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Quality non-fiction books are the antithesis of AI slop

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Re: Quality non-fiction books are the antithesis of AI slop

#41

Post by nephihaha »

DubiousPusher wrote: post #11
adamddev1 wrote: post #7

It's sad now to see a university library where students sit among endless shelves of amazing books, sitting on laptops, almost all of them with ChatGPT open. The library has become just a place to sit and open an LLM.

It's especially sad because on of the things those LLMs are best, almost purpose built for is to tell those students which books to go open, where to find nuggets people haven't bumped into for years, to make cross-connections that would take a PhD a decade to find.

This is a very good point. If it should be used as anything, it is as a pointer to other things.

Re: Quality non-fiction books are the antithesis of AI slop

#42

Post by nephihaha »

sandspar wrote: post #31
zahirbmirza wrote: post #9

Fascinated that the author shares an experience of discovery in libraries. The internet, in its early days felt like that. Of course, no longer. Libraries are certainly declining in their traditional form. I find it odd that everyone has a digital resources in their pocket yet libraries are squeezing out physical books to make way for more and more computers. Try to find paper copy of the Sony founder's book.... that…

AIs are fantastic for discovery. Just today I asked Chatgpt to find blogs 1) about old school newspaper cartoons 2) that have been writing for more than 10 years and 3) are run by one or two passionate people rather than a team. Within seconds Chatgpt found 7 candidates. Within another handful of seconds it gave me RSS links to the ones I wanted. This is incredible!

Sometimes. I think this is partly because search engines are so poor nowadays. I have asked AI for certain websites that I know exist but it can't find them.

Re: Quality non-fiction books are the antithesis of AI slop

#43

Post by titanomachy »

Thank you for this. I sorted the "technology" and "science" sections and saw a few excellent books that I've read and a few that I would really like to read. This motivates me to start setting aside "reading time" again every day, since I've lost that habit.

The recent "society & culture" books gave me some good book club ideas.

Bug report: filtering by "award" appears to be broken for some awards. If I select Pulitzer or National Book Award, no books show up, but I can find books with these awards by browsing.

Re: Quality non-fiction books are the antithesis of AI slop

#44

Post by felipeerias »

adamtaylor_13 wrote: post #14

On a related note, I was just noting to my co-founder, as we struggle to write good case studies for our website, that I find LLMs are astoundingly bad at writing good prose. We all know the "AI-tics" that give away a sloppily AI-written piece, but even if you steer them, they still struggle to write consistently high-quality prose. Somehow I feel that the work of a good copywriter has never been more noticeable.

I gave Claude Fable $25 in Pangram API credits and, after hundreds of attempts, it was unable to produce a single readable original piece of writing that was not immediately identified as AI.

This seems to be a hard problem for LLMs, as passing would probably require good self-perception ("oh no, I am writing like an AI!") and fine-grained control over its own output ("let's write like a human instead!").

Re: Quality non-fiction books are the antithesis of AI slop

#45

Post by benbreen »

titanomachy wrote: post #43

Thank you for this. I sorted the "technology" and "science" sections and saw a few excellent books that I've read and a few that I would really like to read. This motivates me to start setting aside "reading time" again every day, since I've lost that habit. The recent "society & culture" books gave me some good book club ideas. Bug report: filtering by "award" appears to be broken for some awards. If I select Pulitz…

Awesome, that's what I was going for. I originally made this for my own use and got kind of obsessed with building it out once I started finding unfamiliar books I enjoyed using the semantic search and category browsing. Glad to see it out in the world hopefully doing the same thing!

Re: Quality non-fiction books are the antithesis of AI slop

#47

Post by OgsyedIE »

benbreen wrote: post #38
OgsyedIE wrote: post #27

Suggested additions: the Axiom Business Book Awards, Library Journal Best Books of the Year and Booklist Magazine's Editor's Choice Awards. There's also a few popular substacks that have big sideshows in regular book reviews, but I wouldn't even recommend my favourite for a public aggregator like this.

Original author/creator of the site here - thank you! Will add the Axiom one. I am on the fence about whether/how to add "book of the year" type lists as they are somewhat distinct from book awards, but I do think that would probably be the next step to get more books in the corpus. And any other ideas that HN readers have for awards to add would be welcome. Currently it's probably too history-slanted since I'm a his…

It may be hard to parse the lists but if they're still available somewhere online under the current administration the past annual State Department, CIA bookshelf recommendation, Army Chief of Staff, Navy CNO and Marine Commandant reading lists may have some valuable additions. To my knowledge there aren't any analogues to them in the rest of the Anglosphere but some LLMs will probably point out ones I haven't thought of.

I can point out that the UN agencies' respective reading lists for their staffs' professional development are 99% internal UN papers of very limited interest to external audiences but I haven't had a professional reason to look at any EU agencies to confirm or deny value.

Additionally, the Financial Times has a second set of book awards along their main awards which you've not listed, the FT reader's best books list.

Re: Quality non-fiction books are the antithesis of AI slop

#48

Post by dylan604 »

adamtaylor_13 wrote: post #14

On a related note, I was just noting to my co-founder, as we struggle to write good case studies for our website, that I find LLMs are astoundingly bad at writing good prose. We all know the "AI-tics" that give away a sloppily AI-written piece, but even if you steer them, they still struggle to write consistently high-quality prose. Somehow I feel that the work of a good copywriter has never been more noticeable.

More noticeable to me is the lack of the work of a good copy editor which, sadly, we haven't had for a really long time. At least, not on the interwebs. Even the news sites reduced where their print copies were known for rigorous editing saw obvious issues with the various corporate overlords doing serious headcount reductions. The rush to be first to publish reduced even further the time any editors might have had, and then the wide spread use of CMS style articles that slammed output together with something as unintelligent as 'cat segmentFromAuthor1 segmentFromAuthor2 segmentFromAuthor3 > article' where you can tell where each segment started over again with the same basic information as if it was content meant to stand on its own.

Of course, the amount of self published work has also helped make the lack of a good copy editor noticeable. I can excuse self published blogs though. But the stuff released "professionally" has really become farcical.

Re: Quality non-fiction books are the antithesis of AI slop

#49

Post by why_at »

This is pretty nice, I might use this if I'm looking to learn more on a topic.

I'm always cautious when reading nonfiction because it's hard for me to tell if the author knows what they're talking about when I'm not an expert myself. Using awards is a good metric. Maybe.

I am curious what the "score" for each book means. Is it calculated by giving each award a certain weight and adding them up?

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