Montaigne (1533-1592) famously said il y devroit avoir quelque coerction des loix contre les escrivains ineptes et inutiles ("there should be laws against stupid and useless writers").
This was about just a hundred years after the invention of the printing press.
So I searched on Google Books and limited the timeline... What I found were the pretentious ramblings of an old man that thought way too highly of himself for getting lucky at a time that a little luck could make you a fortune to last a lifetime. He wrote a bunch of books on the market. It was like 1910s or something. They were so worthless, but I did find them hilarious to read.
Just like existence of email didn't create the concept of spam, it just made sending it much, much, cheaper.
It's also worth mentioning that this problem isn't limited to ebooks. There's also a cottage industry of mass produced minimal-effort audiobooks on Audible as part of various "passive income" scams. Dan Olson made a pretty good video essay[1] about one such scam where he actually played along for most of it and also gave it a try as a ghostwriter.
[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O1aqLLiIjgA
[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=biYciU1uiUw
EDIT: Considering the most cited examples are Amazon/Kindle and Audible, I think parallels can also be drawn to the proliferation of no-name brand Chinese whitelabel dropshipping products on regular Amazon. Everyone already knows not to trust Amazon reviews but at this point it's hard to find reputable brands for products you're not already familiar with (e.g. which of the one hundred brands featuring near identical products are actually brands you might find in a retail store rather than a random name slapped on the product in the same Chinese factory?). LLMs will definitely make reviews even more untrustworthy but they might also help generating even more plausible copycat product descriptions and designs.
Ye this one is annoying. I often look for automotive tools and before I realized this I thought I was turning insane. Different store fronts pretend they are making some tool or like has sourced a factory to do their design.
But they like order the tool with a sticker and paint job from the same supplier.
Sometimes nuts and bolts or like cover plates vary but it is the same base.
I was browsing for tool hooks for the garage the other day and it felt like there are two factories in China that make hooks and two factories that put rubber on them for 4 combinations and that is it. But 20 flavours of branding.
Edit: It would be really neat if the factory had to mark everything they made.
I read mostly books written before the World Wars and I’m doubtful there’s much after that period of any real and lasting value. That doesn’t mean I don’t enjoy some of it, of course, mostly the fiction. The exception might be really niche works of local history, which is probably <0.001% of all such books, or a few really good scientific/mathematical compendiums.
Yes, I knew someone who was in "publish as remainder", that is publish at a high price then sell in bulk at a discount. Creating the books involved:
1. Think of a subject
2. Get some pictures
3. Find someone to write something which goes with the pictures
4. Repeat
There has always been a market for the undescerning.
"The Value Of Owning More Books Than You’ll Ever Read" - https://clivethompson.medium.com/the-value-of-owning-more-bo...
Of course I understand physical books can also be written by AI (just last week, I saw a physical poetry book fully written by AI, except for the preface). But it is much more cost to produce a physical book than throwing up something online only.
I spam this fact whenever someone makes arguments against piracy. I am utterly fine if no new culture is produced, as there already exists more than I could ever enjoy. Besides, creatives will create (with lowered production values) regardless of money. It’s a primal drive for them.
Although, I would be a little upset if they stopped making high-budget binge-worthy series.
Then again... What the hell do I care if it's made by AI? Especially if they use one of those preference-based RLHF and penalize the model against episodes where the series lost all its viewers.
I'm personally split on this viewpoint. Through a series of events this year (starting with the death of Charlie Munger), I've started reading the Harvard Classics. Doing the 15 minutes a day challenge, which started on New Year's Day. I bought the full original 1910 set on Ebay. They're pretty cheap because they're essentially just room decorum and probably nobody reads them. People on Ebay will gladly sell cool looking leather cover books because it makes their offices look nice. This is an actual descriptions many sellers use.
For me though, above all else it's been an incredibly humbling experience. Because its been a very long time since I've read works from genuine professionals who spent a lifetime mastering their craft. I'm struggling with prose and vocabulary. I'm not an avid reader. I will at most read maybe 5-10 books a month. Some of which are technical or industry related. But I still like hardcopies so I tend to visit bookstores. And the crushing reality is that what's generally available on bookshelves (at least in the USA) is fucking garbage. Half-assed ghostwritten autobiographies of no-name celebrities or politicians, lifestyle in-your-face FEMALE EMPOWERMENT books that give questionable advice, pseudo-historical nonfiction books, bland and uninspired Star Wars science fiction rip offs (and their accompanying video game expanded universe novels). The list goes on.
