Ah yes, another headline with no context.
“Yes, I have actually no problem selling any book, as long as it doesn’t masquerade or pretend to be something that it isn’t,” the British businessman responded. “And that it has an essential quality to it, and that the customer, the reader, wants it.”
“So as long as an AI-written book says it’s an AI-written book and doesn’t pretend to be something else and isn’t ripping off somebody else, as long as that’s clearly stated and the customer wants to buy it, then we will stock them.”
Honestly the most fair take iv ever heard.
Hate or love AI it’s here it’s staying. The pandoras box is open.
Hate or love how it’s trained, the fundamental truth is it’s here and it’s staying.
This isn’t the first or the last time a tool or technique will be built off theft, slave labor or mass murder and atrocities to just name a few awful things that have progressed us forward.
All that matters going forward is we do what we have always done. Socially agree to manage and regulate it. Push for laws and legal regulations to be put into place to protect the weakest and vulnerable.
Then to the best of our ability use the new tool to improve our lives, others lives, create new art and hobbies, and find a place for the tool.
Every tool in all of History has had some good come from its creation. So if people find a way to make stories, art, music or other creations using it. And they enjoy it, then that’s all that matters. If others also enjoy it then there’s no reason to tell people to not share.
Massive models with their data centers are a step too fair at the moment and likey always will be. But locally ran models are a fun toy and a fun tool.
So if someone makes an ai book, is clear and honest it’s an ai book, then wether or not it’s well written or not. If it’s enjoyable or not. Is up to the consumer of the work.
Its not like ai can’t create neat things.
Sure I get his position… But he’s wrong. AI books will devalue romance, penny novels, sci-fi and many more quick and dirty type of writings.
I mean ai by nature is ripping someone off but ok. Thanks for posting the context though, much appreciated
Oh yea, I don’t actually like it, and would rather they refuse. But it’s not as bad as the headline makes it seem.
It’s worse. Sugarcoating bullshit to make it more palatable while having at least all of the negative effect that was originally imagined.
Honestly, I hope they do. It’d be funny to see the sales figures. I don’t care how much anyone likes AI, but nobody wants to read AI novels.
Will they label which books are AI? No law says they have to. Now never can shop there ever again because can’t trust the books.
That’s the sort of logic that results in you becoming miserable and living alone in the woods.
The amount of shit built off the backs of theft is endless. Ai is not new to that. The entire crux of this logic is flawed. I hate ai but I also am educated enough to understand that if I tried to cut out every product, good and service that’s built off the back of theft, slave labor, murder, war, etc. I might as well just throw my self off a cliff.
There’s functionally nothing that isn’t build off atrocities. That’s unfortunately how basically much of humanity has progressed.
Just accept it and move on. You can’t stop awful shit from creating new things. So enjoy what little time you have on this planet. And don’t fuck yourself over just because you have the icky over something dumb.
There’s plenty of things ai related to be angry at. Some idiots selling generated book slop is not one of them.
Yeah, this is a major issue across the board. For a wide variety of products, if they clearly marked which were AI generated, then the sales would likely speak for themselves.
But companies don’t really want to do this. They want to mix AI slop in with regular products, so that over time, the average consumer dumbs down enough to no longer know the difference. Then they just generate every product ever and number go up.
This still ignores the fact that no one will have money to put into the system from the bottom (which is the only way it flows in an economy), but here we are.
I don’t get why people think they can have a career as a LLM middleman.
If I wanted to read a book written by a plagiarism machine about a subject I want, I’ll just ask it myself.
I don’t need someone else to ask it to write a book.
Same for LLM movies, or music.
If Hollywood thinks it can fire all the creatives and just spam out LLM generated content, well, so can the audience…
The problem is getting an LLM to do anything is a tediously annoying slog if you want it to do anything substantial.
It would almost be as much work as writing a good chunk of a book as it would to use an LLM to do it.
You would basically be playing editor to a functionally middle school fanfic writer. Its worse then just reading human or ai slop in the first place. Lol
It’s like anything. I can cook my own food. That doesn’t mean I don’t go out to restaurants sometimes. I could use an LLM myself to write a novel. But it wouldn’t be the same novel. And there is some skill in prompt writing. Even then, just the sheer time to generate a novel-length coherent work from small snippets of chat windows is still a large investment of time.
Yes, but also no. Plenty of people will buy and read these books and watch AI slop movies. Everyone can cook healthy meals at home, and many do, but there’s still a big market for fast food restaurants and prepackaged microwave meals.
Can confirm. I use AI quite a bit, including writing stories where I have editorial control (that’s a dumb decision, she does the other thing!). The best AIs might be able to manage one short passable chapter, but it’s going to be shot quality without massive amounts of hand holding and rewriting.
