[HN Gopher] Update on KDP Title Creation Limits
___________________________________________________________________
Update on KDP Title Creation Limits
Author : ilamont
Score : 199 points
Date : 2023-09-18 20:37 UTC (2 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.kdpcommunity.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.kdpcommunity.com)
| bern4444 wrote:
| It seem that as a society we are coming to realize that enabling
| anyone to do anything on their own and at anytime isn't the best
| of ideas.
|
| Verifiability and authenticity matter and are valuable. Amazon
| has long had a problem of fake reviews. This issue with kindle
| books seems an extension of that. Massive centralized platforms
| like Amazon makes fraud more likely and is bad for the consumer.
|
| The "decentralization" that we need as a society is not in the
| form of any crypto based technical capability but simply for the
| size of the massive players to be reduced so competition can
| reemerge and give consumers more options on where and how to
| spend their dollars. Other E-book stores may just pop up that
| develop relationships with publishers and disallow independent
| publishing if amazon were forced to be broken up.
|
| I hope the FTC can begin finding a strategy to force some of
| these massive corporations to split making it more likely for
| there to be more competition.
| willio58 wrote:
| It seems Amazon cares more about polluting search results in
| Kindle than polluting the search results in their own e-commerce
| business. I think low-effort books generated by AI are much less
| detrimental than sketchy physical products being shipped to your
| door in 2 days or less.
| crooked-v wrote:
| It's probably about volume rather than quality. Sketchy copycat
| product lines are still hard limited by the number of factories
| and shipping operations in existence, while sketchy AI-
| generated books can easily keep growing exponentially in number
| for a while.
| japhyr wrote:
| It'll be interesting to see where this goes. Amazon has had ML-
| generated garbage books for years now, and I assume they haven't
| taken them down because they make money even when they sell
| garbage.
|
| _Maybe_ there 's so much garbage coming in now that they finally
| have to do something about it? I feel for people trying to learn
| about technical topics, who aren't aware enough of this issue to
| avoid buying ML-generated books with high ratings from fake
| reviews. The intro programming market is full of these scam
| books.
| ehsankia wrote:
| I thought it was more so filled with low quality mechanical
| turk garbage books.
| m463 wrote:
| I was thinking about buying an air fryer. My search came up
| with cookbooks specific to that air fryer, and I was intrigued.
| I found a good 5-star book, but then I found that ALL the
| 5-star reviews were submitted the same day.
|
| I complained, but Amazon defended the book as legitimate, and
| since I hadn't purchased it, they would not take any action.
| (to be honest, I assume frontline customer service reps don't
| have much experience or power)
|
| So I purchased it, complained, got a refund and then they were
| able to accept my complaint (after passing the complaint higher
| in the food chain).
|
| Seriously, how hard was it amazon? I guess they're starting to
| notice.
|
| Take a look at air fryer cookbooks - there are books specific
| to most makes and models. But everything is ML copypasta all
| the way up and down - the title, the recipes and the reviews
| all seem to be generated garbage.
| tiew9Vii wrote:
| It's the same across all big tech. The size/volume for
| complaint handling doesn't scale. It's either filtered out by
| some machine learning algorithm or some poor person in a 3rd
| world country getting paid next to nothing who reviews the
| complaints so quality isn't of importance.
|
| There been a recent influx of scammers on Facebook local
| groups. Air con cleaning, car valeting, everyone's calling
| out the scammers in the comments yet when you click report to
| FB the response is we have reviewed the post and it has not
| breached our guidelines, would you like to block the user.
| japhyr wrote:
| I'm the author of _Python Crash Course_ , the best selling
| introductory Python book for some time now. Years ago,
| someone put out a book listing two authors: Mark Matthes and
| Eric Lutz. That's just a simple juxtaposition of my name and
| Mark Lutz, the author of O'Reilly's _Learning Python_. The
| subtitle is obviously taken from my book 's subtitle as well.
| I assume the text is an ML-generated mess, but I haven't
| bought a copy to verify that.
|
| I used to comment on reviews for books like these explaining
| what was happening, but Amazon turned off the ability to
| comment on reviews a long time ago.
|
| I've spoken with other tech authors, and almost all of us get
| emails from people new to programming who have bought these
| kinds of books. If you're an experienced programmer, you
| probably know how to recognize a legitimate technical book.
| But people who are just starting to learn their first
| language don't always know what to look for. This is squarely
| on Amazon; they have blocked most or all of the channels for
| people to directly call out bad products, and they have
| allowed fake reviews to flourish and drown out authentic
| reviews.
| nektro wrote:
| i stopped frequenting the dev.to community because the
| average quality of articles just got so low it stopped
| being worth my time
| quickthrower2 wrote:
| Conversely if you post something sophisticated there it
| will likely bomb. A bunch of emojis and explaining JS
| closures for the hundredth time. Does well!
| arrowsmith wrote:
| dev.to is blocked on HN for this reason (try submitting a
| dev.to link; it won't appear under New.)
|
| There's an old thread where dang explains that it's
| blacklisted (along with many many other sites) due to the
| consistently poor article quality.
| ocdtrekkie wrote:
| I think the best way to recognize a legitimate tech book
| is... visit a Barnes and Noble. If it's a publisher or
| series you can find printed on the shelf, books are legit.
|
| Unfortunately online market "platforms" are pretty much
| widely untrustworthy for any sort of informational
| purposes.
| failTide wrote:
| also, just doing your research on any platform other than
| Amazon helps.
| rmbyrro wrote:
| Why don't beginners start at Python.org, though? It's such
| a great resource to learn the language.
|
| - it's free, unlike books
|
| - always up-to-date, unlike even the best book after a few
| months
|
| - easy to choose: heck, there's only one official
| documentation! No chance of making a mistake here!
| Armisael16 wrote:
| Are you suggesting people just go read the documentation
| like an encyclopedia? I don't know a single person who
| got their start programming by doing that - just about
| everyone wants some sort of guide to help lead them in
| good directions.
| rmbyrro wrote:
| I guess book authors don't like my perspective...
| nanidin wrote:
| If I don't get where I want to be with the front door
| customer service within a decent amount of time, I have
| always had good success contacting jeff@amazon.com. Their
| executive support team gets back quickly via email or phone
| and they really seem to care.
| hinkley wrote:
| Ugh. I hate the, "You're not a customer yet so our CRM system
| won't let me talk to you."
|
| And what happens when my problem is that your system won't
| let me place an order?
| me_again wrote:
| I think that's a different issue. Amazon has thorny
| problems with takedowns. Company A trying to get rival
| company B's listing taken down probably happens 100's of
| times a day. I believe Amazon uses "proof of purchase"
| kinda like a CAPTCHA or proof of work - an extra hoop to
| jump through to reduce the volume of these things they have
| to adjudicate.
| indymike wrote:
| CRM should never mean Sales Prevention as a Service.
| hinkley wrote:
| The great thing about filtering is that you don't have to
| hear the screams.
|
| These accidents play out in slow motion until someone
| corners you at a family reunion and asks why their
| friends can't create accounts and when you ask them how
| long they say "months".
