The year is 2110, and two human writing powerhouses are pitched against each other in mortal confrontation. In Alexandria, Egypt, there's Writers' Street, where both seasoned and aspiring novelists type stories at street cafes, using self-invented codes in chromatic scales that they pluck on their guitars, in front of tourists and ubiquitous survtech that unwillingly--or not so much--witness. Others simply sing their tales. Not for the faint of hearing.
Off the shore of Italy, in Montecristo, the Benedictines have regained full control of the island. No Internet or AIs are allowed there, but their hospitality business rents mechanical typewriters by the hour. More than once, a famous writer has jumped from the island's cliffs, unable to bear the shame of being accused of using AI to produce their magnum opus.
For the unwashed masses, AI-produced literature is free and abundant. The discerning, however, have gotten a taste for manually bound tomes exclusively inked with the output of human brains.
GenAI that imitates human art is the definition of an anti-invention. If an invention is a new innovation that improves something for the human experience, an anti-invention is a new innovation that makes life worse.
This is just one of several areas where GenAI has been harmful and should start getting regulated like digital drugs.
I don't think that definition meets what people would consider an invention.
The AK47 is an invention. The inventor "would prefer to have invented a machine that people could use and that would help farmers with their work - for example a lawnmower", but people still consider it an invention. Inventions do not have a polarity in the axis of quality of life.
There is no consensus on if GenAI is overall harmful or not. In general people are optimistic but concerned.
The last thing we need is another war on drugs.
I would rate A/B testing on human behaviour, or advertising to be more harmful to the overall human experience than GenAI.
I think genAI has been strictly worse for humanity. It's destroying the quality of our industry, it turns creative fields into slop, etc. It is all downside and no benefit, in my opinion.
I think there are other digital technologies that are also a lot like drugs and deserve similar regulation. I.e. if your social media company decides it wants to be a platform and insert stuff to inflame you or generate more engagement....it's a drug, not a tool for social connection..
I think there are ways you could serve ads and make money as a business, just not as much money, and not be basically a drug. The social media giants choose not to do this of course and will have to be forced.
I am distinctly less libertarian/classically liberal/etc. than the average user of HN though. So I understand that this opinion is likely to get me downvoted. I prefer to think that I live in the real world and have seen the damage these things have caused and am not in a tech-only friend group bubble.
Social media still connects real humans to real humans (sure often badly and trying to profit from it at the expense of users). This however takes the other human out and plugs you into itself, which is a simulated average of humans based on their work taken without consent
> Amazon spends a lot of time and effort trying to prevent these [fake] books from getting posted,” Mary Rasenberger, the CEO of the Authors Guild, told me, “but it’s always a game of catch-up.”
Do they really? They take a cut; they have incentives to let people get scammed.
Yes, it's a naive assumption that quality of the presented material doesn't impact consumer behavior, if they get flooded with loads of garbage books and people can't find good book they enjoy they'll stop shopping at Amazon and it doesn't matter if they make money off the slop. It's the same reason Youtube has quality filters for algorithmic feeds, if the stream gets too polluted with bad videos people will watch fewer videos.
It's exactly the same process that's causing people to avoid expensive purchases on Amazon due to the number of fake products that have infiltrated their supply. People move on if they're sold a lot of bunk goods from a place.
I don't know. For years Amazon has had a fraudulent item listing problem to the point where it's hard to trust them. They have made no effort that I have seen to solve it. I mean, why would they, their sales haven't declined.
So, I am skeptical books will be any different than all those knock-off drop-shipped items.
I often trust AliEx more than Amazon these days. At least one of the two isn't pretending not to be what it is.
Plus Amazon has a long history of screwing over sellers. TL;DR if your product is actually successful, they'll make their own "Amazon Basics" version of your product, then deprioritize you (or even ban you over an excuse). They do this a lot. There's a lot more than just this, it's just an example.
I'd say that's hard to judge from the top line sales numbers, their broad sales could remain fine even when they lose larger rare purchases if they're bringing in enough new customers that are fine with only buying the slop.
And yet look at all the non-book products being sold on Amazon that are all garbage. Its the same slop problem and has been for a while, but they don't seem to be addressing that either. I have to assume it doesn't impact their bottom line as much as we think it should, consumers don't (or can't) care as much as we would hope.
sample size of one, but I cancelled my spotify after the non-stop AI music slop.
Not out of principle, but because it's so incredibly distinctive and annoying. There's the composition that's bad (it's like all soul and gospel which was fun the first few times but got really old), but also the actual sound quality on a lot of AI generated music is awful.
Same thing with anything that's AI written. I just can't do it. It's like really bad fanfiction where someone tries too hard with forced metaphors and really stitlted pacing.
There are a couple sound-quality based tells that I've noticed, off the top of my head
1. Usually weird little "flickers" of sound - like how a candle gives you mostly constant light but there are little flashes of bright and dark. AI generated music tends to have little distortions scattered throughout like that. As the models have improved they're less obvious but still absolutely there if you try to listen to any individual 'instrument' or 'track'
2. very low dynamic range - loud sounds and quiet sounds are much more similar volume than you'd expect from most real music, and things that are supposed to fade or taper-off in volume are unnatural
Hi-hats. When testing sound quality, pay attention to the hi-hats. Once you notice the shimmer introduced by audio compression to a hi-hat you can't unhear it, and for whatever reason AI generated music replicates this.
