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AI Is Already Killing Books

85 点作者 tschumacher超过 1 年前

44 条评论

wand3r超过 1 年前
This was a problem before "AI" and will definitely be a bigger problem going forward. That said, there are more great books than I could read in 100 life times published before 2020, so I doubt this will be an issue for me personally in practice. For current events or evolving knowledge like new science or technology, I would probably have that summarized by an LLM anyway as a preference. The author is really saying "AI is hurting authors".
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OskarS超过 1 年前
Yeah, not too worried. AI might kill the &quot;self-published Amazon eBook market of garbage genre novels&quot;, but honestly there&#x27;s very little value there. The suggestion that an LLM could write a Hilary Mantel novel, or a Robert Caro biography, is so far beyond ludicrous that it&#x27;s not even worth arguing.<p>I don&#x27;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?<p>&gt; Now that AI books exist, the probability that I will ever blind purchase another eBook on Amazon from an unknown author drops to zero.<p>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 &quot;sure, I&#x27;ll spend my hard-earned cash to make a 30 hour investment in this thing I know nothing about&quot;?<p>The best version of this argument you can make is that it&#x27;s about the treadmill: great writers aren&#x27;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&#x27;t get any more great writers. But I don&#x27;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.<p>Journalism, however, is a different story: <i>plenty</i> 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&#x27;s maybe a cause for concern. But I don&#x27;t think it&#x27;s an existential threat to literature as an art form. I don&#x27;t think that&#x27;s ever going to go away.
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drhagen超过 1 年前
The recent advances in LLMs have made me realize how important a signal well written English was to filtering content by quality. If the first few sentences were on topic, syntactically correct, and grammatically complex, it was worth skimming at least. This was obviously not remotely perfect, but it was pretty good. LLMs are blowing that up. They have not increased the amount of garbage on the internet (plenty of stupid people around to supply that), but they made it a lot easier to make garbage look superficially like it was thoughtfully written by an intelligent person.
tux3超过 1 年前
That&#x27;s not the first thing people might worry about, but this will also be a pain for archives.<p>When slop floods the library faster than it can expand, who will want to maintain that. I don&#x27;t think we have good enough sorting and rating (or good enough AI output detection) to prevent bookspam.<p>This is a point in history where &quot;record everything&quot; stops being viable, and we have to start hand-picking the text we want to survive. Indiscriminate things like Internet Archives stop being viable.<p>Why keep books, anyways? You can just ask the AI to re-generate whatever it is you want to read about on the fly.
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arketyp超过 1 年前
The argument seems to be based on the premise that books are picked up at random from the pool of all books in the world. (As if what constitutes a book is even well defined to begin with.) But his encounter with The Book of the Dead wasn&#x27;t random. It&#x27;s a classic. Such a renowned book in fact, filtered by time and intellects, that it could be found even in the library of a small Christian town in Ohio.
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alecco超过 1 年前
The signal-to-noise ratio in books of any kind was already quite bad. I used to read many books every year but now it&#x27;s less than 10. And one third I don&#x27;t like anyway. I got tired long ago of crawling GoodReads and all the forums. I don&#x27;t know what is driving a race to the bottom but AI had nothing to do with it. Perhaps the attention span and literacy?<p>In fact, I hope for an LLM service where I can schedule books as good as 10+ years ago.<p>Why would I buy some low-quality generic book on Amazon&#x2F;Audible&#x2F;etc? AI generated or not.
johngossman超过 1 年前
I was recently at a lecture where Ted Chiang talked at length about this. He said there are already so many books published every year that he doesn’t think it will matter. The talk was moderated by a bookseller who agreed vehemently.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.geekwire.com&#x2F;2023&#x2F;ai-chiang-bender-wishful-thinking&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.geekwire.com&#x2F;2023&#x2F;ai-chiang-bender-wishful-think...</a><p>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.
