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Amazon Is Being Flooded with Books Written Entirely by AI

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Re: Amazon Is Being Flooded with Books Written Entirely by AI

#2
Maybe it means books weren't all that important and they should indeed have been blog posts all along, like on substack. For example as Sam Bankman-Fried has said: "I think, if you wrote a book, you f---ed up, and it should have been a six-paragraph blog post."

Re: Amazon Is Being Flooded with Books Written Entirely by AI

#3
post #2

Maybe it means books weren't all that important and they should indeed have been blog posts all along, like on substack. For example as Sam Bankman-Fried has said: "I think, if you wrote a book, you f---ed up, and it should have been a six-paragraph blog post."

Sure let’s take life advice from Sam Bankman-Fried

Re: Amazon Is Being Flooded with Books Written Entirely by AI

#4
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 there.

For me the primary issue has been the words, the lexicon, the cadence; it's flat. Seems like writers have learned to write and learned what's right, they've been writing and not reading. There's not much exploration of the form, it's all so grammatically correct. Maybe it's the fault of the editors or typesetters, if those still exist. It's boring, either way.

Secondly it's the themes. Struggle and oppression have always been plot drivers, but it seems like a vast majority of works published in the last decade are just slight variations on "oppressed person struggles to exist within the System, then finds a way to overcome; The End." The Hero's Journey highly compressed, lossily.

Luckily there are hundreds of years and countless intriguing novels written before all this, more than I could ever hope to read in my lifetime. Maybe this is what it is like to age: to recognize truly that nothing is new under the sun; so, go forth by going back, seek that which was once new in its time.

Re: Amazon Is Being Flooded with Books Written Entirely by AI

#5
post #2

Maybe it means books weren't all that important and they should indeed have been blog posts all along, like on substack. For example as Sam Bankman-Fried has said: "I think, if you wrote a book, you f---ed up, and it should have been a six-paragraph blog post."

> I think, if you wrote a book, you f---ed up, and it should have been a six-paragraph blog post.

pardon my french but this is one of the dumbest fucking things i've ever read which makes complete sense given where it's coming from but christ almighty nobody should be taking this crap to heart.

Re: Amazon Is Being Flooded with Books Written Entirely by AI

#6

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…

There seems to be a singular style that most modern authors use. It’s probably to gain maximum readership. Also I wonder how often top selling authors use a ghost writer.

Re: Amazon Is Being Flooded with Books Written Entirely by AI

#7
post #2

Maybe it means books weren't all that important and they should indeed have been blog posts all along, like on substack. For example as Sam Bankman-Fried has said: "I think, if you wrote a book, you f---ed up, and it should have been a six-paragraph blog post."

Ah yes SBF, the paragon of intellect. Edit: I just saw your username... Fuck me

Re: Amazon Is Being Flooded with Books Written Entirely by AI

#8

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…

> ...the top X of almost any genre I enjoy (which spans a large range of fiction) has been... lackluster.

I read an article a few years ago from a literary editor complaining how MFA programs had made his job harder. He said his job used to be sorting a few gems out of a mountain of rubbish, but now he has the more time consuming task of sorting through a mountain of mediocre work. His point was that MFA programs can teach you how to not be awful, but not make you great.

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