> Amazon lets individuals upload a maximum of six books a week, allowing for endless churn.
That's a book a day (give or take), per account. No human author is publishing a book per day.[0]
It's interesting to me how little the incumbent platforms for digital content seemingly have been able to do in combating the tidal, exponential shift in submissions.
I just spent a month developing a Shopify App, on the side, for fun. When I launched it a couple of weeks ago, I discovered an app doing the same thing as mine with an identical name had also been approved and released a week prior.
How do people think that distribution will change now that supply has increased (at least) tenfold? If the consensus on X.com is to be believed, it's all about personal brand. This used to be the case, but perhaps 80% of it. Is conventional discovery dead now?
[0] - If this includes organisations, like publishing houses, then fair enough. But realistically we should be able to distinguish actual authors.
> That's a book a day (give or take), per account. No human author is publishing a book per day.[0]
Note that it is 2 per week per format. So if you want to publish an e-book, print book and audiobook of your title, you can publish 2 titles, not 6.
Still more than most humans will typically sustain but it does change publishing patterns.
E.g. on Kindle+ (formerly Kindle Unlimited) a lot of people would publish short stories or short novellas. You absolutely can turn around more than 2 short stories per week.
The changes may push some writers to change what they write or bundle up stories.
> How do people think that distribution will change now that supply has increased (at least) tenfold? If the consensus on X.com is to be believed, it's all about personal brand. This used to be the case, but perhaps 80% of it. Is conventional discovery dead now?
For books, I'm hearing there are literary agents who now won't even sign anyone unless they have a sizeable social media following.
Conventional discovery for books will get you a very slow drip. But Amazon massively reward you if you publish lots and often by showing each of your works if someone clicks on one, letting you link series, and letting you do giveaways that are actually quite heavily promoted.
This, of course, incentivises people without a budget for promotion to push hard to release often. E.g. shorter titles, short-stories/novellas.
And that as noted above is being affected by the reduced limit.
> [0] - If this includes organisations, like publishing houses, then fair enough.
It includes anyone who is not large enough to get Amazons attention to get access to send them feeds directly.
I have a client that runs a small press, and basically their only option for Amazon is going via aggregators (and that too is relatively limited) and only pushing their top titles direct as until/unless they sell a lot more than they do now it seems they won't even get to talk to someone with any power to even escalate to anyone with authority to let them bypass KDP.
For e.g. Google on the other hand they got ONIX feeds set up no questions asked (ONIX is an XML format for feeding larger book catalogues to retailers) and pushed their entire ca. 200 book backlog right out of the gate. But Google e-book sales are tiny compared to Amazon - last I heard it was about 5% of their revenue.
The problem for Amazon - and for everyone else - is that for anyone but the biggest publishers Amazon is so dominant that most of the effort from people who want to push out high volume will continue to target Amazon.
I don't think the universal applicability of Sturgeon's Law necessarily leads to a contradiction here.
My incredibly, almost insultingly oversimplified model for what I, a lifelong consumer of text, feels is happening here goes like:
90% of culture is "bad". 10% is "good". Previously, we'd iterate on the 10% and (I remind you: oversimplified) discard the 90%, but `derive :: culture -> culture` still follows Sturgeon's Law, so at the next iteration, 90% is "bad" and 10% is good. But now what's happening is we're iterating on the whole sample, and a polished turd is still feculent. So in the next iteration, 90% + 90% of 10% of the culture is "bad". And so on.
Most content is slop, whether books or TV shows or movies or journalism.
That's why we have IMDB Top 250 lists, and books called "Classics". Curating collections and having taste has always been important, and is even more important now.
AI hasn't really changed that. There is good investigative AI-assisted writing today and there is also fully AI-slop fly-by-night websites made in 15 minutes with Claude.
We could just say "AI has destroyed trust" and it's accurate.
First hand experiences myself:
I can't commission an artist without questioning if they are using AI, which isn't acceptable in the projects I am commissioning for.
I can't trust that my coworkers are actually testing the crap they're generating before wasting my time with runbooks that aren't even validated. It was bad enough that people miss important steps with assumed knowledge, but now we have that amplified by these types of documents that are no being AI generated.
I can't trust that my code wont be sucked up by some money greedy company at speeds unheard of before and benefit someone with out any credit to me doing something novel or interesting.
Even worse, I can't trust the smart people to not be idiots either. How many engineers do you know that have completely outsourced all the thinking to the robot, while we know fully that it's closer to a slot machine than it is a thinking machine?
Maybe even worse than that is the companies thinking they can reduce 10% of their workforce and compensate with LLMs. It's absolutely laughable, because I witnessed it first hand. Company I worked at fired my recruiter and the guy that was going to be my boss before my start date. My onboarding was practically non-existent and nobody wants to train their newbies anymore. The fear of being axed from your job at the first thing that MIGHT make a profit is also high. To every company that retained me through their layoffs, joke is on them, people like me want to see stability and that's just fiscal irresponsibility they're signalling.
Just some thoughts to illustrate it's not just writing. Trust is destroyed in any creative and professional en devour at this point.
We pretty much never only judged the output. An oil painting is valued because it's an oil painting among other things. If people know you have worked on something for a long time, it's valued more than something you just came up with this afternoon. A chair crafted by a woodworker, even if it's worse in some ways, is valued over an IKEA chair produced in a fraction of the time.
