8 ms·

AI Is Already Killing Books

85 points by tschumacher 3y ago

somewhereoutth 3y ago
It may kill e-books, but nobody is going to go to the time and effort to print physical books written by AI. If you want to read books, buy real books (or join a library).
actuallyrizzn 3y ago
Please, give me more "AI is killing <whatever>" it's not tiresome at all. Books were being "killed" far prior to AI.
Donz1 3y ago
AI will come for everyone , last day i read about truck driver (copilot) will be replaced by AI and today this.
- amelius 3y ago
  How much energy does a truck driver AI use compared to a human?
  - criley2 3y ago
    Energy is an interesting comparison. Perhaps we should look at $/energy unit, and compare those dollars to the full cost of hiring a human including time off and benefits and payroll taxes and everything. We should also consider that the human consumes a lot of energy that the AI does not: many truckers have PC's, TVs, consoles, etc in their truck and burn fuel to play video games during their off hours. I don't think we're going to replace truck drivers any time soon, but I'd be surprised if in say 30 years the vast majority of trucking wasn't automated.
    - hkon 3y ago
      But they would do that at home as well. So irrelevant. If anything they consume less energy than people in homes.
    - amelius 3y ago
      > Perhaps we should look at $/energy unit But then also consider the change in this price as energy consumption changes, as a result of jobs becoming AI.
  - the8472 3y ago
    Human energy consumption is highly variable. Especially when you do cradle-to-grave cost analysis. Are we talking about an average american truck driver? Or the ideal high-efficiency truck driver that is raised to only drive trucks, grows on agaragar and undergoes early depowering after its working years?
  - dist-epoch 3y ago
    How much energy does a human use in 18 years of training?
    - selimthegrim 3y ago
      There was a very good talk at NeurIPS this year that was comparing LLM training to amount of energy expended in building wonders of the world. I think this would’ve been a good thing to include too.
      - dist-epoch 3y ago
        A LLM trained once can be instantiated a million times, while each human instantiation requires individual full training.
Baldbvrhunter 3y ago
no it isn't
wand3r 3y ago
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".
- belter 3y ago
  Your post makes me sad. "The Value Of Owning More Books Than You’ll Ever Read" - https://clivethompson.medium.com/the-value-of-owning-more-books-than-youll-ever-read-3d60a6046994 https://clivethompson.medium.com/the-value-of-owning-more-bo...
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - ajdude 3y ago
    https://archive.ph/G7H9s https://archive.ph/G7H9s
    - belter 3y ago
      "...The writer Umberto Eco belongs to that small class of scholars who are encyclopedic, insightful, and nondull. He is the owner of a large personal library (containing thirty thousand books), and separates visitors into two categories: those who react with “Wow! Signore professore dottore Eco, what a library you have! How many of these books have you read?”* and the others — a very small minority — who get the point that a private library is not an ego-boosting appendage but a research tool. Read books are far less valuable than unread ones. The library should contain as much of what you do not know as your financial means, mortgage rates, and the currently tight real-estate market allows you to put there..."
      - throwaway4aday 3y ago
summarity 3y ago
It’s essentially the next logical step in this grift: https://youtu.be/biYciU1uiUw?si=_K1VAtnj-VRXCONQ https://youtu.be/biYciU1uiUw?si=_K1VAtnj-VRXCONQ
RcouF1uZ4gsC 3y ago
[flagged]
- goda90 3y ago
  The value in a piece of writing has always been first and foremost in it's words. Randomly hand scribbled lines are not really worth more than the parchment they're drawn on. Handwriting of actual words does give a boost either in rarity(codexes were just not that common) or the personal touch(a hand written letter specifically for you).
- esafak 3y ago
  It's not the labor; it's the fact that one contains information, and the other does not.
- snakeboy 3y ago
  Maybe I'm just being shortsighted, but I don't see that as a good comparison to this, since we read books for a deep exploration of an idea by the author, not just for the idea. It's not about the rareness, or physical quality of the binding. See e-books, even. The reality is that the LLM is not adding better analysis, it's just padding the length and fluffing. If the author was going to pad with LLM garble, he might as well have made a blog post and saved everyone the time. Of course that's less profitable...
- matwood 3y ago
  Not sure why you're downvoted. This appeal to human created is kind of silly. I've started plenty of terrible books created by humans. If AI makes good content, then what's the problem?
  - sidlls 3y ago
    We have yet to see if AI can produce good, new content the way humans can. I'd consider it a problem if mass-produced AI stuff makes it even harder to surface that content.
  - WesolyKubeczek 3y ago
belter 3y ago
Looking forward to next LLM model trained on books written by LLM models....
mathgeek 3y ago
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.
- lanternfish 3y ago
  The problem is that it's pretty easy to fine tune an adversarial model to fool classifiers. In some sense, building that classifier is a very productive way to improve the model, so it's something the generative side is already doing. That makes it hard to win the arms race from the classification side.
  - randomdata 3y ago
    But also the solution. With enough classify -> beat the classifier iteration, the works will be indistinguishable from human production, at which point there is no longer a need for classification.
    - lanternfish 3y ago
      This assumes that the limit is full generative parity, and not just a our SOTA classification techniques maxing out.
grumbel 3y ago
It'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's the 90s. 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.
- nvarsj 3y ago
  I think the issue is LLMs don't scale well to the level needed for search. They also have obvious latency. So generative usage seems to be the best fit at the moment.
  - grumbel 3y ago
    But you could feed the text through the LLM, generate a summary and a list of keywords, characters and locations and search through that the regular way. And as far as I can tell, that doesn't really exist yet. IMDb has a keyword feature[1], but that's still completely human-curated and quite useless due to that, as it just doesn't have the necessary depths and completeness to discover interesting new content. [1] https://www.imdb.com/search/keyword/ https://www.imdb.com/search/keyword/
rendaw 3y ago
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'd never heard of with AI generated covers. I dug a little into one of them and it sounds like it was an independent author (they posted about it on reddit) who I guess didn't want to put the same effort into procuring a cover as writing the book. A lot of authors I think don't have a lot of respect for visual arts and kind of see the cover as a forced labor to publish a book. TBH sci-fi book covers with abstract spaceships and rainbow nebulas are one of the easier things for AI to believably churn out. But I guess I kind of use the effort put into the cover as a way to gauge how much the author and publisher themselves think the work is worth. Even if I could be sure that the books weren't AI generated themselves (I can't) I left thinking, yeah, I'm probably never going to read again, because I have absolutely no metric, however bad any more, for guessing about the quality of a the book.
- dsq 3y ago
  I do this for blog posts, articles, emails, etc. If i suspect in any way they are AI created I close it immediately. The only reader AI deserves is another AI for the marketing side.
