Royal Road is one of the platforms for indie authors to publish serialized web novels. Many people use that to jump into a full time writing career -- successful new serials get on a ladder, paetrons get set up, and when enough chapters are written, they get edited and published to Kindle. The publication to Kindle Unlimited ends up with the books getting stubbed. In return though, you have a kind of presale so you know people like reading the work, and a sufficient fan base to appeal for support for a successful launch on KU.
One of the things I've been seeing the authors reporting to their subscribers are people stealing that work by scraping the chapters, running it through LLM, and then publishing it on KU. Authors have been adding watermarks into the text, though I don't know how successful that is.
(On the other hand, many authors use generative image AI to create covers, which has angered artists whose work has been sucked up by the generative AI machine).
That is not how the artists I have talked to see it. Many are very angry about it. When I asked one about the generated cover, she came right back with, why didn’t the author reach out to work with them?
And now, DeviantArt is collapsing, as artists flee, and content is being dominated by automated generative AI spamming out content.
Now, I understand the frustration of someone able to see something in their head and is unable to put it into drawing. Storywriting is already an all-consuming discipline … but so is anything creative.
Honestly I don't get why people use GenAI covers. You can get a surprisingly decent if basic cover for as little as $50 (lots of artists in Latam and SEA willing to work for not very much), and if you're willing to drop a couple hundred on it, great artists will make line up to work with you.
Considering the time and effort that goes into writing a book, if you value your own time, and work, this should be a no-brainer.
It's low-effort, and, once enough time has passed, it'll be this decade's equivalent of those trivial-to-add "blink" or "marquee" tags from the geocities times.
Fast-forward 5 years, and our attitude might be:
Hmmm, so you added an AI-generated image to your AI-generated slop "post", everybody knows "those" pages. Not gonna waste my time here.
I really want to like Royalroad, as it's full of well-written stuff, made by clearly passionate and talented authors, but I can't help but notice that everything seems to some sort of Isekai/LitRPG/Progression novel where the protagonist fights anime-style battles and gets progressively more powerful, with sometimes numerical stats increasing, as presented by stat blocks in the story.
This genre was completely unknown to me before I discovered RR, and I'm suprised how ubiquitous it is.
Is this what young people want nowadays? The genre seems to have crossed over from Asian culture, with many novels being translations of Chinese/Korean ones.
One factor you may be missing in the prevalence of Isekai/LitRPG/Progression Fantasy novels on RoyalRoad is that the original purpose of the site was to translate Legendary Moonlight Sculptor, a novel about a Virtual Reality MMORPG called Royal Road which was emblematic of the genre. From there, people started publishing fan fiction of the story, then their own similar novels, and more. The audience for the genre never left and is still the largest on the site, even if now there are other genres as well.
LitRPG fans aren't all young people, it's also weirdly popular with middle-aged women with fond memories of playing World Of Warcraft.
I don't think the phenomenon is young people these days, so much as every online fiction site slowly narrowing in on one subgenre over everything else, and Royal Road's being trashy power fantasies.
I'm on a discord where authors discuss these things, and they talk a lot about the RR community and the hoops they need to jump through to match that specific group's specific tastes, because it's one of the niches where the money is right now.
As a (perhaps not-so-young) consumer of several RR stories in those exact genres, yes. It's a fun genre that really tickles the same part of my brain that building munchkins in D&D does. Progression fantasy is just very satisfying to read.
(In case anyone is looking for recommendations, Mother of Learning is the best all-around, Delve is probably my favorite, and Worth the Candle is incredible if you can stomach how much of a crapsack world the protagonist is dragged through)
That's genre fiction - a formula, with some reader-insert gratification. A site like RR is specifically aimed at readers who want those kinds of stories.
Other fiction markets are the same. Mysteries, fantasy, thrillers, romance, all have their tropes and sub-tropes. Most don't have an RR equivalent because they're marketed through other communities, like TikTok for romance.
Original fiction that doesn't follow strict genre rules and expectations is a very hard sell today - but I'm not sure that's ever been untrue.
I'm sure you are right but it didn't use to be this bad - I remember a couple of years ago I tried to familiarize myself with the old fantasy classics, most of which certainly weren't considered respectable literature back then.
