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Tom Lesley has published 40 books in 2023, all with 100% positive reviews

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Re: Tom Lesley has published 40 books in 2023, all with 100% positive reviews

#61

Post by foobarian »

rcarr wrote: post #34
mkl95 wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

More positive reviews = more sales. They are not just uninterested in dealing with fake reviews, their algorithms reward products with positive reviews regardless of their authenticity. Of course if you report it, they eventually deal with it, as long as it is required by some law.

Only if they’re taking a very short term perspective. If the customer is left feeling like they’re consistently getting scammed, they will stop shopping at Amazon and take their money elsewhere. I highly, highly doubt Amazon is letting these through the net on purpose.

Amazon has a huge range of products for sale, and it is easy to get a feel for what works better there than not. At the end of the day all the reviews and UI doesn't matter as much as that it can actually ship for free and arrive in 1 or 2 days, and that returns are as easy as giving the item to a clerk at a store (no rewrapping or shipping fees needed). This is their only competitive advantage IMO.

Re: Tom Lesley has published 40 books in 2023, all with 100% positive reviews

#62

Post by HPsquared »

jamesgill wrote: post #59

Amazon reviews were exploited and devalued years ago. I don't mean there aren't genuine reviews; I mean they've been gamed to the point that they don't really matter anymore. Amazon knows this.

Of all products, a book written by an LLM raises the "fake review suspicion" index in my mind.

Re: Tom Lesley has published 40 books in 2023, all with 100% positive reviews

#63

Post by chmod775 »

mkl95 wrote: post #14
ccleve wrote: post #12

All the books have approximately the same number of reviews. Is Amazon completely uninterested in dealing with fake reviews?

More positive reviews = more sales. They are not just uninterested in dealing with fake reviews, their algorithms reward products with positive reviews regardless of their authenticity. Of course if you report it, they eventually deal with it, as long as it is required by some law.

At Amazon's scale, chances are that for any product someone decides against because of reviews, a competing product is going to get bought instead - also on Amazon.

What would however be a big problem for Amazon is the marketplace becoming unusable and untrustworthy in the eye of users.

Re: Tom Lesley has published 40 books in 2023, all with 100% positive reviews

#64

Post by ajonit »

jamesgill wrote: post #59

Amazon reviews were exploited and devalued years ago. I don't mean there aren't genuine reviews; I mean they've been gamed to the point that they don't really matter anymore. Amazon knows this.

True that. It is so bad that once I sent a irrefutable proof of the seller incentivising reviews, Amazon didn’t take any action at all.

Re: Tom Lesley has published 40 books in 2023, all with 100% positive reviews

#65

Post by vkou »

topkai22 wrote: post #37
thih9 wrote: post #26

Is it legal to publish books with content copied from chatgpt output? Is it possible to prove (in a legal sense) that this content comes from chatgpt?

I’m not a lawyer, but I really doubt it’d be illegal in the US at least. Just creating a book from ChatGPT is not against its terms of service, as “ OpenAI hereby assigns to you all its right, title and interest in and to Output. This means you can use Content for any purpose, including commercial purposes such as sale or publication, if you comply with these Terms.” What would be against the TOS is claiming that the…

> OpenAI hereby assigns to you all its right, title and interest in and to Output

How can it do that? ChatGPT isn't capable of owning or assigning copyright, because only humans can produce copyrighted works (or enter into copyright assignment contracts - typical in employment contracts), and ChatGPT isn't human.

It's giving you something that it doesn't own.

Re: Tom Lesley has published 40 books in 2023, all with 100% positive reviews

#66

Post by layer8 »

d23 wrote: post #57
mkl95 wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

More positive reviews = more sales. They are not just uninterested in dealing with fake reviews, their algorithms reward products with positive reviews regardless of their authenticity. Of course if you report it, they eventually deal with it, as long as it is required by some law.

They seem to go out of their way to not give an avenue of reporting these issues.

They would get DoS’ed by people who don’t like certain authors.

Re: Tom Lesley has published 40 books in 2023, all with 100% positive reviews

#67

Post by layer8 »

somenameforme wrote: post #31
low_tech_love wrote: post #10

So many questions: Are these books copyright by Tom Lesley, ChatGPT, OpenAI, ...? Should he share the money with OpenAI, or with the internet? Do we need to update the definitions of plagiarism? So it goes.

This [1] is, to my knowledge, the latest word on who'd own the copyright. And the answer is most likely the author, with the second most likely candidate being nobody. In a nutshell, "AI" generated content itself cannot be copyrighted since the process is carried out by software instead of a human, and software cannot be assigned ownership of copyright. However, material that is sufficiently recombined in a 'creative…

> software cannot be assigned ownership of copyright.

More precisely, only human works are subject to copyright. The law simply doesn’t apply to works by animals, AIs, or anything else, even when they are as creative as a human.

Re: Tom Lesley has published 40 books in 2023, all with 100% positive reviews

#68

Post by layer8 »

circuit10 wrote: post #53
slowmovintarget wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Technically, text written by ChatGPT can't be subject to copyright, even if said "Tom Lesley" tweaked them.

The tweaking introduces a human element so from my understanding that would make it copyrightable

Only if a certain threshold of originality is met. It probably would have to be more than just a little “tweaking”.

Re: Tom Lesley has published 40 books in 2023, all with 100% positive reviews

#69

Post by gtirloni »

dahart wrote: post #11

This was an inevitable outcome of ChatGPT/LLMS, no? I expect to see a lot more of this by a lot of different people. I feel like a ton of the examples I’ve seen to date are effectively regurgitating Stack Overflow (sometimes verbatim!) and in a kind of abstract way, I feel like this is exactly the same as someone opportunistically publishing a bunch of auto-generated books… publishing a model trained on a bunch of we…

Even here on HN, people are using ChatGPT to write replies. You can spot it by the very verbose answers that don't say anything meaningful.

Someone else commented here that AI would raise the noise level everywhere and I unfortunately have to agree.

Re: Tom Lesley has published 40 books in 2023, all with 100% positive reviews

#70

Post by layer8 »

Turing_Machine wrote: post #46
low_tech_love wrote: post #10

So many questions: Are these books copyright by Tom Lesley, ChatGPT, OpenAI, ...? Should he share the money with OpenAI, or with the internet? Do we need to update the definitions of plagiarism? So it goes.

OpenAI (ChatGPT, DALL-E, etc.) explicitly assigns their rights to anything generated by their systems to the user. > OpenAI hereby assigns to you all its right, title and interest in and to Output. This means you can use Content for any purpose, including commercial purposes such as sale or publication, if you comply with these Terms.

This doesn’t mean that copyright law applies to AI-created works. OpenAI may have no rights here that they can assign, due to lack of human authorship. See also https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2023/03/16/2023-05....
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