from Hacker News

Fake Books

by tybulewicz on 10/24/22, 5:24 AM with 355 comments

by jerf on 10/24/22, 4:28 PM
One of the things that has kept me out of the cryptocurrency space is that when their advocates discuss value, they speak in pure nonsense.
A big part of that problem is that value is very difficult to discuss. On the one hand you have the classic goldbug that insists that gold has "intrinsic value", which is some sort of platonic ideal thing that gold simply ambiently has and defies any attempt to nail down what it grounds out in. On the other hand you have cryptocurrency advocates claiming that all value is arbitrary and/or based entirely on scarcity. In that context, observing that my kid's doodles are scarce but not valuable is not a cute tweet; it is a complete and utter demolishing of the argument.
(I think one of the things education can accidentally (mis)teach is that short arguments are always worthless and arguments must always be long. This is false. A good grounding in mathematics can help with internalizing this. It is completely possible to demolish entire massive argument edifices in 10-20 of the correct words, and the fact that the "other side" has deployed literally hundreds of thousands of words does not make them right if the foundation is rotten.)
Value is intrinsically a dynamic process. It grounds out in human desires, which are intrinsically temporal, variable, and fickle, and this makes a lot of people uncomfortable as they seek either a more solid or a more completely ethereal/arbitrary base. However, there is no other sensible way to think about value, however complex and ever-shifting this may be, and it is neither mathematically solid, nor an amorphous vapor of no consequence subject to one strong person's Nietzschian will.
by gzer0 on 10/24/22, 6:04 AM
This has been a concern of mine for a while; I have also published absolute garbage just to see how far I can take it. I've published music under various pseudonyms, books underneath different pen-names... the list goes on. I've retracted such publications, but it is frightening if one person like myself had the curiosity to try, what is already out there, and, what a well-funded nation-state actor could do.
----
Post-truth, like post-modernism, does not mean an absolute absence of truth, but a decline in confidence in common knowledge, making your own truth the center of your life, rather than a set of values shared by a community.
We now believe that our own truth is somehow better than the "centralized" or "official" truth. We are now free from the institutions and authorities that controlled the truth. But this is an illusion, because the very definition of truth requires trust in something other than you.
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/philosophy/comments/j5gyp5/the_sear...
by TaylorAlexander on 10/24/22, 6:09 AM
I think there’s a good chance it was ghost written by a content farm for someone who wanted to publish a book in a popular category to make a quick buck. I recently learned that this is a soft-scam technique advocated for by a couple of guys called the Mikkelson Twins. They say you can make money by publishing audiobooks on audible by finding a popular topic on audible, then hiring a ghost writing service to write your book, then hire a voice actor to record it, publish it on audible, and then you too can become fabulously wealthy as the Mikkelson Twins claim to be. Except what the Mikkelson Twins actually make money on is selling you on a “money making course” where they tell you to do the above. So there’s all kinds of people trying to follow this method out there, it seems.
This excellent video [1] from Dan Olson at Folding Ideas is in my opinion a fascinating deep dive in to this whole scam. I don’t want to spoil everything in the video, but Dan does an exceptional job exploring how this ghost writing works, and why it produces the kind of nonsense writing that looks like GPT-3 but is actually being done by an overworked human who is trying to write an entire novel in three weeks or so on a topic they haven’t had time to properly research.
[1] https://youtu.be/biYciU1uiUw
by f311a on 10/24/22, 7:13 AM
Amazon is full of fake/generated/auto translated books in every category. Just search for any programming language and sort it by release date.
I don't understand why they don't fix this problem. It's pretty easy to fix and all those sales don't generate a significant amount of revenue for Amazon considering the negative experience for clients.
Such books are pretty easy to spot since the majority of reviews are written by people who have published more than hundreds of reviews.
by zefhous on 10/24/22, 12:32 PM
A couple years ago we ordered an "on-demand" printed book from Amazon for an old public domain book. It came misprinted, with a book on "Mobile Solar Power" right in the middle of it.
I took a look through it cause I thought it would actually interesting, and found it to be this type of fake book that looks to be instructional on the surface, but in reality is not actually educational in the least, and in fact dead wrong in many places.
I posted a couple excerpts on Twitter here, 3-tweet thread. https://twitter.com/zefhous/status/1281679975339274241
by jcynix on 10/24/22, 7:47 AM
It's virtual evolution at work, i.e. spam evolution. It's the Internet Gold Rush (i.e. "make money fast" at work), which we have watched getting "more professional" in the last ten to twenty years. And because those companies which supply resources (ebook platforms, search engines, but also hardware for crypto mining like graphics cards etc) to those "virtual miners" profit from what's going on, we won't see that fixed in the upcoming years.