- k2enemy 3y ago
  > I'm probably never going to read again, because I have absolutely no metric, however bad any more, for guessing about the quality of a the book. Really? This might be the laziest thing I've read on HN. 30 seconds of Googling (DuckDuckGoing?) https://www.thehugoawards.org/hugo-history/ https://www.thehugoawards.org/hugo-history/ https://nebulas.sfwa.org https://nebulas.sfwa.org https://www.sfadb.com https://www.sfadb.com https://www.esquire.com/entertainment/books/g39358054/best-sci-fi-books/ https://www.esquire.com/entertainment/books/g39358054/best-s... (and tons of other lists like this) https://www.goodreads.com/list/show/19341.Best_Science_Fiction https://www.goodreads.com/list/show/19341.Best_Science_Ficti... (etc...) Yes, searching on Amazon might not be the best discovery method anymore, but there are also institutions that curate.
  - 3y ago
tux3 3y ago
That's not the first thing people might worry about, but this will also be a pain for archives. When slop floods the library faster than it can expand, who will want to maintain that. I don't think we have good enough sorting and rating (or good enough AI output detection) to prevent bookspam. This is a point in history where "record everything" stops being viable, and we have to start hand-picking the text we want to survive. Indiscriminate things like Internet Archives stop being viable. Why keep books, anyways? You can just ask the AI to re-generate whatever it is you want to read about on the fly.
- bambax 3y ago
  In France there is a law called "dépôt légal" that forces all publishers to send a copy of each new book to the national library for archiving. It's been in place since 1537. But ebooks are exempt from it. (Ebooks obviously didn't exist in 1537 but they've now been around for decades.) So unless AI is used to make books published via traditional publishers (which is of course possible, but somewhat unlikely), the situation doesn't change much as regards to archiving books (in France).
  - ajdude 3y ago
    I'm not sure of the situation in France, but this is starting to happen readily on Amazon. Lots of physical books you can buy that are completely AI-generated nonsense.
    - rchaud 3y ago
      Are those books from real publishers or from Amazon's Print on Demand service?
    - bambax 3y ago
      I should have been clearer; it's not just ebooks that are exempt, but anything without an ISBN. You can make a paper book with Amazon print-on-demand that doesn't have an ISBN, and then you don't need to send it to the dépôt-légal. Many people argue this is bad and should be changed. But it's debatable.
DrNosferatu 3y ago
It will be great for editors and content curators - separating the good from bad, genuine from synthetic. This will further emerge and be valued. Reputations as “reliable quality content go-to points” will be made.
- cj 3y ago
  > Reputations as “reliable quality content go-to points” will be made. Can you expand on this? Are you saying people will look for publishers like o'reilly in order to find reliable quality books? How is this different than today’s landscape?
  - DrNosferatu 3y ago
    Exactly: Today you expect the likelihood of a quality book title to be much higher from O’Reilly than, say, Packt Publishing. With the advent of AI Generated Books, reputable sources will count more and more than they already do.
    - mistrial9 3y ago
      sure, nice dream. Dream on! but there are some practical aspects that you totally ignore in this PollyAnna summary. Categorical listing of "problems" can go on for pages, and will be incomplete. Perhaps a few to start it off? * discernment requires effort.. someone has to make an effort, and do it effectively. In the city, time is money. Few to none in the "competitive retail markets" will seize the day to waste, making no money in discernment. Hollywood knows this for decades, and has many many ways to deal. "She knew a good movie from a bad one, and knew how to sell both" was an epitaph for a crooked Hollywood agent, who was murdered by mobsters in her 50s not long ago... * Publication incentives.. as noted many times here today, those who pay to advertise, do not have the incentives of discernment you are so confident in. * Security by Obscurity -- in a blizzard of new publications with new incentive and cost structure, you will apparently find the perfect snowflakes to promote to other snowflake lovers? maybe.. for a minute.. but look! more snow source: years in the book industry in a big University town before the Internet
    - 3y ago
keiferski 3y ago
I don't like the equivalency of "books" with the sort of low-effort drivel that LLMs will replace. In reality, an LLM isn't going to replace an author that is able to communicate a particularly unique viewpoint or experience. I do think, however, that book sales are going to continue becoming more dependent on author-as-person style marketing. Some of the most lucrative books in recent years were functionally add-on products to whatever the author's main "business" is, and the author themselves went on dozens of podcasts, etc. to tell their story. The days of being an unknown mass-market writer that mails a manuscript to a publisher then disappears, is probably over.
bsenftner 3y ago
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'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.
softwaredoug 3y ago
(NM I'm an idiot)
- Freak_NL 3y ago
  Did you read a different article? That is not what the author wrote about.
tpmp313459 3y ago
Books - It's doesn't mean it'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. AI is really helpful in this case, reduce technical books, gives very short and sweet answers -> This all we need either book or AI. AI can't become Adolf Hitler, so the view point of the Author still remains. AI can't replace it.
OskarS 3y ago
Yeah, not too worried. AI might kill the "self-published Amazon eBook market of garbage genre novels", but honestly there'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's not even worth arguing. I don't know who these people are that are reading books so bad that an LLM could plausibly replicate the work, but if that market is killed by a swarm of AI-written nonsense, honestly: who cares? > Now that AI books exist, the probability that I will ever blind purchase another eBook on Amazon from an unknown author drops to zero. This is a thing people do? Like... before AI? Not even reading extract or anything? You just see a cover and a title and go like "sure, I'll spend my hard-earned cash to make a 30 hour investment in this thing I know nothing about"? The best version of this argument you can make is that it's about the treadmill: great writers aren't born great writers, they have to write a lot of crap first to become great writers, and this market is how you do that. Take that away, you don't get any more great writers. But I don't particularly buy that either: there are very few writers I love that were able to successfully make a living selling self-published Amazon eBook garbage until they got good enough to actually be picked up by a publisher. Journalism, however, is a different story: plenty of great writers (fiction or non-fiction) got their starts as journalists and honed their craft writing small pieces there, and that is a market that is under total threat from AI. That's maybe a cause for concern. But I don't think it's an existential threat to literature as an art form. I don't think that's ever going to go away.
- wincy 3y ago
  I can tell you who is reading books every night that are absolutely terrible and don’t require a coherent plot! Children. My kids and I have been crafting a few sentences of some absurd plot then reading a story about it generated by ChatGPT. My daughter got so excited that she drew pictures of the Chicken Nugget and Cookie brothers and showed them to me after work, it’s like a choose your own adventure book but you can really actually choose your own adventure. Personally I find the stories vapid and boring but before I was reading some brain dead story about Ariel using her favorite Dinglehopper to brush her hair, so whatever. We are also reading Little House on the Prairie which I consider a little more “high brow”, and the girls really like that, too. But kids are easy to please and it has been interesting.
