My title might be a bit hyperbolic, but stuff like this worries me. I love to read and I love reading on a kindle. This has been going on for a while, but it has now reached absurd levels.

  • Hypx@kbin.social
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    1 year ago

    It’s the Dead Internet Theory in action. While it stays a conspiracy for the Internet as a whole, it is definitely true at particular websites. There are many communities which are just controlled by bots and have no real people there.

    • megopie@beehaw.org
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      1 year ago

      The goal for most of the investors in this tech is going to be to crow bar large language model nonsense in to every corner of the internet. At a certain point I can’t help but wonder if they are actively trying to ruin it.

      • CanadaPlus@lemmy.sdf.org
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        1 year ago

        There is no way a modern LLM wrote this stuff. Maybe a medium language model, or a really old LLM. It reads better than a Markov chain’s work, I guess.

  • megopie@beehaw.org
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    1 year ago

    This is going to be the real result of the large language model hype train, massive floods of basically worthless “content” made simply to pump metrics and fool investors.

    I’m not saying that there is no useful applications for the tech just that none of those are particularly marketable nor do they generate a lot of monetizable utility.

    And more importantly it’s not AI anymore than auto complete, spell check are. People insisting otherwise almost seem like they’re trying to start cults.

    • Baggins@beehaw.org
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      1 year ago

      This is my daughter at the moment. Just gone 21, at university studying Creative Writing. Thing is she was doing so well with Biology etc. Changed about 3 months into her first year. She’s had a couple of self published books on Amazon, nothing more than a dozen or so sales. She’s going to find it hard to find full time work etc. in her chosen field.

      • TheTrueLinuxDev@beehaw.org
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        1 year ago

        I thought about bringing up technical writing, then I realized that it’s a possibility that even that job isn’t safe within the next 5 years considering the promising development of Spiking Neural Net. This is something I would probably suggests to your daughter at this point that she should probably reconsider her chosen field and try to enter biology or some stable job.

        • Valmond@beehaw.org
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          1 year ago

          And work with AI not against it. I mean if AI can quickly make a filler chapter that can be tweaked, more time can be used to make it all get together etc etc. Or so I figure.

          • potpie@beehaw.org
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            1 year ago

            That’s a really good point. Use the AI to bridge gaps and for short segments. Probably a good way to get around some writer’s block.

          • potpie@beehaw.org
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            1 year ago

            That’s a really good point. Use the AI to bridge gaps and for short segments. Probably a good way to get around some writer’s block.

            • Valmond@beehaw.org
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              1 year ago

              Yeah for sure, but someone good at biology can surely handle AI, while other writers might not.

        • Baggins@beehaw.org
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          1 year ago

          Been there, done that. She has her own mind, so I’ll just have to get on board.

          Kids eh?

        • tanglisha [she/her]@beehaw.org
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          1 year ago

          I dunno, people have been trying to automate technical writing for at least 30 years. The results have been mostly garbage. I’m not sure an LLM is going to understand what’s going on any better than the folks doing this work now, it tends to involve lengthy discussions.

          • TheTrueLinuxDev@beehaw.org
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            1 year ago

            There are active researches on world model working alongside with llm. The idea generally is that llm is used for generating text, but world model provide more context for llm to understand the world.

            • tanglisha [she/her]@beehaw.org
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              1 year ago

              When you say “the world”, what do you mean? If it means the actual world, I don’t understand how that would help with technical writing. Plenty of people can get around in the real world but struggle to use Excel.

              • TheTrueLinuxDev@beehaw.org
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                1 year ago

                As in actual world, providing context to physics of things, providing logical association/evaluation, and so go on. It is basically something that supposed to help LLM get closer to understanding the “world” rather than just spewing out whatever the training dataset give it. It does have a direct implication for technical writing, because with stronger understanding of the things you wanted to write about in technical writing, LLM with World Model would basically auto-fill that.

