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Fake Books

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Re: Fake Books

#51

Post by nonrandomstring »

gzer0 wrote: post #30
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.

In an ideal world, I would hope for your statement to be correct. However, our society has changed the value of recognizing duty to recognizing choice. As long as individuals are aware of the choice they are making, they are justified. The fear of truth is caused by the following dilemma: either you choose for yourself or someone else will choose for you. Because of this fear, choosing correctly becomes less importan…

That's indeed post-modernism for you. Didn't Jean Baudrillard say something similar about communication (the ecstasy of communication?) in which the wanton act itself substitutes for the meaning of the act. We've grown to prefer simulations. Form over function. Seeming right instead of virtue. Meaningful choice is another casualty.

Re: Fake Books

#52

Post by femto »

jcynix wrote: post #35

Every so often in the last n years I stumbled over "books" which simply contain regurgitated wikipedia content. And, of course, all those web pages collecting amazon reviews which simulate product review pages. Or, before that, just link farms to products so people could collect referer compensation. All this is some form of spam, which simply uses search engines to spread instead of email. So the "books" reported he…

I wrote one of those books. That is, a Wikipedia article I largely wrote was plagiarised and published in a book by a scammer. Some time later my words on Wikipedia were tagged as having been plagiarised from the scammer's book. It was clear from wiki timestamps and publication dates what really happened, so it got fixed, but it's irritating that one needs to waste time on things like that (and as far as I know the book is still on Amazon).

Re: Fake Books

#53

Post by HWR_14 »

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?

That doesn't sound like a solution for machine-generated content. That's a solution for misinformation. Different problem.

Although machine generated content will make the misinformation problem much worse.

Re: Fake Books

#54

Post by thih9 »

Perhaps this book was written by the blog post author and this is an attempt at covert content marketing?

Re: Fake Books

#55

Post by akiselev »

number6 wrote: post #15
M4v3R wrote: post #7

We knew it was coming once GPT-3 was released, but I personally didn’t think it will come so fast in a form of printed books. I wonder how hard would it be to train a model that given a longer passage of text could tell with a high certainty that it’s machine generated?

Then you might run into the problem that chess has right now: if you happen to write in a style a GPT-3 trained model would write you will be declared a fraud. You might argue, who writes in a style of said model? Obviously: The corpus of data that trained the model. If you are one of them part of your writing ends up in there. Maybe writing styles are transformed to be more in line with GPT-3 trained models, lets fa…

How long until we’re training models to “style transfer” text using a latent space that doesn’t distort meaning (too much) ala stable difussion?

Re: Fake Books

#56

Post by mypastself »

smeagull wrote: post #49
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.

Well, if you’re writing a review, you could at least warn other readers that the book contains nonsense.

Re: Fake Books

#57

Post by pasdechance »

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…

Absolutely agree with you.

Re: Fake Books

#58

Post by andirk »

kristopolous wrote: post #12
andirk wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Amazon review bots upvoting HN articles about themselves?

I wonder if it's a few keywords in there. Let me try. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33313447 let's see what happens. It got 7 points and then flagged. Then again maybe this is a bad test. Perhaps just reposting the above story in a way to dissuade human upvoters would be the right approach. Then I'd have to withhold it for a couple hours and reveal it later

Good effort. Could just be some tech bro picking stuff sometimes. Whatever it is, I find the content some of the best on the net. Like and subscribe.

Re: Fake Books

#60

Post by sjamaan »

Isn't the "For Dummies" series some sort of trademark? I'm amazed they didn't get sued for using the name. Crap like this devalues the rest of the "for dummies" books.
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