Barnes and Noble realized that their audience doesn't really buy physical books anymore (or just plainly don't fucking read) so have moved in to fill the gap that Toys R' Us left behind. Half the floor space is a glorified toy store. Most of the people that come here either bring their kids or are kids themselves hanging out in the Manga section.
The cliche is obviously here and repeating itself: but with each consecutive generation we become less literate. AI has made it so the illiterate get nifty summaries of other less literate summaries of great works and ideas, which then get challenged by the pseudo-intellectual hack frauds extracting wealth from their fanbase and college students pumping out bullshit papers to meet graduation requirements. Just how fucking low exactly can we limbo before it's too late? In this context AI is basically Accelerationism
Performances and storytelling was pretty much ephemeral before printing presses, records, and now computers. Now it’s cumulative. All the writing and art of the past several hundred years is out there.
Kind of creates an overproduction / saturation problem.
Why is this? due to legal reasons?
I don't know who these people are that are reading books so bad that an LLM could plausibly replicate the work, but if that market is killed by a swarm of AI-written nonsense, honestly: who cares?
> Now that AI books exist, the probability that I will ever blind purchase another eBook on Amazon from an unknown author drops to zero.
This is a thing people do? Like... before AI? Not even reading extract or anything? You just see a cover and a title and go like "sure, I'll spend my hard-earned cash to make a 30 hour investment in this thing I know nothing about"?
The best version of this argument you can make is that it's about the treadmill: great writers aren't born great writers, they have to write a lot of crap first to become great writers, and this market is how you do that. Take that away, you don't get any more great writers. But I don't particularly buy that either: there are very few writers I love that were able to successfully make a living selling self-published Amazon eBook garbage until they got good enough to actually be picked up by a publisher.
Journalism, however, is a different story: plenty of great writers (fiction or non-fiction) got their starts as journalists and honed their craft writing small pieces there, and that is a market that is under total threat from AI. That's maybe a cause for concern. But I don't think it's an existential threat to literature as an art form. I don't think that's ever going to go away.
My daughter got so excited that she drew pictures of the Chicken Nugget and Cookie brothers and showed them to me after work, it’s like a choose your own adventure book but you can really actually choose your own adventure.
Personally I find the stories vapid and boring but before I was reading some brain dead story about Ariel using her favorite Dinglehopper to brush her hair, so whatever.
We are also reading Little House on the Prairie which I consider a little more “high brow”, and the girls really like that, too. But kids are easy to please and it has been interesting.
> We are also reading Little House on the Prairie which I consider a little more “high brow”, and the girls really like that, too. But kids are easy to please and it has been interesting.
Yeah, that's kind of my point :) do you think an AI could write Little House on the Prairie? I don't. Sooner or later the vapid and nonsensical plots from LLMs stop being that amusing, and you need to feel real human connections to the things you're reading. That's the reason you read books, after all.
I'm not convinced. Speaking as someone who's ended up selecting for a bunch of the good (i.e. picked up by publishers) authors for self-published genre novels, I definitely feel less likely to actually put in the effort after a bunch of bad experiences, and certainly if it's LLM generated.
I'm pretty sure I'd nope out, but because there's so much crap it's hard to pay enough attention to find the gems.
At this point, I'm selecting based on prior knowledge and the Hugo longlists, which is depressing as it selects against the interesting new stuff that I'd like to find.
> This is a thing people do? Like... before AI? Not even reading extract or anything? You just see a cover and a title and go like "sure, I'll spend my hard-earned cash to make a 30 hour investment in this thing I know nothing about"?
Yes, many many times. Mind you, I tend to exclusively focus on books for entertainment, and most books aren't that expensive (especially after spending a few years buying academic published statistical books) but I agree with the OP in that I'm becoming less likely to do this (but to be fair, this was happening before LLMs became super convenient and popular).
Actually, thinking about it, I find it pretty unlikely that any current LLM could actually write a coherent novel, given the context window. You'd probably need to do some kind of chain to make it work, i.e. generate synopsis, then recursively generate more text. It would also likely be super inconsistent unless you kept feeding the previous parts in.