                This is something that the researchers are pretty much all hand on deck working on to create.

                One example of the research involving this

      • livus@kbin.social
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        1 year ago

        I guess the silver lining is that academic creative writing is a bit of a pyramid scheme, so if she goes the route of writing “literary” stuff that gets published by her university press, she will probably be able to get work teaching creative writing…

        • SlamDrag@beehaw.org
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          1 year ago

          As someone who’s been there done that, this is the worst time to try and get into academics in the humanities. English departments are downsizing everywhere. There’s an incoming “demographic collapse” coming to higher ed by 2026 - i.e. birth rates went down between 2008-2011 by a large degree and that cohort is 25-30% smaller than previous years. A lot of small, tuition dependent colleges are going to fold. In preparation, non-essential departments are cutting people like crazy. STEM and business are money makers, English and History aren’t.

          Best thing you can do with a creative writing degree is go into corporate communications/marketing. Find a gig at an agency and do creative writing on the side.

          • funnyletter@lemmy.one
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            1 year ago

            I quit a PhD program in a social science and this is absolutely true of basically any field about which you cannot say “You need a degree in X to get that job”.

            Additionally, colleges and universities are increasingly not hiring tenure-track professors and instead relying on adjuncts to teach their classes. Adjuncts make almost no money, get no benefits, have no job security from one term to another, and often have to adjunct at multiple institutions simultaneously to make ends meet. It’s basically the gig-ification of post-secondary education and it’s awful.

            I quit my PhD because I loved the field but it was very clear I wouldn’t be able to live comfortably working in that field. Now I’m a programmer and I made more money at my first non-academic job than my PhD supervisor did with tenure and a decade of seniority.

        • Baggins@beehaw.org
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          1 year ago

          I think that’s her plan. She was a bit disillusioned with knock backs, until I sent her a list of 50 odd famous(?) writers that got rejected, some many times. Ernest Hemingway, Agatha Christie, J. K. Rowling, Isaac Asimov etc. That perked her up a bit ;-)

    • moon_matter@kbin.social
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      1 year ago

      I wouldn’t classify these books as real competition. Nobody was really prepared for this, but it’s a very solvable problem and there’s no market for books full of word salad. I can’t see Amazon or any store tolerating the existence of a product that doesn’t sell.

      • Jamie@jamie.moe
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        1 year ago

        What’s odd is that this isn’t an especially new thing in terms of possibly. Maybe if they wanted some veneer of viability for like, a paragraph or two, but any reader is going to catch on to what’s happening pretty fast.

        The titles are still nonsense enough that even a simple Markov chain could have made them. So I think the main issue at play is whatever they’re doing to exploit themselves to the top of the list.

    • somefool@beehaw.org
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      1 year ago

      Honest questions: What worthwhile alternatives exist already? If there are none, what can be done? What can be built to improve discoverability of authors while moderating what is visible?

      • tanglisha [she/her]@beehaw.org
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        1 year ago

        Libraries and some bookstores are great about picking favorites and putting blurbs about them right on the shelf.

        Powell’s always has great recommendations, I’ve found lots of fantastic new reads there. I wish everyone had access to one in person, I love that store so much.

    • Southrydge Freedom@vlemmy.net
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      1 year ago

      It’s honestly heartbreaking considering how much work it must be to write a book and how scary it is especially with so many influencers and celebrities in the market now already making it harder for real authors to get noticed

      • blindsight@beehaw.org
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        1 year ago

        The two communities I’m most missing from going cold turkey on Reddit are niche book subgenre subs. I used to check them daily for new book announcements and discussions, and I got literally all of my “fun” book recommendations from those subs.

        I guess they have a Discord group which is okay, but I’m not really interested in sitting in a chat room.

        So yeah, agreed. Discoverability is a huge problem for authors already, even before AI-written drivel starts filling the Kindle store.

