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Fake Books

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Re: Fake Books

#61

Post by jcynix »

femto wrote: post #52
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 b…

> as far as I know the book is still on Amazon

I would have expected that. Amazon neither has the staff with expertise to investigate claims nor much interest in removing products that earn them a nice share. Knowledge is fungible nowadays, and in these cases of "fake books" its volatile too.

It's the virtual gold rush on the Internet and companies which supply resources (ebook platforms, search engines, but hardware for crypto mining like graphics cards etc too) to those "miners" profit from what's going on.

Re: Fake Books

#62

Post by jcynix »

mypastself wrote: post #56
smeagull wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That would mean that the reviewer understood the topic and was capable of writing a proper critique? I'm a book lover who reads a lot of fiction and non-fiction and more often than not in the last few years I have the feeling that many reviews are generated by people who read a different book, or didn't understand the one the comment at all.

Re: Fake Books

#63

Post by f311a »

Amazon is full of fake/generated/auto translated books in every category. Just search for any programming language and sort it by release date.

I don't understand why they don't fix this problem. It's pretty easy to fix and all those sales don't generate a significant amount of revenue for Amazon considering the negative experience for clients.

Such books are pretty easy to spot since the majority of reviews are written by people who have published more than hundreds of reviews.

Re: Fake Books

#64

Post by elefanten »

helsinkiandrew wrote: post #47
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.

10,000? Could it be 100,000?

I have to write 10,000 words overnight occasionally in my role.

If it’s $2500 for 10k words, maybe I should be ghostwriting…

Re: Fake Books

#65

Post by _pgln »

> I soon discovered that all the books leaned on the same central argument: value is an inherent consequence of scarcity. My rebuttal to that was simple: it’s an exception, not a rule. My kids’ doodles are scarce, but in a gallery, they wouldn’t fetch much. Alas, while this made for a solid Twitter quip, it wasn’t enough for an in-depth post.

Scarcity in economics refers to when the demand for a resource is greater than the supply of that resource. Your kids doodles aren't scarce because there is no demand for them.

How did the author read 11 books on NFT's and not know this lol? The books must have been all very bad or the article author just skimmed thru them.

Interesting article other than that tho.

Re: Fake Books

#66

Post by nonrandomstring »

akiselev wrote: post #55
number6 wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

"Photoshop for text" was the title of a HN post here just a few days ago. Many commenters delighted at the idea of being able to highlight a passage, pull down a menu and "Rewrite Style -> Ernest Hemingway".

Nice people generally only see the immediate utility of a tool in front of them. It takes a certain mind-set to see the other "weaponised" implications.

Re: Fake Books

#68

Post by yosamino »

_pgln wrote: post #65

> I soon discovered that all the books leaned on the same central argument: value is an inherent consequence of scarcity. My rebuttal to that was simple: it’s an exception, not a rule. My kids’ doodles are scarce, but in a gallery, they wouldn’t fetch much. Alas, while this made for a solid Twitter quip, it wasn’t enough for an in-depth post. Scarcity in economics refers to when the demand for a resource is greater t…

> The books must have been all very bad or the article author just skimmed thru them.

It seems that you have not even bothered to skim the article...

Re: Fake Books

#69

Post by em-bee »

the big question this raises is: how will this affect self publishing and the need for an actual publisher.

i expect that publishers are able to avoid publishing junk like this and therefore are still able to offer some value. whereas self-publishing authors will have to fight to stand out on their own.

Re: Fake Books

#70

Post by _pgln »

yosamino wrote: post #68
_pgln wrote: post #65

> I soon discovered that all the books leaned on the same central argument: value is an inherent consequence of scarcity. My rebuttal to that was simple: it’s an exception, not a rule. My kids’ doodles are scarce, but in a gallery, they wouldn’t fetch much. Alas, while this made for a solid Twitter quip, it wasn’t enough for an in-depth post. Scarcity in economics refers to when the demand for a resource is greater t…

> The books must have been all very bad or the article author just skimmed thru them. It seems that you have not even bothered to skim the article...

How so? The author only mentions one of the books being bad.
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