By far the worst offender of the bunch was Lin Carter's Under the Green Star - in which the sickly protagonist has his mind transported into a body of a powerful hero of legend, in a faraway realm, and rescues a beautiful princess who falls madly in love with him - at which point the teenage boy pandering became so unbearable, that I had to put the book down. This is exactly the tier wher most RR books stand at.
Other books, such as the Elric books by Moorcock, or Leiber's Fafhrd books would still qualify as genre fiction, but have far more depth and nuance to them and I thoroughly enjoyed reading them.
I wonder, what other sites are there for online fiction?
I only know of Wattpad, which seems to largerly focus on romance for teenage girls, and AO3, which seems to focus on smut/fanfiction.
While all 3 sites have hidden gems, it's too much of a bother for me to wade through the typical faire to bother looking for them.
Progressive fantasy is what RR is known for, and many series like that launch from there. There are others that are progressive fantasy adjacent. Progressive fantasy covers litrpg (and its many variants including 4x rpgs), so-called “cultivation” fantasy (wuxia, xianxia, etc). It shouldn’t be surprising since fighting animes have been around for a long time, and now isekai animes are now the rage, and those all overlap into progressive fantasy. There is a subreddit for this.
Other platforms will have other types of serials. I just don’t know them off the top of my head. My wife reads a romance serial somewhere else.
>The genre seems to have crossed over from Asian culture, with many novels being translations of Chinese/Korean ones.
You can basically trace a lot of the web novel versions back to anime/manga/light novels. (Maybe the reason is that in Asia these are also web novel, eg Shousetsuka ni Narou.)
However, this kind of a genre is and was popular in the west independently of that. Edgar Rice Burroughs wrote A Princess of Mars in 1912. It hits onto most of the same ideas these more modern stories do.
I read a few of these on kindle, some are ok, but some are just not very good at all.
and they seem to seamlessly run into another genre called haremlit where the main character easily collects partners left and right.
Now I tend to shy away from kindle unlimited and books with warnings about "unconventional relationships" (in my experience both mostly mean poor writing quality)
If anyone has their own tips for picking not-a-waste-of-time books, I'd like to know.
Isekai (e.g. wish fulfillment + power fantasy) is absurdly popular in the anime/manga industry so I guess I'm rather unsurprised that its leaking over to more traditional novels as well.
As an anime fan, I wish there were more series that strayed from this formula. So many are either isekai, "protagonist has an ultimate power/entity inside them they can't fully control", or both.
You mean like Fieran? That is something author Blaise Corvin calls “exploration fantasy” and inspired him into attempting a new serial along that line.
There is also Your Lie In April. Not a fantasy or reincarnation. There are few other exceptional ones here and there.
Funnily enough I was actually going to write "Frieren is the only one that comes to mind that doesn't follow this formula", but I figured it would sound way too myopic since surely that can't be the only one.
Honestly I was just thinking about this - there have been many manga series (which get turned into anime eventually), that started out with an interesting premise that can be taken into many directions, only to turn into a cookie-cutter shonen battle manga.
I think I know the reason for this - shonen is a relentless popularity contest, where magazines only feature the most popular works and will quickly drop your series once it starts losing readers.
The way to consistently stay on top is to appeal to the biggest demographic - that is shonen battle/isekai fans by making your stuff to be exactly like the other stuff.
But doing so makes you lose the readers who were interested in the thing that made your manga unique in the first place. And after a time, these people will stop reading the publication altogether, skewing fan demographics even more towards genre fiction, making it even more impossible to create something unique.
Anime/manga are pretty strongly intertwined with (web) novels in Japan. Those same novels are fan translated into English (Chinese and Korean too). This has created a kind of fanbase for web novels/self-published novels.
Japanese companies starting to send copyright claims against fan translations probably opened the door for Chinese, Korean, and English web novels like that.
I'm getting more and more convinced that tech people are living in a dangerous bubble re: the generative AI boom. I've been talking to people outside this bubble, and the unanimous response to all the "exciting" AI developments of the last ~3 years has been that their experience of generative AI has been purely negative with no upsides whatsoever. All they see is the content slop, the shitty search results, degraded experiences in e.g. customer service, and so on.
And it's starting to alarm me that nobody in tech appears to care about this and is just going "damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead". That kind of arrogant dismissal of popular mood and forcing unwanted change on people is how resentment and revolution happen.