        • hazeebabee@slrpnk.net
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          1 year ago

          What genres are you looking for? There are a couple good communities, but youre right, not nearly as big or as niche as most subreddits. Though ive found the reccomendations to be higher quality when i do see them.

          • Dusty@l.dustybeer.com
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            1 year ago

            For me it’s fantasy. Stuff like Dungeon Crawler Carl, Joe Abercrombe or R A Salvatore etc… If you have a suggestion for an active community that’s not on discord I’d love to hear it.

            • hazeebabee@slrpnk.net
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              1 year ago

              Hmmm I am more of a sci-fi person, but I’ve definitely still seen some threads talking about fantasy books. I’m guessing you’re already on the main book communities like books@lemmy.ml literature@beehaw.org ? They are pretty active and I do see discussion on threads talking about fantasy books. There is also the fantasy community fantasy@lemmy.ml – which does admittedly have pretty low traffic (though, you could be the change you want to see…). I found one niche community that was very recently made cozyfantasy@wayfarershaven.eu

              I get how hard it can be to find active book reading communities & wish I had more suggestions in the fantasy realm. If you have a specific sub genre in mind, search for it or maybe even make a community for it. I was surprised to find a few different scifi sub genres already had active communities on lemmy & even recently made communities are growing fairly quickly with the new users.

              Good luck finding your next page turner & lmk if you want sci-fi recs :)

              • Rekorse@kbin.social
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                1 year ago

                To be fair you don’t need that many people to commit to a session in a book reading club before it’s full enough to work. Anything more is just a bonus.

              • sgtlighttree@kbin.social
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                1 year ago

                Just a heads up, I think you should remove the exclamation points in your links, it resulted in a 404 for me before I removed them.

      • VoxAdActa@kbin.social
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        1 year ago

        This was a part of the equation when I decided to pursue traditional publishing instead of going the self-publishing route. I wouldn’t be competing against other authors for the attention of publishers, I’d be competing against an ocean of ghost-written get-rich-quick schemes and bots. Sometimes gatekeepers serve a real purpose.

        • jmp242@sopuli.xyz
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          1 year ago

          One thing we’re re learning is that curating content is necessary. Whether you pay a publisher by buying books they sell or crowdsorce via some website, it’s near impossible to just yourself go through the firehose.

  • quortez@kbin.social
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    1 year ago

    It really sucks that we’re facing the digital equivalent of climate change with regards to the internet and the content economy on top of the decline of the actual economy and actual climate change. It’s all so much.

  • Spudger@lemmy.sdf.org
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    1 year ago

    Anyone that buys anything from Amazon is also part of the problem. Support your local bookshop while you still can.

    • greenskye@beehaw.org
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      1 year ago

      I mean, most of my reading comes from authors who are literally only on amazon. And they’re only on amazon because it’s impossible to make a living trying to sell your book anywhere else. Brandon Sanderson has brought attention to this issue.

      I’m supporting indie authors in a sub-genre that you literally can’t even find in a physical bookstore. I get that bookstores are hurting, but I had to make a choice between small time authors and small time book stores.

    • moon_matter@kbin.social
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      1 year ago

      A store cannot survive on good will alone unfortunately. As much as I like my local bookstore, Amazon provides more content in more formats. It’s just better from every angle.

      • Spudger@lemmy.sdf.org
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        1 year ago

        Don’t worry, your utopian vision of streets full of closed shops and associated tumbleweed will be here soon enough.

    • aport@programming.dev
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      1 year ago

      I had kindle unlimited a decade ago and it was decent. Lots of good sci-fi and fantasy.

      Then overnight the entire catalog became “shape shifting billionaire stepbrother bear” and other trash. It’s like browsing your spam folder.

