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I would rather see my books get pirated than this

janefriedman.com

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Re: I would rather see my books get pirated than this

#321

Post by akira2501 »

wpietri wrote: post #55
nomat wrote: post #44

I think this is the future of computers for people. they will open their phone and say "hey siri get this book or computer or car" and the browser will show them a bunch of made up products generated by an AI and they'll get the product drop shipped from china and it'll be a shitty counterfeit just like the $5 256GB USB drives. But they won't know because when you look for reviews, the review websites will also be ge…

Yeah, my big concern about LLMs is not Skynet or a zillion people out of work. It's that the spammers and their ilk are now vastly more capable. The fact that generative LLMs are glib bullshit machines is a problem for most sane uses, but a plus for people who don't give two shits about the truth as long as they've got a chance of making some money.

It reminds me of payola.

Radio stations would get paid to make songs that weren't popular seem more popular than they were so people would blindly buy them. It's the same old snake oil just taken to mass media.

Since both behaviors revolve around profit, you can apply the same means to mediate them. Further, the open plan "user generated content" model has been dying for a while now, the wills of some well moneyed monopolies keep it alive. We will iterate to something much better anyways. Perhaps this is just a force that drives it.

Re: I would rather see my books get pirated than this

#322

Post by huganabaga »

VincentEvans wrote: post #128

Let me tell you how to buy a kindle book for my kid’s Kindle that is connected via a child account in “Amazon Household” to my Amazon account. (This opening sentence already signals how the rest of this will go). A child’s account can’t buy books - you have to do it for them. 1. I open Amazon app on my iphone and find the book - “This app does not support purchasing of this content”. 2. I open Kindle app on my iphone…

If a product is crap, don't buy it.

Perhaps a real book on real paper is an alternative?

Re: I would rather see my books get pirated than this

#323

Post by huganabaga »

chii wrote: post #275
Qwertious wrote: post #261

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>No Author finishes their work and declares, "Now, let me make this as difficult as possible to purchase." It's the PLATFORM. IMO, the logical conclusion here is obvious: copyright should provide the author with the right to money, but not with the right to control actual distribution - we should be legally allowed to send the author $X in the mail and then torrent the thing. This notion that the author should contro…

> every ISBN should have the author's bank account number next to it and obtaining a copy of the ebook should be as simple as sending $X to that bank account, then finding a torrent by ISBN. which is fine, except what happens if the author sold the rights to another company that then demand a different set of condition? Or are you saying that the owner of said copyright does not have the right to decide such (for exa…

The ISBN could be the bank account. Like a DOI. Or a BTC wallet address. Access/control over it could be transferable.

Re: I would rather see my books get pirated than this

#324

Post by huganabaga »

tomsmeding wrote: post #276
Qwertious wrote: post #261

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>No Author finishes their work and declares, "Now, let me make this as difficult as possible to purchase." It's the PLATFORM. IMO, the logical conclusion here is obvious: copyright should provide the author with the right to money, but not with the right to control actual distribution - we should be legally allowed to send the author $X in the mail and then torrent the thing. This notion that the author should contro…

This is an interesting idea but one that will, if anything, increase piracy. Given a torrent link and a bank account number, how many people will think "let me try the book first for a bit, if I like it I'll pay" and then never come around to pay? Or even not care about paying at all, nobody will notice or be able to track, so you're basically safe from law enforcement.

The key here is the dishonesty in society. It annoys me every day.

I hear 30-year old overpaid software engineers brainstorming how to cheat the ticket checks at the ski resort. I watch people at all-you-can-eat buffets piling more food on than they can eat and bring something with them for consuming later at home or by their family. People discussing tax loopholes. Or how to get train rides for free if nobody checks the ticket. All well-off folks. Cheating their way through life. It's sickening.

It makes me wonder whether religion may actually be a (partial) solution to this. An atheist myself, I can see value in brainwashing people into believing that they are constantly being watched by an almighty being which will ensure they go to hell if they steal or similar, even if nobody else is watching.

