Insane that these people think they deserve money for something they didn’t bother writing, nor even proofreading themselves. I truly hope they have to suffer a devastating financial situation, its what they deserve
It’s like Trump with “Art of the Deal”. He didn’t write it, he paid someone else to write it.
Now, people can do this with AI.
Both should be unacceptable in my opinion, but how can you stop it? Hacks gonna hack
Grifter’s gonna grift.
I hope everyone who paid money for the book asks for a refund. If folks use ai in their work, it should be flagged as such so the consumer can make an educated decision on whether to purchase.
Many wealthy, powerful people take credit that they don’t deserve and earn an enormous profit for doing so. It is a common enough belief that having enough money or power to enable someone else’s idea makes the enabler as, if not more, important and deserving than all of those involved in every other aspect of the project.
What has “AI” become, after all? Rich and powerful people stealing the entire collective knowledge and creative works of humanity, mostly without just compensation or even consent. They then combine that collection and a vast quantity of wealth to take as many resources as they can afford to, half in an effort to deny those same resources to competitors trying to do the same thing. Their goal is to become the most dominant source of truth and creativity, which they will then hoard and rent to the highest bidders. All the while promising the good it will do, while simultaneously manipulating the output of this “source” so that it more reflects their interests and worldview.
Yeah, we as a society have long since abandoned the idea that you have to have done hard work yourself to be deserving of praise or recognition. At this point, if something exists, and nobody else is claiming that they made it (or if you have enough power to say it louder than they can) you’re free to do so, and feel proud of your accomplishment regardless of whether any effort was made on your part at all.
Last Christmas a friend of the family I was visiting bragged about her son who had an LLM spit out fantasy books that he was selling on amazon. As far as I can tell, he just prompted it “Write a fantasy book like The Witcher” and sold it without reading it. She excitedly told me “I looked into it, it isn’t plagiarism!”
Sometimes I absently daydream about ruining the day for everyone and insisting on driving home the point that it very much is plagiarism.
Godawful, just as worse and infectious as the MAGA mindset.
Techbros call AI as “liberation”. It’s more like plunder to me.
I don’t think they care about deserving it or not as long as they get the money.
At least you got a warning that the book wasn’t even worth an editor nor the “author” actually reading through it once themselves.
I recently hired a couple beta readers for a novel I wrote, and explained that there was zero AI writing, ot was all human hands.
About half of the proposals said it would be nice to get a break from beta reading people’s AI-written novels. Which is just mind blowing to me that people that get an LLM to write Python script that creates 20 md files that get stitched into a “book” and publish the results bother to care that much in the first place. Why not have the LLM copyedit it, too?
LLM writes it, LLM edits it, LLM reads it. No need for human involvement on any level!
when I finally get hunkered down and write the novel I’ve been trying to get out of my brain for nearly a decade, I actually feel a little bit of hope getting it out in an environment like this. I’m always super harsh on myself, but I mean it’s pretty hard to twist ‘hey I wrote this book with my own thoughts! no llm needed!’ in a bad way
The biggest hurdle for humans to write a good book really is the hunkering down and doing it part. I think AI could actually be useful here in that you have it generate a first draft, read it, get so angry at how bad it is, and suddenly you’re motivated to write a much better version.
You had me, you lost me, then you had me again by the end.
Now that is the emotion-grabbing sway of a human writer.
Yeah, one of my friends is an author and told me that while industry is a nightmare now. Lots of publishers would hold writing contests to give new authors a chance to get some exposure. Apparently they’re just absolutely flooded with AI content now to the point that many are cancelling the contests.
That, and KDP also scoops up a lot of the mediocre ones to start, and filter out successful ones they can scoop up later without eating time and money on discovery. Publishers can afford to be picky these days… I say as I prepare to throw my work at the stone walls of these same places in hopes of not getting relegated to being one more person self-publishing a passion piece.
Why not have the LLM copyedit it, too?
AI’s don’t like working with really large amounts of text. They will not go through a text linr by line and analyze it, not without having a highly specialised “AI” or harness or whatever you call it.
If you simply ask it to remove ending paragraphs like that one in the OP, it will write a script that tries to find phrases like “if you want” and then check the result of the script and replace those. It will NOT read the whole book line by line to find instances like that.
It’s possible, but a pain. I have an html python portal for a self hosted set of LLMs where I can upload a file of any length, and it pulls it apart maybe 400 words at a time to proofread, copyedit, or translate, then stitches it back together. It does mostly OK. But it doesn’t look at things like plot points or consistency or characters. Instead, I could do 1 chapter at a time into Claude, compress it to a two-page summary, and get then have it analyze the summaries.
