It’s bots all the way down at kindle unlimited

cecirdr@beehaw.org to Technology@beehaw.org – 38 points – AI-Generated Books of Nonsense Are All Over Amazon's Bestseller Lists
vice.com

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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It's the Dead Internet Theory in action. While it stays a conspiracy for the Internet as a whole, it is definitely true at particular websites. There are many communities which are just controlled by bots and have no real people there.

The goal for most of the investors in this tech is going to be to crow bar large language model nonsense in to every corner of the internet. At a certain point I can’t help but wonder if they are actively trying to ruin it.

There is no way a modern LLM wrote this stuff. Maybe a medium language model, or a really old LLM. It reads better than a Markov chain's work, I guess.

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.

It's honestly heartbreaking considering how much work it must be to write a book and how scary it is especially with so many influencers and celebrities in the market now already making it harder for real authors to get noticed

This was a part of the equation when I decided to pursue traditional publishing instead of going the self-publishing route. I wouldn't be competing against other authors for the attention of publishers, I'd be competing against an ocean of ghost-written get-rich-quick schemes and bots. Sometimes gatekeepers serve a real purpose.

One thing we're re learning is that curating content is necessary. Whether you pay a publisher by buying books they sell or crowdsorce via some website, it's near impossible to just yourself go through the firehose.

The two communities I'm most missing from going cold turkey on Reddit are niche book subgenre subs. I used to check them daily for new book announcements and discussions, and I got literally all of my "fun" book recommendations from those subs.

I guess they have a Discord group which is okay, but I'm not really interested in sitting in a chat room.

So yeah, agreed. Discoverability is a huge problem for authors already, even before AI-written drivel starts filling the Kindle store.

What genres are you looking for? There are a couple good communities, but youre right, not nearly as big or as niche as most subreddits. Though ive found the reccomendations to be higher quality when i do see them.

For me it's fantasy. Stuff like Dungeon Crawler Carl, Joe Abercrombe or R A Salvatore etc... If you have a suggestion for an active community that's not on discord I'd love to hear it.

Hmmm I am more of a sci-fi person, but I've definitely still seen some threads talking about fantasy books. I'm guessing you're already on the main book communities like !books@lemmy.ml !literature@beehaw.org ? They are pretty active and I do see discussion on threads talking about fantasy books. There is also the fantasy community !fantasy@lemmy.ml -- which does admittedly have pretty low traffic (though, you could be the change you want to see...). I found one niche community that was very recently made !cozyfantasy@wayfarershaven.eu

I get how hard it can be to find active book reading communities & wish I had more suggestions in the fantasy realm. If you have a specific sub genre in mind, search for it or maybe even make a community for it. I was surprised to find a few different scifi sub genres already had active communities on lemmy & even recently made communities are growing fairly quickly with the new users.

Good luck finding your next page turner & lmk if you want sci-fi recs :)

Edit: to add and un-add exclamation points

Just a heads up, I think you should remove the exclamation points in your links, it resulted in a 404 for me before I removed them.

using a exclamation mark should work, and it does work exactly as intended for me. Each of these links properly opens to the community on my local instance

To be fair you don't need that many people to commit to a session in a book reading club before it's full enough to work. Anything more is just a bonus.

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 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.

Been there, done that. She has her own mind, so I'll just have to get on board.

Kids eh?

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.

This seems way to stem biased imho. Interacting with chatgpt isn't really a technical skill. And editing prose certainly isn't. I think writers, especially creative writers would be way ahead on prompts (basically an outline) and massaging the output into one more cohesive whole. Good writers can probably also discriminate between powerful prose and overblown pompous language that GPT can output sometimes.

The other thing is I would hope that good writers would never have a filler chapter. I don't like needlessly padded content of any type, and if I notice that my ranking of the content goes down.

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.

One example of the research involving this

I guess the silver lining is that academic creative writing is a bit of a pyramid scheme, so if she goes the route of writing "literary" stuff that gets published by her university press, she will probably be able to get work teaching creative writing...