| blululu wrote:
| False Negatives and False Positives are always connected.
| On the other side of the equation, there are plenty of bad
| actors who will casually flag their competitors to score a
| quick win. Crime doesn't like to go uphill - raising the
| stakes for feedback lowers the prevalence of bad actors.
| onlyrealcuzzo wrote:
| > Seriously, how hard was it amazon? I guess they're starting
| to notice.
|
| It's not hard. It's a cost center, and they're in the
| business of making money - not providing the best service.
| kristopolous wrote:
| They're biggest risk has always been the perception they
| peddle fraudulent simulacrums of worthy products. It's a
| hard to shake perception but dangerously easy to acquire
| given how they've set up their marketplace.
| tetrep wrote:
| > Maybe there's so much garbage coming in now that they finally
| have to do something about it?
|
| It seems like this is preventative action rather than
| reactionary, as they say that there hasn't been an increase in
| publishing volume, "While we have not seen a spike in our
| publishing numbers..."
| harles wrote:
| > ... I assume they haven't taken them down because they make
| money even when they sell garbage.
|
| I'd be surprised if this is the case. The money they make is
| probably a rounding error compared even just to other Kindle
| sales. Much more likely is that they haven't seen it as a big
| enough problem - and I'm willing to bet it's increased multiple
| orders of magnitude recently.
| throe37848 wrote:
| I knew guy who made "generated" text books in 2010. He would
| absorb several articles, and loosely stitch them into chapters
| with some computer scripts and from memory. In a week he would
| produce 400 pages on new subject. It was mostly coherent and
| factual (it kept references). Usually it was the only book on
| market about given subject (like rare disease).
|
| Current auto generated garbage is very different.
| plagiarist wrote:
| I wouldn't even consider that generated. That's like where
| useful content and copyright infringement overlap on a Venn
| diagram.
| Karellen wrote:
| > That's like where useful content and copyright
| infringement overlap on a Venn diagram.
|
| That sounds like a description of LLM-generated content to
| me ;-)
| delecti wrote:
| LLMs only ever accidentally generate useful content. They
| fundamentally can't know whether the things they're
| outputting are true, they just _tend_ to be, because the
| training data also tends to be.
| franze wrote:
| explains the CouchDB Book from OReily from that time.
| quickthrower2 wrote:
| Do people still use CouchDB? Blast from the past!
| miohtama wrote:
| Garbage books are used for money laundering.
|
| You buy books using stolen credit cards and such.
|
| https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/apr/27/fake-books-sol...
| hinkley wrote:
| I wonder if that means the Feds made a phone call to Jeff on
| his private line and said we need to have a little chat.
|
| We can track money laundering when there are X fake books. We
| can't when there are 10X fake books.
| mortureb wrote:
| In my opinion, all we learn over time is that we need
| gatekeepers (publishing houses in this case). The general
| public is a mess.
| barrysteve wrote:
| The standards for filtering internet data have dropped badly.
|
| Amazon and Google both abuse their filtering systems on a
| daily basis to effect social change.
|
| We need new companies built with policies to keep the
| filtering systems rigid, effective and unchanging. We need
| filterkeepers.
| mortureb wrote:
| I'm good with Amazon and Google over some unknown. I don't
| want some right wing shit to be my gatekeepers.
| barrysteve wrote:
| Yay, politics in my business soup. That'll generate a
| quality outcome for my customers!
|
| /s
|
| The politics are ephemeral, the results matter.
| chongli wrote:
| I think what we're seeing here is a symptom of the broader
| and more fundamental problem of trust in society. We've gone
| from a very high trust society to a very low trust society in
| just a few decades. We, as technology people, keep searching
| (desperately) for technical solutions to social problems.
| It's not working.
| pixl97 wrote:
| Because technology never was the solution for social
| problems, it's a solution to the few people getting very
| rich problem.
| VancouverMan wrote:
| Such systems just result in content that is terribly bland,
| or worse, intentionally limited to push specific political
| narratives.
|
| I'd rather have a much more diverse and interesting set of
| content to choose from, even if some of it might not be to my
| liking, and even if I'd have to put some effort into
| previewing or filtering before I find something I want to
| consume.
| ozfive wrote:
| Some people value their time, energy, and money more. I can
| appreciate that you do not as we all have choices but I
| imagine that most people would disagree.
| dzink wrote:
| Strategically, AI generated content is a boon for platforms like
| Amazon.
|
| 1. The more content there is, the more you can't reliably get
| good stuff without reviews, the more centralized distribution
| platforms with reviews and rankings are needed. 2. Even if people
| are making fake books for money laundering, Amazon gets a cut of
| all sales, laundered or not.
|
| Just like Yahoo's directory once upon a time though, and Movie
| theaters, the party gets ruined when most people learn they can
| use AI to generate custom stories at home and/or converse with
| the characters and interact in far more ways than currently
| possible. Content is going from king to commodity.
| blibble wrote:
| amazon's reviews and rating are completely garbage and have
| been for some time
| Supply5411 wrote:
| While not exactly the same, the invention of the printing press
| caused a lot of controversy with the Catholic Church. With the
| printing press, people could mass produce and spread information
| relatively easily. I'm sure a lot of it was considered "low
| quality" (also heretical)[1]. Seems like we're going through
| similar growing pains now. Yes I know it's different, but it
| rhymes.
|
| 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Index_Librorum_Prohibitorum
| BarryMilo wrote:
| You're implying that what is being produced has actual value,
| the problem is they're acting in patently bad faith. Weep not
| for the spammers.
| Barrin92 wrote:
| >similar growing pains
|
| For what it's worth, these 'growing pains' took the form of the
| wars of religion in Europe, which in Germany killed up to 30%
| of the population, that's in relative terms significantly worse
| than the casualties of World War I and II. So maybe the
| Catholic Church had a point
| lovemenot wrote:
| >> So maybe the Catholic Church had a point
|
| Is that really the take-away? If the Catholic Church had not
| been so belligerent, those wars would not have been needed.
| Now that we are past that time, we should surely be thanking
| those combatants who helped disseminate knowledge in spite of
| the Church whose interest was in hoarding it.
| dougmwne wrote:
| I really dislike the comparison. The printing press
| democratized knowledge. The LLM destroys it. LLM output is
| perfect white noise. Enough of it will drown out all signal.
| And the worst part is that it's impossible to distinguish it
| from real human output.
|
| I mean think about it. Amazon had to stop publishing BOOKS
| because it can no longer separate the signal from the noise.
| The printing press was the birth of knowledge for the people
| and the LLM is the death.
| jedberg wrote:
| If you asked the Church back then, they would tell you that
| the printing press was the death of truth, because to them
| only the word of god was truth, and only the church could
| produce it.
|
| It's all just a matter of perspective.
|
| Yes, right now it looks like white noise, just like back then
| it looked like white noise which could drown out the
| religious texts. But we managed to get past it then and I'm
| sure we'll manage now.
