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Scammy AI-Generated Books Are Flooding Amazon

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Re: Scammy AI-Generated Books Are Flooding Amazon

#81

Post by riley333 »

herval wrote: post #66
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…

idk why you're getting downvoted, but I kinda feel the same too. I've been gradually abandoning all social media sites bc it's all hustlers and fake antics (fake news, fake tiktok 'hidden cameras', fake articles, fake everything!), vying for a second of fame to sell you on something. The fact that it's 99% video also compounds it, I feel like

Not sure. I'm kind of surprised at the reaction myself haha

HN still feels like the old internet for the most part, at least. :)

Re: Scammy AI-Generated Books Are Flooding Amazon

#82

Post by nonbirithm »

herval wrote: post #66
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…

idk why you're getting downvoted, but I kinda feel the same too. I've been gradually abandoning all social media sites bc it's all hustlers and fake antics (fake news, fake tiktok 'hidden cameras', fake articles, fake everything!), vying for a second of fame to sell you on something. The fact that it's 99% video also compounds it, I feel like

And this time it's not only driven by larger media organizations, but also by random people who now have a chance to propagate their views from decreased barriers to entry.

I believe it wasn't only journalistic gatekeeping that prevented this for so long, but simply a lack of affordance for willing parties to do those things. High-speed Internet has made everything so much easier.

My feelings about the rise of streaming video are also conflicted. It has given us high-quality longform content on topics that hadn't been covered before, but all those other people's passions and hobbies take up way too much time if you as a consumer become deeply invested in them (not even counting the conspiracy genre and its implications). It's easy to do partially because YouTube facilitates that, but I think in the end people want to consume all this information in the end, for some definition of "want". And dozens of 6-hour streams of the latest game or another will keep being uploaded every day.

And there's this other thing that I keep coming back to. Someone I know was really into this engineer creating fake Apple product boxes that recorded thieves stealing them and being glitterbombed. They found it hilarious, but I was sort of confounded. It was the conversion of a few people's bad choices into entertainment and ad revenue, coated over with the intellectual sheen of detailed makerspace engineering diagrams and wit mixed with a moral high ground. Though what the thieves did was not right, there was something smug and passive aggressive about the entire thing that rubbed me the wrong way. And this was presented as just a humble guy with engineering experience creating his content and getting people interested in STEM. Anyone has the capability to do this sort of thing now, not just a media machine with questionable motives. It's just regular, driven people with questionable motives now.

Re: Scammy AI-Generated Books Are Flooding Amazon

#83

Post by herval »

nonbirithm wrote: post #82
herval wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

idk why you're getting downvoted, but I kinda feel the same too. I've been gradually abandoning all social media sites bc it's all hustlers and fake antics (fake news, fake tiktok 'hidden cameras', fake articles, fake everything!), vying for a second of fame to sell you on something. The fact that it's 99% video also compounds it, I feel like

And this time it's not only driven by larger media organizations, but also by random people who now have a chance to propagate their views from decreased barriers to entry. I believe it wasn't only journalistic gatekeeping that prevented this for so long, but simply a lack of affordance for willing parties to do those things. High-speed Internet has made everything so much easier. My feelings about the rise of stream…

I think what you're describing ("the long tail") has been a phenomenon for a decade or so - tons of youtubers, tons of bloggers, tons of twitter personalities, etc. I see it as a good thing, people definitely want to consume it.

What's been bothering is the layers of skimmers that are dominating all those mediums - the top youtube channels now are repeaters, the top tiktok channels are fake accounts copying the content, there's layers of "reactors" (they call themselves that) that add absolutely no value, but polute the whole timeline, and so on. This is mostly a newer phenomenon - as if the internet is quickly turning into a multimedia version of the mail system - it'll snuff out actual creativity/usefulness and slowly decay into spam spam spam spam.

Re: Scammy AI-Generated Books Are Flooding Amazon

#84

Post by jasonb05 »

_teyd wrote: post #59
wincy wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I spit my coffee :)

Re: Scammy AI-Generated Books Are Flooding Amazon

#85

Post by jakderrida »

robocat wrote: post #78
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.

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 Americ…

> particularly American or British. "can't" is particularly hard to say properly in my English and US people misunderstand the way we say it.

What'd you call me?

Re: Scammy AI-Generated Books Are Flooding Amazon

#86

Post by lancesells »

bnpxft wrote: post #13
photon_collider wrote: post #7

As platforms become flooded with AI-generated garbage, I wonder how people will be able to find meaningful content. Are there going to be a new set of AI tools for content curation? It just seems like this will only spark a new AI-driven arms race.

The old fashion way, friends. I only have so much time in the day. I can only consume so much content. I don't need AI or machine learning to filter a firehose of content. My friends provide a human scale stream of recommendation that I trust much more than a profit driven algorithm.

Yes, and if you don't have friends go to a library or a known subreddit (for now) or forum (for now).

Also, stop using Amazon for delivery of said content as they are part of the issue.

Re: Scammy AI-Generated Books Are Flooding Amazon

#87

Post by Balgair »

ado__dev wrote: post #56
spookybones wrote: post #5

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.

It's the new "Dropshipping"

Oh man, I had a boss once that was really into dropshipping back in ~2017. He kept it professional at work, but once over beers he got on to how he was making all this money with dropshipping and how it was this great idea. Never pressured us into it or anything, thank god.

I had previously thought that the guy was somewhat smart and had it together. After that, I never looked at anything he did the same way again. The nice clothes and car? Yeah, no way he wasn't doing all that on a load of debt.

That said, all his up-to-date management-speak and being 'with-it' when it came to the latest corporate craze, well, I hate to admit it, but it made him a better boss. He was at least trying really hard. Were a lot of the methods just hot air? Yeah, of course. But it was a lot better than a boss that actually thought that they knew what they were doing. My boss just pretended but was otherwise terrified of being left out, and at least he was hungry that way.

Still, after he boasted about his dropshipping business, I knew the guy was mostly hot air and his ventures would change with the wind. I'm glad that particular get rich quick scheme is (mostly) over.

Re: Scammy AI-Generated Books Are Flooding Amazon

#88

Post by arp242 »

> Amazon in September limiting authors to uploading a maximum of three books to its store each day.

Why not 3 books a month? Or even a few a year? Even extremely prolific authors rarely write more than a few books a year. This is a ludicrous rate-limit that seems designed to not actually do much (so Amazon can still get their commission) while giving the appearance that it does. It's hard to take this in good faith.

Re: Scammy AI-Generated Books Are Flooding Amazon

#89

Post by Aloisius »

It feels like Amazon has been a willing participant when it comes to seedy vendors flooding their marketplace with crap for a while now.

They made a token effort to curtail some AI spam by limiting how many self-published books you can upload per day to 3, but that's still laughably high.

Re: Scammy AI-Generated Books Are Flooding Amazon

#90

Post by Casteil »

Aloisius wrote: post #89

It feels like Amazon has been a willing participant when it comes to seedy vendors flooding their marketplace with crap for a while now. They made a token effort to curtail some AI spam by limiting how many self-published books you can upload per day to 3, but that's still laughably high.

100%

Real question is whether they'll start making their own 'AmazonBasics' branded AI-generated dogshit, just like they do to undercut/displace successful 3rd party products.

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