johngossman 3y ago
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. https://www.geekwire.com/2023/ai-chiang-bender-wishful-thinking/ https://www.geekwire.com/2023/ai-chiang-bender-wishful-think... I think the problem is curation more than generation. Amazon could do a much better job in general with poor goods showing up in their marketplaces.
- johngossman 3y ago
  Some sobering statistics here https://ideas.bkconnection.com/10-awful-truths-about-publishing https://ideas.bkconnection.com/10-awful-truths-about-publish... Summary: over 2 million self-published books each year in the US alone. Now think about blogs. But as a reader, I don’t find this much of a problem. Yes, I rely on book reviews and recommendations by friends and on author name recognition. But that seems a lot better than relying on advertisements and Amazon’s algorithm anyway. And it’s pretty much what people have done for centuries with bookshops and libraries.
arketyp 3y ago
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't random. It'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.
- jzebedee 3y ago
  It's a time investment for everyone involved to sift through enough cruft for these classics to surface. Generating orders of magnitude more of increasingly plausible cruft means that the human arbiters can spend a much greater time investment attempting to surface nuggets of human wisdom that simply aren't present. How do classics appear out of that environment?
barrenko 3y ago
I guess the average ebook on Amazon written by a human is already pretty close to something a LLM would generate so...
alecco 3y ago
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's less than 10. And one third I don't like anyway. I got tired long ago of crawling GoodReads and all the forums. I don't know what is driving a race to the bottom but AI had nothing to do with it. Perhaps the attention span and literacy? In fact, I hope for an LLM service where I can schedule books as good as 10+ years ago. Why would I buy some low-quality generic book on Amazon/Audible/etc? AI generated or not.
jstummbillig 3y ago
This is somewhere in "think about the horses" territory. - AI will raise the floor in a lot of industries, more quickly than it will raise the ceiling. I don't see a problem with that. Less garbage is nice. - Good writers will make use of AI to be better, much as they (and we in general) did with the internet, and so many other technologies before that. - If we can not tell good or bad apart, then we should be extremly suspicious in how far it actually matters, specially with everything that is not grounded in physics. Truth is fickle. Feeling ambivalent about things that can not be argued away by way of physics is probably a good thing on average. - Bullshit detection has always been an issue and will continue to be so. As far as I can tell, we have been getting better, not worse, at this (if you consider the absolutely monumental increase in total bullshit generation that we had to cope with over the past years.) - In the end, as per usual, despite all claims to the contrary, people will not care how it was made. All that will matter is if it does something for somebody. Note that how it was created might do something for somebody, or, more likely, a certain illusion of how it was made will be good enough and more economical. Over time the sentimental power will fade.
paxys 3y ago
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.
- ZiiS 3y ago
  If it was worth a human spending weeks writing the 90% trash. LLM make it economical for 99.999999% to be trash by next year.
  - coffeebeqn 3y ago
    I doubt it was monetarily worth it before expect for a handful of people with a following from somewhere like a blog
  - johngossman 3y ago
    Most writers write because they want to write and think they have something to say. Very, very few make money. Ted Chiang made this point in the lecture I linked to elsewhere in this thread
JoeDaDude 3y ago
I can't speak for Amazon'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. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35999896 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35999896
drhagen 3y ago
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.
pama 3y ago
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.
padolsey 3y ago
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'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. EDIT: Tangent: I run a book recommendation platform and am envisaging having to implement a pre-2021 lock-in/time-freeze as my data is about to get massively polluted by the AI Boom.
JoeDaDude 3y ago
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' operas, are not everyone's cup of tea. You may like it or hate it. The point here is to showcase Book of the Dead text). Hear the opening verses in English here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hRyauSlnP54 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hRyauSlnP54 Hear the opera scene in Egyptian with subtitles here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XENvMGyy4J8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XENvMGyy4J8
nunez 3y ago
Did anyone else pick up on a condescending undertone off of this article towards people who don't like reading? Reading this felt like the author was saying "I love reading, and if you don't, you're wrong." Regardless, this is the same argument as the one being made about AI taking artists' jobs.
Karellen 3y ago
> authors tried to eek out an existence * eke out https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/eke_out https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/eke_out
iammjm 3y ago
There'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's not limited to just books but content in general. So: let's sharpen our focus to choose wisely what we consume and support content curators who preselect the best stuff for us
randomdata 3y ago
> 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. In other words, the market already sees no value in books. If it did, the money would be pouring in for this type of work. AI isn't the problem. AI might be the solution, though. It is conceivable that AI could find a way to make books appealing to the market in a way that humans have failed to discover.
mcphage 3y ago
People are posting AI grift books, but is anyone buying?
gmuslera 3y ago
It may kill the market of books, if it weren'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. Curated books, even if they were written by AIs, could be a way to get out of this cycle, at least if editors/publishers didn't had all the incentives to lay a hand on it (Goodreads is a good precedent for this). Another way of get out of this may be to turn over the economics of books. Did you read something good, that enjoyed and considered that it was time well spend? Then consider paying for it. With digital distribution the cost of having more readers is nearly zero. AI or human written books, what in the end matters is how it was the experience for you. And maybe how much you trust in whatever made you to pick that book. At the start I thought that the article was about killing books as in the experience of reading books. Having AIs that somewhat had read already the book let you have a summary of what is discussed there, even have a discussion and analysis on the content, maybe even posing as the author or the main character or an expert on those topics. You may not "need" to read the book itself, and decide for a shorter activity. That won't be the end of books or reading them fully, but for some books, some topics, one approach may be better than the other. That may affect how books are written, or what are exactly books from now on. And shorter fiction like articles, blog posts and so on.
