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Fake Books

lcamtuf.substack.com

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91–100 of 371 posts

Re: Fake Books

#91

Post by archon1410 »

sneak wrote: post #21
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…

Ahh yes, the nation-state funded military-fake-book complex, destabilizing nations the world over. We really need to watch out for nation-states using incoherent technobabble!

Yeah, not sure what the new concern here is. "Nation-states" always have had the ability to manufacture truth out of nothing, they've been doing this since before there were any computers. Why would they need the help of GPT-3? Why would they want to spam incoherent hallucinations? What would they gain out of that when they already have the ability to "manufacture consent" at scale?

It's not even a democratisation of bullshit, non-state actors also don't need GPT-3 to spam nonsense. PR and advertising is all about that and has a history of hundreds if not thousands of years. Maybe the new thing here is that people now realise lying is easy.

Re: Fake Books

#92

Post by moss2 »

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 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.

The article literally says

> My first theory was that the writing must have been outsourced to a content farm, where multiple individuals worked on portions of the text without caring to understand the context. But the explanation had a flaw: there’s nothing you can find on the internet if you search for “NFP chemotherapy” or “NTF Strategic Development Group”. The text didn’t merely describe a garbled version of our reality; it invented its own.

Re: Fake Books

#93

Post by HyperLinear »

> " 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. "

There isn't really a market for kids doodles, and with the barrier to entry being really low the supply is many orders of magnitude higher than the demand. So the central argument stays.

Not a great start of the article this.

Re: Fake Books

#94

Post by Cthulhu_ »

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 suspect the first few chapters were well-written and researched with the rest slowly filling up with bulk filler; I find that with a lot of books, I read the first few chapters, get the gist of it and stop reading. I suspect a lot of people do that.

That said, there's a few books in my library / to-read list that are great content cover to cover. Timeless classics, etc.

Re: Fake Books

#95

Post by kuu »

gexla wrote: post #87

Edit: Commented in wrong browser tab. Apologies.

Where does this appear in the article? I think you're not answering the proper article or I am veeery confused

Re: Fake Books

#96

Post by jhoechtl »

f311a wrote: post #63

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 writ…

> I don't understand why they don't fix this problem.

Because they act as a platform an the platform makes a living by its transactions and not by the quality of the content.

Re: Fake Books

#97

Post by Cthulhu_ »

sneak wrote: post #21
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…

Ahh yes, the nation-state funded military-fake-book complex, destabilizing nations the world over. We really need to watch out for nation-states using incoherent technobabble!

The commenter does have a point though; there's a lot of low effort high volume spam on the internet that reinforce certain narratives that cause division, on subjects like gender identity, generational differences, favorite TV shows, wokeism, Brexit, classism, racism, etc. There's actors on both sides of those debates, not because they're particularly leaning towards one or the other, but because the division is causing political shifts and internal strife.

This has already led to the EU starting to fall apart - the UK is out of the EU, Hungary and Poland no longer meet the criteria for having backslid into totalitarianism or at the very least, no longer having a division between the legal and executive branches of law. And it's causing lines to be drawn in the US as well, with calls for secession rising. But the US has been an "us vs them" type of "democracy" for a while now, it probably didn't take much to entrench the sides more deeply.

Anyway, that's online discourse, I'm sure it extends to books too, just less obviously.

Re: Fake Books

#98

Post by Cthulhu_ »

jhoechtl wrote: post #96
f311a wrote: post #63

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 writ…

> I don't understand why they don't fix this problem. Because they act as a platform an the platform makes a living by its transactions and not by the quality of the content.

That's exactly it, it doesn't hurt them enough that the products they sell are low quality. For every one person that returns a book (which costs Amazon money), there's a dozen that just won't bother, it's not worth the hassle for them.

Re: Fake Books

#99

Post by nextlevelwizard »

kwhitefoot wrote: post #90
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 JavaScript off by default in uBlock. Substack is quite readable without JS; and no popups.

I used to run NoScript back in the day, but way too many websites are just beyond broken without JS. I'm just not going to bother reading bad sites, I am not losing anything of value.

Re: Fake Books

#100

Post by a3w »

jgaa wrote: post #4

I think the problem is Amazons fundamentally broken reviews system. Seems like the fake review bots are a lot smarter than the anti-measures applied by Amazon. And the fun part is that both parties are probably running on AWS ;)

I think the problem is [bra] fake books and [ket] Amazons...

I think the problem is [left] fake books and [Quote sign] Amazons...

Okay, on the third try I read less and more. Still, it felt ugly.

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