It's really sad that people can't just be decent.

Re: I would rather see my books get pirated than this

#325

Post by Cthulhu_ »

> Garbage books getting uploaded to Amazon where my name is credited as the author.

This is an issue with a lot of sites and services nowadays; I get tons of recommendations on auto-generated Spotify lists (discover weekly, release radar) where someone just attaches $artist as one of the co-artists of their own mediocre hip-hop track. Maybe they use a sample from $artist, I don't know for sure, but I've gathered that it's a known trick to promote your own music on there and get /some/ listens at least, probably mostly accidental.

I wouldn't be surprised if some of those now are or will be AI generated, in a way so that it kinda sounds like $artist but isn't, and that legally it falls under "inspired by" or "a cover".

Re: I would rather see my books get pirated than this

#326

Post by jbergens »

nomat wrote: post #267
opportune wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, until someone creates a website that just ships the products they say they have, and people type in the URL for the site directly and shop there? If online shopping were truly such a terribly scammy UX in 100% of cases people would stop using it or shift to shopping from trusted sellers who recognize the tremendous amount of value they can capture by not scamming people.

Imagine like an LLM trained on everything you've ever done since birth included as part of the data set. and then one of those for each other person in the world. they could slice and dice you into a thousand different groups. at some point technology is going to stop being something that we interact with through a screen and a keyboard. Google maps will be there, where ever you go, all the time. No more getting lost…

I don't remember everything I've done or why. There is very little training data to be found for us as persons. IF they hack your phone or computer they might be able to store how you interact with the internet. Which things you browse and read, what you buy, how you write on social media. They could possible then create a digital twin (a clone) of your online presence but it would be a lot of work for very unclear gains. If they hack enough people they could learn some connections like that people interested in electric cars might also be interested in battery technology and solar panels, people who are interested in vegetarian food might also like to read/write about vegan food or the environment and so on. But I still think it would be a LOT of work just to end up creating a fake website selling fake batteries or vegetarian food that you either never deliver or that ends up being a poor replica of the good stuff.

Re: I would rather see my books get pirated than this

#327

Post by waihtis »

sznio wrote: post #315
waihtis wrote: post #274

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, currently the top LLM fails at repeatedly generating a stable set of pretty simple regexes for me, so where pretty far from a full-blown LLM dystopia at this point.

LLMs are too dumb to be useful, but smart enough to be destructive. You don't need to be able to generate correct regexes to create a blogspam article about regexes that will go to the top of the search results.

search is dying anyway and this will just accelerate that trend.

Re: I would rather see my books get pirated than this

#328

Post by Planktonne »

sznio wrote: post #315
waihtis wrote: post #274

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, currently the top LLM fails at repeatedly generating a stable set of pretty simple regexes for me, so where pretty far from a full-blown LLM dystopia at this point.

LLMs are too dumb to be useful, but smart enough to be destructive. You don't need to be able to generate correct regexes to create a blogspam article about regexes that will go to the top of the search results.

> LLMs are too dumb to be useful, but smart enough to be destructive.

I think this puts the blame in the wrong place; LLMs are too dumb to be useful, but it's the users who are too dumb to realise that, or too unethical to care.

Re: I would rather see my books get pirated than this

#329

Post by VincentEvans »

munchler wrote: post #214
VincentEvans wrote: post #128

Let me tell you how to buy a kindle book for my kid’s Kindle that is connected via a child account in “Amazon Household” to my Amazon account. (This opening sentence already signals how the rest of this will go). A child’s account can’t buy books - you have to do it for them. 1. I open Amazon app on my iphone and find the book - “This app does not support purchasing of this content”. 2. I open Kindle app on my iphone…

I understand your frustration, but what does this have to do with the article?

Only to point out that Amazon’s dominant market position allows it to pay very little attention to the issues plaguing participants on both sides of its marketplace with, as it appears, little effect on its bottom line, and I wouldn’t expect them to be resolved in any haste.
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