Which sounds like a great way to get terrible results and burn more tokens than I need to pay two humans to her the info I need.
It’s really hard to avoid sycophancy when proofing more than a paragraph at a time, anyway. They will not set you straight.
Yea just a waste of tokens really, this kind of stuff is for humans, like a billion other things
How long before NPR unwittingly interviews an AI “author”?
As someone who has worked in print for 20 years you would be surprised how often stupid shit goes to print and no one catches it despite multiple people looking at it throughout the processes before it gets to me at the end point.
No one really looks because someone else will notice
Also, human brains are not that good at proofreading huge amounts of text. We tend to zone out and lose focus. It’s just a quirk of the way our brains work and the human condition. Ironically, an LLM is comparatively great at scaming large bodies of text for errors like this; rather than being used to create the book in the first place.
Did you notice the typo in my comment?
Did you notice the typo in my comment?
Yeah, scamming is missing an m, and the rest of the sentence doesn’t make much sense.
It should be LLMs are great at scamming, period.
It was originally “scanning”
Well, it was wrong then, wasn’t it?
Some brains. Not all brains. Typos jump out at me even when I’m not actively trying to read. It’s not uncommon for me to point out a misspelling on a sign I’m casually passing by.
I understand and agree most people miss such details; that’s why editors are so important. I just think it should be noted that not every human brain works the same way. Some are more detail-oriented that others, some lock in to certain patterns more than others, and what can be a challenge for one person could be a breeze for another.
Please don’t discount the neurodivergent when attempting to define “the human condition.”
Same for me. I was speaking generally, of course. Please don’t try and needlessly frame me as exclusionary
:)
Very true. It more frequently happens with customer approved artwork which is even better for us as we get paid twice as it isn’t our fault but more often than not they want it rectified.
I was a graphic designer for many years. We’d get multiple revisions for everything except copy. We’d paste in the copy exactly as provided, I’d catch a few obvious spelling and grammatical errors, showing they didn’t even run a simple spellcheck, and off it would go into the approval loop. I had to mark every spelling change in the notes. Teh --> The, etc.
No one reads the copy. All the way through to the press check. They catch the copy mistakes AFTER the print run. Sorry, I don’t know how the founder’s French name is spelled.
I can only imagine it’s worse now with AI.
This is what the CYA contract is for.
There should be some great centralized wall of shame for stuff like this, auther publishers editors distributors sellers included.
And it should come up first when you search for them, like Wikipedia. It should be the first thing in their Wikipedia page, before occupation. Repeat offenders should have a dedicated section.
Do people not use editors any more? Jfc how does this happen?
Self published drivel. Amazon will let you print anything.
The editor is “AI” too.
They don’t use authors, why would they use editors?
They do use authors. Lots of 'em, all over the place.
People like that use agents with Editor persona.
IDK about other writers, but I have an editor who is going through my novel as I write it. It’s a nice process.
Jesus. That’s one hell of an own goal. I promise that anyone who looks at my photographs online is seeing the real deal. I mean, no one would use AI to make that shite.
SOunds like AI generated book.
Who’s the “author”?
Gerald Baker Book is named “Pitigliano: The City of Stone and Sunlight”
The Amazon reviews are tearing it to shreds with photos of the AI. It’s all I wanted to know.
I would return that book to the store
I recently read “The Rose Field”, the final book in the series Book of Dust by Philip Pullman. It’s a follow up trilogy on His Dark Materials, which recently had a TV series adaptation made by the BBC, and previously a film was made back in like 2006, “The Golden Compass.”
Pullman writes a story about a world where people’s souls live outside of their bodies, taking the shape of an animal that speaks and lives side by side with their person. He calls it their Daemon, and it’s a terrific narrative device.
In the second book of this second series one of the main cast, Pan (a Daemon) leaves the other protagonist Lyra (Pan’s human) in order to find the latter’s imagination, which he believed that she had lost. Over the journey, they both separately ponder the nature of Imagination, why Pan had gone to such lengths to find something he wasn’t sure about. Lyra is also tasked with finding “The Alkahest”, of which she has never heard of.
In the end, they both find their answers, the importance of imagination, and what Alkahest truly is. I think Pullman has observed how the world is changing, how imagination, play, creativity, and interpersonal relationships are left to wither to make room for money. I’ll quote some bits of it here.
