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Fake Books

lcamtuf.substack.com

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Re: Fake Books

#41

Post by colordrops »

HWR_14 wrote: post #34
colordrops wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or maybe people will start paying attention to references and provenance, and start looking into sources of information - maybe even more widespread use of cryptographic signatures. Misinformation has always been out there, and so there are tools to deal with it. Perhaps now is our chance to make these tools wide spread.

I don't see how references and providence will solve that problem. References are trivial for machine-generated content to add. And the providence of a new author and a new AI are the exact same. Unless your plan is to require a PhD to publish a book on Amazon on something.

References are used to trace back to source material. Once you've verified that the source material is truthful, you have started building trust in the author. Over time you can trust this author without verifying every single datum they publish. This is how trust works. We do it all the time to more or less of a degree. No PhD required. What's the issue here?

Re: Fake Books

#42

Post by nextlevelwizard »

nine_k wrote: post #29
nextlevelwizard wrote: post #23

Off topic: Why is everything posted here all of a sudden begging for my email? It feels like every article I click after reading few sentences I get a box begging to sign up for some stupid ass mailing list as if after spending 10 seconds reading their words I had become a fan and absolutely needed more of their bullshit in my life. If I am interested in hearing more about you, I will find a way to subscribe to your…

Have you tried paying? Publishers need food, too. So do some authors who write in a (semi)professional capacity and spend significant time writing.

What are you on? Are you implying that these people are collecting emails to sell them?

If your content is worth money you will make money, but most content is definitely not worth even my time.

Re: Fake Books

#43

Post by smilespray »

planetsprite wrote: post #36
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…

I get the feeling it was outsourced to a content farm, which outsourced itself to GPT-3

...which then outsourced itself to GPT-2...

Re: Fake Books

#44

Post by fullstackchris »

cowtools wrote: post #24
gzer0 wrote: post #10

This has been a concern of mine for a while; I have also published absolute garbage just to see how far I can take it. I've published music under various pseudonyms, books underneath different pen-names... the list goes on. I've retracted such publications, but it is frightening if one person like myself had the curiosity to try, what is already out there, and, what a well-funded nation-state actor could do. ---- Pos…

I don't think it's that scary. I mean it's basically spam isn't it? The only thing new is the volume in which you can produce surface-level-indistinguishable spam. It is now cheaper to produce lots of flowery, meaningless text that is full of definitions. I suspect that the future of literature is more concise and externally-meaningful writing. Amazon is a terrible marketplace insofar as the rating system isn't sybil…

Yes, for now. But what will these models look like in something like 5-10 more years?

Re: Fake Books

#45

Post by TaylorAlexander »

smilespray wrote: post #43
planetsprite wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I get the feeling it was outsourced to a content farm, which outsourced itself to GPT-3

...which then outsourced itself to GPT-2...

GPT-3 is lounging on a beach somewhere while GPT-2 does all the hard work!

Re: Fake Books

#46

Post by derefr »

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?

Re: Fake Books

#47

Post by helsinkiandrew »

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…

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.

Re: Fake Books

#48

Post by fullstackchris »

andirk wrote: post #5

ML-generated content can be pretty funny. This is more an example of Amazon being a garbage distributor of crap; this is an example of fraud. I hope there's a followup of what punishments happen with such a grift from one the world's largest companies.

Writing a book about NFTs (IMO a fraud based market in the first place) with it being full of lies is, as the author said, hardly a crime. It's just unethical.

Amazon isn't going to read every letter of every book that it sells, so it's hardly their fault either.

Re: Fake Books

#49

Post by smeagull »

mypastself wrote: post #40

Alarmingly 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.

If you thought it was garbage, why would you continue to pour your time into reading it in detail? That's just silly. You throw it in the bin and move on with your life.

Re: Fake Books

#50

Post by thriftwy »

colordrops wrote: post #41
HWR_14 wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't see how references and providence will solve that problem. References are trivial for machine-generated content to add. And the providence of a new author and a new AI are the exact same. Unless your plan is to require a PhD to publish a book on Amazon on something.

References are used to trace back to source material. Once you've verified that the source material is truthful, you have started building trust in the author. Over time you can trust this author without verifying every single datum they publish. This is how trust works. We do it all the time to more or less of a degree. No PhD required. What's the issue here?

Machine may easily add references to truthful sources from what is bogus content.
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