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Pre-2022 Books

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Re: Pre-2022 Books

#71

Post by kccqzy »

mrandish wrote: post #62

I hate slop as much as anyone else and was, until recently, absolute in my zero tolerance of any LLM use in personal posts and correspondence. Now I've adopted a slightly more nuanced view because I sometimes use an LLM when writing but only in a couple very limited, narrowly focused ways. The first is trying to remember a specific turn of phrase I can't recall at the moment (when you get past 50 this happens a bit m…

I like my writing too. But I’ve found that the kind of writing I’m most skilled at is memoir-style writing. I don’t actually like my writing when it comes to business proposals for example, so I let LLM rewrite these. Such writing doesn’t really “belong” to me anyways; they belong to my employer. And I don’t feel a sense of accomplishment or craft when writing them.

Re: Pre-2022 Books

#72

Post by fy20 »

julianeon wrote: post #66

This will work for a little while but this can't go on indefinitely: no one is going to want to stick to 30+ year old books. We should probably work on developing standards for what we want in a book instead of clinging to a losing position.

I'd guess some publishers just need to set a hard stance against clearly AI generated work, and have more in-depth reviews before publishing.

On the other hand, it means the age of self-publishing was short lived and is effectively dead now.

Re: Pre-2022 Books

#74

Post by pluralmonad »

cryo32 wrote: post #33

It’s not just 2022 and earlier books. There’s a supply chain problem as well. I’ve seen two older books so far from Amazon which were AI generated copy text with a genuine looking cover on it. Amazon just took the return and probably restocked it for the next victim. I tend to buy books from second hand book shops and eBay now and usually older or well used copies. A good sign of their authenticity.

Thriftbooks is a decent source. Used hardcovers abound.

Re: Pre-2022 Books

#75

Post by pluralmonad »

fy20 wrote: post #72
julianeon wrote: post #66

This will work for a little while but this can't go on indefinitely: no one is going to want to stick to 30+ year old books. We should probably work on developing standards for what we want in a book instead of clinging to a losing position.

I'd guess some publishers just need to set a hard stance against clearly AI generated work, and have more in-depth reviews before publishing. On the other hand, it means the age of self-publishing was short lived and is effectively dead now.

I don't think self publishing is dead. But it probably is an end to grabbing new books from unfamiliar names. So self publishing will be harder, since it will take grinding to build human rep, but certainly not dead.

Re: Pre-2022 Books

#76

Post by geraneum »

julianeon wrote: post #66

This will work for a little while but this can't go on indefinitely: no one is going to want to stick to 30+ year old books. We should probably work on developing standards for what we want in a book instead of clinging to a losing position.

> no one is going to want to stick to 30+ year old books

This is... satire, right? right?

Re: Pre-2022 Books

#77

Post by subygan »

Anything that feels like it came out of matrix multiplication immediately loses the value for me.

Something about the industrialization of thinking makes it uninteresting. similar to frozen pasta from the shelves, heated and served.

Re: Pre-2022 Books

#78

Post by AlexeyBrin »

RomanPushkin wrote: post #3

It's one of the reasons I don't want to update my free book about Ruby: https://leanpub.com/rubyisforfun - written by a human, and will stay the same forever I think. The moment you touch it to update - immediately changes the date from 2022-05-26 to 2026 and all the value is gone

Thanks for the book. If you want to update it, why don't you slap a 2nd edition on the cover and some No AI sigil (I saw this strategy on the books of Nils M Holm from Lulu).

Re: Pre-2022 Books

#80

Post by appplication »

golem14 wrote: post #44
dspillett wrote: post #42

Not just books. When searching for information online, for anything where things haven't changed significantly in the last few years, I definitely favour a post on SO/SE/HN/reddit/etc dated before 2023 over those that are later. And where there are no good looking references before that, the earlier the better. Of course there are no doubt people out there realising that a fair few of us do this, and are starting to…

In this case, archiv.* might be your friend, since they have time stamped copies.

That would somewhat work for some limited things for a limited time, but I feel like this is all just asymptotically approaching the inevitable conclusion that we cannot trust essentially anything online anymore because special interest (corporate, political, etc) have abused LLMs.

I think near term this feels like something bad for individuals because we can no longer find truthy information. But longer term this is going to be an issue for the same special interests, as people normalize to this and longer view the internet or media as a place they can get reliable information.

I really do not think children born today are going to think “let me just look up reviews for a product online” or even “let me just ask AI to summarize reviews” in 20-some years when they have purchasing power, because it will be ubiquitously known that nothing written online can be trusted, and AI is just ouroborosing itself (and a few more decades of increasingly desperate and short-sighted advertising/over-productization by the controlling corporations).

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