Spoiler for the climax of "The Rose Field" by Philip Pullman
It is the universal solvent, just as it says in the encyclopedia. The destroyer of bonds. Look at what’s happening here—all the old ways and habits that brought people together, like bartering and trading—just dissolved. Wiped away by new ways people don’t fully understand. The new roads that go who knows where but just tear up the rose gardens and knock down perfectly good houses.
What’s the closest bond there is? It’s between people and their dæmons. Somehow when you’re separated, like we are, the bond is still there, but this isn’t the same at all. With the sickness here, people just seem indifferent. They’re not interested anymore. But it’s not just happening here. It’s every kind of bond, in our world as well. Like the new Master of Jordan, breaking the old connection between me and the college, because I was costing them too much. It sounded so reasonable when he said it. Money. They had to save money, because…Everything about the alkahest is reasonable. It’s reasonable to make money, to save money…
“All being dissolved. The more I see, the more obvious it seems…I really think I’m beginning to understand at last. Everything having to give way to money.”
Of course people have always knocked things down and built other things in their place. But money’s different somehow. It swallows everything… […] But Thuringia Potash and all these other companies are only interested in the rose oil as a unit of value. If an acre of roses makes money, fine, but because the roses and the oil themselves aren’t important, they’ll tear them up in a moment. All those fields being dug up: it isn’t because the developers hate the roses, it’s because they can make more per acre by growing peanuts, or by building a factory.”
“The thing that troubles me most […] It’s something like this. In making rose oil, each part of the process is an end in itself. The roses are beautiful as they grow. Distilling the rosewater and making the oil are crafts worth knowing, things worth doing in themselves, things you can get better at and take pride in. So people who did them used to have a connection with the soil and the seasons and the light and the weather, and they felt the sun and the wind and the rain on their skins—the alkahest will change all that. They’ll soon be sitting in offices under artificial light, entering figures into ledgers and account books, and their dæmons will be dying beside them, and no one will care, and no one will know why.”
What I take from this is that money has this effect of always taking a precedent. It makes sense for it to, because it is the means with which we navigate a capitalist society. We’ve constructed society in such a way that everything always has to give way to money some way or another. By letting money take precedent, we’re destroying our bonds to other people, we’re destroying our bonds to nature, and we’re destroying our bonds to ourselves, our creativity, our imagination, and we do so while giving ourselves completely reasonable justifications for it.
The message that we’re slowly killing our souls isn’t exactly subtle, but I get it. We’ve gotten to a point where some people are happy to outsource their thinking and creativity to machines, all in the service of money. People build fake followings on social media, just to make money.
These books are so good, I swear. I’m glad he finally got to finish and release the third one, Iand thank you for reminding me, I’m gonna buy it for sure.
I was so worried he wouldn’t! He is coming up in the years, and this was apparently the first book he didn’t manage to write fully by hand because of pain, so he finished it on a computer. The audiobook read by Michael Sheen has a kind of, interview/dialogue between Sheen and Pullman at the end, where they discuss… lots of things. Sheen was so taken with the story that he named his daughter Lyra as well.
Here is the book on goodreads:
haha. LESS than one star average. how is that even possible
You can give quarters of stars, hover the rating with the mouse. Help bring it down to .25!
ah, I don’t use goodreads and haven’t for a very long time. Good to know though, thanks!
Ah, fuck, I’m cooked…
I thought the book added that as a threat. Like “don’t make write this stupid nonsense, because I will.”
I’ve been writing a dinky little coffeeshop mystery for the past two years. I’m 2/3 of the way through and its been a lot of work. I’m not perfect but its been heck.
Stuff like this makes me really sad. I think anyone caught taking shortcuts like that as an author should be banned from the industry.
You just said you want a central authority who decides what can get ridden a terrible idea with massive downsides so as to avoid more bad books an ever present unfixable problem with human nature. Maybe if you had written this comment with chatGPT it would actually make sense.
Super mean and aggressive. I guess i touched a nerve?
Do I think that book with a prompt request written right into it should get removed from Amazon and banned from being allowed to self publish? Yes.
Getting aggressive with me and implying I’m stupid isn’t going to change my mind.
No, they said people who fake writing with “AI” are hacks who should be shunned from writing, which is true. Human slop still requires effort and thought and is infinitely superior to faking it by using an “AI” to vomit plagiarism.
Maybe if you had written this comment with chatGPT it would actually make sense.
Words to live by i guess, for you at least… i suppose we can clearly see that you didn’t have chatgpt proofread your comment, so there is that
