Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Generative AI floods and dilutes the market for books

arxiv.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 110 posts

Re: Generative AI floods and dilutes the market for books

#31

Post by sieve »

epolanski wrote: post #15
sieve wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have hundreds of plot ideas from 40 years of reading and watching crappy books and films/tv. Never had the time or energy to explore those. LLMs let me try out various plots. To see which ones work and which don't. I haven't really thought about publishing anything though. Too much work and bureaucracy. The thing is ... ideas matter just as much as the writing. You cannot simply say: "Hey Claude, write me a Sherloc…

But why would I want to read that? Just give me the prompt at this point.

You could say that for any book.

People are too precious about man-made art. I don't see the point. Every book ever written might have some novelty value of its own. But it mostly has the same plots, character archetypes and other tropes found in other fiction. We think there is something special about human writing. But LLMs have read the same stuff we have. And produce similar inspired writing.

Re: Generative AI floods and dilutes the market for books

#32

Post by charlieyu1 »

ajsnigrutin wrote: post #20
jdw64 wrote: post #2

Why do people use Gen AI for writing? What's the motivation? For academic papers, it's probably citation metrics and the number of publications. For novels, it's likely economic factors. If those factors disappear, would people still use Gen AI for writing?

"back then", you had to write for months to get a book out, and it sold 20 copies and you earned $20. Now you can do it in minutes, get 50 books out, 20 of them sell 10 copies, you've earned $200. (i might be exaggerating the times and earnings, but the point stands)

I had about 2000 hours invested in a few books. I think I have made less than $2/hour so far after all the years.

Re: Generative AI floods and dilutes the market for books

#33

Post by plastic-enjoyer »

I wonder if this spells the end for online bookshops. I can imagine that small bookshops – or even online bookshops that focus primarily on selling curated books – are the future.

The book retail in my city is thriving, and consists mainly of shops where the owners curate the books.

Re: Generative AI floods and dilutes the market for books

#34

Post by cyanydeez »

epolanski wrote: post #10

For any kind of online entertainment really. The overwhelming majority of content on Youtube is also plagued by AI. You're 6 minutes in a documentary about Russo-Ottoman wars and only then you start noticing something's wrong, paintings are made up, the voice sounds similar to voices of other videos and the script has an odd non-human character to it. Then you dig into it, and indeed it's a bunch of crap prompts glue…

It's funny cause on the embedded youtube app they show you like 30 second clip and in about 10-15 seconds AIsm makes it pretty clear it's just going to be a grating voice over with horrible prose.

Re: Generative AI floods and dilutes the market for books

#35

Post by illwrks »

I have been tinkering with this over the past few months. One story with a specific genre and demographic target, but as I've been reading each draft there are so many small issues that crop up, inconsistency across various parts of the story, items that are introduced, questions that go unanswered etc. Unless your goal is to become an editor of AI content, it's not worth the effort.

Perhaps in time it will be better but you will need a proper pipeline to write, assess, track changes etc... perhaps all that's needed is a GitHub of sorts for writing.

However... what is the chance of any book finding an audience if there are so many to compete with. It might make more sense in having something created just for you though.

Re: Generative AI floods and dilutes the market for books

#37

Post by paganel »

encrux wrote: post #13
grey-area wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is not about money it is that we are made massively culturally poorer by the flood of ahistorical, amoral, incoherent, rococco, contradictory yet plausible shit produced by LLMs. Both the internet and books have been flooded with ‘content’ which appears like human content but has no coherence or intention to it and tends to fall apart completely the longer form the story. Even our autocomplete is being in…

I don’t see any other way past this other than regulation: We need authenticated online spaces where your account is linked to a real, government issued ID. This way, moderating content becomes feasible again. Bans will hold value, since you can’t just create new accounts all the time. I predict people will gravitate towards authenticated markets (and social media). I for one am sick and tired of second guessing ever…

> Bans will hold value, since you can’t just create new accounts all the time.

People will just flood to places that are not official and where they'll be able to express their views freely. That's how these things have always turned out to be.

In other words, let's say that I'll get banned from the likes of FB or IG as a result of me trespassing my government's ideological wishes, well, tough luck for FB and IG (and fuck them while I'm at it), I'll just make an account on a platform that won't abide by EU/Romanian (I'm Romanian myself) propaganda, where I'll still be able to share views with people thinking similar thoughts to what I think.

Re: Generative AI floods and dilutes the market for books

#38

Post by FartyMcFarter »

Gigachad wrote: post #19
grey-area wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is not about money it is that we are made massively culturally poorer by the flood of ahistorical, amoral, incoherent, rococco, contradictory yet plausible shit produced by LLMs. Both the internet and books have been flooded with ‘content’ which appears like human content but has no coherence or intention to it and tends to fall apart completely the longer form the story. Even our autocomplete is being in…

There was a case a while back now of an AI generated mushroom identification book filled with inaccuracies. Problem is short of filtering out anything published after 2023 it’s almost impossible to find something that isn’t slop now.

> Problem is short of filtering out anything published after 2023

Is it even feasible to filter this? Such metadata can be easily faked too in a lot of contexts.

Re: Generative AI floods and dilutes the market for books

#39

Post by ducktective »

epolanski wrote: post #10

For any kind of online entertainment really. The overwhelming majority of content on Youtube is also plagued by AI. You're 6 minutes in a documentary about Russo-Ottoman wars and only then you start noticing something's wrong, paintings are made up, the voice sounds similar to voices of other videos and the script has an odd non-human character to it. Then you dig into it, and indeed it's a bunch of crap prompts glue…

No passion, no independent research, only the drive to make money with as little effort as possible

Re: Generative AI floods and dilutes the market for books

#40

Post by photios »

jdw64 wrote: post #2

Why do people use Gen AI for writing? What's the motivation? For academic papers, it's probably citation metrics and the number of publications. For novels, it's likely economic factors. If those factors disappear, would people still use Gen AI for writing?

I've gotten yearly performance reviews that have been obviously ChatGPT-generated. People are just lazy.

Some HR systems even support that and have AI writing/rewording integrated.

Corporate hellscapes intensifying, I guess.

Post reply on HN