As someone who's been there done that, this is the worst time to try and get into academics in the humanities. English departments are downsizing everywhere. There's an incoming "demographic collapse" coming to higher ed by 2026 - i.e. birth rates went down between 2008-2011 by a large degree and that cohort is 25-30% smaller than previous years. A lot of small, tuition dependent colleges are going to fold. In preparation, non-essential departments are cutting people like crazy. STEM and business are money makers, English and History aren't.

Best thing you can do with a creative writing degree is go into corporate communications/marketing. Find a gig at an agency and do creative writing on the side.

I quit a PhD program in a social science and this is absolutely true of basically any field about which you cannot say "You need a degree in X to get that job".

Additionally, colleges and universities are increasingly not hiring tenure-track professors and instead relying on adjuncts to teach their classes. Adjuncts make almost no money, get no benefits, have no job security from one term to another, and often have to adjunct at multiple institutions simultaneously to make ends meet. It's basically the gig-ification of post-secondary education and it's awful.

I quit my PhD because I loved the field but it was very clear I wouldn't be able to live comfortably working in that field. Now I'm a programmer and I made more money at my first non-academic job than my PhD supervisor did with tenure and a decade of seniority.

I think that's her plan. She was a bit disillusioned with knock backs, until I sent her a list of 50 odd famous(?) writers that got rejected, some many times. Ernest Hemingway, Agatha Christie, J. K. Rowling, Isaac Asimov etc. That perked her up a bit ;-)

As someone who's been there done that, this is the worst time to try and get into academics in the humanities. English departments are downsizing everywhere. There's an incoming "demographic collapse" coming to higher ed by 2026 - i.e. birth rates went down between 2008-2011 by a large degree and that cohort is 25-30% smaller than previous years. A lot of small, tuition dependent colleges are going to fold. In preparation, non-essential departments are cutting people like crazy. STEM and business are money makers, English and History aren't.

Best thing you can do with a creative writing degree is go into corporate communications/marketing. Find a gig at an agency and do creative writing on the side.

I wouldn't classify these books as real competition. Nobody was really prepared for this, but it's a very solvable problem and there's no market for books full of word salad. I can't see Amazon or any store tolerating the existence of a product that doesn't sell.

They are competing for attention of potential buyers. In terms of sales new authors are similar to these spammy nonsense books. Therefore when Amazon chooses a "new author to promote" chances are it's going to be a spammy one instead of more genuine work. I agree that amazon should react to this as it should hurt their brand from both an authors and readers point of view

I think you've misunderstood this. Listen to the two recent episodes of behind the bastards on this topic if you want to get a good handle on it.

This is half the problem: these books ARE selling. I do try to be kind, but I can't deny that there are a lot of idiots in the world who seem to have a fair amount of disposable income.

They are buying these books for their children, or being duped by a pretty front cover, or a synopsis that sounds up their alley.

The books aren't 'word salad' so much as they are simply a cheap facsimile of actual stories. They have the elements of storytelling, munged together into a brain-breaking stew - but they aren't word salad, they just aren't human.

This whole situation is making me fairly uncomfortable, but also making me laugh. I love books. I love literature. The idea that one of the largest retailers in the world: an almost tech-giant that made all of their money flogging books to the masses cannot seem to clear its platform of fake books ghost written by computers with a little unscrupulous human help is simultaneously delicious and disturbing as hell.

I hate amazon with every fiber of my being, but this doesn't feel like a good omen for my children.

What's odd is that this isn't an especially new thing in terms of possibly. Maybe if they wanted some veneer of viability for like, a paragraph or two, but any reader is going to catch on to what's happening pretty fast.

The titles are still nonsense enough that even a simple Markov chain could have made them. So I think the main issue at play is whatever they're doing to exploit themselves to the top of the list.

This is what I'm having trouble with: how are word salad books at the top of their "bestsellers" list - is anyone buying them? If someone is buying them, then are others buying them just because they appear on the bestseller list?
It doesn't pass the sniff test.