It can be entertaining in a choose your own adventure sense where each page really only needs to be barely coherent and minimally cohesive with the other pages. I sure as hell wouldn’t pay $25 for an AI-penned book.
use AI quite a bit
shot quality
heh
Hey well at least typos serve as a marker that everything is human written. You know, for all the comments about how AI is fancy autocorrect, why the hell is autocorrect still such fucking garbage??? Just do the things with the damn thing already!
It’s funny that LLMs generally have stellar spelling and grammar, but LLM/AI assisted autocorrect, at least the version on the iPhone, is horribly inferior to standard autocorrect.
Now that I read what you said again, I think I just said the same thing with other words. But I’m so tired I’m just writing what I’m thinking and I should go to sleep, but I’m here writing what I’m thinking.
Anyway, I agree with you!
Your iPhone doesn’t have to boil a lake to make those corrections slightly better, though.
I would rather read… anything else? It’s not like we have a shortage of books and especially not bad books.
People can ask an AI summary of the AI book i guess XD
Grok, is this true?
Finally a book burning tradition I can support starting
The first book burning where 0 knowledge is lost.
So long as you steal the books - absolutely don’t give them a cent or we’re just supporting the industry.
Legit ethical question: since LLMs are trained on stolen knowledge and art, is stealing an AI book theft? Also, given the current US laws about how an AI “work” cannot be copyrighted, what’s to stop me from taking someone’s AI “book” and just slapping my name on the cover and reselling it?
Absolutely nothing stops you.
Thanks to AI, where no true creativity has gone into the process of writing, it has no inherent value nor creator - for all intents and purposes, it may as well have suddenly apparated into existence. As soon as it gets created, it’s an “early bird gets the worm” type situation of staking a claim to ownership. Like a car that suddenly manifested into the world, created by no man, made of no man’s materials - it’s a free-for-all.
the ethical option
It was a greasy Thursday morning and the air smelled of Novocaine and Pepsi. Gary shifted in his seat to take the weight off of his ears.
Now to fuck up their plan by training their AI on House of Leaves.
Why the fuck would anyone buy an AI generated book instead of… Generating their own? If they generate it they even get to change the story on the fly, a printed out AI book is like the worst lmao
You assume the buyer would know.
and that the buyer wants to create the story. believe it or not, some people just want to read something that came out of someone else’s imagination (in the case of fiction). AI just facilitates the story telling for the idea originator (FKA author)
There are jurisdictions where AI content can’t be copyrighted. I don’t see how an AI-written book could even exist in those places, since anyone could post it online for anyone to read.
This isn’t really true. The courts have held that there needs to be some human involvement, but that involvement can be pretty minimal.
That seems a strange carve out considering that no LLMs do anything without prompting, presumably by a human. Depending on the wording, the law may literally be unable to apply to any real scenarios.
But if that’s the case, perhaps a page out of the SovCit playbook would work: bombard them with lawsuits for copyrighting the work to prove it was written with human involvement.
Effectively China is the only major market where AI generated outputs are granted copyright. And even then, it’s a hard maybe. This makes zero sense to me as a business move.
You can find many copyrighted works online, people still buy them.
When I worked at B&N way back in the day the policy was to sell any book that was legal to sell, though many would have to be ordered. In that regard, as long as AI slop is legal to sell I don’t have any particular problem with a store selling it.
I wouldn’t buy it, of course. It’s bound to be wretched.
Then I back no longer walking into a Barnes & Nobles and giving them my time or business.
I’ve got the archive for a better selection of books.
As long as they are clearly marked as AI-generated, I can safely ignore it.
Oh, yeah, and also: Barnes and Noble is still in business?
The one near me has a large kids section and a number of events for kids. They also have a coffee shop and pleasant reading area. I think they still also sell books.
As long as they are clearly marked as AI-generated
As clearly labeled as all the food products are?
They will not label them properly because that won’t sell; if they happen to be labeling now, they will stop in the future. This is the entire “vote with your wallet” strategy they know they have control over since they will obfuscate all the valuable information we need to make informed decisions.
Yeah B&N is still expanding AFAIK
Fine, just as long as they contain all of it in an “AI Slop” section.
So this is how society crumbles. Not with a nuclear explosion. Not with war. But instead with brain crippling stupidity. This is the world we live in now. Book stores filled with romance novels about Romeo and Julie. Where the author writes a bit about biting the thumb, but it goes in a very literal, violent and bloody direction that’s supposed to be romantic.
Never thought I’d live to see the day where smart people AVOID reading books!
Every day we get a little closer to Idiocracy being real.
Oh, we’re way past “close”, much too deep in it.
Why would I pay money to purchase a genAI book when I could just have Copilot gen me one up at home!?
This right here.
Ew
WHAT THE FUCK.
