For the Kindle Unlimited:
1. How did it get into the program?
2. Does it get paid a share everytime someone browses one of its books, before realizing it is a fake book?
Tom Lesley has published 40 books in 2023, all with 100% positive reviews
161–170 of 182 posts
Re: Tom Lesley has published 40 books in 2023, all with 100% positive reviews
#162Earlier quoted context omitted.
> You can spot it by the very verbose answers that don't say anything meaningful. Although, in all fairness, I have been known to write verbose answers that don't say anything meaningful, too, and I'm not a bot. I think.
ChatGPT replies to you with: > Don't worry, JohnFen. We still love you even if you're not sure whether you're a bot or not. After all, aren't we all just a bunch of biological machines running on meat-based neural networks?
Except for the first sentence, that would easily pass for a HN reply.
Re: Tom Lesley has published 40 books in 2023, all with 100% positive reviews
#163Earlier quoted context omitted.
Unless you know the category or have a trusted brand, Amazon has become absolutely junk. Search for something where you likely won't know any trusted brands (such as car covers) and you'll get 200 results with exactly the same picture but random brand names. All of it is imported crap from Alibaba, of course, and Amazon sellers won't even bother customizing the images. The degradation in quality has been astonishing.
> Search for something where you likely won't know any trusted brands (such as car covers) and you'll get 200 results with exactly the same picture but random brand names. > All of it is imported crap from Alibaba, of course, and Amazon sellers won't even bother customizing the images. Which, by the way, is also the literal user experience of AliExpress or Taobao. You forgot to mention widely varying prices. Whenever…
Let me offer you a red pill: everything in your house is "imported crap from Alibaba", trusted brand or not.
Re: Tom Lesley has published 40 books in 2023, all with 100% positive reviews
#164Earlier quoted context omitted.
Only if they’re taking a very short term perspective. If the customer is left feeling like they’re consistently getting scammed, they will stop shopping at Amazon and take their money elsewhere. I highly, highly doubt Amazon is letting these through the net on purpose.
Amazon has a huge range of products for sale, and it is easy to get a feel for what works better there than not. At the end of the day all the reviews and UI doesn't matter as much as that it can actually ship for free and arrive in 1 or 2 days, and that returns are as easy as giving the item to a clerk at a store (no rewrapping or shipping fees needed). This is their only competitive advantage IMO.
What 1 or 2 days? Its more like 3 to 5 days now.
Re: Tom Lesley has published 40 books in 2023, all with 100% positive reviews
#165Earlier quoted context omitted.
Even here on HN, people are using ChatGPT to write replies. You can spot it by the very verbose answers that don't say anything meaningful. Someone else commented here that AI would raise the noise level everywhere and I unfortunately have to agree.
> You can spot it by the very verbose answers that don't say anything meaningful. Although, in all fairness, I have been known to write verbose answers that don't say anything meaningful, too, and I'm not a bot. I think.
AI is taking your job I'm afraid.
Re: Tom Lesley has published 40 books in 2023, all with 100% positive reviews
#166I accidentally fell for one of these AI-written books a few weeks ago, when I bought a book for work. It appears I'm still the only negative review: https://www.amazon.com/gp/customer-reviews/R3FM33XXWCEZV5?re...
Re: Tom Lesley has published 40 books in 2023, all with 100% positive reviews
#167Are they purchasing all the positive reviews?
Re: Tom Lesley has published 40 books in 2023, all with 100% positive reviews
#168Earlier quoted context omitted.
True that. It is so bad that once I sent a irrefutable proof of the seller incentivising reviews, Amazon didn’t take any action at all.
> irrefutable proof Anything coming directly from a customer is probably refutable. For example, the incentives I normally see are on these little cards they include with the product encouraging reviews in exchange for a gift card or something similar. What's to stop a competitor from falsely reporting it using a fake incentive card they created? Amazon could take your report then actually open the product and see if…
You have a valid point but then for a company of the size of Amazon so deeply in tech, wouldn’t take much to find out that I have a decade old account with several thousand $ of purchase, abiding by the rules all along. The probability of such an account being a competitor would be extremely less.
Re: Tom Lesley has published 40 books in 2023, all with 100% positive reviews
#169Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think it needs to be evaluated relative to the volume of the work. If you take a novel in the public domain and just change a few sentences, I don’t think you can claim copyright for the modified novel.
That’s true, but the output of something like chatGPT isn’t an existing work. The author’s prompt caused it to be created. I think it will ultimately hinge on whether courts find the totality of the process to be creative enough to constitute a “modicum of creativity” My prediction is that courts will eventually rule that something like writing a prompt is enough. I think too much would be upended to rule otherwise.
The courts are going to always be obsessed with one practical scenario. I take e.g. Harry Potter, put it through an LLM with the prompting of essentially writing the exact same thing with slightly different characters, locations, and phrasings. And then put it up for sale (or free download), making no secret of the fact that it's essentially the same book.
If an LLM reaches a sufficient capability that this can be achieved while maintaining a roughly comparable level of readability, then you'd have just completely legalized 'piracy by proxy'. And the same would come to every single medium from movies to software. This is going to make it an extremely difficult question to answer.
I expect what it come down to is determinism. LLMs are completely deterministic - same model + same input + same seed = same output. And so any seller will be obligated to retain any model composition/data, and any copyright holder of an input training item will have a copyright claim on any output item. In other words, you can only train on stuff you already have the copyright to, or rights to.
Re: Tom Lesley has published 40 books in 2023, all with 100% positive reviews
#170Ha, rookie!
Need no reviews, just dedication...
... and automation.