Hmmmmm....in a world where I have more free time, I might take a stab at getting LLaMa to do this.
"Even after two months on their prolonged, glamorous, non-sleep shopping spree, she couldn't resist the allure of his white shirt over his hard pectorals. He wasn't at all like the other men in her life, vapid things that would spend a lot of time in the gym trying to lose weight, instead of just being outright gorgeous and indulging her social needs."
A part of me agrees with your statement: people indulges themselves a lot in junk literature, as they do in junk mates and unfulfilling social events. And yet, I have known myself for enjoying junk food and junk literature and sorely missing partners who were certified by their backwater witch-doctor from Hornborga as having too small of a brain for even a minor demon to consider possessing.
We may end up in a world where some people will enjoy AI-generated content, and some people will be at war with the death of the soul that comes with it. I'm decidedly in the second camp.
When slop floods the library faster than it can expand, who will want to maintain that. I don't think we have good enough sorting and rating (or good enough AI output detection) to prevent bookspam.
This is a point in history where "record everything" stops being viable, and we have to start hand-picking the text we want to survive. Indiscriminate things like Internet Archives stop being viable.
Why keep books, anyways? You can just ask the AI to re-generate whatever it is you want to read about on the fly.
But ebooks are exempt from it. (Ebooks obviously didn't exist in 1537 but they've now been around for decades.)
So unless AI is used to make books published via traditional publishers (which is of course possible, but somewhat unlikely), the situation doesn't change much as regards to archiving books (in France).
A few put them up on third-party bookseller sites for a time, and I've been able to get a lot of rare and notable works for comparatively little money. Actually, a lot of them come from university libraries, so maybe they're not as much of an exception as I think.
Now ebooks and on-demand printing allow you to "publish" books without going through the quality filter of a publisher. But you won't get into a book store that way, and anybody talking about the trouble of archiving those better already have an archive of the low hanging fruit of the same category: fanfiction.org and friends (and I don't mean this derogatory, there are great stories in there)
Surely, there are multiple sci-fi stories exploring this exact premise. I would love some recommendations in my replies.
In fact, I hope for an LLM service where I can schedule books as good as 10+ years ago.
Why would I buy some low-quality generic book on Amazon/Audible/etc? AI generated or not.
https://www.geekwire.com/2023/ai-chiang-bender-wishful-think...
I think the problem is curation more than generation. Amazon could do a much better job in general with poor goods showing up in their marketplaces.
https://ideas.bkconnection.com/10-awful-truths-about-publish...
Summary: over 2 million self-published books each year in the US alone.
Now think about blogs. But as a reader, I don’t find this much of a problem. Yes, I rely on book reviews and recommendations by friends and on author name recognition. But that seems a lot better than relying on advertisements and Amazon’s algorithm anyway. And it’s pretty much what people have done for centuries with bookshops and libraries.
I think the same thing may happen here - some genres may literally just disapper because there's no way to match readers with writers anymore in a way that's economical.
I'm reasonably happy with the average physical book I read. That's much less true for ebooks.
And I mostly buy books from Amazon that I've heard about elsewhere so don't depend on that filter as much.
In the same way that the noise floor is becoming too high for eBooks, the quality threshold is too high for real books - (d) basically doesn't happen because you have to be so great and sign such a bad deal. Not least because publishers have consolidated into an effective monopoly.
Reputations as “reliable quality content go-to points” will be made.
Can you expand on this? Are you saying people will look for publishers like o'reilly in order to find reliable quality books? How is this different than today’s landscape?
Today you expect the likelihood of a quality book title to be much higher from O’Reilly than, say, Packt Publishing.
With the advent of AI Generated Books, reputable sources will count more and more than they already do.
The already enormous mountain of content out there keeps growing, fuel by AI now, yet ways to explore that mountain keep staying the same or even diminishing, as the clutter in the results just keeps increasing.
IMDb has a keyword feature[1], but that's still completely human-curated and quite useless due to that, as it just doesn't have the necessary depths and completeness to discover interesting new content.
Curated books, even if they were written by AIs, could be a way to get out of this cycle, at least if editors/publishers didn't had all the incentives to lay a hand on it (Goodreads is a good precedent for this).
Another way of get out of this may be to turn over the economics of books. Did you read something good, that enjoyed and considered that it was time well spend? Then consider paying for it. With digital distribution the cost of having more readers is nearly zero. AI or human written books, what in the end matters is how it was the experience for you. And maybe how much you trust in whatever made you to pick that book.
