I’ve been writing a dinky little coffeeshop mystery for the past two years. I’m 2/3 of the way through and its been a lot of work. I’m not perfect but its been heck.
Stuff like this makes me really sad. I think anyone caught taking shortcuts like that as an author should be banned from the industry.
You just said you want a central authority who decides what can get ridden a terrible idea with massive downsides so as to avoid more bad books an ever present unfixable problem with human nature. Maybe if you had written this comment with chatGPT it would actually make sense.
No, they said people who fake writing with “AI” are hacks who should be shunned from writing, which is true. Human slop still requires effort and thought and is infinitely superior to faking it by using an “AI” to vomit plagiarism.
Super mean and aggressive. I guess i touched a nerve?
Do I think that book with a prompt request written right into it should get removed from Amazon and banned from being allowed to self publish? Yes.
Getting aggressive with me and implying I’m stupid isn’t going to change my mind.
Maybe if you had written this comment with chatGPT it would actually make sense.
Words to live by i guess, for you at least… i suppose we can clearly see that you didn’t have chatgpt proofread your comment, so there is that
See, this is the kind of extreme, unbridled laziness that gives regular laziness a bad name.
Insane that these people think they deserve money for something they didn’t bother writing, nor even proofreading themselves. I truly hope they have to suffer a devastating financial situation, its what they deserve
Many wealthy, powerful people take credit that they don’t deserve and earn an enormous profit for doing so. It is a common enough belief that having enough money or power to enable someone else’s idea makes the enabler as, if not more, important and deserving than all of those involved in every other aspect of the project.
What has “AI” become, after all? Rich and powerful people stealing the entire collective knowledge and creative works of humanity, mostly without just compensation or even consent. They then combine that collection and a vast quantity of wealth to take as many resources as they can afford to, half in an effort to deny those same resources to competitors trying to do the same thing. Their goal is to become the most dominant source of truth and creativity, which they will then hoard and rent to the highest bidders. All the while promising the good it will do, while simultaneously manipulating the output of this “source” so that it more reflects their interests and worldview.
Yeah, we as a society have long since abandoned the idea that you have to have done hard work yourself to be deserving of praise or recognition. At this point, if something exists, and nobody else is claiming that they made it (or if you have enough power to say it louder than they can) you’re free to do so, and feel proud of your accomplishment regardless of whether any effort was made on your part at all.
Well put!
Last Christmas a friend of the family I was visiting bragged about her son who had an LLM spit out fantasy books that he was selling on amazon. As far as I can tell, he just prompted it “Write a fantasy book like The Witcher” and sold it without reading it. She excitedly told me “I looked into it, it isn’t plagiarism!”
Sometimes I absently daydream about ruining the day for everyone and insisting on driving home the point that it very much is plagiarism.
Godawful, just as worse and infectious as the MAGA mindset.
Techbros call AI as “liberation”. It’s more like plunder to me.
I don’t think they care about deserving it or not as long as they get the money.
It’s like Trump with “Art of the Deal”. He didn’t write it, he paid someone else to write it.
Now, people can do this with AI.
Both should be unacceptable in my opinion, but how can you stop it? Hacks gonna hack
I hope everyone who paid money for the book asks for a refund. If folks use ai in their work, it should be flagged as such so the consumer can make an educated decision on whether to purchase.
Grifter’s gonna grift.
AI-written books are the equivalent of chalkboards in movies covered with random, meaningless equations meant to look sciency.
No cuz at least a human actually took the time to scrawl that shit on there
Honestly AI writing is so fucking bad you can read a couple paragraphs and know its AI. Just makes going to a book store and opening the book up for a quick look before buying it worth it again.
technically, there are ways to make AI writing good and go beyond blunt imitation. However, to do so requires a very peculiar framework with rigid ruleset, specific sources and style guide and the progress will be extrememly incremental and you’ll do much of the heavy lifting regardless - so it kinda defeats the idea of being fast and cheap and it won’t handle much writing in a regular sense.
To expand on this because it’s what I’ve been dicking around with for the past year or so:
the slop machine sucks at a lot of things. Particularly compartmentalizing. Character a knows something character b doesn’t, but ai output has character b talking about it. Only way to prevent this is to ensure the ai doesn’t know the secret information.
I could keep going. Will if anyone is interested.
Sounds like a lot of work when you can just, ya know, write the book yourself.
oh no, you got me with the sheer scale of your intelligence, and your ability to ascertain everything about me without any context whatsoever. What can I do to rebuke you when short lemmy comments don’t leave room for nuance? I’m done for and withering
and I can’t keep a straight face.
One of my ongoing projects is a detailed report on my opinions and experiences with ai, 100% human written. Bits of it are in my comment history if you care to look (cw: there’s also horny shit and political shit in my comment history). There’s space for a nuanced discussion if you actually care instead of wanting a simple “gottem”.
Man, you took that really personally, huh?
Oh wow, some of your comments are…pretty sad.
once again, making assumptions based on limited information. I could copy pasta my previous comment and it would apply just the same.
You told me to look at your comments for proof and then said they were “limited information”.
Yikes-eroni.