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SilverBirch超过 1 年前
I think you can kind of view this as a Signal:Noise ratio problem. Previously there were good books and bad books, but the signal to noise ratio was relatively high, it wasn&#x27;t particularly easy to write passable bad books and the bad books were a lot worse than the good books. So it was very easy to distinguish the good books from the bad and there were enough good books. Now LLMs have made bad books better - making it difficult to distinguish bad books from good books essentially raising the nosie floor, and made writing bad books easier - increasing the total noise in the system. This results in a much worse environment - it&#x27;s much more difficult to pick out good books from amongst the noise and there&#x27;s much more noise. Imagine someone rolled out an extremely popular new product that let people broadcast across the entire nation on FM radio frequencies with no way of stopping it. Suddenly FM radio is flooded with shit. What do you think would happen? People would just abandon FM radio entirely. Radio stations would give up - they can&#x27;t get to their listeners anymore because they&#x27;re constantly getting over-ridden by random people broadcasting, and listeners would turn off unable to listen to anything.<p>I think the same thing may happen here - some genres may literally just disapper because there&#x27;s no way to match readers with writers anymore in a way that&#x27;s economical.
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DrNosferatu超过 1 年前
It will be great for editors and content curators - separating the good from bad, genuine from synthetic. This will further emerge and be valued.<p>Reputations as “reliable quality content go-to points” will be made.
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grumbel超过 1 年前
It&#x27;s weird, I always expected AI categorization and search to arrive long before generative content. But despite a lot of research going into that direction, it never really arrived in the consumer space. Search today feels not fundamentally different than search 20 years ago and if I want to know about a movie I still use IMDb like it&#x27;s the 90s.<p>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.
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gmuslera超过 1 年前
It may kill the market of books, if it weren&#x27;t already badly damaged by publishers and editors. A lot of pre-AI books, specially on the latest years, were of bad quality, even recognized authors wrote bad books, but very extended, seeming more worried about selling words and pages instead of quality content. There were a lot of garbage already, and somewhere floating in that sea, some good books.<p>Curated books, even if they were written by AIs, could be a way to get out of this cycle, at least if editors&#x2F;publishers didn&#x27;t had all the incentives to lay a hand on it (Goodreads is a good precedent for this).<p>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.<p>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 &quot;need&quot; to read the book itself, and decide for a shorter activity. That won&#x27;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.
rendaw超过 1 年前
I was trying to get back into reading, and after re-reading a few books I remembered liking I went on Amazon and sorted Sci-fi books by popularity or rating or something. Basically nothing on the first page was classics, it was all novels I&#x27;d never heard of with AI generated covers.<p>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&#x27;t want to put the same effort into procuring a cover as writing the book. A lot of authors I think don&#x27;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.<p>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&#x27;t AI generated themselves (I can&#x27;t) I left thinking, yeah, I&#x27;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.
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bdw5204超过 1 年前
The main thing AI does is kill off blind purchases of ebooks from unknown authors. Reputable publishers won&#x27;t be publishing and bookstores won&#x27;t be stocking AI generated books so it&#x27;s mainly an ebook problem.<p>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&#x27;s heard of you, self publishing a book has always been a waste of your time. It&#x27;s just even moreso now because somebody is using the BS generator to write fake books and flood Amazon with them.<p>[0]: This doesn&#x27;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 <i>before</i> you write a book.
bsenftner超过 1 年前
Yes, in the next few years the entire pop book industry is going to decimated. Just like the nearly gone magazine industry. However, what evolves to replace it is going to be very interesting. Humans are social animals, we&#x27;re not going to stop communicating. Confusing prose? Will become a relic. Books that explain how to use some product or tool or adopt some behavior will become relics. LLMs will provide that learning resource. A hybrid LLM that tells a specific, intellectually challenging, Nobel quality narrative is what I hope is the result; it would be like talking to the survivor of an epic adventure, and you can both listen to the narrative as well as interrupt and ask questions. Likewise, new scientific theories would be published as an LLM that can explain at every level from Phd to 5 year old.
JoeDaDude超过 1 年前
Tangential, but those who love the language used in the Egyptian Book of the Dead, surely know about the opera Akhnaten by Philip Glass which used some of the text, both translated and in Egyptian. (Warning, opera, and especially Philip Glass&#x27; operas, are not everyone&#x27;s cup of tea. You may like it or hate it. The point here is to showcase Book of the Dead text).<p>Hear the opening verses in English here:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=hRyauSlnP54" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=hRyauSlnP54</a><p>Hear the opera scene in Egyptian with subtitles here:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=XENvMGyy4J8" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=XENvMGyy4J8</a>
bitshiftfaced超过 1 年前
Here&#x27;s a concept: on-demand, neverending AI books that ask you for feedback (and&#x2F;or take into account variables like reading speed, duration, etc.) and actively try to predict what you&#x27;ll find entertaining as you read.