At the start I thought that the article was about killing books as in the experience of reading books. Having AIs that somewhat had read already the book let you have a summary of what is discussed there, even have a discussion and analysis on the content, maybe even posing as the author or the main character or an expert on those topics. You may not "need" to read the book itself, and decide for a shorter activity. That won't be the end of books or reading them fully, but for some books, some topics, one approach may be better than the other. That may affect how books are written, or what are exactly books from now on. And shorter fiction like articles, blog posts and so on.
I dug a little into one of them and it sounds like it was an independent author (they posted about it on reddit) who I guess didn't want to put the same effort into procuring a cover as writing the book. A lot of authors I think don't have a lot of respect for visual arts and kind of see the cover as a forced labor to publish a book. TBH sci-fi book covers with abstract spaceships and rainbow nebulas are one of the easier things for AI to believably churn out.
But I guess I kind of use the effort put into the cover as a way to gauge how much the author and publisher themselves think the work is worth. Even if I could be sure that the books weren't AI generated themselves (I can't) I left thinking, yeah, I'm probably never going to read again, because I have absolutely no metric, however bad any more, for guessing about the quality of a the book.
Really? This might be the laziest thing I've read on HN. 30 seconds of Googling (DuckDuckGoing?)
https://www.thehugoawards.org/hugo-history/
https://www.esquire.com/entertainment/books/g39358054/best-s... (and tons of other lists like this)
https://www.goodreads.com/list/show/19341.Best_Science_Ficti... (etc...)
Yes, searching on Amazon might not be the best discovery method anymore, but there are also institutions that curate.
But I guess more to the point in the past I've grabbed books with interesting covers or titles off the shelves at a library and enjoyed them, and I don't feel confident in that method working today. Or at least, I feel like there was a time when the rankings on Amazon were probably a lot closer to what you'd see in libraries.
How can I trust any award as a standard of quality that has ridiculous stuff like that getting nominated?
1: Here's a blog post reposting an older one with a lot of the common classics: https://blog.zog.org/2017/06/nprs-guide-through-the-top-100-...
Something tells me you just aren't interested in reading (which is fine) and are trying to find excuses for it.
While I am sure it shares metrics, I have usually had success looking at past books I have read in goodreads and their related recommendations.
The only reader AI deserves is another AI for the marketing side.
Are you sure they weren't just modern sci-fi authors you haven't heard of?
Sci-fi has never been stronger and it makes sense the most popular wouldn't be what you read way back when.
That's doesn't mean they are written by bots.
If only there were some sort of short and catchy idiom that encapsulates some wisdom about the potential folly of judging the interior contents of a book just from looking at the exterior coverings.
The way to successfully write a book as an unknown author without a major publisher intent on making you famous is already to build a social media following[0] then leverage your social media following to promote your book.If nobody's heard of you, self publishing a book has always been a waste of your time. It's just even moreso now because somebody is using the BS generator to write fake books and flood Amazon with them.
[0]: This doesn't just mean writing social media posts but could also involve things like getting published by magazines, doing podcasts, appearing on TV or even just doing Twitter Spaces. The point is to be a known figure by your target audience before you write a book.
Hear the opening verses in English here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hRyauSlnP54
Hear the opera scene in Egyptian with subtitles here:
* eke out
Authors today can't be invisible. They have to market their work, which they do by going on podcasts, giving media interviews, some kind of social media presence as well. This filters out most of the AI flotsam.
Regardless, this is the same argument as the one being made about AI taking artists' jobs.
The solution is to charge a nominal fee to self-publishing a book. Maybe $100. The author now has to be confident in the quality of the book and is betting it’ll generate at least $100 in profits.
Books were being "killed" far prior to AI.
If you want to read books, buy real books (or join a library).
In other words, the market already sees no value in books. If it did, the money would be pouring in for this type of work. AI isn't the problem.
AI might be the solution, though. It is conceivable that AI could find a way to make books appealing to the market in a way that humans have failed to discover.
I do think, however, that book sales are going to continue becoming more dependent on author-as-person style marketing. Some of the most lucrative books in recent years were functionally add-on products to whatever the author's main "business" is, and the author themselves went on dozens of podcasts, etc. to tell their story. The days of being an unknown mass-market writer that mails a manuscript to a publisher then disappears, is probably over.