bdw5204 3y ago
The main thing AI does is kill off blind purchases of ebooks from unknown authors. Reputable publishers won't be publishing and bookstores won't be stocking AI generated books so it's mainly an ebook problem. The way to successfully write a book as an unknown author without a major publisher intent on making you famous is already to build a social media following[0] then leverage your social media following to promote your book.If nobody's heard of you, self publishing a book has always been a waste of your time. It's just even moreso now because somebody is using the BS generator to write fake books and flood Amazon with them. [0]: This doesn't just mean writing social media posts but could also involve things like getting published by magazines, doing podcasts, appearing on TV or even just doing Twitter Spaces. The point is to be a known figure by your target audience before you write a book.
rchaud 3y ago
This post should be retitled to indicate that the author is referring primarily to "Amazon self published" ebook sector. Authors today can't be invisible. They have to market their work, which they do by going on podcasts, giving media interviews, some kind of social media presence as well. This filters out most of the AI flotsam.
Axien 3y ago
In the past quality was maintained because it cost money to publish a book. 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.
- skydhash 3y ago
  And that’s why the apple store has better apps than google play. Paying $100 every year is enough to deter drive-by scams.
SilverBirch 3y ago
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'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's much more difficult to pick out good books from amongst the noise and there'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't get to their listeners anymore because they're constantly getting over-ridden by random people broadcasting, and listeners would turn off unable to listen to anything. I think the same thing may happen here - some genres may literally just disapper because there's no way to match readers with writers anymore in a way that's economical.
- aworks 3y ago
  I think there is still a place for filtering of physical books. Both bookstores and libraries do a reasonable job of presenting a set of potential books to read. I'm reasonably happy with the average physical book I read. That's much less true for ebooks. And I mostly buy books from Amazon that I've heard about elsewhere so don't depend on that filter as much.
  - SilverBirch 3y ago
    Physical bookstores are on the complete other end of the Signal:Noise ratio spectrum, you've got such an enormous cost of publishing that even quality isn't enough (and this is the old problem of book publishing) you won't get a physical book produced unless (a) you have a track record, (b) you publish it yourself or )c) you're a celebrity who is using their celebrity to sell books or (d) you're great and you sign a usurious deal with a book publisher. In the same way that the noise floor is becoming too high for eBooks, the quality threshold is too high for real books - (d) basically doesn't happen because you have to be so great and sign such a bad deal. Not least because publishers have consolidated into an effective monopoly.
throwaway4aday 3y ago
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 advertising and distribution. If all a publisher did was print your book then it'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. The author complains that they are finding bad content when they search for books. Guess what, that's a search problem not a problem with the content. Search is only useful if it returns relevant results. All this talk of betrayal and trust is just a symptom of crappy search or recommendation algorithms. It doesn't win any sympathy that they are also complaining about free books on Kindle Unlimited so they aren't even cheated out of money, they simply lost a tiny bit of time since they indicate they can quickly identify machine generated content. This > There is no feeling of betrayal like thinking you are about to read something that another person slaved over, only to discover you've been tricked. and this > Part of the reason people invest so many hours into reading is because we know the author invested far more in writing. are incomprehensible to me as they appear to be some subset of sadism that derives pleasure from someone enduring a form of hardship. Not quite the same since parts of creative work are enjoyable but still weird because any form of creative work will inevitably have large sections of difficult, tedious or just unpleasant effort that goes into it. Saying that something has less value to you because its creator used a tool to make the bad parts easier to do is just wrongheaded. The only argument that could stand is if the tool they use made their output worse in which case it is justifiable to criticize it but the same goes for an author who doesn't bother to edit his own work or to ask another person to check it and edit or takes other shortcuts like ignoring consistency or using tired plot devices or copying some popular style. > Good writing kills its darlings. If you don't care enough about a section to write it, then I don't care enough to read it. That is just not what that phrase means. "Kill your darlings" means to throw away parts that you care about, it's literally the exact opposite of what they're saying here. Honestly just skimming the rest it seems the author does a lot of work to paint a picture but it doesn't do much to support the argument. A great deal is made of the effort it takes to read a book and decide if it's worthy of recommending or selling in a book store. This just ties back to the search problem and is ironically a place where LLMs and similar ML tools could help a great deal since they can make for excellent classification and recommendation engines. It's pointless to complain about the volume of books since this was already an untenable problem with only human authors and the sheer weight of history. The author says that a book seller may read 80 books a year, certainly an accomplishment but absolutely nothing compared to the number of books published each year[0]: - 500,000 to 1 million from traditional publishers - 1.7 million from self-publishing - 130 million globally Once again, it's a search problem. When you have 130 million new titles per year it really doesn't matter if you make it 230 million or 1 billion if your solution is to chip away at it 80 titles at a time, you need automation. Fixing search and recommendation is the only thing that will impact the awareness and advertising side of the business. If you don't fix it then yes publishers will carry more weight for their ability to vet their authors but this is nothing new and was not meaningfully impacted by digital publishing as already established. I'm afraid the thing the author is decrying is exactly the medicine they need. [0] https://wordsrated.com/number-of-books-published-per-year-2021/ https://wordsrated.com/number-of-books-published-per-year-20...
bitshiftfaced 3y ago
Here's a concept: on-demand, neverending AI books that ask you for feedback (and/or take into account variables like reading speed, duration, etc.) and actively try to predict what you'll find entertaining as you read.
gumballindie 3y ago
AI is already getting killed, people being disgusted and annoyed by this garbage. 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.
al2o3cr 3y ago
Unless the LLMs have suddenly gained API access at Amazon, the correct title for this piece is "SCAMMERS are CONTINUING to kill books".
Subdivide8452 3y ago
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.
craigdalton 3y ago
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.