Generative models are like outsourcing to cheap mass production factory, not an advanced woodworking tool in your basement.
Both of those things are visible in the output. An Ikea chair isn't denigrated because we're such snobs, but because it's made of inferior materials. If Ikea started selling solid hardwood bookshelves tomorrow at the same price as their other stuff, I'd be driving right over there!
No, because you can get indistinguishable hand painted oil clones of famous paintings from Vietnamese rep shops and they obviously sell for far less than the originals.
Barring AI generated art and prose assets is valid, if for example you don't want to have the AI generation marker on steam, or you object to the use of AI for various ethical reasons. Also there's apparently quite the market of motivated purchasers that want to signal their anti AI values by buying from projects that don't use AI.
"Maybe even worse than that is the companies thinking they can reduce 10% of their workforce and compensate with LLMs"
It's significantly dumber than that. Companies are paying to pour all of their domain and institutional knowledge, processes, and data into the training pipeline of tools their competitors use. Even better, they ignore the fact that as these tools gain competency the owners of these systems are guaranteed to start spinning up integrated industry verticals in direct competition.
Tried to tell that to my executive suite and they told me I was being ridiculous. Showed them OpenAIs "digital program management" for USG projects and it was like they suddenly went blind. Half a beat later it was like I never uttered a word and they were back to talking about "becoming a leader in AI." We're a fucking consulting company that can't even put small, hand written projects written by domain experts in front of the client because of our joke of an IT department. We're never going to credibly be "leaders in AI."
The charitable interpretation here is your executive suite all have exit strategies with < 2-5 year timelines. All alternative interpretations suggest profound incompetence.
Its the reverse turing test: can a human convince another human (or bot screener) that they are human?
We need legislation banning ai from imitating/impersonating humans and creating confusion about whats real. And people using ai to make their art need to label it or else theyre just plagarizing
I mean, even ghost writers arent making the world a better place
>I mean, even ghost writers arent making the world a better place
I think people should be allowed to put their name on anything, be that hired work or AI generated. It’s only their own credibility and good name at stake.
Sure, but I disagree when you’re selling that thing.
In a large society trust is necessary because you can’t know everyone. So I think it’s reasonable that at least if you’re selling something you can’t lie about it, including whether you wrote it or not.
And yes, I’m aware ghost writing is a long established practice and I think it’s always been deceitful.
This is multi-faceted and I agree that AI is destroying some levels of trust, but many of the publications on the Internet were never deserving of trust anyway so I'd describe it as formalizing or recognizing distrust or lack of credibility and, in a manner of speaking now that the tide is going out we can see who has been swimming naked.
One of the other facets is the idea that trust is now being lost due to AI. It's unfortunate that it seems that publications like The Atlantic (and others) are now going to scapegoat the lost of trust that they've earned over the last decade or so to be about AI when it's actually about bad, biased writing with a default point of view, and lack of intellectual honesty and an inability to facilitate intellectual debate and discussion.
As some of these publications continue to spiral into irrelevancy I think what is a bit tragic is they'll never really understand why. They'll blame AI, which will likely destroy all but the top-tier sites, but in reality the quality of the writing and honesty went down the drain next to their ad-filled garbage pages and other spam.
Things are ogre in the fanfiction and webserial scene. Everything written after 2024 REEKS of AI, and most of them, over 90% are obvious AI. It's very easy to spot if you're advanced reader, AI style has a lot of tells and idiosyncratic phrases (and please don't disclose them). There are meta tells as well: unrealistic output volume for a human writer, having a patreon for fanfiction, etc.
Well, this was all foretold in 2019 when OpenAI held back GPT-2, an
unusable model by today's standards, for fear of making misinformation
and fraud too easy. I remember when the internet, once the preserve for
businesses and universities, came to the home, and I said, wow, kids are
going to watch a lot more porn. As with any life-changing technology,
you take the good with the bad.
I don't think there ever was generic trust between writers and readers.
Trusting the written word just because it's written by someone or published by some newspaper was a huge mistake before AI was in the picture.
The trust was exploited by many actors with agenda - politicians, journalists, academics and just plain grifters publishing another "self-help" book.
You could get a glimpse when a newspaper, even a very respected one published an article about your domain of expertise - I am sure I wasn't the only one who realized that if an incomplete, simplistic or just plain wrong text could be reviewed and published then probably a big part of other work is of similar quality - you are just not in position to judge it so you naturally trust it.
Sadly the same goes for academic world - millions of papers gets published - a lot of them not worth the paper they are written on. You are just rarely in position to say.
What AI has done to it is actually a favor: it exposed what was always there but covered well enough to deceive big part of the population.
Now we need to reevaluate. Come back to fundamental mechanisms. Can the claims be verified? Maybe in formal manner. If not who the author or someone authorizing the text is. What did they achieve in their life? What experiences they have lived through? What work have they done? What incentives do they have to publish it? If you can't answer those questions the text is irrelevant as a source of information. It turns out not everyone is worth listening to.
It was always the case. It's just easier to see now.
