I tried Kindle Unlimited a few years ago, and the amount of scammy trash on there was staggering. I can't imagine how much worse it must be in the ChatGPT era.
Scammy AI-Generated Books Are Flooding Amazon
101–110 of 114 posts
Re: Scammy AI-Generated Books Are Flooding Amazon
#102As 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 answer is AI-based reviewers and moderators.
More stochastic systems isn't a solution lol.
Re: Scammy AI-Generated Books Are Flooding Amazon
#103Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm interested. Is this a work of fact or fiction? How much editing are you adding/subtracting to the content? How granular are your prompts (e.g., prompting for roughly each new paragraph, ~page, chapter, or larger)? How much are you finding you need to repeat/retry to get good output for your project?
I'm making non-fiction books that summarise historical events. No manual editing is necessary, as it automatically goes back through and cleans up any errors. I can't share my exact prompt style since I believe I've found a reliable way to generate these books en masse with minimal factual errors.
>I'm making non-fiction books
If there are factually incorrect things to the books hallucinated by LLMs, they're not non-fiction.
>...minimal factual errors
This is still really bad when pretending to be a book portraying historical events...
Re: Scammy AI-Generated Books Are Flooding Amazon
#104Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 th…
I think the arguments of "well people didn't like photoshop/cameras/the printing press/etc" is kind of a lazy excuse that ignores the actual criticism being leveled at generative AI systems. AI has removed basically all effort required to just create an image or generate some text. It does take effort to either discern the good from the bad or edit the output using some expertise enough for the content to reach a "professional" level, but that's kind of beside the point. These systems break the creative economy and have a really negative effect on online communities dedicated to these skills. There's a lot of spam in these online spaces that's being put there by low effort amateurs that don't even realize how shit they are. It increases the signal to noise and requires more effort on the part of community members in discerning truth from fiction. The maintainers of curl just discussed this problem with respect to their bug bounty program. Bad reports are still bad reports, but it takes more effort to tell them apart now.
Add that to the fact that these systems are built by scraping work without permission and these turn into headwinds that push people away from creative pursuit. Rather than bringing new people into these communities, the people who actually know what they're doing just get trampled by the uninformed.
None of these dynamics really exist with photoshop. While photoshop has tools that can speed up the artistic process, you need a base understanding of how to illustrate to actually use it effectively. It's truly a tool, as opposed to a slot machine you just give a prompt to.
Re: Scammy AI-Generated Books Are Flooding Amazon
#105Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 th…
I wasn't passing judgement on the merit of AI-generated content, but rather asking how we might reliably show and tell that content was not generated by AI.
Oh wait, I did call it "AI-generated crap", but I am open to the idea that not all AI content is crap.
Re: Scammy AI-Generated Books Are Flooding Amazon
#106Re: Scammy AI-Generated Books Are Flooding Amazon
#107I hope that AI allows Amazon to determine who put years into writing a book, and who is a spammer.
(Amazon refused to let me publish my books.)
Re: Scammy AI-Generated Books Are Flooding Amazon
#108Remember - Amazon is a marketplace. They don't care what they sell as long as the sales go on. I stopped ordering books from amazon after I got some poorly printed (by amazon), blurry books. The problem is that amazon will not tell you if it is print on demand or a real book.
Re: Scammy AI-Generated Books Are Flooding Amazon
#109Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 th…
I think the arguments of "well people didn't like photoshop/cameras/the printing press/etc" is kind of a lazy excuse that ignores the actual criticism being leveled at generative AI systems. AI has removed basically all effort required to just create an image or generate some text. It does take effort to either discern the good from the bad or edit the output using some expertise enough for the content to reach a "pr…
But Photoshop itself is adding generative AI tools, because the simple fact is just typing in a prompt into Midjourney or whatever isn't going to result in a professional quality image. You'll get weird hands, too many arms, etc. So Adobe has the idea that you use generative AI as a starting point after which someone with artistic skills will need to improve it. Just like with any other tool in Photoshop.
As for the "scraping" issue -- that is a boring sideshow that will be decided by lawyers -- is it fair use or not? Your or my opinion on that whether it "should be" is irrelevant. But even if the courts decide that training generative AI on data the trainer doesn't have permission to is illegal, this wouldn't "stop generative AI" as many seem to think. For example, Adobe is training its models only on public domain works and works it has the rights to.
Re: Scammy AI-Generated Books Are Flooding Amazon
#110Not 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…
> ESOL people: avoid searching YouTube for "How to pronounce" videos because they are usually shit. Often poorly generated computer voices.
Or people with thick foreign accents, which is just baffling.