| SketchySeaBeast wrote:
| I'd argue that giving a group with unique thoughts and
| ideas a voice is different than creating a noise machine.
| jedberg wrote:
| I think the jury is still out on whether an LLM produces
| ideas any more or less unique than most humans. :)
| duskwuff wrote:
| This is an _astoundingly_ bad take. Surely you aren 't
| trying to suggest that original, factual, human-authored
| content has no more inherent value than randomly generated
| nonsense?
| rileyphone wrote:
| That's Wittgenstein's argument.
| jedberg wrote:
| No not at all, I'm not sure why you would even think
| that.
| duskwuff wrote:
| As I read it, your parent comment suggests that the
| distinction in quality and utility between human-authored
| and AI-generated content is merely "a matter of
| perspective", i.e. that there is no real distinction, and
| that they're both equally valuable.
|
| If you actually meant something else, you should probably
| clarify.
| lovemenot wrote:
| I am not the person to whom you replied. I understood
| their comment to be about paradigms shifting through
| social awareness of the limits and opportunities of new
| technology.
|
| It can be both true that _right now_ predominantly low
| quality content emanates from LLMs and at some future
| time the highest quality material will come from those
| sources. Or perhaps even right now (the future is already
| here, just unevenly distributed).
|
| If that was their reasoning, I tend agree. The equivalent
| of the Catholic Church in this metaphor is the
| presumption human-generated content's _inherent_
| superiority.
| [deleted]
| dambi0 wrote:
| Suggesting clarification to suit your imaginary
| inferences seems puzzling. The parent post pointed out
| that perspectives on authorship have a historical
| precedent, I didn't see the value judgement your reading
| suggested.
| rmbyrro wrote:
| The discussion here is that we're not able to distinguish
| them.
|
| If we cannot distinguish, I'd argue they have similar
| value.
|
| They must have. Otherwise, how can we demonstrate
| objectively the higher value in the human output?
| SketchySeaBeast wrote:
| If they were of similar value would there be a problem
| with the deluge?
| rmbyrro wrote:
| Can't the deluge be delusional or an overreaction at
| best?
| snailmailman wrote:
| They _can_ be distinguished. They are just becoming more
| difficult to. Its slightly-more difficult, but also the
| amount of garbage is _overwhelming_. AI can spit out
| _entire books_ in moments that would take an individual
| _months_ or _years_ to write.
|
| There are lots of fake recipe books on amazon for
| instance. But how can you _really_ be sure without trying
| the recipes? It might _look_ like a recipe at first
| glance, but if its telling you to use the right
| ingredients in a subtly-wrong way, its hard to tell at
| first glance that you won 't actually end up with edible
| food. Some examples are easy to point at, like the case
| of the recipe book that lists Zelda food items as
| ingredients, but they aren't always that obvious.
|
| I saw someone giving programming advice on discord a few
| weeks ago. Advice that was blatantly copy/pasted from
| chat GPT in response to a very specific technical
| question. It _looked_ like an answer at first glance, but
| the file type of the config file chat GPT provided wasn
| 't correct, and on top of that it was just making up
| config options in attempt to solve the problem. I told
| the user this, they deleted their response and admitted
| it was from chatGPT. However, the user asking the
| question didn't know the intricacies of "what config
| options are available" and "what file types are valid
| configuration files". This could have wasted so much of
| their time, dealing with further errors about invalid
| config files, or options that did not exist.
| rmbyrro wrote:
| They can indeed distinguish them, I agree. So why the
| fuss?
|
| I think the concern is that bad authors would game the
| reviews and lure audiences into bad books.
|
| But aren't they already able to do so? Is it sustainable
| long term? If you spit out programming books with code
| that doesn't even run, people will post bad reviews, ask
| for refunds. These authors will burn their names.
|
| It's not sustainable.
| geraldwhen wrote:
| It's sustainable if you can automate the creation of
| amazon seller accounts. Based on the number of fraudulent
| Chinese seller accounts, I'd say it's very likely
| automated or otherwise near 0 cost.
| snailmailman wrote:
| It doesn't need to be sustainable as one author or one
| book. These aren't _real_ authors. Its people using AI to
| make a quick buck. By the time the fraud is found out,
| they 've already made a profit.
|
| They make up an authors name. Publish a bunch of books on
| a subject. Publish a bunch of fake reviews. Dominate the
| search results for a specific popular search. They get
| people to buy their book.
|
| Its not even book specific, its been happening with
| actual products all over amazon for years. People make up
| a company, sell cheap garbage, and make a profit. But
| with books, they can now make the cheap garbage look
| slightly convincing. And the cheap garbage is so cheap to
| produce in mass amounts that nobody can really sort
| through and easily figure out "which of these 10k books
| published today are real and which are made up by ai".
|
| It takes time and money to produce cheap products at a
| factory. But once these scammers have the AI generation
| setup, they can just publish books on loop until someone
| ends up buying one. They might get found out eventually,
| and they will have to pretend to be a different author,
| and they just repeat the process.
| failuser wrote:
| What's the fuss about spam? You can distinguish it from
| useful mail? What's the fuss about traffic jams? You'll
| get there eventually.
|
| The LLM allow DDoS attack by increasing the threshold
| needed to check the books for gibberish.
|
| It's not like this stream of low quality did not exist
| before, but the topic is hot and many grifters try LLMs
| to get a quick buck at the same time.
| emodendroket wrote:
| I can't distinguish between pills that contain the
| medicine that I was prescribed and those than contain
| something else entirely. Therefore taking either should
| be just as good.
| rmbyrro wrote:
| Really. Are you comparing a complex chemical analysis
| required to attest the contents of a pill to reading
| text?
| emodendroket wrote:
| It depends, is the text of a technical nature? How
| exactly is one to know they're being deceived if, to take
| one of the examples that has been linked in this
| discussion, they receive a mushroom foraging guide but
| the information is actually AI-generated?
| rmbyrro wrote:
| You first check who published it. Is the author an expert
| in the matter with years, perhaps decades in the
| industry?
|
| Heck, we always did that since before GPT.
|
| Good authors will continue to publish good content
| because they have a reputation to protect. They might use
| ChatGPT to increase productivity, but will surely and
| carefully review it before signing off.
| skydhash wrote:
| I'm not a native English speaker, but ChatGPT answers in
| each interaction I had with it sound bland. And I dislike
| the bite-sized format of it. I'm reading "Amusing
| Ourselves to Death" by Neil Postman and while you may
| agree or disagree with his take, he developed it in a
| very coherent way, exploring several aspects. ChatGPT's
| output falls into the same uncanny valley as the robotic
| voice from text to speech software, understandable, but
| no human does write that way.
|
| ChatGPT as an autocompletion tool is fine, IMO. As well
| as generating alternative sentences. But anything longer
| than a paragraph falls back to the uncanny valley.
| rmbyrro wrote:
| I totally agree. So why are people so worried about books
| being written by ChatGPT?
|
| These pseudo-authors will get bad reviews, will lose
| money in refunds, burn their names.
|
| It's not sustainable. Some will try, for sure, but they
| won't last long.
