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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

#51

Post by titanomachy »

benbreen wrote: post #45
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 I originally made this for my own use and got kind of obsessed with building it out once I started finding unfamiliar books I enjoyed using the semantic search and category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!

One thing that would make this information even more useful and searchable would be a JSON dump of your dataset. You could serve it statically on S3 or similar, to keep hosting costs to a minimum.

Of course, having created a cool thing generates no obligation for further work on your part! I'm grateful that you did this work and made it available for free.

Did you build your semantic search index based on the full text of the books, or just the reviews and descriptions?

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

#52

Post by dylan604 »

Mtinie wrote: post #23
cyanydeez wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

those people will also start adopting the AIsm and will become indistinguishable.

AI adopted humanisms, we just weren’t used to seeing them at the same scale we do today. Diversity of writing styles was part of that, but I’d point to vernacular exposure as the larger component. We’re going to go through a period where we try to adapt to a form of “Universal English” for those of us who read primarily English writing. Other languages’ readers may be experiencing the same dissonance when they come a…

It's like people learning a new language according to the book. Those people sound foreign to a native speaker. If AI was trained on school books for grammar, then they too will sound odd to a native speaker even if their output is technically fine or technically more proper. I known nothing of LLM training and how weighting is applied to educational content vs other sources, but it feels like they were weighted away from modern colloquial speak and towards book grammar. The whole thing reminds me of school literature classes where the teachers comments always felt like I was being guided to a more strained sound and less natural. But what do I know. Lit was my least favorite subject which is well evidenced by my grades compared to my math/science scores.

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

#55

Post by topham »

conception wrote: post #22
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 recently realized this as well and I think what I’ve discovered is that AI just produces mediocre content in all realms, but you don’t really notice it except in the realms where you have real expertise. With a lot of harness and prompting you can have it pump out something that’s pretty good but by default the next best token rarely produces anything of quality it seems like and if you think it does, perhaps you m…

It tends to the mean. You can get it to do that less, but it's an inherent bias

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

#56

Post by zem »

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…

> The internet, in its early days felt like that. Of course, no longer.

back in the reasonably early days of the web (I would guess ~2000) I stumbled across a webpage that said "I used to collect random interesting snippets in a shoebox, here is the internet version of it". I was delighted enough that I actually wrote to the author to compliment them on helping keep the web interesting, and though I haven't thought about it in ages it clearly made enough of an impression on me that I remembered the author's name. and it's still up! https://www-users.york.ac.uk/~ss44/cyc/index.htm

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

#58

Post by Der_Einzige »

maxdo wrote: post #29

I participate book club for several years with friends, we casually navigate certain topics, and i can tell you human slop in literature is a real thing. - almost every book try to stretch core idea into book size format - unique ideas are rare people attack them under different angels - a later phenomena : their believes almost predict entire book, outcomes etc, brainwash impact is real so not sure, how ai slop is b…

This is sadly correct/true. This is one of the many reasons why I militantly reject carbon chauvinism. Most of the potshots people take against AI can be easily retorted with “have you seen how bad the average human is at X?”

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

#59

Post by annzabelle »

m463 wrote: post #20
jeffreyrogers wrote: post #12

I would bet that how your brain stores information that you read from long-form text is very different from how it stores information you acquire from chatting with an LLM. When I read something challenging or new to me I spend a lot of time thinking about how what I'm reading matches my own experiences or knowledge. Although I'm a fairly fast reader, it often takes me a long time to get through difficult pages since…

I listen to audiobooks while I walk and hike, and sometimes when I recall some particular thing I've learned, I can also recall where I was hiking when I heard it. I think there's a lot to learn on how we really process information.

There's a podcast I listened to as it came out when I was a teenager. I'm now relistening to it over a decade later, and I distinctly remember walking home from the bus stop with it coming through wired earbuds from my ipod.

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

#60

Post by benbreen »

titanomachy wrote: post #51
benbreen wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!

One thing that would make this information even more useful and searchable would be a JSON dump of your dataset. You could serve it statically on S3 or similar, to keep hosting costs to a minimum. Of course, having created a cool thing generates no obligation for further work on your part! I'm grateful that you did this work and made it available for free. Did you build your semantic search index based on the full te…

Already tried to do this in a basic form. Advice from experts would be welcome as it's my first time trying to make data and an API available: https://book-prize-index.vercel.app/data

Also I just had to upgrade my Vercel plan due to traffic, which is very welcome and appreciated, but if anyone wants to donate, that would be really helpful! There's a Stripe link at the site: https://book-prize-index.vercel.app

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