Generating books instead of spam emails looks more professional so gullible people, who meanwhile (hopefully) did learn that the Nigerian prince isn't a prince, will buy such books (it's written in a book, and book writing is real work you know, so it must be true) to learn about all those fancy new concepts they hear about.
It's actually not that different from all these ads you see, especially if you actually watch recent youtube ads. Due to the current "energy crisis" and the upcoming winter, I've seen videos advertising magical electric heaters, which will "recycle" 85% of the energy used for heating and thus will save you lots of money. It's simple physics that warm air coming out at the front of such a device will be sucked in at its back again, but there's nothing to "recycle" here, to somehow save energy.
BTW, anybody interested in my upcoming book on quantum heating? Quantum heating will even earn you money, because it will generate certain energy efficient by-products which you can sell at your favourite online retailer ;-)
by danwee on 10/24/22, 8:35 AM
Reminds me of the joke:
> It's been months since I bought the book, "How to scam people online." It still hasn't arrived yet.
by Borrible on 10/24/22, 7:21 AM
Ah, remember those times when producing hundred of thousands of books was just a side-gig for a Professor of Management Science? And he didn't even faked it.
https://singularityhub.com/2012/12/13/patented-book-writing-...
https://patents.google.com/patent/US7266767B2/en
https://www.icongrouponline.com/
by andirk on 10/24/22, 6:01 AM
ML-generated content can be pretty funny. This is more an example of Amazon being a garbage distributor of crap; this is an example of fraud. I hope there's a followup of what punishments happen with such a grift from one the world's largest companies.
by mypastself on 10/24/22, 6:29 AM
Alarmingly enough, not even the one- or two-star Amazon reviews caught the garbled nonsense, indicating that not even real people bothered to read the book in detail.
I’m wondering if any person on the planet other than the author of the article read this best-selling book in its entirety. Because even the book’s purported author likely didn’t.
by Andrew_nenakhov on 10/24/22, 10:31 AM
A ghostwriter commissioned to write a book on some hot topic is, essentially, a poorly trained and badly optimized neural network.
by jcynix on 10/24/22, 6:26 AM
Every so often in the last n years I stumbled over "books" which simply contain regurgitated wikipedia content.
And, of course, all those web pages collecting amazon reviews which simulate product review pages. Or, before that, just link farms to products so people could collect referer compensation.
All this is some form of spam, which simply uses search engines to spread instead of email. So the "books" reported here (while somehow "fascinating" just look like the next step of spam/scam evolution to me.
And yes, I see that they are more problematic the "better" they get generated, because more people will think they are genuine works.
by apitman on 10/24/22, 5:49 PM
It's crazy to think that the internet may have already peaked, at least in certain ways. 5 years ago I could Google anything and was confident (maybe more than I should have been) of getting close to the best answer, whether looking for a product recommendation or just general knowledge. That confidence has seriously eroded the past couple years.
That said, I'm optimistic that we can keep finding solutions to new problems. Maybe it wouldn't be so bad to make purchasing decisions closer to the way we used to, by asking our friends what they recommend. That's essentially how appending " reddit" to a google search works today, but even that is vulnerable to manipulation.
I'm hoping that social media of the future builds in better tools for polling our network for recommendations, and for incentivizing us to respond to our friends' queries.
by phtrivier on 10/24/22, 1:10 PM
"90% of everything is crap" ; but, now, 'everything' is computer-generated, and therefore, infinite. I'll let mathematicians study the convergence, while physicists conclude that "everything is crap", give up and get a beer, and software engineers go back to fixing the other 90%.
by tkk23 on 10/24/22, 9:28 AM
How is this different from email spam? People will stop trusting random sources for books. Established publishers will make sure that only vetted authors are able to access the market. The only problem is that it's difficult for new publishers and fringe authors to enter the market.
by jgaa on 10/24/22, 6:01 AM
I think the problem is < fake books and > Amazons fundamentally broken reviews system.
