My title might be a bit hyperbolic, but stuff like this worries me. I love to read and I love reading on a kindle. This has been going on for a while, but it has now reached absurd levels.
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Yeah, I absolutely can’t imagine being a writer who is trying to break in this space. Discoverability is going to be a nightmare going forward.
This is my daughter at the moment. Just gone 21, at university studying Creative Writing. Thing is she was doing so well with Biology etc. Changed about 3 months into her first year. She’s had a couple of self published books on Amazon, nothing more than a dozen or so sales. She’s going to find it hard to find full time work etc. in her chosen field.
I thought about bringing up technical writing, then I realized that it’s a possibility that even that job isn’t safe within the next 5 years considering the promising development of Spiking Neural Net. This is something I would probably suggests to your daughter at this point that she should probably reconsider her chosen field and try to enter biology or some stable job.
I dunno, people have been trying to automate technical writing for at least 30 years. The results have been mostly garbage. I’m not sure an LLM is going to understand what’s going on any better than the folks doing this work now, it tends to involve lengthy discussions.
There are active researches on world model working alongside with llm. The idea generally is that llm is used for generating text, but world model provide more context for llm to understand the world.
When you say “the world”, what do you mean? If it means the actual world, I don’t understand how that would help with technical writing. Plenty of people can get around in the real world but struggle to use Excel.
As in actual world, providing context to physics of things, providing logical association/evaluation, and so go on. It is basically something that supposed to help LLM get closer to understanding the “world” rather than just spewing out whatever the training dataset give it. It does have a direct implication for technical writing, because with stronger understanding of the things you wanted to write about in technical writing, LLM with World Model would basically auto-fill that.
This is something that the researchers are pretty much all hand on deck working on to create.
Been there, done that. She has her own mind, so I’ll just have to get on board.
Kids eh?
Guess that all you can do, yep.
And work with AI not against it. I mean if AI can quickly make a filler chapter that can be tweaked, more time can be used to make it all get together etc etc. Or so I figure.
That’s a really good point. Use the AI to bridge gaps and for short segments. Probably a good way to get around some writer’s block.
That’s a really good point. Use the AI to bridge gaps and for short segments. Probably a good way to get around some writer’s block.
Yeah, though it would be more challenging to make a living when it lower the barrier of entry for writers.
Yeah for sure, but someone good at biology can surely handle AI, while other writers might not.
Honest questions: What worthwhile alternatives exist already? If there are none, what can be done? What can be built to improve discoverability of authors while moderating what is visible?
Libraries and some bookstores are great about picking favorites and putting blurbs about them right on the shelf.
Powell’s always has great recommendations, I’ve found lots of fantastic new reads there. I wish everyone had access to one in person, I love that store so much.
This is going to be the real result of the large language model hype train, massive floods of basically worthless “content” made simply to pump metrics and fool investors.
I’m not saying that there is no useful applications for the tech just that none of those are particularly marketable nor do they generate a lot of monetizable utility.
And more importantly it’s not AI anymore than auto complete, spell check are. People insisting otherwise almost seem like they’re trying to start cults.
“Folding Ideas” does amazing work on YouTube around exposing grifters in well structured, long form explanations of their grifts.
One of their videos looked into a group of growth hustler type folks, a pair of twins. Part of their scam was automating the process of creating fake books like this from start to finish to sell them online for passive income.
Highly recommend anything this channel creates. Worth your time to have a focused sit to watch the journey unfold (especially if interested in the main subject of this post).
I fully second this. Folding Ideas is a first-class educator. I would still be completely in the dark on NFTs and Crypto without him, and “In Search of a Flat Earth” completely changed my perspective on flat earth adherents (i.e., I am much less amused by it).
Flat Earth adherents? What’s their dirty secret?
No secret, I just used to think they were being stubbornly dense, like goofy idiots. His video contended that it’s more malicious than that, born out of evangelical arrogance and an unfulfilled need to be smarter and more “moral” than everyone else.
I feel like I turned out similarly, except the exact opposite.
To me, it’s really, really important to be correct. Not to think I’m correct, mind you, but to actually be correct. One of my fears, therefore, is to be wrong about something without realizing it, especially if other people do realize that I’m wrong.
I wonder what that says about me.
What I don’t understand is who is downloading and reading these books?
More bots
My guess is: adventurous readers who are intrigued by a small snippet, then figure it out on page 2 after they’ve bought it already.
Judging by the article even the snippets are pure nonsense:
Black lace pajamas, very short skirt, the most important thing, now this lace pajamas are all wet.
It could be vastly improved upon with the new LLMs, but these are just complete rubbish.
It’s surprising to me that they didn’t at least have a human write/steal the title and blurb. You’d think that’d work better than books with obviously gibberish titles.
When your listing is written in a way only fools fall for you avoid the hassle of people that know better wanting to return things or complain. It’s the same concept as email scams.
I had to pull my kindle unlimited membership… it’s just a pile of crap.
I had kindle unlimited a decade ago and it was decent. Lots of good sci-fi and fantasy.
Then overnight the entire catalog became “shape shifting billionaire stepbrother bear” and other trash. It’s like browsing your spam folder.
We should stop making rankings of books…
I, too, have snorted scornfully at this shameful state of affairs.
Well, that’s all the more reason to not try to monetize through Amazon. But Patreons seem to only be about 0.5% of the people who Follow a story on Royal Road. Well, I’ll have to keep working on more incentives I guess.
This is solvable problem, things will just need time to adapt.
