How is this different from email spam? People will stop trusting random sources for books. Established publishers will make sure that only vetted authors are able to access the market. The only problem is that it's difficult for new publishers and fringe authors to enter the market.
Fake Books
121–130 of 371 posts
Re: Fake Books
#122Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think NKRFZ had a video about a weird genre of pro-war fiction that is published en mass in Russia and promoted quite alot, but which does not really sell.
Pro-war fiction? That's like the standard movie for several decades from Rambo to Michael Bay's epics and Top Gun Maverick, and in movie form that has far wider appeal, 10000x the audiences, and is way more glamorous! "weird pro war fiction" would be very low in effectiveness...
Reminds me of the "long tail effect". One work of weird pro war fiction is not enough, but different customised propaganda for every niche might be something.
Re: Fake Books
#123[deleted]
Re: Fake Books
#124Alarmingly enough, not even the one- or two-star Amazon reviews caught the garbled nonsense, indicating that not even real people bothered to read the book in detail. I’m wondering if any person on the planet other than the author of the article read this best-selling book in its entirety. Because even the book’s purported author likely didn’t.
Well, if people don’t actually invest any time and effort into consuming the books they buy, then perhaps it is an inevitable adaptation on the part of authors to also not invest any time and effort into creating them. (The rise of Blinkist et. al. seems to support the idea that many people value being able to say that they have read a book much more highly than actually reading it.)
I suppose, but it seems like such a weird brag to say i read off-brand nfts for dummies.
Like i totally get people lying about reading Finnegan's wake, but who is impressed by a weird intro to NFT book? Maybe it depends on social circle.
Re: Fake Books
#125> " I soon discovered that all the books leaned on the same central argument: value is an inherent consequence of scarcity. My rebuttal to that was simple: it’s an exception, not a rule. My kids’ doodles are scarce, but in a gallery, they wouldn’t fetch much. " There isn't really a market for kids doodles, and with the barrier to entry being really low the supply is many orders of magnitude higher than the demand. So…
Which was precisely the author's point.
Re: Fake Books
#126Even human-written content has become so bad it's sometimes hard to tell it apart from a Mark V. Shaney or Racter implementation. I mean, aren't our brains' language capabilites not just Markov chains on steroids, with billions and billions of inputs and weights? Why are we still using text-based content-generation algorithms? Can't we train some kind of AI to generate "good" fiction content? Like, for example, this:
"Oh," said Lucy, peeping into the parlour, "is that our old friend, the fairy?"
"Yes," said Mr. Bennet, looking up from his newspaper, "my sister has been entertaining you in the best way she can."
"She has been telling me," said Mrs. Bennet, with a solemn laugh, "all about her doll's tea-party. I wish I had been there."
"My dear," replied her husband, "I am certain that it has been her greatest enjoyment. And the little girl really seems to have had a very good time of it."
"Not more so, I am afraid, than the other ladies. _They_ had none of the advantages of hearing the charming story.
Re: Fake Books
#127I think there’s a good chance it was ghost written by a content farm for someone who wanted to publish a book in a popular category to make a quick buck. I recently learned that this is a soft-scam technique advocated for by a couple of guys called the Mikkelson Twins. They say you can make money by publishing audiobooks on audible by finding a popular topic on audible, then hiring a ghost writing service to write yo…
> Except what the Mikkelson Twins actually make money on is selling you on a “money making course” where they tell you to do the above. So there’s all kinds of people trying to follow this method out there, it seems. How do people still become wealthy selling "money making courses", when enough people have created "money making courses" that they are, themselves, a commodity?
Well, see, that’s just it: once they become fungible then the value inevitably follows.
Re: Fake Books
#128Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is a brilliant (but very sad) video. The ghost writers get about $2500 for a 10,000 word book researched and written in a month. I guess this is cheaper than using GPT-3 and having to prune out the flights of fancy/complete nonsense that GPT-3 can sometimes generate.
From the video, it is $2500 for a 25,000 word book, written in 25 days. That is $100 per day writing 1000 words per day. If this takes you 8 hours per day, that is $12.50 per hour. If you can do this every month, that is $30,000 per year. A comfortable wage for some people, and poverty wages for others. It also seems like a difficult pace to research a topic and write 1000 words per day, and seems like miserable work…
Yes, sorry - 25000 words, too late to edit my comment. But it sounds like miserable work, writing on something you are an expert in, or are interested it sounds like a great way to improve your skills and make a bit of money. But researching, writing, and editing content on a made up topic for some charlatan book publishers sounds aweful.
Re: Fake Books
#129I think there’s a good chance it was ghost written by a content farm for someone who wanted to publish a book in a popular category to make a quick buck. I recently learned that this is a soft-scam technique advocated for by a couple of guys called the Mikkelson Twins. They say you can make money by publishing audiobooks on audible by finding a popular topic on audible, then hiring a ghost writing service to write yo…
It's the same thing. Ghost writers are using GPT-3 (know this for a fact).
Re: Fake Books
#130[deleted]