| failuser wrote:
| If you ask LLM something you know you can distinguish
| noise from good output. If you ask LLM something you
| don't know then how do you know if the output is correct?
| There are cases where checking is easier than producing
| the result, e.g. when you ask for a reference.
| rmbyrro wrote:
| Book buyers should give themselves primarily by who's the
| author, I think.
|
| Choose a book from someone that has a hard earned
| reputation to protect.
| mostlylurks wrote:
| A piece of human-written content and a piece of AI-
| written content may have similar value if we cannot
| distinguish between them. But if you can add the
| information that the human-written content was written by
| a human to the comparison, the human-written content
| becomes significantly more valuable, because it allows
| for a much deeper reading of the text, since the reader
| can trust that there has been an actual intent to convey
| some specific set of ideas through the text. This allows
| the reader to take a leap of faith and put in the work
| required to examine the author's point of view, knowing
| that it is based on the desires and hopes of an actual
| living person with a lifetime of experience behind them
| instead of being essentially random noise in the
| distribution.
| courseofaction wrote:
| The LLM does democratize knowledge, but you have to be the
| user of the LLM, not the target of the user of the LLM.
|
| The LLM is the most powerful knowledge tool ever to exist. It
| is both a librarian in your pocket. It is an expert in
| everything, it has read everything, and can answer your
| specific questions on any conceivable topic.
|
| Yes it has no concept of human value and the current
| generation hallucinates and/or is often wrong, but the
| responsibility for the output should be the user's, not the
| LLM's.
|
| Do not let these tools be owned, crushed and controlled by
| the same people who are driving us towards WW3 and cooking
| the planet for cash. This is the most powerful knowledge tool
| ever. Democratize it.
| shitloadofbooks wrote:
| Asking a statistics engine for knowledge is so unfathomable
| to me that it makes me physically uncomfortable. Your
| hyperbolic and relentless praise for a stochastic parrot or
| a "sentence written like a choose your own adventure by an
| RNG" seems unbelievably misplaced.
|
| LLMs (Current-generation and UI/UX ones at least) will tell
| you all sorts of incorrect "facts" just because "these
| words go next to each other lots" with a great amount of
| gusto and implied authority.
| __loam wrote:
| This happened to me looking up am obscure c library. It
| just confidently made up a function that didn't actually
| exist in the library. It got me unstuck but you can
| really fuck yourself if you trust it blindly.
| Supply5411 wrote:
| My mind is blown that someone gets so little value out of
| an LLM. I get over software engineering stumbling blocks
| _much_ faster by interrogating an LLM 's knowledge about
| the subject. How do you explain that added value? Are you
| skeptical that I am actually moving and producing things
| faster?
| lxgr wrote:
| My mind is also blown by how much people seemingly get
| out of them.
|
| Maybe they're just orders of magnitude more useful at the
| beginning of a career, when it's more important to digest
| and distill readily-available information than to come up
| with original solutions to edge cases or solve gnarly
| puzzles?
|
| Maybe I also simply don't write enough code anymore :)
| Supply5411 wrote:
| I'm very far from the beginning of my career, but maybe I
| see a point in your comment, because I frequently try
| technologies that I am not an expert in.
|
| Just yesterday, I asked if Typescript has the concept of
| a "late" type, similar to Dart, because I didn't want to
| annotate a type with "| null" when I knew it would be
| bound before it was used. Searching for info would have
| taken me much longer than asking the LLM, and the LLM was
| able to frame the answer from a Dart perspective.
|
| I would say that that information neither "important to
| digest" nor "readily available."
| pests wrote:
| I agree with you but at what point does it change? Aren't
| we all just stochastic parrots? How do we ourselves
| choose the next word in a sentence?
| __loam wrote:
| God dammit please stop comparing these things to brains.
| Stop it. It's not even close.
| barrysteve wrote:
| If you wish to make an apple pie, first you must make the
| universe from scratch. (carl sagan)
|
| We can generate thoughts that are spatially coherent,
| time aware, validated for correctness and a whole bunch
| of other qualities that LLMs cannot do.
|
| Why would LLMs be the model for human thought, when it
| does not come close to the thoughts humans can do every
| minute of every day?
|
| Aren't we all just stochastic parrots, is the kind of
| question that requires answering an awful lot about the
| universe before you get to an answer.
| skydhash wrote:
| We use languages to express ideas. Sentences are always
| subordinate to the ideas. It's very obvious when you try
| to communicate in another language you're not fluent in.
| You have the thought, but you can't find the words. The
| same thing happens when writing code, taking ideas from
| the business domain and translating it into code.
| [deleted]
| ForHackernews wrote:
| > and can answer your specific questions on any conceivable
| topic
|
| Yeah, I mean, so can I, as long as you don't care whether
| the answers you receive are accurate or not. The LLM is
| just better at pretending it knows quantum mechanics than I
| am.
| scarmig wrote:
| Even if a human expert responds about something in their
| domain of expertise, you have to think critically about
| the answer. Something that fails 1% of the time is often
| more dangerous than something that fails 10% of the time.
|
| The best way to use an LLM for learning is to ask a
| question, assume it's getting things wrong, and use that
| to probe your knowledge which you can iteratively use to
| prove the LLM's knowledge. Human experts don't put up
| with that and are a much more limited resource.
| halfmatthalfcat wrote:
| > but the responsibility for the output is the user's, not
| the LLM's.
|
| The current iteration of the internet (more specifically
| social media) has used the same rationality for its
| existence but at a level, society has proven itself too
| irresponsible and/or lazy to think for itself but be fed by
| the machine. What makes you think LLMs are going to do
| anything but make the situation worse? If anything, they're
| going to reenforce whatever biases were baked into the
| training material, of which is now legally dubious.
| [deleted]
| lxgr wrote:
| For a librarian, they're confidently asserting factual
| statements suspiciously often, and refer me to primary
| literature shockingly rarely.
| arrowsmith wrote:
| In other words they behave like a human?
| Supply5411 wrote:
| You could argue that speech is literally noise that drowns
| out the signals of your environment. If you just babbled, it
| would be useless, but instead you use it intelligently to
| communicate ideas. LLM output is a new palette with which
| humans can compose new signals. We just have to use it
| intelligently.
|
| Prompt engineering is an example of this. A clever prompt by
| a domain expert can prime an LLM interaction to yield better
| information to the recipient in a way that the recipient
| themselves could not have produced on their own.
| woah wrote:
| It used to be that a scribe would painstakingly copy a
| manuscript, through the process absorbing the text at a deep
| level. This same scribe could then apply this knowledge to
| his own writing, or just understand and curate existing work.
| The manual labor required to copy at scale employed many
| scribes, who formed the next generation of thinkers.
|
| With the press, a greasy workman can churn out hundreds of
| copies an hour, for whichever charlatan or heretic palms him
| enough coin. The people are flooded with falsehoods by men
| whose only interest in writing is how many words they can fit
| on a page, and where to buy the cheapest ink.