Trust in media corporations died a long time ago, AI has just accelerated the trend. When human ‘journalists’ write to a script handed to them by the media’s editors and owners (eg ‘write articles that convince our readers to maintain their confidence in the <dot-com, subprime, AI> market’ or ‘write articles that convince our readers that <regime change, tariffs> is needed’), and the result is a debacle, then trust is eroded and questions arise about the journalist’s integrity and/or intelligence. Then the owners and editors find new fresh journalists to generate new stories to ‘restore trust’.
With AI, the editors and owners can just send their scripts to a machine and it’ll write the narrative as requested - but without a human face on that article. However, most readers would not accept such material as trustworthy.
There is another reason that AI reduces trust in media, which is that AI now makes it trivial to trace media ownership up the tree to the consequential owners, look at their other economic interests, and examine if the articles they print tend to favor those economic interests. Applying this analytical framework to the Atlantic itself is an interesting exercise.
Q1: Would it be entirely unfair to characterize the Atlantic as ‘yet another mouthpiece of the neoliberal project instantiated in the United States in the 1970s’?
> Ever since, I’d worried that the misrepresentation might somehow have a real-life impact
Doubt is good for the brain & mind.
But either the author is AI or she--Rachel Kadish, born in '69--needed something AI related to write about.
There is no trust between writers & readers. People either distrust and scrutinize or they like or dislike how the reading went. Some don't even judge but just shrug it off whatever impact the reading might have had.
The problem is that the AI conversation is reinforcing cultural polarity, especially among experts and people who are at least well enough off, so any methods to ignore the actual problems, which have been ignored in the past by most people almost by convention, are welcome and this article seems, at least to me, to be the result of one of these applied methods.
> There is no trust between writers & readers. People either distrust and scrutinize or they like or dislike how the reading went. Some don't even judge but just shrug it off whatever impact the reading might have had.
I interpret this more as an underlying social contract: Both writing a book and reading it used to be laborious. Now they're not.
Reaching out to an author about specific details used to mean you've deeply engaged with the work. Writing a book used to mean you spent lots of time understanding and writing about the topic.
Neither is now true, so it makes it harder to distinguish what's worth paying attention to.
I've definitely seen this happen with myself. When I shop for books, I do extra research into the author and publisher for anything published after 2022.
Agreed I also think, what unique perspective am I getting if it's just AI? If I want to know what AI thinks I could ask it myself, I want more diverse opinions.
> what unique perspective am I getting if it's just AI?
It is entirely possible for existing AI tools to introduce you to a perspective on something that is neither new or unique to the world, but which IS new to you.
Whether what represents is a wholly unique perspective or not is kinda irrelevant, so long as it's unique to you.
For example - most popular science or history books aren't offering up wholly unique perspective that nobody in that field of study has ever thought about before / ever committed to paper. Most of them are providing an engaging overview of widely studied topics in a way that is accessible and engaging to the average enthusiast.
Sure, the more in-depth your knowledge of a subject is the harder it is for those books to give you a unique perspective...but that is true of human authors too (as anybody who has read multiple books on the same subject will surely attest).
Also - without getting all Rumsfeldian...there are things you don't know that you don't know...and whilst with the right approach you could get AI to enlighten you, there can be value in someone/something having already curated that content together for you.
Just to be clear here - i'm not arguing in favour of AI books or suggesting they are as good/equivalent to human-authored books. I don't believe they are, i'm mostly questioning the logic that because Ai isn't producing some unique perspective it's therefore of no value).
> It is entirely possible for existing AI tools to introduce you to a perspective on something that is neither new or unique to the world, but which IS new to you. Whether what represents is a wholly unique perspective or not is kinda irrelevant, so long as it's unique to you.
True, but then the but then the question becomes why you bought a book instead of just asking AI yourself and getting a personalized version.
Buying an AI-generated book just puts an intermediary between you and the AI.
> There is no trust between writers & readers. People either distrust and scrutinize or they like or dislike how the reading went. Some don't even judge but just shrug it off whatever impact the reading might have had.
That suggests that writer reputation and the reader’s past experience are of no importance. But before you even get to read something, you have to decide to do so. On what basis? And how might a bad experience colour future decisions?
The year is 2110, and two human writing powerhouses are pitched against each other in mortal confrontation. In Alexandria, Egypt, there's Writers' Street, where both seasoned and aspiring novelists type stories at street cafes, using self-invented codes in chromatic scales that they pluck on their guitars, in front of tourists and ubiquitous survtech that unwillingly--or not so much--witness. Others simply sing their tales. Not for the faint of hearing.
Off the shore of Italy, in Montecristo, the Benedictines have regained full control of the island. No Internet or AIs are allowed there, but their hospitality business rents mechanical typewriters by the hour. More than once, a famous writer has jumped from the island's cliffs, unable to bear the shame of being accused of using AI to produce their magnum opus.
For the unwashed masses, AI-produced literature is free and abundant. The discerning, however, have gotten a taste for manually bound tomes exclusively inked with the output of human brains.
I just started reading infinite jest and I can't help, but wonder if that is what is coming.
GenAI that imitates human art is the definition of an anti-invention. If an invention is a new innovation that improves something for the human experience, an anti-invention is a new innovation that makes life worse.
This is just one of several areas where GenAI has been harmful and should start getting regulated like digital drugs.
I don't think that definition meets what people would consider an invention.
The AK47 is an invention. The inventor "would prefer to have invented a machine that people could use and that would help farmers with their work - for example a lawnmower", but people still consider it an invention. Inventions do not have a polarity in the axis of quality of life.