It really sucks that we're facing the digital equivalent of climate change with regards to the internet and the content economy on top of the decline of the actual economy and actual climate change. It's all 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.

Anyone that buys anything from Amazon is also part of the problem. Support your local bookshop while you still can.

I mean, most of my reading comes from authors who are literally only on amazon. And they're only on amazon because it's impossible to make a living trying to sell your book anywhere else. Brandon Sanderson has brought attention to this issue.

I'm supporting indie authors in a sub-genre that you literally can't even find in a physical bookstore. I get that bookstores are hurting, but I had to make a choice between small time authors and small time book stores.

A store cannot survive on good will alone unfortunately. As much as I like my local bookstore, Amazon provides more content in more formats. It's just better from every angle.

Don't worry, your utopian vision of streets full of closed shops and associated tumbleweed will be here soon enough.

"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).

https://youtu.be/biYciU1uiUw

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.

We should stop making rankings of books...

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.

Welp..this is a problem we have to expect now. What a time to be alive. The scary part is this is basically gen 1. Wait till the books are actually good

When I first heard of the Elon and Zuckerberg cage match, I assumed it was some deep fake thing. I literally had my first experience of not knowing if something was real or AI. I just assumed it was AI. Not until days later did I know it was a real thing.

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.

So like the rest of Amazon then? Never used kindle, but Amazon for physical goods has been a dumpster fire for a while - completely overrun with dropshipped garbage, to the extent that it's actually difficult now to find quality stuff in the sea of "brands" with random string of capital letter names, all using the same poorly photoshopped image...

The kindle eink reader is amazing and absolutely great. However I don’t use KU and rarely buy books on it. I mainly use my library and read the borrowed books on it. As a piece of hardware it’s one of the few Amazon builds well. I’m surprised too.

This. I own a basic Kindle because it only cost me $60, and while I could upgrade to a better e-reader from a less monopolistic company, it'd just be a bit of e-waste I don't need to produce, and in the meantime Calibre + NoDRM / DeDRM means I can read books from anywhere on it.

If this indeed breaks Amazon then at least that is one silver lining of AI. It's a shame indie authors are losing their platform, but they'll find another.

I don't think these particular books are even generated by large language models - from the examples the content is just meaningless nonsense.

It would make it even more important to have sites like Goodread where books are recommended by communities.

There's even a federated alternative, BookWyrm!

...I guess these days the Fediverse is my hammer of choice, and every problem with the internet is a nail.

Unfortunately it is extremely sparse vs goodreads. Maybe someday it will catch up, but I really didn't find it useful right now. Then again I am def a lurker on goodreads so where I read lists and reviews from doesn't matter that much.

I guess what I don't get is what were people using GoodReads for? Because I'm using BookWyrm to just track what I already wanted to read and use the review system as a way to sum up books for myself.

How does the federation work in this case? Do I have to create a new account there, or can I see their content using my Kbin account?

I guess the most intuitive way to federate is that you can follow @user, after which all reviews published by the user will appear in your subscriptions. You can participate in the conversation as normal, and boost it to increase visibility across the Fediverse.

If you want to do more sophisticated things like manage your library or post reviews, I think you'll have to sign up for an instance of BookWyrm. :)

Not everything has an answer yet, for example Discord, there's alternatives but none on Fedi. Also somebody earlier was mentioning fanfiction sites, there's problems with all the existing ones and again, no Fedi alternative. However, not everything needs to be federated, look at Wikipedia for example.

Honestly, AO3 is pretty based for what it is, especially when you consider how the two main competitors (FFN and Wattpad) are ad driven with all the problems that entails. Tho come to think of it, now I’m getting worried about FFN getting enshittified…

I would like to peruse a copy of apricot bar code architecture! Surely, it must be one of the books of all time!

What I don't understand is who is downloading and reading these books?

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 didn’t totally get it. So, people are using AI to generate fake books, but how are the fake books getting into the top 100?