|
| The worst part is that it is impossible to distinguish the
| work of a real thinker from that of a cheap sophist, since
| they are all printed on the same rough paper, and serve
| equally well as tomorrow's kindling.
| emodendroket wrote:
| Where are the good AI-generated books that serve as the
| positive side of this development?
| __loam wrote:
| People comparing the AI bullshit spigot to the printing press
| are clowns.
| [deleted]
| rockemsockem wrote:
| I really feel like you can't have used any advanced LLMs if
| you legitimately think the out put "perfect white noise". The
| results that you can get from an LLM like GPT-4 are
| incredibly useful and are providing an enormous amount of
| value to lots of people. It isn't just for generating phony
| information to spread or having it do your work for you.
|
| I get the most value out of asking for examples of things or
| asking for basic explanations or intuitions about things. And
| I get so much value from this that I really think the
| printing press is the most apt comparison.
| mostlylurks wrote:
| What you say is not in conflict with AI-generated content
| being white noise. Even if you find some piece of AI-
| generated content useful, it is still white noise if it is
| merely combining pieces of information found in its dataset
| and the result is posted online or published elsewhere.
| There is no signal being added in that process, and it
| pollutes the space of content. Humans are also prone to
| doing this, but with the help of AI, it becomes a much
| larger issue.
|
| "Signal" would mean new data, which is by definition not
| possible via LLMs trained on publicly available content,
| since that means the data is already out there, or new and
| meaningful ideas or innovations beyond just combining
| existing material. I have not seen LLMs accomplish the
| latter. I consider it at least possible that they are
| capable of such a feat, but even then the relevant question
| would be how often they produce such things compared to
| just rearranging existing content. Is the proportion high
| enough that unleashing floods of AI-generated content
| everywhere would not lower the signal-to-noise ratio from
| the pre-AI situation?
| softg wrote:
| The problem is advanced LLMs are controlled by large
| corporations. Powerful local models exist (in part thanks
| to Meta's generosity oddly enough) and they're close to
| GPT-3.5, but GPT-4 is far ahead of them and by the time
| other models reach to that point whatever OpenAI or
| Antropic, Meta etc. have developed behind closed doors
| could be significantly better. In that case open models
| will be restricted to niche uses and most people will use
| the latest model from a giant corp.
|
| So it is possible that LLMs will centralize the production
| and dissemination of knowledge, which is the opposite of
| what people think the printing press did. I hope I'm wrong
| and open models can challenge/overtake state of the art
| models developed by tech giants, that would be amazing.
| courseofaction wrote:
| Precisely. I spent weeks learning about cybersecurity
| when GPT-4 first came out, as I could finally ask as many
| stupid questions as I liked, get detailed examples and
| use-cases for different attacks and defenses, and
| generally actually learn how the internet around me
| works.
|
| Now it refuses, because OpenAI's morals apparently don't
| include spreading openly available knowledge about how to
| defend yourself.
|
| Scary. I have also been using it to generate useful
| political critiques (given a particular theoretical
| tradition, some style notes, and specific articles to
| critique, it's actually excitingly good). What if OpenAI
| decides that's a threat? What reason do we have to think
| that a powerful institution would not take this course of
| action, in the cold light of history?
| blibble wrote:
| how do you know what you learnt wasn't completely made up
| gibberish?
| Supply5411 wrote:
| The same way you know that the things you learn from a
| person isn't made up gibberish: You see how well it
| explains a scenario, how well it lines up with your
| knowledge and experience, and you sample parts to verify.
| [deleted]
| mrighele wrote:
| > Amazon had to stop publishing BOOKS because it can no
| longer separate the signal from the noise.
|
| That's because they are trying very hard not to check what
| they are selling, hoping that their own users and a few ML
| algorithms can separate the signal from the noise for them.
| It seems to me that the approach is no longer working, and
| they should start doing it by themselves.
| pacman2 wrote:
| I was told publishers dont promote a good book anymore these
| days. They ask how many instagram followers do you have?
|
| Maybe the self-publishing and BoD will decline in the long
| term due to ML white noise and publishers are a sign of
| quality again.
| rmbyrro wrote:
| > the worst part is that it's impossible to distinguish it
| from real human output
|
| Doesn't that make human content look bad in the first place?
|
| If we can't distinguish a Python book written by a human
| engineer or by ChatGPT, how can we demonstrate objectively
| that the machine-generated one is so much worse?
| mostlylurks wrote:
| That argument might work for content which serves a purely
| informational purpose, such as books teaching the basics of
| programming languages, for instance, but it doesn't work
| for art (e.g. works of fiction) because most of the
| potential for a non-superficial reading of a work relies on
| being able to trust that there is an author that has made a
| conscious effort to convey something through that work, and
| that that something can be a non-obvious perspective on the
| world that differs from that of the reader. AI-generated
| content does not have any such intent behind it, and thus
| you are effectively limited to a superficial reading, or if
| were to instist on assigning such intent to AI, then at
| most you would have one "author" per AI model, which
| additionally has no interesting perspectives to offer,
| simply those perspectives deemed acceptible in the culture
| of whatever group of people developed the model, no
| perspective that could truly surprise or offend the reader
| with something they had not yet considered and force them
| to re-evaluate their world view, just a bland average of
| their dataset with some fine tuning for PR etc. reasons.
| Nashooo wrote:
| The problem is not that no one can distinguish it. It's
| that the intended audience (beginners in Python in your
| example) can't distinguish it and are not able to easily
| find and learn from trusted sources.
| rmbyrro wrote:
| Aren't there already bad Python books written by humans?
|
| I bet ChatGPT can come up with above-average content to
| teach Python.
|
| We should teach beginners how to prompt engineer in the
| context of tech learning. I bet it's going to yield
| better results than gate-keeping book publishing.
| rmbyrro wrote:
| Another great contribution would be fine-tuning open
| source LLMs on less popular tech. I've seen ChatGPT
| struggling with htmx, for example (I presume the training
| dataset was small?), whereas it performs really well
| teaching React (huge training set, I presume)
| nneonneo wrote:
| There are, but it used to take actual time and effort to
| produce a book (good or bad), meaning that the small pool
| of experts in the world could help distinguish good from
| bad.
|
| Now that it's possible to produce mediocrity at scale,
| that process breaks down. How is a beginner supposed to
| know whether the tutorial they're reading is a legitimate
| tutorial that uses best practices, or an AI-generated
| tutorial that mashes together various bits of advice from
| whatever's on the internet?
| rmbyrro wrote:
| Personally I don't subscribe to the "best practices"
| expression. It implies an absolute best choice, which, in
| my experience, is rarely sensible in tech.
|
| There are almost always trade-offs and choosing one
| option usually involves non-tech aspects as well.
|
| Online tutorials freely available very rarely follow,
| let's say, "good practices".
|
| They usually omit the most instructive parts, either
| because they're wrapped in a contrived example or
| simplify for accessibility purposes.
|
| I don't think AI-generated tutorials will be particularly
| worse at this to be honest...