There is no consensus on if GenAI is overall harmful or not. In general people are optimistic but concerned.
The last thing we need is another war on drugs.
I would rate A/B testing on human behaviour, or advertising to be more harmful to the overall human experience than GenAI.
Delegating the thinking and feeling parts of the human experience, mechanizing human creativity itself, is a direct attack on human dignity.
It makes people dumber, less self-sufficient and (maybe worst of all) less interesting.
I was never going to be interesting or truly self-sufficient, anyway. As for dumber? Sure, I guess, at least about some things.
I think genAI has been strictly worse for humanity. It's destroying the quality of our industry, it turns creative fields into slop, etc. It is all downside and no benefit, in my opinion.
I think there are other digital technologies that are also a lot like drugs and deserve similar regulation. I.e. if your social media company decides it wants to be a platform and insert stuff to inflame you or generate more engagement....it's a drug, not a tool for social connection..
I think there are ways you could serve ads and make money as a business, just not as much money, and not be basically a drug. The social media giants choose not to do this of course and will have to be forced.
I am distinctly less libertarian/classically liberal/etc. than the average user of HN though. So I understand that this opinion is likely to get me downvoted. I prefer to think that I live in the real world and have seen the damage these things have caused and am not in a tech-only friend group bubble.
Social media still connects real humans to real humans (sure often badly and trying to profit from it at the expense of users). This however takes the other human out and plugs you into itself, which is a simulated average of humans based on their work taken without consent
> Amazon spends a lot of time and effort trying to prevent these [fake] books from getting posted,” Mary Rasenberger, the CEO of the Authors Guild, told me, “but it’s always a game of catch-up.”
Do they really? They take a cut; they have incentives to let people get scammed.
Probably the same amount of effort spent on trying to prevent fake SSDs and usb drives.
Yes, it's a naive assumption that quality of the presented material doesn't impact consumer behavior, if they get flooded with loads of garbage books and people can't find good book they enjoy they'll stop shopping at Amazon and it doesn't matter if they make money off the slop. It's the same reason Youtube has quality filters for algorithmic feeds, if the stream gets too polluted with bad videos people will watch fewer videos.
It's exactly the same process that's causing people to avoid expensive purchases on Amazon due to the number of fake products that have infiltrated their supply. People move on if they're sold a lot of bunk goods from a place.
I don't know. For years Amazon has had a fraudulent item listing problem to the point where it's hard to trust them. They have made no effort that I have seen to solve it. I mean, why would they, their sales haven't declined.
So, I am skeptical books will be any different than all those knock-off drop-shipped items.
I often trust AliEx more than Amazon these days. At least one of the two isn't pretending not to be what it is.
Plus Amazon has a long history of screwing over sellers. TL;DR if your product is actually successful, they'll make their own "Amazon Basics" version of your product, then deprioritize you (or even ban you over an excuse). They do this a lot. There's a lot more than just this, it's just an example.
I trust Temu more than Amazon these days. Exactly what I ordered shows up, on or before the expected delivery date, and works.
I get NVMes from them now, 2.5G Ethernet switches, and lots of other random items for a fraction of a cost of playing the Amazon lottery.
NVMes, and they're not fake? Your courage is impressive.
I'd say that's hard to judge from the top line sales numbers, their broad sales could remain fine even when they lose larger rare purchases if they're bringing in enough new customers that are fine with only buying the slop.
And yet look at all the non-book products being sold on Amazon that are all garbage. Its the same slop problem and has been for a while, but they don't seem to be addressing that either. I have to assume it doesn't impact their bottom line as much as we think it should, consumers don't (or can't) care as much as we would hope.
sample size of one, but I cancelled my spotify after the non-stop AI music slop.
Not out of principle, but because it's so incredibly distinctive and annoying. There's the composition that's bad (it's like all soul and gospel which was fun the first few times but got really old), but also the actual sound quality on a lot of AI generated music is awful.
Same thing with anything that's AI written. I just can't do it. It's like really bad fanfiction where someone tries too hard with forced metaphors and really stitlted pacing.
> but also the actual sound quality on a lot of AI generated music is awful.
I feel like I don't quite know what to listen for here.
There are a couple sound-quality based tells that I've noticed, off the top of my head
1. Usually weird little "flickers" of sound - like how a candle gives you mostly constant light but there are little flashes of bright and dark. AI generated music tends to have little distortions scattered throughout like that. As the models have improved they're less obvious but still absolutely there if you try to listen to any individual 'instrument' or 'track'
2. very low dynamic range - loud sounds and quiet sounds are much more similar volume than you'd expect from most real music, and things that are supposed to fade or taper-off in volume are unnatural
Hi-hats. When testing sound quality, pay attention to the hi-hats. Once you notice the shimmer introduced by audio compression to a hi-hat you can't unhear it, and for whatever reason AI generated music replicates this.
> Amazon lets individuals upload a maximum of six books a week, allowing for endless churn.
That's a book a day (give or take), per account. No human author is publishing a book per day.[0]
It's interesting to me how little the incumbent platforms for digital content seemingly have been able to do in combating the tidal, exponential shift in submissions.
I just spent a month developing a Shopify App, on the side, for fun. When I launched it a couple of weeks ago, I discovered an app doing the same thing as mine with an identical name had also been approved and released a week prior.
