it starts you can tell it's 90s, 00s or even 70s. Really damages the perceived quality of the service when it can be gamed like that.

Just wait til the ads start pumping in, the quality can only go up!

Re: Scammy AI-Generated Books Are Flooding Amazon

#55

Post by wincy »

lxgr wrote: post #8

Not just books. I remember seeing a "movie" on Amazon (not sure if it was Prime or some other service I was subscribed to). It was called "how to pronounce 'Stranger Things'", and the total length was about 10 seconds. I'll leave the plot to your imagination.

Reminds me of when I was trying to figure out the pronunciation for “synedoche” and got this as the top YouTube results.

https://youtu.be/v-n1vGeVIXo

Re: Scammy AI-Generated Books Are Flooding Amazon

#57

Post by criddell »

empath-nirvana wrote: post #50
criddell wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Since you are working in the space maybe you probably know more about this than most of us. Are there any AI generated books out there that have found an audience and built a fan base? I don't doubt that it's going to happen but I'm skeptical if we are all that close. There are some very successful authors out there that many would say are awful, so that's why I asked for books with a fan base rather than good books.

Every once in a while I'll start a session with the AI where I'll just sort of interactively make a story with it and I quite enjoy the process, but the end result is not generally very good as a story.

It might be fun to do a choose-your-own-adventure (CYOA) style of story. Those were never high literature to begin with and most of the fun was seeing where new paths went. An AI-based CYOA could be much more dynamic.

Re: Scammy AI-Generated Books Are Flooding Amazon

#58

Post by duskwuff »

ben_w wrote: post #52
FiddlerClamp wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's got no dialog, no characters, no real scenes. It's a summary of a plot, not a story.

OK, so the things you don't like about it are effable rather than ineffable, but none of what you say changes that I do, in fact, like it[1]. To me, it's fine that it has no named characters, no dialog. One of the most grating things in plots with aliens is the names, no matter if they're American names like the spiders in A Deepness in the Sky , or the Star Trek pattern giving us random apostrophes and internal capi…

> no matter if they're American names like the spiders in A Deepness in the Sky

This is a bit of a tangent, but: you missed an important point in that book with some broad implications. Those weren't the spiders' names, those were the translators' deliberately humanized names for the spiders.

(And, to bring the discussion back home: no language model would have ever come up with a clever narrative trick like this.)

Re: Scammy AI-Generated Books Are Flooding Amazon

#59

Post by _teyd »

wincy wrote: post #55
lxgr wrote: post #8

Not just books. I remember seeing a "movie" on Amazon (not sure if it was Prime or some other service I was subscribed to). It was called "how to pronounce 'Stranger Things'", and the total length was about 10 seconds. I'll leave the plot to your imagination.

Reminds me of when I was trying to figure out the pronunciation for “synedoche” and got this as the top YouTube results. https://youtu.be/v-n1vGeVIXo

My favourite is https://youtu.be/3DSgsON3u8E?feature=shared

Re: Scammy AI-Generated Books Are Flooding Amazon

#60

Post by freedomben »

nsypteras wrote: post #20

I'm pretty sure the ads displayed on my Kindle are all for AI generated children's books lately. It's actually kind of fun looking at them to find the AI generated artifacts (e.g little girl building snowman has three fingers, etc.) Not sure who's actually buying these things...

The other day I saw an advert for a "course" that teaches you how to capitalize on the "AI gold rush" by using AI to write and sell ebooks. It's the new get-rich quick idea I guess
Post reply on HN