41–50 of 50 posts
I'd venture to say that most of the non-fiction ebooks, and especially the best-sellers for Kindle, are published by multi-nom-de-plume "grindset" publishers.
In 2017, a 10,000-word "booklet" on any non-fiction topic cost $200. That usually took about ten days from order to completion. The content was pretty much the same you'd now get via LLMs.
One day an AI will write a brilliant book. It will write something as good as the most competent and insightful human writer out there. And it will write a thousand more. The problem is that for every good book there will be a thousand bad books. What good is a good book if no one has time to discover it and read it? No one has time to get through all the good books written by humans, why are we worried about books w…
Not going to lie, i didn't spot it.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
LitRPG category suffers a lot from this. A number of good series. Then tons of ones that are basically. I wake up in a new world. I punched a rabbit. I gained a level. I walk 10 feet. Walking got a skill level. Oh good I got that walking level just in time to not die to a snake. I gain a level in poison resist. … I punched a a dragon and gained a level. Oh crap, umm a plot. Yeah. Let’s add one in last chapter so ther…
Which do you consider to be among the good series? (I have read and enjoyed a couple of LitRPGs)
One day an AI will write a brilliant book. It will write something as good as the most competent and insightful human writer out there. And it will write a thousand more. The problem is that for every good book there will be a thousand bad books. What good is a good book if no one has time to discover it and read it? No one has time to get through all the good books written by humans, why are we worried about books w…
So the inevitable end result of this will be that all content will be AI generated as soon as the quality becomes - not great, competent or insightful, but just good enough to make money in the immediate short term. And this will be the case for all forms of media.
The flood began years ago with low-priced ghostwriting services. I'd venture to say that most of the non-fiction ebooks, and especially the best-sellers for Kindle, are published by multi-nom-de-plume "grindset" publishers. In 2017, a 10,000-word "booklet" on any non-fiction topic cost $200. That usually took about ten days from order to completion. The content was pretty much the same you'd now get via LLMs.
Either you get volume, or you had to produce those very cheaply to it make any sense at all.
One day an AI will write a brilliant book. It will write something as good as the most competent and insightful human writer out there. And it will write a thousand more. The problem is that for every good book there will be a thousand bad books. What good is a good book if no one has time to discover it and read it? No one has time to get through all the good books written by humans, why are we worried about books w…
The situation now is different, in that AIs are capable of flooding the market with more exponentially more material than human beings could possibly ever produce or sort through. Also that AI provides a market incentive to prefer machine generated content over human generated content, as the presence of humans in the loop at all reduces profit margins (this includes having AIs curate the libraries,) as humans can't…
The situation is exactly the same as it was before as far as you or I are concerned.
More books are released every day than any of us can keep up with. More books have been published (and lost to time) than we can even account for.
There's more competition now, but the amount of attention you or I have to give to discovery has not changed. Like when competing restaurants open across the street from yours, it just means authors need to work harder to entice people to buy from them instead of Jimmy Pesto.
(In the case of Amazon, they're doing it through astroturfed reviews...)
This is DAY ONE of the content explosion. People will soon learn they can skip the middlemen and generate yourself any niche theme at all. The story gen a.i. are only going to get better day by day. If you must have new published books (allegedly human authored, edited, and curated for cultural relevancy) you will almost have to use your own a.i. anyway. You'll need to trust it to summarize the work or "human" review…
It's funny to see early Stable Diffusion threads go from "lol we have the power to see EVERYBODY naked" to "ok this is boring now" over the course of just two years.
A sandwich you make yourself never tastes as good as one made by someone else. When you know exactly how it was constructed, by the time you take a bite you already know what to expect. Nothing is left to the imagination. There's no thrill of having your expectations challenged and discovering new flavors.
(The best tasting sandwich is the one you steal from the workplace refrigerator. Then, the thrill is in the chase.)
This is DAY ONE of the content explosion. People will soon learn they can skip the middlemen and generate yourself any niche theme at all. The story gen a.i. are only going to get better day by day. If you must have new published books (allegedly human authored, edited, and curated for cultural relevancy) you will almost have to use your own a.i. anyway. You'll need to trust it to summarize the work or "human" review…
> People will soon learn they can skip the middlemen and generate yourself any niche theme at all. It's funny to see early Stable Diffusion threads go from "lol we have the power to see EVERYBODY naked" to "ok this is boring now" over the course of just two years. A sandwich you make yourself never tastes as good as one made by someone else. When you know exactly how it was constructed, by the time you take a bite yo…
For now the prompts are deliberate creations of mind but in due time they could be largely auto generated (perhaps even blurred from the user) like feathers in a cap you collect and never have to look at. They will learn how to surprise us to a delightful degree with levers that don't reveal all the magic.
Spotify is facing a similar crisis. AI generated songs being listened to by bots, presumably to generate money. https://cointelegraph.com/news/spotify-reportedly-deletes-th...
It has felt this way to me for years now, really. Somewhere in the last decade or so the top X of almost any genre I enjoy (which spans a large range of fiction) has been... lackluster. Not just in the hipster contrarian sense of "popular therefore bad" but also the lists of books touted as "critics adore this obscure gem" and crowd-sourced "most read/reviewed" and all in between. Certainly a few standouts here and t…
I suspect it has something to do with a few factors (just speculation):
1. Publishers / writers taking the safe route to content creation: using formulaic storytelling to generate "likely" successes (the pop music effect). They're treating writing more as a product than art.
2. Creative writing as a medium no longer attracts the best and brightest, who instead go into other expressive forms that are more on trend / current (movies, tv, video games, digital art, music, programming, etc).
3. People's attention spans are shorter, and novelty is not perceived as being rewarded (this is related to the first point)
4. A culture that is increasingly trending toward narcissism due to the effects of social media, pop culture, and more broken homes. People aren't writing for the sake of expression or art so much as to get attention and win prizes.
5. (Ties in with 1 and 3) An increasingly garbage information landscape full of click-bait and vapid content optimized for algorithms and views. This information landscape creeps into the culture at every level, I believe (to varying degrees)
It is ironic, and a poignant observation, that AI writing is nearly indistinguishable from much of the existing user-written content. I tend to agree, and blame that on the fact that in the past ten years, people have become intellectually lazy (perhaps for the above reasons?) and are really just parrots and synthesizers themselves.