Live data from Hacker News

Scammy AI-Generated Books Are Flooding Amazon

wired.com

71–80 of 114 posts

Re: Scammy AI-Generated Books Are Flooding Amazon

#72
post #71

What are the best ways to signal that your content is not AI-generated crap? Will we need to come up with a way to authenticate non-AI content?

> What are the best ways to signal that your content is not AI-generated crap?

Publish it prior to 2022.

Re: Scammy AI-Generated Books Are Flooding Amazon

#73
Hardly surprising. Ever since the barrier to production/publication/distribution was dropped to very low (15ish? years ago) the SNR on available books has been terrible. LLMs are making the 1st part even lower effort, at least for trash, so the noise is going to increase by an order of magnitude at least.

Current discoverability outside people-you-actually know seems to be in a nosedive, so it's hard to see this getting better any time soon.

Re: Scammy AI-Generated Books Are Flooding Amazon

#75
post #71

What are the best ways to signal that your content is not AI-generated crap? Will we need to come up with a way to authenticate non-AI content?

> What are the best ways to signal that your content is not AI-generated crap? Publish it prior to 2022.

Cue the “photoshop artists aren’t real artists” cries

Re: Scammy AI-Generated Books Are Flooding Amazon

#76

Youtube is becoming flooded with influencers showing you how to do it and promising massive imaginary profits. Same for AI generated Etsy designs, copywriting gigs, and various other things.

Not new to AI. Before it was learn to code, start a print on demand store, start an FBA store, learn to trade crypto, etc. There's no shortage of suckers looking to buy $5 bills for $2.

Re: Scammy AI-Generated Books Are Flooding Amazon

#77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What are the best ways to signal that your content is not AI-generated crap? Publish it prior to 2022.

Cue the “photoshop artists aren’t real artists” cries

Exactly. In the 1990s there was a lot of grumbling by older artists used to pen and paper about how Photoshop and Illustrator and the like were evil and were only capable of creating cookie-cutter art with no "soul" (and going back even farther I remember reading articles by old journalists who decried the advent of the word processor and claimed that the limitations of typewriters made them better writers because they had to think what they wanted to write before typing it rather than endlessly edit what they wrote afterwards).

Re: Scammy AI-Generated Books Are Flooding Amazon

#78
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.

ESOL people: avoid searching YouTube for "How to pronounce" videos because they are usually shit. Often poorly generated computer voices.

Instead look for examples of real usage of the word in use e.g. https://youglish.com/

English is my mother tongue and I often need to look up how to say and use phrases from other English speaking regions e.g. "nowt" recently.

And take care to pick your accent - particularly American or British. "can't" is particularly hard to say properly in my English and US people misunderstand the way we say it.

Re: Scammy AI-Generated Books Are Flooding Amazon

#79
We recently got duped buying an AI generated book about native plants on amazon. The cover page was low-res and the information contained within was wrong. All of the citations given in the back of the book were non-existant. When we tried to return it they just gave our money back.

Re: Scammy AI-Generated Books Are Flooding Amazon

#80
post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.)

I didn't miss it ;)

Just because it had a good in-universe reason didn't stop it being grating.

Post reply on HN