I’m presuming you could actually write an entire plot structure with individual agents writing the actions of individual characters with one narrator deciding what to include then consume this structure incrementally having it preprompt each scene with the plot structure for that scene and what happened.
man, let’s be friends! i used to work at a startup that researched generative AI and my field was generative literature!
My goal is to have the ai help, not have it do for me. Slop is for personal entertainment and inspiration purposes only.
Not that I haven’t tried. I am currently without a keyboard so my responses will be limited.
genlit is basically a completely different field regardless - at this point it is more about tools and frameworks not really about content.
you’ll do much of the heavy lifting regardless
i.e. it works as long as the AI has a human ghost writer.
it will be just writing the whole setting and its rules and everything inside to the point you can train a model to generate bits in controlled environment. so basically a fancy text adventure. technically, it can be interesting but that’s not the stuff you can do with regular chatGPT or Claude.
it’s really bad writing, it tends to repeat a lot of the same ideas in rephrased terms while also accidently deconstructing meaning in narrative.
Yes, but right now it’s also as bad as it’s ever going to be again.
While I don’t buy into the hype of the techbros, I do think it’s something we’re stuck with from now on, and they’ll get better and better at hiding it.
True. I’m torn on where to rank it though. It’s roughly B tier in “shitty use of AI”, but I cannot place it in good conscience above coloring books made with AI. I think the coloring books subcategory puts books in A to A+.
Thoughts?
What?
As someone who has worked in print for 20 years you would be surprised how often stupid shit goes to print and no one catches it despite multiple people looking at it throughout the processes before it gets to me at the end point.
No one really looks because someone else will notice
Very true. It more frequently happens with customer approved artwork which is even better for us as we get paid twice as it isn’t our fault but more often than not they want it rectified.
Also, human brains are not that good at proofreading huge amounts of text. We tend to zone out and lose focus. It’s just a quirk of the way our brains work and the human condition. Ironically, an LLM is comparatively great at scaming large bodies of text for errors like this; rather than being used to create the book in the first place.
Did you notice the typo in my comment?
Some brains. Not all brains. Typos jump out at me even when I’m not actively trying to read. It’s not uncommon for me to point out a misspelling on a sign I’m casually passing by.
I understand and agree most people miss such details; that’s why editors are so important. I just think it should be noted that not every human brain works the same way. Some are more detail-oriented that others, some lock in to certain patterns more than others, and what can be a challenge for one person could be a breeze for another.
Please don’t discount the neurodivergent when attempting to define “the human condition.”
Same for me. I was speaking generally, of course. Please don’t try and needlessly frame me as exclusionary
:)
Did you notice the typo in my comment?
Yeah, scamming is missing an m, and the rest of the sentence doesn’t make much sense.
It should be LLMs are great at scamming, period.
It was originally “scanning”
Well, it was wrong then, wasn’t it?
I was a graphic designer for many years. We’d get multiple revisions for everything except copy. We’d paste in the copy exactly as provided, I’d catch a few obvious spelling and grammatical errors, showing they didn’t even run a simple spellcheck, and off it would go into the approval loop. I had to mark every spelling change in the notes. Teh --> The, etc.
No one reads the copy. All the way through to the press check. They catch the copy mistakes AFTER the print run. Sorry, I don’t know how the founder’s French name is spelled.
I can only imagine it’s worse now with AI.
This is what the CYA contract is for.
Yeh, see my other response where I said more often than not it is the customers artwork that is incorrect. I am a finisher so literally the last port of call before being shipped out to said customer.
Customers, as with any industry, are the fucking problem xD
There should be some great centralized wall of shame for stuff like this, auther publishers editors distributors sellers included.
And it should come up first when you search for them, like Wikipedia. It should be the first thing in their Wikipedia page, before occupation. Repeat offenders should have a dedicated section.
Not only do AI boosters not write, they don’t even read the stuff they don’t write.
“A bad reader cannot be a good writer”, nobody knew that advice could get even more true.
Why would I read that stuff when I can have AI summarize it for me?
Alternatively, I’ll put a book on a earbud and listen at to two books at once at 5x speed! While on a date!
Maximum Efficiency!!!
I recently read “The Rose Field”, the final book in the series Book of Dust by Philip Pullman. It’s a follow up trilogy on His Dark Materials, which recently had a TV series adaptation made by the BBC, and previously a film was made back in like 2006, “The Golden Compass.”
Pullman writes a story about a world where people’s souls live outside of their bodies, taking the shape of an animal that speaks and lives side by side with their person. He calls it their Daemon, and it’s a terrific narrative device.
In the second book of this second series one of the main cast, Pan (a Daemon) leaves the other protagonist Lyra (Pan’s human) in order to find the latter’s imagination, which he believed that she had lost. Over the journey, they both separately ponder the nature of Imagination, why Pan had gone to such lengths to find something he wasn’t sure about. Lyra is also tasked with finding “The Alkahest”, of which she has never heard of.
In the end, they both find their answers, the importance of imagination, and what Alkahest truly is. I think Pullman has observed how the world is changing, how imagination, play, creativity, and interpersonal relationships are left to wither to make room for money. I’ll quote some bits of it here.