85 points by tschumacher 3y ago

It may kill e-books, but nobody is going to go to the time and effort to print physical books written by AI. If you want to read books, buy real books (or join a library).

actuallyrizzn 3y ago

Please, give me more "AI is killing <whatever>" it's not tiresome at all. Books were being "killed" far prior to AI.

Donz1 3y ago

AI will come for everyone , last day i read about truck driver (copilot) will be replaced by AI and today this.

amelius 3y ago
How much energy does a truck driver AI use compared to a human?
- criley2 3y ago
  Energy is an interesting comparison. Perhaps we should look at $/energy unit, and compare those dollars to the full cost of hiring a human including time off and benefits and payroll taxes and everything. We should also consider that the human consumes a lot of energy that the AI does not: many truckers have PC's, TVs, consoles, etc in their truck and burn fuel to play video games during their off hours. I don't think we're going to replace truck drivers any time soon, but I'd be surprised if in say 30 years the vast majority of trucking wasn't automated.
  - hkon 3y ago
    But they would do that at home as well. So irrelevant. If anything they consume less energy than people in homes.
  - amelius 3y ago
    > Perhaps we should look at $/energy unit But then also consider the change in this price as energy consumption changes, as a result of jobs becoming AI.
- the8472 3y ago
  Human energy consumption is highly variable. Especially when you do cradle-to-grave cost analysis. Are we talking about an average american truck driver? Or the ideal high-efficiency truck driver that is raised to only drive trucks, grows on agaragar and undergoes early depowering after its working years?
- dist-epoch 3y ago
  How much energy does a human use in 18 years of training?
  - selimthegrim 3y ago
    There was a very good talk at NeurIPS this year that was comparing LLM training to amount of energy expended in building wonders of the world. I think this would’ve been a good thing to include too.
    - dist-epoch 3y ago
      A LLM trained once can be instantiated a million times, while each human instantiation requires individual full training.

Baldbvrhunter 3y ago

no it isn't

wand3r 3y ago

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".

belter 3y ago
Your post makes me sad. "The Value Of Owning More Books Than You’ll Ever Read" - https://clivethompson.medium.com/the-value-of-owning-more-books-than-youll-ever-read-3d60a6046994 https://clivethompson.medium.com/the-value-of-owning-more-bo...
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- ajdude 3y ago
  https://archive.ph/G7H9s https://archive.ph/G7H9s
  - belter 3y ago
    "...The writer Umberto Eco belongs to that small class of scholars who are encyclopedic, insightful, and nondull. He is the owner of a large personal library (containing thirty thousand books), and separates visitors into two categories: those who react with “Wow! Signore professore dottore Eco, what a library you have! How many of these books have you read?”* and the others — a very small minority — who get the point that a private library is not an ego-boosting appendage but a research tool. Read books are far less valuable than unread ones. The library should contain as much of what you do not know as your financial means, mortgage rates, and the currently tight real-estate market allows you to put there..."
    - throwaway4aday 3y ago

summarity 3y ago

It’s essentially the next logical step in this grift: https://youtu.be/biYciU1uiUw?si=_K1VAtnj-VRXCONQ https://youtu.be/biYciU1uiUw?si=_K1VAtnj-VRXCONQ

RcouF1uZ4gsC 3y ago

[flagged]

goda90 3y ago
The value in a piece of writing has always been first and foremost in it's words. Randomly hand scribbled lines are not really worth more than the parchment they're drawn on. Handwriting of actual words does give a boost either in rarity(codexes were just not that common) or the personal touch(a hand written letter specifically for you).
esafak 3y ago
It's not the labor; it's the fact that one contains information, and the other does not.
snakeboy 3y ago
Maybe I'm just being shortsighted, but I don't see that as a good comparison to this, since we read books for a deep exploration of an idea by the author, not just for the idea. It's not about the rareness, or physical quality of the binding. See e-books, even. The reality is that the LLM is not adding better analysis, it's just padding the length and fluffing. If the author was going to pad with LLM garble, he might as well have made a blog post and saved everyone the time. Of course that's less profitable...
matwood 3y ago
Not sure why you're downvoted. This appeal to human created is kind of silly. I've started plenty of terrible books created by humans. If AI makes good content, then what's the problem?
- sidlls 3y ago
  We have yet to see if AI can produce good, new content the way humans can. I'd consider it a problem if mass-produced AI stuff makes it even harder to surface that content.
- WesolyKubeczek 3y ago

belter 3y ago

Looking forward to next LLM model trained on books written by LLM models....

mathgeek 3y ago

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.

lanternfish 3y ago
The problem is that it's pretty easy to fine tune an adversarial model to fool classifiers. In some sense, building that classifier is a very productive way to improve the model, so it's something the generative side is already doing. That makes it hard to win the arms race from the classification side.
- randomdata 3y ago
  But also the solution. With enough classify -> beat the classifier iteration, the works will be indistinguishable from human production, at which point there is no longer a need for classification.
  - lanternfish 3y ago
    This assumes that the limit is full generative parity, and not just a our SOTA classification techniques maxing out.

grumbel 3y ago

It'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's the 90s. 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.

nvarsj 3y ago
I think the issue is LLMs don't scale well to the level needed for search. They also have obvious latency. So generative usage seems to be the best fit at the moment.
- grumbel 3y ago
  But you could feed the text through the LLM, generate a summary and a list of keywords, characters and locations and search through that the regular way. And as far as I can tell, that doesn't really exist yet. IMDb has a keyword feature[1], but that's still completely human-curated and quite useless due to that, as it just doesn't have the necessary depths and completeness to discover interesting new content. [1] https://www.imdb.com/search/keyword/ https://www.imdb.com/search/keyword/

rendaw 3y ago

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'd never heard of with AI generated covers. I dug a little into one of them and it sounds like it was an independent author (they posted about it on reddit) who I guess didn't want to put the same effort into procuring a cover as writing the book. A lot of authors I think don't have a lot of respect for visual arts and kind of see the cover as a forced labor to publish a book. TBH sci-fi book covers with abstract spaceships and rainbow nebulas are one of the easier things for AI to believably churn out. But I guess I kind of use the effort put into the cover as a way to gauge how much the author and publisher themselves think the work is worth. Even if I could be sure that the books weren't AI generated themselves (I can't) I left thinking, yeah, I'm probably never going to read again, because I have absolutely no metric, however bad any more, for guessing about the quality of a the book.