| emporas wrote:
| If beginners in Python programming are not capable of
| visiting python.org, assuming they are genuinely
| interested in learning Python, it would be very
| questionable how good their knowledge on the subject can
| really be.
| rmbyrro wrote:
| 100% agreed.
|
| I've seen many developers using technologies without
| reading the official documentation. It's insane. They
| make mistakes and always blame the tech. It's
| ludicrous...
| vosper wrote:
| > The printing press democratized knowledge
|
| That's true, but it also allowed protestant "heretics" to
| propagate an idea that caused a permanent schism with the
| Catholic church, which led to centuries of wars that killed
| who-knows-how-many people, up to recent times with Northern
| Ireland.
|
| (Or something like that, my history's fuzzy, but I think
| that's generally right?)
| [deleted]
| bbarnett wrote:
| I thought it was a king wanting a divorce, and as he
| couldn't get it from the catholic church, created his own.
| mmcdermott wrote:
| Henry VIII created the Church of England in 1534 for the
| purposes of granting himself an annulment. Most histories
| count Martin Luther's 95 Theses as beginning of the
| Reformation in 1517 (a crisp date for a less-than-crisp
| event; Luther did not originally see himself as
| protesting the Roman Catholic Church). The Protestant
| Reformation was a heterogeneous movement from the
| beginning.
| TRiG_Ireland wrote:
| Not really, no. It was Luther who kick-started
| Protestantism. Henry VIII attempted to supplant the Pope,
| and kind of slid into Protestantism by accident.
| vladms wrote:
| That was the case just for the anglican church, which is
| only one "part" of the reformation.
| verve_rat wrote:
| Protestantism started in Germany with Martin Luther
| nailing his theses to a church door. Henry's reproductive
| problems came later and where only sort of related.
| peab wrote:
| I'm reminded of the Library of Babel
| OfSanguineFire wrote:
| > The printing press democratized knowledge.
|
| Not for centuries. Due to the expense of the technology and
| the requirement in some locations for a royal patent to print
| books, the printing press just opened up knowledge a bit more
| from the Church and aristocracy to the bourgeoisie, but it
| did little for the masses until as late as the 1800s.
| ls612 wrote:
| A big part of this is that literacy didn't come to the
| masses until the 1800s. But in England and the Netherlands
| you had (somewhat) free press by the late 1600s and early
| 1700s.
| ben_w wrote:
| > LLM output is perfect white noise.
|
| Not even close to white noise. White noise, in the context of
| the token space, looks like this:
|
| auceverts exceptionthreat."<ablytypedicensYYY DominicGT
| portaelight\\- titular Sebast
| Yellowstone.currentThreadrition-zoneocalyptic
|
| which is literally the result of "I downloaded the list of
| tokens and asked ChatGPT to make a python script to
| concatenate 20 random ones".
|
| No, the biggest problem with LLMs is that the best of them
| are simultaneously better than untrained humans and yet also
| nowhere near as good as trained humans -- someone, don't
| remember who, described them as "mansplaining as a service",
| which I like, especially as it (sometimes) reminds me to be
| humble when expressing an opinion outside my domain of
| expertise, as it knows more than I do about everything I'm
| not already an expert at.
|
| Specific example: I'm currently trying to use ChatGPT-3.5 to
| help me understand group theory, because the brilliant.org
| lessons on that are insufficient; unfortunately, while it
| knows infinitely more than I do about the subject, it is
| still so bad it might as well be guessing the multiple choice
| answers (if I let it, which I don't because that would be
| missing the point of using a MOOC like brilliant.org in the
| first place).
| gamepsys wrote:
| The rhyme has a lot to do with how existing power structures
| handle a sudden increase in the amount of written text
| generated. In this comparison, they both try to apply the
| breaks. Banned books didn't work well for the Catholic Church.
| I think increasing QA for Amazon might actually help their book
| business. Of course, a book seller has a greater responsibility
| to society than to make money.
| neilv wrote:
| This sounds like a commendable move by Amazon. I especially like
| the idea of requiring disclosure of use of "AI".
| corethree wrote:
| How do we even know this entire comment thread isn't polluted
| with AI?
|
| Maybe it doesn't matter. The quality of the work matters more
| than the process of actualization.
| quickthrower2 wrote:
| In a practical sense: AI generated stuff is crappy and often
| subtly wrong and it can be generated faster than human
| generated content. So it becomes untenable to even search for
| good information.
| DookieBiscuit wrote:
| [dead]
| fuddle wrote:
| About time, YouTube is full of videos about making eBook's with
| ChatGPT. e.g "Free Course: How I Made $200,000 With ChatGPT eBook
| Automation at 20 Years Old"
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Annsf5QgFF8
| hinkley wrote:
| How do we...
|
| I'm not entirely sure how to word this question.
|
| How do we make sure that most of the people we talk to are at
| least humans if not necessarily the person we expect them to be?
| And I'm not saying that like a cartoonish bad guy in a movie who
| hates artificial intelligence and augmented humans.
|
| How do I not get inundated by AI that's good at trolling. How do
| I keep the social groups I belong to from being trolled?
|
| These questions keep drawing me back to the concept of Web of
| Trust we tried to build with PGP for privacy reasons. Unless I've
| solicited it, I really only want to talk to entities that pass a
| Turing Test. I'd also like it if someone actively breaking the
| law online were actually affected by the deterrence of law
| enforcement, instead of being labeled a glitch or a bug in
| software that can't be arrested, or even detained.
|
| It feels like I want to talk to people I know to be human
| (friends, famous people - who might actually be interns posing as
| their boss online), and people they know to be human, and people
| those people _suspect_ to be human.
|
| I have long term plans to set up a Wiki for a hobby of mine, and
| I keep getting wrapped around the axle trying to figure out how
| to keep signup from being oppressive and keep bots from turning
| me into an SEO farm.
| timeagain wrote:
| This is only a problem for someone terminally online. The vast
| majority of people talk to their friends and coworkers in
| person.
| mostlylurks wrote:
| > This is only a problem for someone terminally online.
|
| Is it? Even those whose social life is entirely IRL, they
| still have to increasingly interact with various businesses,
| banks, healthcare providers, the government, and often more
| distant collegues through online services. Do I want these to
| go through LLM chatbots? No. Can I ensure that I'm speaking
| to an actual human if the communication is text based? Not
| really.
| munificent wrote:
| That was the solution that came to mind to me too, but it
| doesn't work either.
|
| Even if you're never online and only talk to people in
| person... over time those people will be increasingly
| informed by LLM-generate pseudo-knowledge. We aren't just
| training the AIs. They're training us back.
|
| If you want to live in a society where the people you
| interact with have brains mostly free of AI-generated
| pollution, then I'm sorry but that world isn't going to be
| around much longer. We are entering the London fog era of the
| Information Age.
| invalidptr wrote:
| This is a problem for anyone who is not actively vigilant
| about the information they consume. A family member (who I
| would not describe as "terminally online") came to me today
| in a panic talking about how some major event had just
| occurred and how social order was beginning to collapse. I
| quickly glanced at the headlines on a few major news outlets
| and realized that they just saw some incendiary content
| designed to elicit that reaction. I calmed them down and
| walked them through a process they could use to evaluate
| information like that in the future, and they were a little
| embarrassed.