Spoiler for the climax of "The Rose Field" by Philip Pullman
It is the universal solvent, just as it says in the encyclopedia. The destroyer of bonds. Look at what’s happening here—all the old ways and habits that brought people together, like bartering and trading—just dissolved. Wiped away by new ways people don’t fully understand. The new roads that go who knows where but just tear up the rose gardens and knock down perfectly good houses.
What’s the closest bond there is? It’s between people and their dæmons. Somehow when you’re separated, like we are, the bond is still there, but this isn’t the same at all. With the sickness here, people just seem indifferent. They’re not interested anymore. But it’s not just happening here. It’s every kind of bond, in our world as well. Like the new Master of Jordan, breaking the old connection between me and the college, because I was costing them too much. It sounded so reasonable when he said it. Money. They had to save money, because…Everything about the alkahest is reasonable. It’s reasonable to make money, to save money…
“All being dissolved. The more I see, the more obvious it seems…I really think I’m beginning to understand at last. Everything having to give way to money.”
Of course people have always knocked things down and built other things in their place. But money’s different somehow. It swallows everything… […] But Thuringia Potash and all these other companies are only interested in the rose oil as a unit of value. If an acre of roses makes money, fine, but because the roses and the oil themselves aren’t important, they’ll tear them up in a moment. All those fields being dug up: it isn’t because the developers hate the roses, it’s because they can make more per acre by growing peanuts, or by building a factory.”
“The thing that troubles me most […] It’s something like this. In making rose oil, each part of the process is an end in itself. The roses are beautiful as they grow. Distilling the rosewater and making the oil are crafts worth knowing, things worth doing in themselves, things you can get better at and take pride in. So people who did them used to have a connection with the soil and the seasons and the light and the weather, and they felt the sun and the wind and the rain on their skins—the alkahest will change all that. They’ll soon be sitting in offices under artificial light, entering figures into ledgers and account books, and their dæmons will be dying beside them, and no one will care, and no one will know why.”
What I take from this is that money has this effect of always taking a precedent. It makes sense for it to, because it is the means with which we navigate a capitalist society. We’ve constructed society in such a way that everything always has to give way to money some way or another. By letting money take precedent, we’re destroying our bonds to other people, we’re destroying our bonds to nature, and we’re destroying our bonds to ourselves, our creativity, our imagination, and we do so while giving ourselves completely reasonable justifications for it.
The message that we’re slowly killing our souls isn’t exactly subtle, but I get it. We’ve gotten to a point where some people are happy to outsource their thinking and creativity to machines, all in the service of money. People build fake followings on social media, just to make money.
These books are so good, I swear. I’m glad he finally got to finish and release the third one, Iand thank you for reminding me, I’m gonna buy it for sure.
I was so worried he wouldn’t! He is coming up in the years, and this was apparently the first book he didn’t manage to write fully by hand because of pain, so he finished it on a computer. The audiobook read by Michael Sheen has a kind of, interview/dialogue between Sheen and Pullman at the end, where they discuss… lots of things. Sheen was so taken with the story that he named his daughter Lyra as well.
Ah, fuck, I’m cooked…
I thought the book added that as a threat. Like “don’t make write this stupid nonsense, because I will.”
At least you got a warning that the book wasn’t even worth an editor nor the “author” actually reading through it once themselves.
I would return that book to the store
Thankfully, the venn diagram between people who don’t read and people who use AI is a circle. Makes it easier to tell
Hey, I can use AI to summarize!
Or … Ask it to tell me a story … Whateves works
I mean, the one thing you need to be able to do to use an Large Language Model is to read and write.
And what level of reading and writing is required?
I read my AI responses tho
Books written prior to 2022 just used a ghost writer from fiver
Then at least a human wrote it and poured thought into it.
Human sure, thought less so. Slop existed before AI as well, and the ghost written kind was just as brainless as today’s kind.
I’d much rather have slop than a person came up with than whatever the plagiarism regurgitation machine does
I don’t think you’ve read any human slop then, its just as bad. It often is literally just plagerism anyway.
honestly i spend much of my free time reading and a good bit of that on Royal Road, Scribble Hub and Space Battles
as much as i detest AI morally, as a tool its just that, a tool
two of these sites have rules on AI use (that are often obviously not being followed) but a number of these AI slop books are markedly better than the worse human written stuff
at the moment i am amused by a story that is mashing up Path of Exile 2 (as a player not the lore) and a returner time travel to start of dungeons on earth story
almost as good as pokemon meets the Roman legion
plagiarism regurgitation machine
This is the perfect definition of a hack writer.
You can still do that. And on Upwork.
That’s just means the fiverr person is outsourcing it to LLMs instead of you lol.
Nah, I hired a couple true blue nerds with real job resumes that seemed too obstinate to cut corners.
Even better since you can pipe the order straight into ai
“I promise not to use ai, I’m a ghost writer after all!”
Who’s the “author”?
Gerald Baker Book is named “Pitigliano: The City of Stone and Sunlight”
The Amazon reviews are tearing it to shreds with photos of the AI. It’s all I wanted to know.
Gerald Baker
The WSJ editor? … After searching, they’ve got to be different people.