dsq 3y ago
I do this for blog posts, articles, emails, etc. If i suspect in any way they are AI created I close it immediately. The only reader AI deserves is another AI for the marketing side.
k2enemy 3y ago
> I'm probably never going to read again, because I have absolutely no metric, however bad any more, for guessing about the quality of a the book. Really? This might be the laziest thing I've read on HN. 30 seconds of Googling (DuckDuckGoing?) https://www.thehugoawards.org/hugo-history/ https://www.thehugoawards.org/hugo-history/ https://nebulas.sfwa.org https://nebulas.sfwa.org https://www.sfadb.com https://www.sfadb.com https://www.esquire.com/entertainment/books/g39358054/best-sci-fi-books/ https://www.esquire.com/entertainment/books/g39358054/best-s... (and tons of other lists like this) https://www.goodreads.com/list/show/19341.Best_Science_Fiction https://www.goodreads.com/list/show/19341.Best_Science_Ficti... (etc...) Yes, searching on Amazon might not be the best discovery method anymore, but there are also institutions that curate.
- 3y ago

tux3 3y ago

That's not the first thing people might worry about, but this will also be a pain for archives. When slop floods the library faster than it can expand, who will want to maintain that. I don't think we have good enough sorting and rating (or good enough AI output detection) to prevent bookspam. This is a point in history where "record everything" stops being viable, and we have to start hand-picking the text we want to survive. Indiscriminate things like Internet Archives stop being viable. Why keep books, anyways? You can just ask the AI to re-generate whatever it is you want to read about on the fly.

bambax 3y ago
In France there is a law called "dépôt légal" that forces all publishers to send a copy of each new book to the national library for archiving. It's been in place since 1537. But ebooks are exempt from it. (Ebooks obviously didn't exist in 1537 but they've now been around for decades.) So unless AI is used to make books published via traditional publishers (which is of course possible, but somewhat unlikely), the situation doesn't change much as regards to archiving books (in France).
- ajdude 3y ago
  I'm not sure of the situation in France, but this is starting to happen readily on Amazon. Lots of physical books you can buy that are completely AI-generated nonsense.
  - rchaud 3y ago
    Are those books from real publishers or from Amazon's Print on Demand service?
  - bambax 3y ago
    I should have been clearer; it's not just ebooks that are exempt, but anything without an ISBN. You can make a paper book with Amazon print-on-demand that doesn't have an ISBN, and then you don't need to send it to the dépôt-légal. Many people argue this is bad and should be changed. But it's debatable.

DrNosferatu 3y ago

It will be great for editors and content curators - separating the good from bad, genuine from synthetic. This will further emerge and be valued. Reputations as “reliable quality content go-to points” will be made.

cj 3y ago
> Reputations as “reliable quality content go-to points” will be made. Can you expand on this? Are you saying people will look for publishers like o'reilly in order to find reliable quality books? How is this different than today’s landscape?
- DrNosferatu 3y ago
  Exactly: Today you expect the likelihood of a quality book title to be much higher from O’Reilly than, say, Packt Publishing. With the advent of AI Generated Books, reputable sources will count more and more than they already do.
  - mistrial9 3y ago
    sure, nice dream. Dream on! but there are some practical aspects that you totally ignore in this PollyAnna summary. Categorical listing of "problems" can go on for pages, and will be incomplete. Perhaps a few to start it off? * discernment requires effort.. someone has to make an effort, and do it effectively. In the city, time is money. Few to none in the "competitive retail markets" will seize the day to waste, making no money in discernment. Hollywood knows this for decades, and has many many ways to deal. "She knew a good movie from a bad one, and knew how to sell both" was an epitaph for a crooked Hollywood agent, who was murdered by mobsters in her 50s not long ago... * Publication incentives.. as noted many times here today, those who pay to advertise, do not have the incentives of discernment you are so confident in. * Security by Obscurity -- in a blizzard of new publications with new incentive and cost structure, you will apparently find the perfect snowflakes to promote to other snowflake lovers? maybe.. for a minute.. but look! more snow source: years in the book industry in a big University town before the Internet
  - 3y ago

keiferski 3y ago

I don't like the equivalency of "books" with the sort of low-effort drivel that LLMs will replace. In reality, an LLM isn't going to replace an author that is able to communicate a particularly unique viewpoint or experience. I do think, however, that book sales are going to continue becoming more dependent on author-as-person style marketing. Some of the most lucrative books in recent years were functionally add-on products to whatever the author's main "business" is, and the author themselves went on dozens of podcasts, etc. to tell their story. The days of being an unknown mass-market writer that mails a manuscript to a publisher then disappears, is probably over.

bsenftner 3y ago

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'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.

softwaredoug 3y ago

(NM I'm an idiot)

Freak_NL 3y ago
Did you read a different article? That is not what the author wrote about.

tpmp313459 3y ago

Books - It's doesn't mean it'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. AI is really helpful in this case, reduce technical books, gives very short and sweet answers -> This all we need either book or AI. AI can't become Adolf Hitler, so the view point of the Author still remains. AI can't replace it.