|
| The concern isn't necessarily for _you_. It 's for the large
| swaths of people who are less equipped to filter through
| noise like this.
| hinkley wrote:
| I don't trust my friends for medical advice. Some of them
| trust me for plant advice, and they really probably
| shouldn't. I am very stove-piped.
|
| We have two and a half generations of people right now most
| of whom think "I did the research" means "I did half as much
| reading as the average C student does for a term paper, and
| all of that reading was in Google."
|
| And Alphabet fiddles while Google burns. This is going to end
| in chaos.
| vorpalhex wrote:
| Meet people in real life. This problem is trivially solved by
| just using meatspace.
|
| Alternatively for sign ups, tell them to contact you and ask.
| Chat with them a moment. Ask them about their hobbies and
| family.
| ethanbond wrote:
| Using meatspace doesn't solve the problem, using meatspace
| _exclusively_ solves the problem. And it 's not a great one
| given, you know, how much of the world "happens" online now.
| romseb wrote:
| There is some irony in Sam Altman bringing us the cause (AI)
| and purported solution (Worldcoin) for your problem at the same
| time.
| hinkley wrote:
| It's what ad men do. Point out there's a problem, offer you
| the solution.
| Almondsetat wrote:
| Livestreams where artists show their creative process and use the
| streaming platform to immediately sell the thing they produced,
| just to prove it had human origins.
|
| This is the future
| SketchySeaBeast wrote:
| You're only kicking the can down the road.
| edgarvaldes wrote:
| We have realtime filters, avatars, translators, TTS, etc. Soon,
| all of this will be "good enough" to mimic the proposed
| solution.
| gz5 wrote:
| I think we will see tidal waves of 'not-so-good' AI-generated
| content. Not that AI can't generate or help generate 'good'
| content, but it will be faster and cheaper to generate 'not-so-
| good'.
|
| These waves will mainly be in places in which we are the product.
| And those waves could make those places close to uninhabitable
| for folks who don't want to slosh through the waves of noise to
| find the signal.
|
| And in turn that perhaps enables a stronger business model for
| high quality content islands (regardless of how the content is
| generated) - e.g. we will be more willing to pay directly for
| high quality content with dollars instead of time.
|
| In that scenario, AI could be a_good_thing in helping to spin a
| flywheel for high quality content.
| omnicognate wrote:
| Except they shouldn't be islands. Unify/standardise the payment
| mechanism, make it frictionless and only for content consumed.
| There's no technical reason you shouldn't see an article on hn
| or wherever, follow the link and read it _and pay for it_
| without having set up and pay for a subscription for the entire
| publication or jump through hoops. It should be a click at
| most.
|
| There will always be a place for subscriptions, but people want
| the hypertext model of just following a link from somewhere and
| there is absolutely no technical reason for that to be
| incompatible with paying for content. The idea that ads are the
| only way to fund the web needs to be challenged, and generative
| AI might just provide the push for that to finally happen.
|
| Or maybe there will be no such crisis and it'll just make the
| whole thing even more exploitative and garbage-filled.
| munificent wrote:
| _> There 's no technical reason you shouldn't see an article
| on hn or wherever, follow the link and read it and pay for it
| without having set up and pay for a subscription for the
| entire publication or jump through hoops. It should be a
| click at most._
|
| People have been saying this and building startups on this
| and having those startups crash and burn for _decades_.
|
| It's not a technical problem. It's a psychology problem.
|
| Paying after you've read an article doesn't provide the
| immediate post purchase gratification to make it an inpulse
| purchase [0]. The upside of paying for an article you've
| already read is more like a considered purchase [1]. But the
| amount of cognitive effort worth putting into deciding
| whether or not to pay for the article is often less than the
| value you got from the article itself. So it's very hard for
| people to force themselves to decide to commit to these kinds
| of microtransactions. See also [2].
|
| It's just a sort of cognitive dead zone where our primate
| heuristics don't work well for the technically and
| economically optimal solution. It's sort of like why you
| can't go into a store and buy a stick of gum.
|
| [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impulse_purchase
|
| [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Considered_purchase
|
| [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bounded_rationality
| pixl97 wrote:
| >It should be a click at most.
|
| Welcome to new and interesting ways to defraud people over
| the internet for money school of thought.
|
| At least with Amazon it's a "one and done shop" of who I
| spent my money with when I bought something.
|
| Imagine tomorrow with your click to pay for random links on
| the internet you suddenly have 60,000 1 cent charges. They
| all appear to go different places and to get a refund you
| need to challenge each one.
| bobthepanda wrote:
| It sounds like the digital version of the CD scam.
| https://viewing.nyc/nyc-scams-101-dont-get-fooled-by-the-
| cd-...
| rwmj wrote:
| Assuming not too many people die eating mushrooms while we're
| waiting:
| https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/sep/01/mushroom-...
| hinkley wrote:
| Common foraging rhetoric is that you need two independent
| sources asserting that a wild food is edible. Ones that cite
| neither each other or the same chain of citations. And
| preferably a human who says, "I've been eating these for
| years and no problems." or scientists who did recent blood
| work to make sure you aren't destroying your organs by eating
| [1].
|
| In a world with fake books, it would be quite easy for two
| books to contain the same misinformation or mis-
| identification (how many times have I found the wrong plant
| in a google image search? More times than I care to count).
| Two fake books putting the wrong mushroom picture next to a
| mushroom because they were contiguous on some other page and
| you have dead people.
|
| [1] In the ten years since I started working with indigenous
| plants, wild ginger (asarum caudatum), has gone from quasi-
| edible to medicinal to don't eat. More studies show subtler
| wear and tear on the organs (wikipedia lists it as
| carcinogenic!) and it is recommended now that you don't eat
| them at all, even for medicinal purposes. I'm not sure I own
| a foraging or native species book younger than 5 years, and
| many are older.
| cellu wrote:
| Why do people read contemporary books is something I can't really
| get my head around. There're so many classics to keep people busy
| for life - and are 100% guaranteed to be insightful and
| pleasurable.
| bwb wrote:
| Contemporary books are just new classics. It is like asking why
| read :)
| rustymonday wrote:
| Should people stop telling new stories? A century from now the
| best books of today will be classics. Books can act as a time
| capsule of a certain time and place and mode of life. And that
| has value.
| gamepsys wrote:
| I think the risk of reading a suboptimal book is not greater
| than the risk of not allowing myself to be exposed to different
| voices.
| OfSanguineFire wrote:
| There's a distinct demographic in the contemporary-fiction-
| reading community, as can be seen in corners of Goodreads or
| Instagram, that demands new fiction to tell the stories of
| groups not covered, or supposedly unfairly covered, in that
| classic literature: LGBT, BIPOC, the working class, etc. In
| fact, they might even deny that the classics are "insightful
| and pleasurable" due to these social concerns.