Seems like the fake review bots are a lot smarter than the anti-measures applied by Amazon. And the fun part is that both parties are probably running on AWS ;)

by dEnigma on 10/24/22, 12:49 PM

Contrary to what the article says it IS possible to find information about NFP chemotherapy on the internet. E.g.:

  Of these patients, 44 were treated with HAIC and 20 with sorafenib. HAIC involved cisplatin (50 mg fine powder in 5-10 ml lipiodol) and a continuous infusion of 5-fluorouracil (FU) (1,500 mg/5 days), which is referred to as new 5-FU and cisplatin therapy (NFP). [1]

[1] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/29285366/

by freediver on 10/24/22, 6:03 AM
The 'book factory business oppportunity' trend spotted in the article is explored in depth in this excellent Dan Olson video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=biYciU1uiUw
It is a great and informative watch.
by Roark66 on 10/24/22, 1:33 PM
I disagree with the author on the below: >With GPT-3, we now have an infinitely-scalable technology that is years away from being able to enrich our lives, but is already more than capable of drowning out all remnants of authentic content on the internet. And because you can leverage this to earn money or sway opinions, that outcome is probably hard to avoid.
I can't speak for GPT-3 specifically as I haven't spent enough time with it, but it's open equivalent Bloom is very useful today. Author says it is far from being able to "enrich our lives". I think otherwise. The whole "AI revolution" definitely did enrich my life. It renewed my passion for programming in general. The possibilities are truly endless. From translation, to content summarisation and search. Then it is only a step away from enriching other people's lives with products that make them more productive, help them in execution of mundane tasks etc.
I think AIs like bloom will in not to distant time allow us to fix the Internet to how it was before all the shitty content generation replaced genuine content in Google for example.
Also, there is a huge potential to improve our understanding of what it means to think and understand complex concepts. For the very first time we have something that comes very close to such understanding. Something that doesn't have feelings, it can be cut, modified, transformed and studied in myriad of different ways.
Also, believe me when I say the next AI revolution will be with models like Bloom that will be able to run on the edge. This is currently impossible due to their size, but it is very likely we'll find methods to optimise them significantly.
Then there is potential application of such models to decision making. I bet there is ongoing research in that field right now.
Addressing the negative side, "ability to generate garbage content that looks good". The ability has already existed for advanced adversaries. Hostile nations can simply employ people to "generate content". Smaller players have lots of other (inferior) tools. Their content doesn't have to fool people most of the time. It just has to fool various algorithms. Even without advanced AI models the search engines and social networks have been loosing badly in this fight. Existence of those tools will improve the bad actors capabilities, but it will also give good actors the chance to innovate with something new.
by garyrob on 10/24/22, 3:46 PM
I would like to mention the concept of "Soulbound Tokens" as a way of attacking this problem. This is the subject of a paper this year by Vitalik Buterin (founder of Ethereum), E. Glen Weyl (economist/researcher at Microsoft Research) and Puja Ohlhaver.
Here's the abstract:
""" Web3 today centers around expressing transferable, financialized assets, rather than encoding social relationships of trust. Yet many core economic activities—such as uncollateralized lending and building personal brands—are built on persistent, non-transferable relationships. In this paper, we illustrate how non-transferable “soulbound” tokens (SBTs) representing the commitments, credentials, and affiliations of “Souls” can encode the trust networks of the real economy to establish provenance and reputation. More importantly, SBTs enable other applications of increasing ambition, such as community wallet recovery, sybil-resistant governance, mechanisms for decentralization, and novel markets with decomposable, shared rights. We call this richer, pluralistic ecosystem “Decentralized Society” (DeSoc)—a co-determined sociality, where Souls and communities come together bottom-up, as emergent properties of each other to co-create plural network goods and intelligences, at a range of scales. Key to this sociality is decomposable property rights and enhanced governance mechanisms—such as quadratic funding discounted by correlation scores—that reward trust and cooperation while protecting networks from capture, extraction, and domination. With such augmented sociality, web3 can eschew today’s hyper-financialization in favor of a more transformative, pluralist future of increasing returns across social distance. """
Here's the paper: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4105763
by sjamaan on 10/24/22, 7:01 AM
Isn't the "For Dummies" series some sort of trademark? I'm amazed they didn't get sued for using the name. Crap like this devalues the rest of the "for dummies" books.
by jakub_g on 10/24/22, 10:23 AM
Not exactly the same though related: IIRC there's another scam on Amazon where people self-publish some ebooks which are clearly gibberish, put a massive price tag on it, and use hacked accounts to buy them. Very low effort and essentially free money, because no physical goods are involved. It's been discussed here a year ago or so.
by warbler73 on 10/24/22, 6:09 AM
Wow! Fantastic article. With AI generated stuff I expect we are going to see 99% of the book market saturated with generated nonsense, then collapse as a market for lemons.
by Tade0 on 10/24/22, 2:38 PM
This is nothing new really.