OskarS 3y ago

Yeah, not too worried. AI might kill the "self-published Amazon eBook market of garbage genre novels", but honestly there'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's not even worth arguing. I don't know who these people are that are reading books so bad that an LLM could plausibly replicate the work, but if that market is killed by a swarm of AI-written nonsense, honestly: who cares? > Now that AI books exist, the probability that I will ever blind purchase another eBook on Amazon from an unknown author drops to zero. This is a thing people do? Like... before AI? Not even reading extract or anything? You just see a cover and a title and go like "sure, I'll spend my hard-earned cash to make a 30 hour investment in this thing I know nothing about"? The best version of this argument you can make is that it's about the treadmill: great writers aren't born great writers, they have to write a lot of crap first to become great writers, and this market is how you do that. Take that away, you don't get any more great writers. But I don't particularly buy that either: there are very few writers I love that were able to successfully make a living selling self-published Amazon eBook garbage until they got good enough to actually be picked up by a publisher. Journalism, however, is a different story: plenty of great writers (fiction or non-fiction) got their starts as journalists and honed their craft writing small pieces there, and that is a market that is under total threat from AI. That's maybe a cause for concern. But I don't think it's an existential threat to literature as an art form. I don't think that's ever going to go away.

wincy 3y ago
I can tell you who is reading books every night that are absolutely terrible and don’t require a coherent plot! Children. My kids and I have been crafting a few sentences of some absurd plot then reading a story about it generated by ChatGPT. My daughter got so excited that she drew pictures of the Chicken Nugget and Cookie brothers and showed them to me after work, it’s like a choose your own adventure book but you can really actually choose your own adventure. Personally I find the stories vapid and boring but before I was reading some brain dead story about Ariel using her favorite Dinglehopper to brush her hair, so whatever. We are also reading Little House on the Prairie which I consider a little more “high brow”, and the girls really like that, too. But kids are easy to please and it has been interesting.

johngossman 3y ago

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. https://www.geekwire.com/2023/ai-chiang-bender-wishful-thinking/ https://www.geekwire.com/2023/ai-chiang-bender-wishful-think... I think the problem is curation more than generation. Amazon could do a much better job in general with poor goods showing up in their marketplaces.

johngossman 3y ago
Some sobering statistics here https://ideas.bkconnection.com/10-awful-truths-about-publishing https://ideas.bkconnection.com/10-awful-truths-about-publish... Summary: over 2 million self-published books each year in the US alone. Now think about blogs. But as a reader, I don’t find this much of a problem. Yes, I rely on book reviews and recommendations by friends and on author name recognition. But that seems a lot better than relying on advertisements and Amazon’s algorithm anyway. And it’s pretty much what people have done for centuries with bookshops and libraries.

arketyp 3y ago

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't random. It'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.

jzebedee 3y ago
It's a time investment for everyone involved to sift through enough cruft for these classics to surface. Generating orders of magnitude more of increasingly plausible cruft means that the human arbiters can spend a much greater time investment attempting to surface nuggets of human wisdom that simply aren't present. How do classics appear out of that environment?

barrenko 3y ago

I guess the average ebook on Amazon written by a human is already pretty close to something a LLM would generate so...

alecco 3y ago

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's less than 10. And one third I don't like anyway. I got tired long ago of crawling GoodReads and all the forums. I don't know what is driving a race to the bottom but AI had nothing to do with it. Perhaps the attention span and literacy? In fact, I hope for an LLM service where I can schedule books as good as 10+ years ago. Why would I buy some low-quality generic book on Amazon/Audible/etc? AI generated or not.

jstummbillig 3y ago

This is somewhere in "think about the horses" territory. - AI will raise the floor in a lot of industries, more quickly than it will raise the ceiling. I don't see a problem with that. Less garbage is nice. - Good writers will make use of AI to be better, much as they (and we in general) did with the internet, and so many other technologies before that. - If we can not tell good or bad apart, then we should be extremly suspicious in how far it actually matters, specially with everything that is not grounded in physics. Truth is fickle. Feeling ambivalent about things that can not be argued away by way of physics is probably a good thing on average. - Bullshit detection has always been an issue and will continue to be so. As far as I can tell, we have been getting better, not worse, at this (if you consider the absolutely monumental increase in total bullshit generation that we had to cope with over the past years.) - In the end, as per usual, despite all claims to the contrary, people will not care how it was made. All that will matter is if it does something for somebody. Note that how it was created might do something for somebody, or, more likely, a certain illusion of how it was made will be good enough and more economical. Over time the sentimental power will fade.

paxys 3y ago

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.

ZiiS 3y ago
If it was worth a human spending weeks writing the 90% trash. LLM make it economical for 99.999999% to be trash by next year.
- coffeebeqn 3y ago
  I doubt it was monetarily worth it before expect for a handful of people with a following from somewhere like a blog
- johngossman 3y ago
  Most writers write because they want to write and think they have something to say. Very, very few make money. Ted Chiang made this point in the lecture I linked to elsewhere in this thread

JoeDaDude 3y ago

I can't speak for Amazon'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. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35999896 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35999896

drhagen 3y ago

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.

pama 3y ago

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.

padolsey 3y ago

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'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. EDIT: Tangent: I run a book recommendation platform and am envisaging having to implement a pre-2021 lock-in/time-freeze as my data is about to get massively polluted by the AI Boom.

JoeDaDude 3y ago

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' operas, are not everyone's cup of tea. You may like it or hate it. The point here is to showcase Book of the Dead text). Hear the opening verses in English here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hRyauSlnP54 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hRyauSlnP54 Hear the opera scene in Egyptian with subtitles here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XENvMGyy4J8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XENvMGyy4J8

nunez 3y ago

Did anyone else pick up on a condescending undertone off of this article towards people who don't like reading? Reading this felt like the author was saying "I love reading, and if you don't, you're wrong." Regardless, this is the same argument as the one being made about AI taking artists' jobs.

Karellen 3y ago

> authors tried to eek out an existence * eke out https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/eke_out https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/eke_out

iammjm 3y ago

There'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's not limited to just books but content in general. So: let's sharpen our focus to choose wisely what we consume and support content curators who preselect the best stuff for us

randomdata 3y ago

> 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. In other words, the market already sees no value in books. If it did, the money would be pouring in for this type of work. AI isn't the problem. AI might be the solution, though. It is conceivable that AI could find a way to make books appealing to the market in a way that humans have failed to discover.

mcphage 3y ago

People are posting AI grift books, but is anyone buying?

gmuslera 3y ago

It may kill the market of books, if it weren'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. Curated books, even if they were written by AIs, could be a way to get out of this cycle, at least if editors/publishers didn't had all the incentives to lay a hand on it (Goodreads is a good precedent for this). Another way of get out of this may be to turn over the economics of books. Did you read something good, that enjoyed and considered that it was time well spend? Then consider paying for it. With digital distribution the cost of having more readers is nearly zero. AI or human written books, what in the end matters is how it was the experience for you. And maybe how much you trust in whatever made you to pick that book. At the start I thought that the article was about killing books as in the experience of reading books. Having AIs that somewhat had read already the book let you have a summary of what is discussed there, even have a discussion and analysis on the content, maybe even posing as the author or the main character or an expert on those topics. You may not "need" to read the book itself, and decide for a shorter activity. That won't be the end of books or reading them fully, but for some books, some topics, one approach may be better than the other. That may affect how books are written, or what are exactly books from now on. And shorter fiction like articles, blog posts and so on.