JoeDaDude超过 1 年前
I can&#x27;t speak for Amazon&#x27;s, or any publishers policies, but there is at least one publisher screening submissions to hopefully filter out AI generated stories. That would be Clarkeworld, a science fiction magazine, who was famously overwhelmed with low quality AI-generated submissions, as was discussed on HN last year.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=35999896">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=35999896</a>
Karellen超过 1 年前
&gt; authors tried to eek out an existence<p>* eke out<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wiktionary.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;eke_out" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wiktionary.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;eke_out</a>
Subdivide8452超过 1 年前
I am hoping this gives publishers an important role of becoming the quality gatekeeper. The publisher has the relationship with the writer and ensures a certain level of quality. If a writer keeps coming up with nonsense (AI or not), they’ll cut ties. For me as someone who reads about 3-4 books a year, I don’t see an issue with this. It sucks for this indie market, but even before AI, someone had to plough through the shit.
mathgeek超过 1 年前
This seems like a space with a problem to solve: identifying AI-generated fiction and rating how much of a given work fits that classification.
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rchaud超过 1 年前
This post should be retitled to indicate that the author is referring primarily to &quot;Amazon self published&quot; ebook sector.<p>Authors today can&#x27;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.
nunez超过 1 年前
Did anyone else pick up on a condescending undertone off of this article towards people who don&#x27;t like reading? Reading this felt like the author was saying &quot;I love reading, and if you don&#x27;t, you&#x27;re wrong.&quot;<p>Regardless, this is the same argument as the one being made about AI taking artists&#x27; jobs.
pama超过 1 年前
As a distinct difference to personal computers replacing typewriters and the internet enabling self publishing, both of which transformed writing, AI is much faster than humans in reading and analyzing books and thus can also be part of a solution to problems from this new transformation in writing.
Axien超过 1 年前
In the past quality was maintained because it cost money to publish a book.<p>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.
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craigdalton超过 1 年前
Misses the angle that there are people with something important to say who have trouble writing - LLMs will help get them out there. An LLM can take some poorly expressed insights and developmentally edit the text.
paxys超过 1 年前
Self publishing is already 90% trash that you have to wade through to find a gem. LLMs will maybe make it 95% trash. So overall bad for the industry, yes, but not as game changing that people are making it seem.
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belter超过 1 年前
Looking forward to next LLM model trained on books written by LLM models....
actuallyrizzn超过 1 年前
Please, give me more &quot;AI is killing &lt;whatever&gt;&quot; it&#x27;s not tiresome at all.<p>Books were being &quot;killed&quot; far prior to AI.
somewhereoutth超过 1 年前
It may kill e-books, but nobody is going to go to the time and effort to print physical books written by AI.<p>If you want to read books, buy real books (or join a library).
al2o3cr超过 1 年前
Unless the LLMs have suddenly gained API access at Amazon, the correct title for this piece is &quot;SCAMMERS are CONTINUING to kill books&quot;.
randomdata超过 1 年前
<i>&gt; The book market relies on a vast army of unpaid volunteers to effectively sacrifice their time and wade through a sea of trash to find the gems.</i><p>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&#x27;t the problem.<p>AI <i>might</i> 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.
barrenko超过 1 年前
I guess the average ebook on Amazon written by a human is already pretty close to something a LLM would generate so...
keiferski超过 1 年前
I don&#x27;t like the equivalency of &quot;books&quot; with the sort of low-effort drivel that LLMs will replace. In reality, an LLM isn&#x27;t going to replace an author that is able to communicate a particularly unique viewpoint or experience.<p>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&#x27;s main &quot;business&quot; 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.
jstummbillig超过 1 年前
This is somewhere in &quot;think about the horses&quot; territory.<p>- AI will raise the floor in a lot of industries, more quickly than it will raise the ceiling. I don&#x27;t see a problem with that. Less garbage is nice.<p>- 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.<p>- 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.<p>- 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.)<p>- 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 <i>might</i> 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.