The Bogdanoff brothers, before their time as rulers of France and the crypto world with a fair, but iron fist gained notoriety by publishing works which were largely gibberish:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bogdanov_affair
NFTs and the like were especially fascinating because it was a game of rock-paper-scissors in terms of cunning, meaning someone could be so cunning that they appeared gullible to those ostensibly one level of craftiness higher, so you never knew if someone was shilling something because they were that gullible or that cunning.
by krosaen on 10/24/22, 1:19 PM
A lot of this hinges on fake reviews. It seems like it should be a solvable problem, but then I read about things like scammers going so far as to actually order their bogus products to real addresses of unsuspecting people (not caring what the confused recipients do with it) just so they can get a "verified purchase" review. Maybe they get caught, but by then, the damage is done.
I bought an electric leaf blower off amazon a couple years ago - the reviews seemed authentic and it seemed like the obvious one to buy. The thing had the power of like two hair dryers - I took the time to write a negative review but by then the product no longer seemed to be listed.
by tommica on 10/24/22, 6:05 AM
Its a scary concept - internet and books being nothing but generated content is going to be a sad world.
by residualmind on 10/24/22, 9:46 AM
Even human-written content has become so bad it's sometimes hard to tell it apart from a Mark V. Shaney or Racter implementation. I mean, aren't our brains' language capabilites not just Markov chains on steroids, with billions and billions of inputs and weights? Why are we still using text-based content-generation algorithms? Can't we train some kind of AI to generate "good" fiction content? Like, for example, this: "Oh," said Lucy, peeping into the parlour, "is that our old friend, the fairy?" "Yes," said Mr. Bennet, looking up from his newspaper, "my sister has been entertaining you in the best way she can." "She has been telling me," said Mrs. Bennet, with a solemn laugh, "all about her doll's tea-party. I wish I had been there." "My dear," replied her husband, "I am certain that it has been her greatest enjoyment. And the little girl really seems to have had a very good time of it." "Not more so, I am afraid, than the other ladies. _They_ had none of the advantages of hearing the charming story.
by coldtea on 10/24/22, 8:32 AM
>I soon discovered that all the books leaned on the same central argument: value is an inherent consequence of scarcity. My rebuttal to that was simple: it’s an exception, not a rule. My kids’ doodles are scarce, but in a gallery, they wouldn’t fetch much
Well, how about "value is an inherent consequence of scarcity with respect to demand"?
by pelasaco on 10/24/22, 9:09 AM
the book has 4 stars at Amazon. Positive reviews. It highlights another rabbit-hole: The fake reviews
by parentheses on 10/24/22, 5:07 PM
There will come a time when only experts on a given topic will be able to separate fact from fiction.
I would expect that AI will get good at internally consistent content _first_, so this work would make sense on its own even if it’s nonsense in actuality. Talk about bubbles.
by DoneWithAllThat on 10/24/22, 1:14 PM
I find it to be pretty obviously ML generated. As in even the parts about NFTs are written in a style that is patently obviously not authored by a human. I’m sure the difference will become less noticeable over time but for now AI-authored prose is easy to spot.
by AaronBBrown on 10/24/22, 2:28 PM
Clicked expecting this to be about the history (https://officialrealbook.com/history/) of jazz fake books, which eventually evolved into the Real Book!
by n10c on 10/24/22, 7:15 AM
> I soon discovered that all the books leaned on the same central argument: value is an inherent consequence of scarcity. My rebuttal to that was simple: it’s an exception, not a rule. My kids’ doodles are scarce, but in a gallery, they wouldn’t fetch much. Alas, while this made for a solid Twitter quip, it wasn’t enough for an in-depth post.
Scarcity in economics refers to when the demand for a resource is greater than the supply of that resource. Your kids doodles aren't scarce because there is no demand for them.
How did the author read 11 books on NFT's and not know this lol? The books must have been all very bad or the article author just skimmed thru them.
Interesting article other than that tho.
by peter303 on 10/24/22, 7:38 PM
Submit GPT-3 written journal articles to vanity journals. They deserve each other.
by NotYourLawyer on 10/24/22, 1:26 PM
It reads like a lot of the auto-generated content / Amazon affiliate link farms that google ranks so highly when I search for product reviews.
