by tschumacher on 1/6/24, 12:39 PM with 155 comments
by wand3r on 1/6/24, 1:37 PM
by OskarS on 1/6/24, 1:54 PM
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.
by drhagen on 1/6/24, 2:01 PM
by tux3 on 1/6/24, 1:46 PM
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.
by arketyp on 1/6/24, 1:56 PM
by alecco on 1/6/24, 1:57 PM
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.
by johngossman on 1/6/24, 1:55 PM
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.
by SilverBirch on 1/6/24, 3:10 PM
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.
by DrNosferatu on 1/6/24, 1:46 PM
Reputations as “reliable quality content go-to points” will be made.
by grumbel on 1/6/24, 1:43 PM
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.
by gmuslera on 1/6/24, 2:33 PM
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.
by rendaw on 1/6/24, 1:45 PM
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.
by bdw5204 on 1/6/24, 2:35 PM
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.
by bsenftner on 1/6/24, 1:48 PM
by JoeDaDude on 1/6/24, 2:09 PM
Hear the opening verses in English here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hRyauSlnP54
Hear the opera scene in Egyptian with subtitles here:
by bitshiftfaced on 1/6/24, 3:15 PM
by JoeDaDude on 1/6/24, 2:00 PM
by Karellen on 1/6/24, 2:25 PM
* eke out
by Subdivide8452 on 1/6/24, 9:49 PM
by mathgeek on 1/6/24, 1:40 PM
by rchaud on 1/6/24, 2:50 PM
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.
by nunez on 1/6/24, 2:18 PM
Regardless, this is the same argument as the one being made about AI taking artists' jobs.
by pama on 1/6/24, 2:01 PM
by Axien on 1/6/24, 3:04 PM
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.
by craigdalton on 1/7/24, 2:22 AM
by paxys on 1/6/24, 1:59 PM
by belter on 1/6/24, 1:38 PM
by actuallyrizzn on 1/10/24, 7:07 AM
Books were being "killed" far prior to AI.
by somewhereoutth on 1/6/24, 1:56 PM
If you want to read books, buy real books (or join a library).
by al2o3cr on 1/6/24, 5:21 PM
by randomdata on 1/6/24, 2:31 PM
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.
by barrenko on 1/6/24, 1:57 PM
by keiferski on 1/6/24, 1:46 PM
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.
by jstummbillig on 1/6/24, 1:58 PM
- 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.
by iammjm on 1/6/24, 2:18 PM
by padolsey on 1/6/24, 2:06 PM
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.
by tpmp313459 on 1/6/24, 1:53 PM
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.
by throwaway4aday on 1/6/24, 3:12 PM
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...
by gumballindie on 1/6/24, 3:33 PM
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.
by summarity on 1/6/24, 1:37 PM
by mcphage on 1/6/24, 2:32 PM
by Donz1 on 1/6/24, 1:28 PM
by Baldbvrhunter on 1/6/24, 1:36 PM
by softwaredoug on 1/6/24, 1:49 PM