| timeagain wrote:
| That's really weird. People are making all kinds of books and
| stories. And stories are relevant to their time. The matrix
| wouldn't be written in 1900, a tale of two cities wouldn't be
| written in 1200, ...
|
| It is true though that if you have a culturally diverse set
| of friends and are open to their experiences and opinions, a
| lot of "the classics" start to smell bad. Imagine being black
| and reading Grapes of Wrath. You might think the situation of
| the main characters as humorous or infantile, considering how
| relatively fortunate they are.
| Baeocystin wrote:
| What's the name of the law where the longer something has
| already been around, the longer it will likely stay around in
| the future?
|
| I've found that it definitely applies to books. Starting at a
| ~20 year horizon is a surprisingly good filter for quality.
| savoyard wrote:
| > What's the name of the law where the longer something has
| already been around, the longer it will likely stay around in
| the future?
|
| The Lindy effect.
| carlosjobim wrote:
| One of the best books I read last year was the story of the
| rescue of the football team that was trapped in a flooded cave
| in 2018 - written by cave diver Rick Stanton, who found the
| team and led the rescue. How would that account have been
| written into a book before it happened?
| harles wrote:
| The title of this story doesn't seem to match the content. This
| seems like a proactive move to prevent individual publishers from
| spamming many many submissions - and even then, they're willing
| to make exceptions.
|
| > While we have not seen a spike in our publishing numbers, in
| order to help protect against abuse, we are lowering the volume
| limits we have in place on new title creations. Very few
| publishers will be impacted by this change and those who are will
| be notified and have the option to seek an exception.
| freediver wrote:
| This is just a tip of the iceberg, compared to what we are
| heading into with the web. Very concerning.
|
| I would go long the value of genuine human writing, aka the
| 'small web'.
| adamredwoods wrote:
| >> We require you to inform us of AI-generated content (text,
| images, or translations) when you publish a new book or make
| edits to and republish an existing book through KDP. AI-generated
| images include cover and interior images and artwork. You are not
| required to disclose AI-assisted content.
| pcl wrote:
| This is really interesting. I imagine that AI-generated art /
| illustrations for books mostly-text is a pretty compelling
| thing for authors, for all the same reasons that AI-generated
| text is of value for non-authors. I wonder how this line will
| work out in practice.
| hiidrew wrote:
| Their distinction:
|
| >AI-generated: We define AI-generated content as text, images,
| or translations created by an AI-based tool. If you used an AI-
| based tool to create the actual content (whether text, images,
| or translations), it is considered "AI-generated," even if you
| applied substantial edits afterwards. AI-assisted: If you
| created the content yourself, and used AI-based tools to edit,
| refine, error-check, or otherwise improve that content (whether
| text or images), then it is considered "AI-assisted" and not
| "AI-generated." Similarly, if you used an AI-based tool to
| brainstorm and generate ideas, but ultimately created the text
| or images yourself, this is also considered "AI-assisted" and
| not "AI-generated." It is not necessary to inform us of the use
| of such tools or processes.
|
| https://kdp.amazon.com/en_US/help/topic/G200672390#aicontent...
| .
| prvc wrote:
| Allowing the use of tools to modify the contents erases any
| clear distinction between the categories.
| campbel wrote:
| Gee, I sure hope people don't just lie about it...
| skepticATX wrote:
| It doesn't matter. It's garbage content and immediately
| recognizable as being AI generated.
|
| It is absolutely possible to write a good article or even a
| good book with AI, but at least for now it's just as hard, if
| not harder, than doing it without AI.
|
| But of course people trying to make a quick buck won't put in
| the required effort, and they likely don't even have the
| ability to create great or even good content.
| duskwuff wrote:
| > It's garbage content and immediately recognizable as being
| AI generated.
|
| It's also recognizable by its sheer volume. An "author" who
| submits several new books every day is clearly not doing
| their own writing. The AI publishing scam relies on volume --
| they can't possibly win on quality, but they're hoping to
| make up for that by putting so many garbage books on the
| market that buyers can't find anything else.
| atrus wrote:
| I'm not sure. Ghostwriting exists, and a person (or
| organization) with enough money could easily pay enough
| ghostwriters to output at a more than human pace.
| duskwuff wrote:
| Even at their most prolific, a ghostwritten author still
| probably wouldn't publish more than one or two books a
| month. Beyond that point, you're just competing with
| yourself. (For instance, young adult series like
| _Goosebumps_ , _The Baby-Sitters Club_ , or _Animorphs_
| typically published a book every month or two.)
|
| Publishing multiple books _per day_ is out of the
| question. That 's beyond even what's reasonable for an
| editor to skim through and rubber-stamp.
| gamepsys wrote:
| > It's garbage content and immediately recognizable as being
| AI generated.
|
| Yea, but the Turning Test is actively being assaulted. Soon
| we won't know the difference between an uninspired book
| written by an AI and an uninspired book written by a human.
| mostlylurks wrote:
| > It doesn't matter. It's garbage content and immediately
| recognizable as being AI generated.
|
| Is it? How do you immediately recognize a book as AI
| generated before buying it, if the author isn't doing
| something silly like releasing several books per day/month?
| And even after you buy a book, how can you distinguish
| between the book just being terrible and the book being
| written with extensive use of AI? I don't believe AI can
| write good books, but I would still like to distinguish those
| two cases, since the former is just a terrible book, which is
| perfectly fine, while the latter I would like to avoid. I
| don't want to waste my limited time reading AI content.
| tyingq wrote:
| >It is absolutely possible to write a good article or even a
| good book with AI, but at least for now it's just as hard, if
| not harder, than doing it without AI.
|
| How hard is it though, to create a shitty book with AI, that
| Amazon can't detect was written with AI?
| ilamont wrote:
| See also: "Tom Lesley has published 40 books in 2023, all with
| 100% positive reviews"
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35687868
| ritzaco wrote:
| I remember that one - interestingly the amazon link it goes to
| shows only 3 books now, all that look real, not the 40 that I
| remember seeing before.
|
| So I guess Amazon is doing _something_ even though I regularly
| hear complaints from authors that they allow blatant piracy all
| the time
| phh wrote:
| Possibly it's the author removing them at the first one star
| rating to keep their author score high?
| kmeisthax wrote:
| Amazon has no reason to give a shit about piracy on KDP: they
| make money either way. But having a load of AI generated
| garbage on your platform makes it far less valuable. You want
| your stolen books to actually be good. :P
| bragr wrote:
| >shows only 3 books now
|
| Those appear to be by different authors with similar names:
| https://www.amazon.com/s?k=%22tom+lesley%22
| cogman10 wrote:
| Here's a pretty good article about the problem with AI generated
| books. "AI Is Coming For Your Children" [1]
|
| [1] https://shatterzone.substack.com/p/ai-is-coming-for-your-
| chi...
| el_benhameen wrote:
| This doesn't seem surprising. Half of my YouTube ads these days
| are for some kind of AI+Kindle-based get rich quick scheme.
| NotYourLawyer wrote:
| [flagged]
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2023-09-18 23:00 UTC)