- AI will raise the floor in a lot of industries, more quickly than it will raise the ceiling. I don't see a problem with that. Less garbage is nice.
- Good writers will make use of AI to be better, much as they (and we in general) did with the internet, and so many other technologies before that.
- If we can not tell good or bad apart, then we should be extremly suspicious in how far it actually matters, specially with everything that is not grounded in physics. Truth is fickle. Feeling ambivalent about things that can not be argued away by way of physics is probably a good thing on average.
- Bullshit detection has always been an issue and will continue to be so. As far as I can tell, we have been getting better, not worse, at this (if you consider the absolutely monumental increase in total bullshit generation that we had to cope with over the past years.)
- In the end, as per usual, despite all claims to the contrary, people will not care how it was made. All that will matter is if it does something for somebody. Note that how it was created might do something for somebody, or, more likely, a certain illusion of how it was made will be good enough and more economical. Over time the sentimental power will fade.
EDIT: Tangent: I run a book recommendation platform and am envisaging having to implement a pre-2021 lock-in/time-freeze as my data is about to get massively polluted by the AI Boom.
AI is really helpful in this case, reduce technical books, gives very short and sweet answers -> This all we need either book or AI.
AI can't become Adolf Hitler, so the view point of the Author still remains. AI can't replace it.
The author complains that they are finding bad content when they search for books. Guess what, that's a search problem not a problem with the content. Search is only useful if it returns relevant results. All this talk of betrayal and trust is just a symptom of crappy search or recommendation algorithms. It doesn't win any sympathy that they are also complaining about free books on Kindle Unlimited so they aren't even cheated out of money, they simply lost a tiny bit of time since they indicate they can quickly identify machine generated content.
This
> There is no feeling of betrayal like thinking you are about to read something that another person slaved over, only to discover you've been tricked.
and this
> Part of the reason people invest so many hours into reading is because we know the author invested far more in writing.
are incomprehensible to me as they appear to be some subset of sadism that derives pleasure from someone enduring a form of hardship. Not quite the same since parts of creative work are enjoyable but still weird because any form of creative work will inevitably have large sections of difficult, tedious or just unpleasant effort that goes into it. Saying that something has less value to you because its creator used a tool to make the bad parts easier to do is just wrongheaded. The only argument that could stand is if the tool they use made their output worse in which case it is justifiable to criticize it but the same goes for an author who doesn't bother to edit his own work or to ask another person to check it and edit or takes other shortcuts like ignoring consistency or using tired plot devices or copying some popular style.
> Good writing kills its darlings. If you don't care enough about a section to write it, then I don't care enough to read it.
That is just not what that phrase means. "Kill your darlings" means to throw away parts that you care about, it's literally the exact opposite of what they're saying here.
Honestly just skimming the rest it seems the author does a lot of work to paint a picture but it doesn't do much to support the argument. A great deal is made of the effort it takes to read a book and decide if it's worthy of recommending or selling in a book store. This just ties back to the search problem and is ironically a place where LLMs and similar ML tools could help a great deal since they can make for excellent classification and recommendation engines. It's pointless to complain about the volume of books since this was already an untenable problem with only human authors and the sheer weight of history. The author says that a book seller may read 80 books a year, certainly an accomplishment but absolutely nothing compared to the number of books published each year[0]:
- 500,000 to 1 million from traditional publishers
- 1.7 million from self-publishing
- 130 million globally
Once again, it's a search problem. When you have 130 million new titles per year it really doesn't matter if you make it 230 million or 1 billion if your solution is to chip away at it 80 titles at a time, you need automation. Fixing search and recommendation is the only thing that will impact the awareness and advertising side of the business. If you don't fix it then yes publishers will carry more weight for their ability to vet their authors but this is nothing new and was not meaningfully impacted by digital publishing as already established. I'm afraid the thing the author is decrying is exactly the medicine they need.
[0] https://wordsrated.com/number-of-books-published-per-year-20...
Central command seems to have instructed drones to use “already” as a means to gaslight people into thinking there’s use and demand for this gibberish. Dont fall for it.
I don't think we're going to replace truck drivers any time soon, but I'd be surprised if in say 30 years the vast majority of trucking wasn't automated.