Think it’s worth calling out that many people in tech have significant reservations about the reckless push of generative AI into just about every product — the issue is the executive class that insists on chasing hype and potential short-term stock growth over everything else.
> I'm getting more and more convinced that tech people are living in a dangerous bubble
You don't need the rest of this sentence. They are. Almost everyone I talk to in the Valley of Silicon speaks of broad trends in... I mean, anything really, in how people use technology, in what people need cars for, in what people eat, in what goods typically cost, genuinely any topic of sufficient breadth that escapes the technology itself, as though they have not been on planet earth since roughly 2009. It is astonishing how well insulated from common concerns tech workers are, which is probably how we got shit like Juicero, an incredibly overbuilt, over-spec, ludicrously designed wifi-connected machine to squeeze a fucking bag. And it explains a bunch of their other incredibly stupid ideas, like e-scooters.
This is why, I am sorry, but I simply do not put a lot of stock (literally, and metaphorically) into the opinions of SV's elites. That's like, a bubble in a damn bubble. That's a bubbled subset of people who haven't had a normal experience of being human for who knows how long, inside a bubble of people who largely do not share the same reality as me.
Bringing it back to what I was replying to: you are absolutely right about the common folk's experience with AI. It's an annoying thing being shoved into tons of products they use, that seemingly no one asked for, that doesn't work. And it's a massive, 400 foot tall neon sign, telling them that big tech doesn't give a fuck about them, what they want, or anything else besides sign up for the subscription dumbass.
I'm mostly with you but "other incredibly stupid ideas, like e-scooters" just sounds like a personal vendetta to me. I don't see anything SV specific about e-scooters, not is it a dangerous bubble or stupid to use compact electric powered modes of transport in a dense area.
Couldn’t one make the argument that EVERYONE is in a bubble of sorts?
I (one of the SV tech workers you mention) was recently in rural Georgia for a cousin’s wedding, where I was shocked to learn that many people in the area considered the previous presidential election to have been stolen. I wanted to scream “you need to get out of your bubble!”
And I would argue, more importantly, it has way too little understanding for the influence it wants to have. SV companies want to disrupt every industry, irrespective of if the inefficiencies present are down to organizational inertia on the part of the market holders, or whether those inefficiencies are down to a myriad of other reasons we might want to do any given thing a little slower and more carefully than we otherwise might. Like, for example, background checks for taxi drivers before we give them the job of transporting strangers, alone, with zero oversight. That's not to say the taxi industry prior to Uber was saintly, far fucking from it. But it had a baseline of safety that went along with the corrupt incentive structures present in many places, that Uber completely failed to replicate and we had to re-learn the lessons we had already learned, which has cost a non-zero amount of lives.
I think AI has a place in this world. As does virtual reality, the previous hype. The problem with these hypes is, the overstressed business types that think it is the key to the future for everything. Almost nothing is the next internet. And in a year or so when they don't see their 2000% payoff, they will consider it a flop, which will also harm the genuine efforts that were made and usecases where the tech does add value. It's the overexpectations that hurt it.
The problem starts happening when you shoehorn it into a bunch of shit for the sake of it, where it adds no value and often even degrades it. Like what everyone is now doing with AI. Especially Microsoft.
It's great for some stuff, like making summaries. It's not GenAI and if we try to use it as such (as Nadella is doing) the bubble will burst sooner rather than later and that's bad for the tech community as a whole. I find the journey super interesting however from a personal tech interest point of view and I love playing with it locally. But I'm not blind to its glaring limitations and I don't care whether it makes money or not, I'm just into it for the tech. It's the money boys that keep blowing good stuff up.
It's almost like capital has become so big that the investment money sloshing around looking for high returns at the expense of anything else, does not care if excessive capital ruins the early dot.com companies, real estate, crypto, generative AI or anything else.
We need an investor class that just wants to get their 50 pounds a year to maintain the country estate, not one that wants to vacuum up 80% of the economy in short term speculative bubbles.
It's ultimately a lack of "class". The scenario you're describing requires that the wealthy maintain a set of social virtues that are more important than money. One of those virtues must then be that greed is seen as very low class. It's the stereotypical depiction of new vs old money. It does exist in the US, but it's mainly in certain industries and the uber wealthy are generally shunned / excluded because to be focused on the pursuit of money is taboo. It's literally the primary differentiator, "I'm so rich we don't care about money." Even though they are nowhere near as rich as billionaires. To be seen as concerned about making money shows a lack of class and even if you have billions of dollars from a social standpoint your no different than any random poor person working paycheck to paycheck.