How do people think that distribution will change now that supply has increased (at least) tenfold? If the consensus on X.com is to be believed, it's all about personal brand. This used to be the case, but perhaps 80% of it. Is conventional discovery dead now?
[0] - If this includes organisations, like publishing houses, then fair enough. But realistically we should be able to distinguish actual authors.
> That's a book a day (give or take), per account. No human author is publishing a book per day.[0]
Note that it is 2 per week per format. So if you want to publish an e-book, print book and audiobook of your title, you can publish 2 titles, not 6.
Still more than most humans will typically sustain but it does change publishing patterns.
E.g. on Kindle+ (formerly Kindle Unlimited) a lot of people would publish short stories or short novellas. You absolutely can turn around more than 2 short stories per week.
The changes may push some writers to change what they write or bundle up stories.
> How do people think that distribution will change now that supply has increased (at least) tenfold? If the consensus on X.com is to be believed, it's all about personal brand. This used to be the case, but perhaps 80% of it. Is conventional discovery dead now?
For books, I'm hearing there are literary agents who now won't even sign anyone unless they have a sizeable social media following.
Conventional discovery for books will get you a very slow drip. But Amazon massively reward you if you publish lots and often by showing each of your works if someone clicks on one, letting you link series, and letting you do giveaways that are actually quite heavily promoted.
This, of course, incentivises people without a budget for promotion to push hard to release often. E.g. shorter titles, short-stories/novellas.
And that as noted above is being affected by the reduced limit.
> [0] - If this includes organisations, like publishing houses, then fair enough.
It includes anyone who is not large enough to get Amazons attention to get access to send them feeds directly.
I have a client that runs a small press, and basically their only option for Amazon is going via aggregators (and that too is relatively limited) and only pushing their top titles direct as until/unless they sell a lot more than they do now it seems they won't even get to talk to someone with any power to even escalate to anyone with authority to let them bypass KDP.
For e.g. Google on the other hand they got ONIX feeds set up no questions asked (ONIX is an XML format for feeding larger book catalogues to retailers) and pushed their entire ca. 200 book backlog right out of the gate. But Google e-book sales are tiny compared to Amazon - last I heard it was about 5% of their revenue.
The problem for Amazon - and for everyone else - is that for anyone but the biggest publishers Amazon is so dominant that most of the effort from people who want to push out high volume will continue to target Amazon.
Pre-2023 writing is the low-background steel of culture.
Oh... No it isn't... Everyone and their aunt was writing books about the JS framework of the month before that... Slop before the AI slop existed.
I don't think the universal applicability of Sturgeon's Law necessarily leads to a contradiction here.
My incredibly, almost insultingly oversimplified model for what I, a lifelong consumer of text, feels is happening here goes like:
90% of culture is "bad". 10% is "good". Previously, we'd iterate on the 10% and (I remind you: oversimplified) discard the 90%, but `derive :: culture -> culture` still follows Sturgeon's Law, so at the next iteration, 90% is "bad" and 10% is good. But now what's happening is we're iterating on the whole sample, and a polished turd is still feculent. So in the next iteration, 90% + 90% of 10% of the culture is "bad". And so on.
Most content is slop, whether books or TV shows or movies or journalism.
That's why we have IMDB Top 250 lists, and books called "Classics". Curating collections and having taste has always been important, and is even more important now.
AI hasn't really changed that. There is good investigative AI-assisted writing today and there is also fully AI-slop fly-by-night websites made in 15 minutes with Claude.
I maintain that the AI era is forcing us to finally build good filters.
Part of the outrage is so called high literary critics have been fooled at book prizes.
Maybe a revolution like the blind taste testing of fine wines needs to happen in literature.
Do you think that's the kind of book the article is about?
We could just say "AI has destroyed trust" and it's accurate.
First hand experiences myself:
I can't commission an artist without questioning if they are using AI, which isn't acceptable in the projects I am commissioning for.
I can't trust that my coworkers are actually testing the crap they're generating before wasting my time with runbooks that aren't even validated. It was bad enough that people miss important steps with assumed knowledge, but now we have that amplified by these types of documents that are no being AI generated.
I can't trust that my code wont be sucked up by some money greedy company at speeds unheard of before and benefit someone with out any credit to me doing something novel or interesting.
Even worse, I can't trust the smart people to not be idiots either. How many engineers do you know that have completely outsourced all the thinking to the robot, while we know fully that it's closer to a slot machine than it is a thinking machine?
Maybe even worse than that is the companies thinking they can reduce 10% of their workforce and compensate with LLMs. It's absolutely laughable, because I witnessed it first hand. Company I worked at fired my recruiter and the guy that was going to be my boss before my start date. My onboarding was practically non-existent and nobody wants to train their newbies anymore. The fear of being axed from your job at the first thing that MIGHT make a profit is also high. To every company that retained me through their layoffs, joke is on them, people like me want to see stability and that's just fiscal irresponsibility they're signalling.
Just some thoughts to illustrate it's not just writing. Trust is destroyed in any creative and professional en devour at this point.
> I can't commission an artist without questioning if they are using AI, which isn't acceptable in the projects I am commissioning for.
We've always judged the output, so why stop now. AI is just a tool. The artist still owns the output.
