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Fake Books

lcamtuf.substack.com

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Re: Fake Books

#161

Post by Gigachad »

tkk23 wrote: post #121

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.

Because you didn’t pay money to receive the email spam. I suppose the main detail is that many people will just eat the loss on a scam book and devalue their trust in Amazon rather than bothering to refund and return it.

Re: Fake Books

#162

Post by Gigachad »

residualmind wrote: post #126

Even 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:…

The generated content is all nonsensical babel when it’s asked to do more than give a definition for a word or concept.

It’s grammatically correct but has no deeper meaning. And sure, some of the human written crap posted here is also meaningless blogspam.

Re: Fake Books

#163

Post by latexr »

glenstein wrote: post #152
coldtea wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The article literally says Yes, and the parent literally generalizes this one-off observation, puts it in context, and gives examples and even a source with a deep dive on the issue.

I don't understand how you think this is responsive to the issue of fabrication. The article already considered the possibility of the human content farm and concluded it was unlikely on the basis of information that was completely fabricated. The fact that the commenter proceeded to generalize, show a link, etc is not responsive to that. A responsive answer would be along the lines of "well, a content farm might fab…

> A responsive answer would be along the lines of "well, a content farm might fabricate too because _____."

That is precisely what the original commenter did:

> (…) exploring how this ghost writing works, and why it produces the kind of nonsense writing that looks like GPT-3 but is actually (…)

Re: Fake Books

#164

Post by helsinkiandrew »

elefanten wrote: post #64
helsinkiandrew wrote: post #47

Earlier 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.

10,000? Could it be 100,000? I have to write 10,000 words overnight occasionally in my role. If it’s $2500 for 10k words, maybe I should be ghostwriting…

Sorry it was 25,000 - that includes research

Re: Fake Books

#165

Post by sarchertech »

TaylorAlexander wrote: post #77
elefanten wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

10,000? Could it be 100,000? I have to write 10,000 words overnight occasionally in my role. If it’s $2500 for 10k words, maybe I should be ghostwriting…

In the video it's $2,500 for 25,000 words. I think the 10k words was a typo in the above comment.

That’s also the average ghost writing rate. Not the rate the content farm he uses pays the ghost writers.

Re: Fake Books

#166

Post by rjmunro »

warbler73 wrote: post #19

Wow! Fantastic article. With AI generated stuff I expect we are going to see 99% of the book market saturated with generated nonsense, then collapse as a market for lemons.

Depends what you mean by "99% of the book market". I'm sure the major publishers will not start publishing generated nonsense, and I suspect the small players self-publishing nonsense on Amazon will go away in time.

Of course major publishers may be duped into unintentionally publishing AI generated or part AI generated content by bad authors, but if it's good enough to get through their editing processes, it will hopefully be non-nonsense.

Re: Fake Books

#167

Post by kayxspre »

derefr wrote: post #46
TaylorAlexander wrote: post #16

I 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?

Probably because the ultimate end of these course isn't to make money by yourself, but by engaging in an MLM and let it work.

There's a company engaging in MLM sales paying some news agencies to promote its scheme every day during the news (a subtle sponsor, so to speak; it's on regular TV so SponsorBlock won't help). As my family watched the news from this channel often, I would recognize how it works. It would promote an online course along the lines of "Make Money with a Smartphone" and advertised the course it claimed to cost $249.99 at $2.49 (price may vary, depending on who is the presenter, though the course are the exact same).

The news program is careful not to show the names of the ultimate company offering it, only presenting that this person will be teaching. Sharp-eyed viewer, however, can notice that those adverts intend to direct the prospective "client" to an MLM.

Re: Fake Books

#168

Post by latexr »

derefr wrote: post #46
TaylorAlexander wrote: post #16

I 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?

As the saying goes, there’s a sucker born every minute¹.

An important feature of these scams is to frame success and failure as being entirely in your hands: it’s not the system’s fault that you didn’t achieve success, it’s yours and yours alone, you didn’t want it bad enough. Someone who falls in that hole is bound to do it again, this time for a different grift which looks easier. They’ll do as much as it takes until they strike gold, go bankrupt, or finally understand it’s all a scam. That last one can take a long time to come.

In sum, money making courses don’t need an infinite supply of new chumps when they can keep reeling in the same ones. Offer some discounts and rewards for bringing in new members, and you’ve gone full MLM².

¹ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/There%27s_a_sucker_born_every_...

² https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multi-level_marketing

Re: Fake Books

#169

Post by TazeTSchnitzel »

f311a wrote: post #63

Amazon is full of fake/generated/auto translated books in every category. Just search for any programming language and sort it by release date. I don't understand why they don't fix this problem. It's pretty easy to fix and all those sales don't generate a significant amount of revenue for Amazon considering the negative experience for clients. Such books are pretty easy to spot since the majority of reviews are writ…

Amazon is full of low-effort products in every category. If you search for certain consumer goods you'll get several different brand names for the same white-label product, for instance. And lots of people buy them! It's not just an easily-ignored spam problem…

I really hope Amazon's sea of garbage devours Amazon before it destroys the remaining un-Amazon-ified online retailers through unfair competition.

Re: Fake Books

#170

Post by nix23 »

I have a book from amazon (it's about a Seawolf submarine) the book is so bad, the story so lame, and the mix of themes (music-taste with a rescue), kind of artificial...it's almost comical and i bet it's mostly written by a AI who cobbled text together...an absolute low effort book.
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