iammjm超过 1 年前
There&#x27;s already more good books than what you could read in your lifetime. Which means you have to pick them wisely. Which means good services that pick the best books for you are valuable. And: the key problem with AI here is the risk of drowning quality content in the sea of nonsense or, worse, disinformation. But it&#x27;s not limited to just books but content in general. So: let&#x27;s sharpen our focus to choose wisely what we consume and support content curators who preselect the best stuff for us
padolsey超过 1 年前
This suggests, more than ever, that human curation and review is absolutely crucial. The sad thing about this is that it just lends more power to monopolistic publishers and renowned critics and away from people who, without access to such esteem and networks, have to work tirelessly to produce self-published works. All in the hopes of earning a pittance and finding a way to thrive artistically within capitalism. It&#x27;s strange that AI, contrary to what true believers say, may not end up democratizing information, but instead it will make us more reliant on centralised and assured sources. Perhaps the journalism industry, and other ostensibly old fashioned institutional vestiges, are about to see a renaissance.<p>EDIT: Tangent: I run a book recommendation platform and am envisaging having to implement a pre-2021 lock-in&#x2F;time-freeze as my data is about to get massively polluted by the AI Boom.
tpmp313459超过 1 年前
Books - It&#x27;s doesn&#x27;t mean it&#x27;s the source with evidence. Books also has a message has bunch of lies and illogical theories to hallucinate the readers. Sapiens is one of the greatest fools book.<p>AI is really helpful in this case, reduce technical books, gives very short and sweet answers -&gt; This all we need either book or AI.<p>AI can&#x27;t become Adolf Hitler, so the view point of the Author still remains. AI can&#x27;t replace it.
throwaway4aday超过 1 年前
The article is mostly nonsense mixed with misunderstanding. There was a time before publishers where everyone essentially self published by paying a printer, that never really went away but what changed was <i>advertising</i> and <i>distribution</i>. If all a publisher did was print your book then it&#x27;d have the same chances of being read as if you had self-published. eBooks have had a mixed impact because they a) lowered the price and difficulty to self-publish and b) made wide distribution cheap or free but they did not have any meaningful impact on advertising. Introducing LLMs or any other form of automated production of content to the mix does not impact advertising either. All it does is increase the speed of production for everyone, good authors, amateurs and those looking to make a quick buck.<p>The author complains that they are finding bad content when they search for books. Guess what, that&#x27;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&#x27;t win any sympathy that they are also complaining about <i>free</i> books on Kindle Unlimited so they aren&#x27;t even cheated out of money, they simply lost a tiny bit of time since they indicate they can quickly identify machine generated content.<p>This<p>&gt; There is no feeling of betrayal like thinking you are about to read something that another person slaved over, only to discover you&#x27;ve been tricked.<p>and this<p>&gt; Part of the reason people invest so many hours into reading is because we know the author invested far more in writing.<p>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 <i>worse</i> in which case it is justifiable to criticize it but the same goes for an author who doesn&#x27;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.<p>&gt; Good writing kills its darlings. If you don&#x27;t care enough about a section to write it, then I don&#x27;t care enough to read it.<p>That is just not what that phrase means. &quot;Kill your darlings&quot; means to throw away parts that you care about, it&#x27;s literally the exact opposite of what they&#x27;re saying here.<p>Honestly just skimming the rest it seems the author does a lot of work to paint a picture but it doesn&#x27;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&#x27;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&#x27;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]:<p>- 500,000 to 1 million from traditional publishers<p>- 1.7 million from self-publishing<p>- 130 million globally<p>Once again, it&#x27;s a search problem. When you have 130 million new titles per year it really doesn&#x27;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 <i>only</i> thing that will impact the awareness and advertising side of the business. If you don&#x27;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&#x27;m afraid the thing the author is decrying is exactly the medicine they need.<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;wordsrated.com&#x2F;number-of-books-published-per-year-2021&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;wordsrated.com&#x2F;number-of-books-published-per-year-20...</a>
gumballindie超过 1 年前
AI is already getting killed, people being disgusted and annoyed by this garbage.<p>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.
summarity超过 1 年前
It’s essentially the next logical step in this grift: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtu.be&#x2F;biYciU1uiUw?si=_K1VAtnj-VRXCONQ" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtu.be&#x2F;biYciU1uiUw?si=_K1VAtnj-VRXCONQ</a>
mcphage超过 1 年前
People are posting AI grift books, but is anyone buying?
Donz1超过 1 年前
AI will come for everyone , last day i read about truck driver (copilot) will be replaced by AI and today this.
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Baldbvrhunter超过 1 年前
no it isn&#x27;t
softwaredoug超过 1 年前
(NM I&#x27;m an idiot)
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