So that investment class certainly is out there, but it's not really in places like California, New York, Florida etc. Those areas and the industries spawned in them are dominated by the profit obsessed social pariahs.
Of course money and investments are a major aspect but it's never about how much money you can make, all the pursuits are profitable, but it's about how much importance and control they will generate.
Most Tech, Crypto, AI, anything like that, if it gets shut down tomorrow, the impacts are minimal and easily mitigated. People involved lose money, but everyone else carries on, possibly somewhat inconvenienced. If a regional cold storage facility, railroad, pipeline, quarry, or container yard decides to shut down you have real impacts that start to get serious quickly.
Crypto mining is where solar system companies will go as states start letting grid operators only net meter instead of paying you for power your system puts in.
They kind of were at one point. It’s sort of been memory-holed now, but some years back, everyone was trying to hawk a private blockchain, or their own cryptocurrency, or whatever. Even very big companies.
Same. Anecdata I know yadda yadda. But I don't know one single person that is hyped about _consuming_ art or any content generated by AI. Only people producing content with generative AI and expecting a financial benefit are the excited ones. And I might guess they are not that keen into consuming AI generated content as well. It's all about who is the sucker that pays for all the slop.
Perplexity is one of the only tools that I think takes great advantage of LLMs strengths (pattern matching, interpolation) while also making up for its weaknesses (hallucinations, lack of ability for novel contribution/thought) by using it for summarisation with search.
I'd go further and that lately, for the average person, tech is causing at least as many problems as it solves. The public internet is a chaotic mess of scams and ripoffs. Social media is a cesspool that many people still feel obligated to participate in. Dating apps are an exercise in masochism, etc etc.
What actual problems are we solving for these people?
> And it's starting to alarm me that nobody in tech appears to care about this and is just going "damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead". That kind of arrogant dismissal of popular mood and forcing unwanted change on people is how resentment and revolution happen.
Tell that to the schoolchildren who excitedly use AI to do all the busywork for them.
There was a discussion on /r/professors about this exact issue. The big downside they identified with blue exam books is that 90 minutes or 2 hours or whatever with no spell checker is insufficient time for most students to have developed appropriately deep insights for college-level work.
The AI power brokers are all getting rich by hyping up the tech to the high heavens, while pooh-pooing AI ethics and safety concerns. Governments are following in lock step so as not to appear "anti-innovation".
I don't see revolution on the cards. Maybe a giant market correction once the hype wears off and pension funds figure out that throwing more H100 GPUs into the mix isn't going to make AGI happen any faster, and that there there's no real road to profitability for startups making shitty genAI chatbots, images and music.
Gen AI is the worst thing that happened to AI research. It is a bullshit generation machine that feeds resentment towards all technologies that make up the broad field of AI.
The same thing with meta verse. That hype is the worst thing that happened to VR. Now everyone treats it like a good for nothing flop. While it is good for some things. Just not for everything those retarded investors wanted it to be.
I actually know two ordinary people who pay to use ChatGPT. One uses it to write sex education policy statement and the other uses it for D&D narrative descriptions.
But I understand lots of people are very annoyed by it and with things like this, reasonably so. The problem that revolution only comes from desperation, not annoyance. If health care, rents, the experience of flying and traffic, global warming and so-forth hasn't produced a revolution, generative AI won't.
And this situation is pretty much what has brought-about the present "death by a thousand paper-cuts" world.
That's probably the reason for using an LLM - you need to write dozens (one for each nominal entity, and a new one each time they nominally update their objectives/etc.) that are essentially indistinguishable, but directly copy/pasting would be noticed.
First, you are on HN, a website full of entrepreneurs betting their savings on AI companies. "It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it" [1]. Remember that the CEO of OpenAI used to be the president of HN.
Second, remember NFTs? Bitcoin? Perhaps even MongoDB [2]? Tech lives and dies on hype and AI is the newest one. This too shall pass.
Did NFTs and Bitcoin indirectly cause a bullish rally such as the one we are seeing on Nvidia? Genuine question here. Because that's what scares me the most, what will happen with Nvidia.
I’d argue IBM to some extent; around 2016 the markets did get somewhat excited about its blockchain efforts (all but forgotten today). Nothing on the scale of the current thing, mind you.