We pretty much never only judged the output. An oil painting is valued because it's an oil painting among other things. If people know you have worked on something for a long time, it's valued more than something you just came up with this afternoon. A chair crafted by a woodworker, even if it's worse in some ways, is valued over an IKEA chair produced in a fraction of the time.
Generative models are like outsourcing to cheap mass production factory, not an advanced woodworking tool in your basement.
Both of those things are visible in the output. An Ikea chair isn't denigrated because we're such snobs, but because it's made of inferior materials. If Ikea started selling solid hardwood bookshelves tomorrow at the same price as their other stuff, I'd be driving right over there!
Ikea does sell some hardwood furniture, though I don't know if any of their bookshelves are. But it's definitely within the realm of possibility.
No, because you can get indistinguishable hand painted oil clones of famous paintings from Vietnamese rep shops and they obviously sell for far less than the originals.
Barring AI generated art and prose assets is valid, if for example you don't want to have the AI generation marker on steam, or you object to the use of AI for various ethical reasons. Also there's apparently quite the market of motivated purchasers that want to signal their anti AI values by buying from projects that don't use AI.
> If Ikea started selling solid hardwood bookshelves tomorrow at the same price as their other stuff, I'd be driving right over there!
better go quick, they'll end up losing a lot of money selling more expensive furniture at a cheaper price...
> We've always judged the output, so why stop now. AI is just a tool. The artist still owns the output.
But we didn't. We relied heavily on a mix of trust and maybe occasional sampling. Having to verify everything is inefficient and exhausting.
"Maybe even worse than that is the companies thinking they can reduce 10% of their workforce and compensate with LLMs"
It's significantly dumber than that. Companies are paying to pour all of their domain and institutional knowledge, processes, and data into the training pipeline of tools their competitors use. Even better, they ignore the fact that as these tools gain competency the owners of these systems are guaranteed to start spinning up integrated industry verticals in direct competition.
Tried to tell that to my executive suite and they told me I was being ridiculous. Showed them OpenAIs "digital program management" for USG projects and it was like they suddenly went blind. Half a beat later it was like I never uttered a word and they were back to talking about "becoming a leader in AI." We're a fucking consulting company that can't even put small, hand written projects written by domain experts in front of the client because of our joke of an IT department. We're never going to credibly be "leaders in AI."
The charitable interpretation here is your executive suite all have exit strategies with < 2-5 year timelines. All alternative interpretations suggest profound incompetence.
http://archive.today/8sikZ
Its the reverse turing test: can a human convince another human (or bot screener) that they are human?
We need legislation banning ai from imitating/impersonating humans and creating confusion about whats real. And people using ai to make their art need to label it or else theyre just plagarizing
I mean, even ghost writers arent making the world a better place
>I mean, even ghost writers arent making the world a better place
I think people should be allowed to put their name on anything, be that hired work or AI generated. It’s only their own credibility and good name at stake.
Sure, but I disagree when you’re selling that thing.
In a large society trust is necessary because you can’t know everyone. So I think it’s reasonable that at least if you’re selling something you can’t lie about it, including whether you wrote it or not.
And yes, I’m aware ghost writing is a long established practice and I think it’s always been deceitful.
it seems like a slam dunk that we should own our likeness legally, but the scam lobby is very powerful at the moment
When reading takes more effort than writing, trust is inevitably a victim.
This is multi-faceted and I agree that AI is destroying some levels of trust, but many of the publications on the Internet were never deserving of trust anyway so I'd describe it as formalizing or recognizing distrust or lack of credibility and, in a manner of speaking now that the tide is going out we can see who has been swimming naked.
One of the other facets is the idea that trust is now being lost due to AI. It's unfortunate that it seems that publications like The Atlantic (and others) are now going to scapegoat the lost of trust that they've earned over the last decade or so to be about AI when it's actually about bad, biased writing with a default point of view, and lack of intellectual honesty and an inability to facilitate intellectual debate and discussion.
As some of these publications continue to spiral into irrelevancy I think what is a bit tragic is they'll never really understand why. They'll blame AI, which will likely destroy all but the top-tier sites, but in reality the quality of the writing and honesty went down the drain next to their ad-filled garbage pages and other spam.
Things are ogre in the fanfiction and webserial scene. Everything written after 2024 REEKS of AI, and most of them, over 90% are obvious AI. It's very easy to spot if you're advanced reader, AI style has a lot of tells and idiosyncratic phrases (and please don't disclose them). There are meta tells as well: unrealistic output volume for a human writer, having a patreon for fanfiction, etc.
Are you kidding me? For a general audience:
The absolutely fraudulent blog post to nonfiction "bestseller" pipeline already crushed nonfiction writing over the last decade or more.
Good fiction has always been niche. The rules are the same, read the best.
Well, this was all foretold in 2019 when OpenAI held back GPT-2, an unusable model by today's standards, for fear of making misinformation and fraud too easy. I remember when the internet, once the preserve for businesses and universities, came to the home, and I said, wow, kids are going to watch a lot more porn. As with any life-changing technology, you take the good with the bad.
I don't think there ever was generic trust between writers and readers. Trusting the written word just because it's written by someone or published by some newspaper was a huge mistake before AI was in the picture. The trust was exploited by many actors with agenda - politicians, journalists, academics and just plain grifters publishing another "self-help" book.