bdw5204 3y ago

The main thing AI does is kill off blind purchases of ebooks from unknown authors. Reputable publishers won't be publishing and bookstores won't be stocking AI generated books so it's mainly an ebook problem. The way to successfully write a book as an unknown author without a major publisher intent on making you famous is already to build a social media following[0] then leverage your social media following to promote your book.If nobody's heard of you, self publishing a book has always been a waste of your time. It's just even moreso now because somebody is using the BS generator to write fake books and flood Amazon with them. [0]: This doesn't just mean writing social media posts but could also involve things like getting published by magazines, doing podcasts, appearing on TV or even just doing Twitter Spaces. The point is to be a known figure by your target audience before you write a book.

rchaud 3y ago

This post should be retitled to indicate that the author is referring primarily to "Amazon self published" ebook sector. Authors today can't be invisible. They have to market their work, which they do by going on podcasts, giving media interviews, some kind of social media presence as well. This filters out most of the AI flotsam.

Axien 3y ago

In the past quality was maintained because it cost money to publish a book. 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.

skydhash 3y ago
And that’s why the apple store has better apps than google play. Paying $100 every year is enough to deter drive-by scams.

SilverBirch 3y ago

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'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's much more difficult to pick out good books from amongst the noise and there'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't get to their listeners anymore because they're constantly getting over-ridden by random people broadcasting, and listeners would turn off unable to listen to anything. I think the same thing may happen here - some genres may literally just disapper because there's no way to match readers with writers anymore in a way that's economical.

aworks 3y ago
I think there is still a place for filtering of physical books. Both bookstores and libraries do a reasonable job of presenting a set of potential books to read. I'm reasonably happy with the average physical book I read. That's much less true for ebooks. And I mostly buy books from Amazon that I've heard about elsewhere so don't depend on that filter as much.
- SilverBirch 3y ago
  Physical bookstores are on the complete other end of the Signal:Noise ratio spectrum, you've got such an enormous cost of publishing that even quality isn't enough (and this is the old problem of book publishing) you won't get a physical book produced unless (a) you have a track record, (b) you publish it yourself or )c) you're a celebrity who is using their celebrity to sell books or (d) you're great and you sign a usurious deal with a book publisher. In the same way that the noise floor is becoming too high for eBooks, the quality threshold is too high for real books - (d) basically doesn't happen because you have to be so great and sign such a bad deal. Not least because publishers have consolidated into an effective monopoly.

throwaway4aday 3y ago

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 advertising and distribution. If all a publisher did was print your book then it'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. The author complains that they are finding bad content when they search for books. Guess what, that's a search problem not a problem with the content. Search is only useful if it returns relevant results. All this talk of betrayal and trust is just a symptom of crappy search or recommendation algorithms. It doesn't win any sympathy that they are also complaining about free books on Kindle Unlimited so they aren't even cheated out of money, they simply lost a tiny bit of time since they indicate they can quickly identify machine generated content. This > There is no feeling of betrayal like thinking you are about to read something that another person slaved over, only to discover you've been tricked. and this > Part of the reason people invest so many hours into reading is because we know the author invested far more in writing. are incomprehensible to me as they appear to be some subset of sadism that derives pleasure from someone enduring a form of hardship. Not quite the same since parts of creative work are enjoyable but still weird because any form of creative work will inevitably have large sections of difficult, tedious or just unpleasant effort that goes into it. Saying that something has less value to you because its creator used a tool to make the bad parts easier to do is just wrongheaded. The only argument that could stand is if the tool they use made their output worse in which case it is justifiable to criticize it but the same goes for an author who doesn't bother to edit his own work or to ask another person to check it and edit or takes other shortcuts like ignoring consistency or using tired plot devices or copying some popular style. > Good writing kills its darlings. If you don't care enough about a section to write it, then I don't care enough to read it. That is just not what that phrase means. "Kill your darlings" means to throw away parts that you care about, it's literally the exact opposite of what they're saying here. Honestly just skimming the rest it seems the author does a lot of work to paint a picture but it doesn't do much to support the argument. A great deal is made of the effort it takes to read a book and decide if it's worthy of recommending or selling in a book store. This just ties back to the search problem and is ironically a place where LLMs and similar ML tools could help a great deal since they can make for excellent classification and recommendation engines. It's pointless to complain about the volume of books since this was already an untenable problem with only human authors and the sheer weight of history. The author says that a book seller may read 80 books a year, certainly an accomplishment but absolutely nothing compared to the number of books published each year[0]: - 500,000 to 1 million from traditional publishers - 1.7 million from self-publishing - 130 million globally Once again, it's a search problem. When you have 130 million new titles per year it really doesn't matter if you make it 230 million or 1 billion if your solution is to chip away at it 80 titles at a time, you need automation. Fixing search and recommendation is the only thing that will impact the awareness and advertising side of the business. If you don't fix it then yes publishers will carry more weight for their ability to vet their authors but this is nothing new and was not meaningfully impacted by digital publishing as already established. I'm afraid the thing the author is decrying is exactly the medicine they need. [0] https://wordsrated.com/number-of-books-published-per-year-2021/ https://wordsrated.com/number-of-books-published-per-year-20...

bitshiftfaced 3y ago

Here's a concept: on-demand, neverending AI books that ask you for feedback (and/or take into account variables like reading speed, duration, etc.) and actively try to predict what you'll find entertaining as you read.

gumballindie 3y ago

AI is already getting killed, people being disgusted and annoyed by this garbage. 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.

al2o3cr 3y ago

Unless the LLMs have suddenly gained API access at Amazon, the correct title for this piece is "SCAMMERS are CONTINUING to kill books".

Subdivide8452 3y ago

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.

craigdalton 3y ago

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.