    • doctortofu@kbin.social
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      1 year ago

      So like the rest of Amazon then? Never used kindle, but Amazon for physical goods has been a dumpster fire for a while - completely overrun with dropshipped garbage, to the extent that it’s actually difficult now to find quality stuff in the sea of “brands” with random string of capital letter names, all using the same poorly photoshopped image…

      • macstainless@discuss.tchncs.de
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        1 year ago

        The kindle eink reader is amazing and absolutely great. However I don’t use KU and rarely buy books on it. I mainly use my library and read the borrowed books on it. As a piece of hardware it’s one of the few Amazon builds well. I’m surprised too.

        • Mummelpuffin@beehaw.org
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          1 year ago

          This. I own a basic Kindle because it only cost me $60, and while I could upgrade to a better e-reader from a less monopolistic company, it’d just be a bit of e-waste I don’t need to produce, and in the meantime Calibre + NoDRM / DeDRM means I can read books from anywhere on it.

  • goryramsy@kbin.social
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    1 year ago

    Remember the good old days when you could mod your kindle and download any book from Amazon servers? Lots of books got leaked that way.

  • sab@kbin.social
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    1 year ago

    If this indeed breaks Amazon then at least that is one silver lining of AI. It’s a shame indie authors are losing their platform, but they’ll find another.

      • sab@kbin.social
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        1 year ago

        There’s even a federated alternative, BookWyrm!

        …I guess these days the Fediverse is my hammer of choice, and every problem with the internet is a nail.

        • jmp242@sopuli.xyz
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          Unfortunately it is extremely sparse vs goodreads. Maybe someday it will catch up, but I really didn’t find it useful right now. Then again I am def a lurker on goodreads so where I read lists and reviews from doesn’t matter that much.

          • Mummelpuffin@beehaw.org
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            I guess what I don’t get is what were people using GoodReads for? Because I’m using BookWyrm to just track what I already wanted to read and use the review system as a way to sum up books for myself.

    • potpie@beehaw.org
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      1 year ago

      My guess is: adventurous readers who are intrigued by a small snippet, then figure it out on page 2 after they’ve bought it already.

      • fidodo@beehaw.org
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        1 year ago

        Judging by the article even the snippets are pure nonsense:

        Black lace pajamas, very short skirt, the most important thing, now this lace pajamas are all wet.

        It could be vastly improved upon with the new LLMs, but these are just complete rubbish.

        • greenskye@beehaw.org
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          1 year ago

          It’s surprising to me that they didn’t at least have a human write/steal the title and blurb. You’d think that’d work better than books with obviously gibberish titles.

          • fckgwrhqq2yxrkt@beehaw.org
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            1 year ago

            When your listing is written in a way only fools fall for you avoid the hassle of people that know better wanting to return things or complain. It’s the same concept as email scams.

  • Snapz@beehaw.org
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    1 year ago

    “Folding Ideas” does amazing work on YouTube around exposing grifters in well structured, long form explanations of their grifts.

    One of their videos looked into a group of growth hustler type folks, a pair of twins. Part of their scam was automating the process of creating fake books like this from start to finish to sell them online for passive income.

    Highly recommend anything this channel creates. Worth your time to have a focused sit to watch the journey unfold (especially if interested in the main subject of this post).

    https://youtu.be/biYciU1uiUw

    • ConstableJelly@beehaw.org
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      I fully second this. Folding Ideas is a first-class educator. I would still be completely in the dark on NFTs and Crypto without him, and “In Search of a Flat Earth” completely changed my perspective on flat earth adherents (i.e., I am much less amused by it).

        • ConstableJelly@beehaw.org
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          No secret, I just used to think they were being stubbornly dense, like goofy idiots. His video contended that it’s more malicious than that, born out of evangelical arrogance and an unfulfilled need to be smarter and more “moral” than everyone else.

          • argv_minus_one@beehaw.org
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            1 year ago

            I feel like I turned out similarly, except the exact opposite.

            To me, it’s really, really important to be correct. Not to think I’m correct, mind you, but to actually be correct. One of my fears, therefore, is to be wrong about something without realizing it, especially if other people do realize that I’m wrong.

            I wonder what that says about me.