You could get a glimpse when a newspaper, even a very respected one published an article about your domain of expertise - I am sure I wasn't the only one who realized that if an incomplete, simplistic or just plain wrong text could be reviewed and published then probably a big part of other work is of similar quality - you are just not in position to judge it so you naturally trust it. Sadly the same goes for academic world - millions of papers gets published - a lot of them not worth the paper they are written on. You are just rarely in position to say.
What AI has done to it is actually a favor: it exposed what was always there but covered well enough to deceive big part of the population. Now we need to reevaluate. Come back to fundamental mechanisms. Can the claims be verified? Maybe in formal manner. If not who the author or someone authorizing the text is. What did they achieve in their life? What experiences they have lived through? What work have they done? What incentives do they have to publish it? If you can't answer those questions the text is irrelevant as a source of information. It turns out not everyone is worth listening to.
It was always the case. It's just easier to see now.
Trust in media corporations died a long time ago, AI has just accelerated the trend. When human ‘journalists’ write to a script handed to them by the media’s editors and owners (eg ‘write articles that convince our readers to maintain their confidence in the <dot-com, subprime, AI> market’ or ‘write articles that convince our readers that <regime change, tariffs> is needed’), and the result is a debacle, then trust is eroded and questions arise about the journalist’s integrity and/or intelligence. Then the owners and editors find new fresh journalists to generate new stories to ‘restore trust’.
With AI, the editors and owners can just send their scripts to a machine and it’ll write the narrative as requested - but without a human face on that article. However, most readers would not accept such material as trustworthy.
There is another reason that AI reduces trust in media, which is that AI now makes it trivial to trace media ownership up the tree to the consequential owners, look at their other economic interests, and examine if the articles they print tend to favor those economic interests. Applying this analytical framework to the Atlantic itself is an interesting exercise.
Q1: Would it be entirely unfair to characterize the Atlantic as ‘yet another mouthpiece of the neoliberal project instantiated in the United States in the 1970s’?
Internet already lost faith with paywall site like this.
And how could I trust if their article is not written by AIs at this point?
> Ever since, I’d worried that the misrepresentation might somehow have a real-life impact
Doubt is good for the brain & mind.
But either the author is AI or she--Rachel Kadish, born in '69--needed something AI related to write about.
There is no trust between writers & readers. People either distrust and scrutinize or they like or dislike how the reading went. Some don't even judge but just shrug it off whatever impact the reading might have had.
The problem is that the AI conversation is reinforcing cultural polarity, especially among experts and people who are at least well enough off, so any methods to ignore the actual problems, which have been ignored in the past by most people almost by convention, are welcome and this article seems, at least to me, to be the result of one of these applied methods.
> There is no trust between writers & readers. People either distrust and scrutinize or they like or dislike how the reading went. Some don't even judge but just shrug it off whatever impact the reading might have had.
I interpret this more as an underlying social contract: Both writing a book and reading it used to be laborious. Now they're not.
Reaching out to an author about specific details used to mean you've deeply engaged with the work. Writing a book used to mean you spent lots of time understanding and writing about the topic.
Neither is now true, so it makes it harder to distinguish what's worth paying attention to.
I've definitely seen this happen with myself. When I shop for books, I do extra research into the author and publisher for anything published after 2022.
Agreed I also think, what unique perspective am I getting if it's just AI? If I want to know what AI thinks I could ask it myself, I want more diverse opinions.
> what unique perspective am I getting if it's just AI?
It is entirely possible for existing AI tools to introduce you to a perspective on something that is neither new or unique to the world, but which IS new to you.
Whether what represents is a wholly unique perspective or not is kinda irrelevant, so long as it's unique to you.
For example - most popular science or history books aren't offering up wholly unique perspective that nobody in that field of study has ever thought about before / ever committed to paper. Most of them are providing an engaging overview of widely studied topics in a way that is accessible and engaging to the average enthusiast.
Sure, the more in-depth your knowledge of a subject is the harder it is for those books to give you a unique perspective...but that is true of human authors too (as anybody who has read multiple books on the same subject will surely attest).
Also - without getting all Rumsfeldian...there are things you don't know that you don't know...and whilst with the right approach you could get AI to enlighten you, there can be value in someone/something having already curated that content together for you.
Just to be clear here - i'm not arguing in favour of AI books or suggesting they are as good/equivalent to human-authored books. I don't believe they are, i'm mostly questioning the logic that because Ai isn't producing some unique perspective it's therefore of no value).
> It is entirely possible for existing AI tools to introduce you to a perspective on something that is neither new or unique to the world, but which IS new to you. Whether what represents is a wholly unique perspective or not is kinda irrelevant, so long as it's unique to you.
True, but then the but then the question becomes why you bought a book instead of just asking AI yourself and getting a personalized version.
Buying an AI-generated book just puts an intermediary between you and the AI.
Bingo. I read plenty of AI writing. My AI writes it for me. The way I like it. Usually along with obvious action items already drafted.
There may be a market for sharing useful prompt ideas. There isn’t one—broadly—for sharing the outputs.
> There is no trust between writers & readers. People either distrust and scrutinize or they like or dislike how the reading went. Some don't even judge but just shrug it off whatever impact the reading might have had.
That suggests that writer reputation and the reader’s past experience are of no importance. But before you even get to read something, you have to decide to do so. On what basis? And how might a bad experience colour future decisions?