Everything is awful online nowadays.
by ajot on 10/24/22, 1:58 PM
Totally unrelated to TFA, but to the (great, in my opinion) author: here's[0] an older prepping guide for non-crazy people. I understand that the author has published a book recently about the topic.
[0] https://lcamtuf.coredump.cx/prep/index-old.shtml
by tomglynch on 10/24/22, 6:05 AM
Has the same author published many other books?
by nix23 on 10/24/22, 11:52 AM
I have a book from amazon (it's about a Seawolf submarine) the book is so bad, the story so lame, and the mix of themes (music-taste with a rescue), kind of artificial...it's almost comical and i bet it's mostly written by a AI who cobbled text together...an absolute low effort book.
by M4v3R on 10/24/22, 6:03 AM
We knew it was coming once GPT-3 was released, but I personally didn’t think it will come so fast in a form of printed books.
I wonder how hard would it be to train a model that given a longer passage of text could tell with a high certainty that it’s machine generated?
by angry_octet on 10/25/22, 10:04 AM
Why have I not received GPT generated spam yet? Something that looks like a genuine email, but is fundamentally nonsense but with a link to click?
by B1FF_PSUVM on 10/24/22, 10:50 PM
"Spam begets (strong) AI" was my guess a few years ago. Of course it will be full-cycle, and we already have (weak) AI begotten spam.
by narahs on 10/24/22, 1:26 PM
And this is how publishers/publishing houses stand to gain a renewed relevance in a world of self publishing and digital platform technologies.
by gexla on 10/24/22, 8:03 AM
Edit: Commented in wrong browser tab. Apologies.
by jollyllama on 10/24/22, 1:57 PM
Any chance that it's at least partially non-english speakers using bad translator/thesaurus app output?
by ipeev on 10/24/22, 6:13 AM
What actually surprises me is that the author bought 11 paper books from Amazon about NFTs. You really need 11 books to understand or write about a single concept? It is a highly controversial ongoing topic. Those 11 books most likely become obsolete exactly on the day after they were written.
Good catch on the one fake book! But I am surprised it was only one. Maybe the author started from that one and will write about the others later.
by em-bee on 10/24/22, 7:29 AM
the big question this raises is: how will this affect self publishing and the need for an actual publisher.
i expect that publishers are able to avoid publishing junk like this and therefore are still able to offer some value. whereas self-publishing authors will have to fight to stand out on their own.
by masswerk on 10/25/22, 1:52 AM
So the important question is: are ML-models ready for influencer deals? ;-)
by beardyw on 10/24/22, 6:17 AM
Time to produce a book about fake books ... click.
by scyclow on 10/24/22, 3:24 PM
Am I the only one who thinks that reading all the "highest rated" NFT books on Amazon in an attempt to write a good-faith critique is hilarious?
by stingtao on 10/24/22, 7:01 AM
A book-formed content farm
by nextlevelwizard on 10/24/22, 6:13 AM
Off topic: Why is everything posted here all of a sudden begging for my email? It feels like every article I click after reading few sentences I get a box begging to sign up for some stupid ass mailing list as if after spending 10 seconds reading their words I had become a fan and absolutely needed more of their bullshit in my life.
If I am interested in hearing more about you, I will find a way to subscribe to your shit otherwise all you manage to do is to get me frustrated and leave.
This time I couldn't even get to reading, I opened the article and had to answer an IM. By the time I got back I was treated with full screen "Type your email to subscribe" box that couldn't even be dismissed without clicking small "Let me read first" link.
Why is simple blog design such ass these days? Why can't I just read the content without being bombarded with pop ups, pop overs, and other crap that has nothing to do with the actual content?
by thih9 on 10/24/22, 6:54 AM
Perhaps this book was written by the blog post author and this is an attempt at covert content marketing?
by deviation on 10/24/22, 6:01 AM
#1 on HN and no comments? I'm curious how the ranking system here works... Posts with the greatest # of upvotes per minute?
by HyperLinear on 10/24/22, 8:17 AM
> " I soon discovered that all the books leaned on the same central argument: value is an inherent consequence of scarcity. My rebuttal to that was simple: it’s an exception, not a rule. My kids’ doodles are scarce, but in a gallery, they wouldn’t fetch much. "
There isn't really a market for kids doodles, and with the barrier to entry being really low the supply is many orders of magnitude higher than the demand. So the central argument stays.
Not a great start of the article this.