> Because that's what scares me the most, what will happen with Nvidia.
What’s your concern? Ultimately if the bubble bursts, its stock price will fall, presumably. But, well, stock prices fall, life goes on.
Bitcoin and crypto come with a get-rich-quick stench that turns off most people. AI hype is much more dangerous because it mixes real use cases, to push enthusiastic viewpoints for LLM slop.
The President of YC's board, allegedly. Which he never was because that position didn't actually exist until after he left. There's been numerous articles about that recently.
Not to undermine your point, the techbroism is strong here but facts are facts
Unfortunately, the anti-AI discourse is a vocal minority in the grand scheme of things. As long as engagement metrics are up and the marginal benefits outweigh the marginal costs, the AI slop will continue.
Boomers using Meta AI to create nonsensical images on Facebook and WhatsApp aren't complaining about it on social media.
I'm not sure its Boomers who create these images. It's Boomers who reply "Amen" to a pictures of six-fingered Jesus wrapped in an American flag. (Actually I'm not quite sure - maybe it's just mostly bots replying to other bots...?)
Boomers aren't making them. They are the captive audience in Facebook groups. I predict that around October, the content on those pages will switch to political stuff (at least for American audiences).
By the by, I’ve enjoyed my Kindle a whole lot more since turning on its airplane mode. I connect to WiFi to sync new books to it, but don’t give my Amazon overlords other opportunities to present AI slop from the vaults.
“Is Amazon cutting out the author middle man and using A.I. and user data to generate books on its own? What generative models are being used? What kinds of prompts are generating these texts?
I don’t know. I’m not a virgin. As I said, I have a child.”
Same. Calibre works pretty seamlessly as well with transferring and converting books to and from mobi/epub with targeted layouts depending on whether you're on a full sized Kindle vs Paperwhite etc.
I remember there being some buzz a few months back around something similar happening with Spotify. Lots of random tracks that looked/sounded suspiciously AI-generated strewn into Spotify-generated playlists.
> This week’s edition is a guest post about spooky Kindle A.I. slop from Leah Beckmann, an L.A.-based screenwriter and journalist and Chief Kindle Bullshit Correspondent for Read Max.
I had to reread this a couple times before understanding that the guest post - not the A.I. slop - was from Leah Beckmann.
Agreed. First couple paragraphs of the post had me like, wtf am I reading right now? Threw the article into Claude and had it succinctly summarize the key ideas the author was trying to convey. Thankful for the clarity that provided and time it saved me.
I've been getting these too — they've largely supplanted the plausibly-human-written glurge I used to get (mil-SF and disturbingly specific romance subgenres). I don't think I've given Amazon any reason to believe I'd want them, though. My guess is that these are just the highest-expected-profit books that Kindle has, and it's what you get if Kindle doesn't have a more specific signal for you.
I guess my dozens of followed authors and infinitely expanding TBR list on goodreads that I regularly buy books and 15+ years of purchase history and ratings just can't be used as a signal, because my reccs are full of this nonsense too.
Lately I've noticed that in self pub pulp land authors are trading shoutouts with each other without curation or discretion, but even those are self selecting to a higher degree of 'gives a shit' than what the algo reccs have been offering. I think it has been over a year since I found something off of the 'if you liked X' carousel and that used to be extremely reliable for me.
And like I said, I'm reading pulp. I'm the kind of person who will see 'this is my first ever written work please be nice' as a synopsis and will read the first ten chapters just to see. There's plenty of decent trash around if I look for it but the robots only want me to have the soup at the bottom.
> I guess my dozens of followed authors and infinitely expanding TBR list on goodreads that I regularly buy books and 15+ years of purchase history and ratings just can't be used as a signal, because my reccs are full of this nonsense too.
This is what I don't understand. There is SO much -good- data about us, but recommendations everywhere, by and large, are terrible. You'd think that with all the tracking, with all the pushback on privacy protections and whatnot, that we'd be getting -something- out of it. But I go to Amazon and it tells me "you just bought a printer? here's 10 more printers you might be interested in".
There are two principal ways in which businesses make sales. Either by giving people what they want or need at a price they are happy to pay. These businesses don't need advertisement to drive demand, as word of mouth is such a powerful force. The other way is by using advertising. That's why normal consumers will never be shown an ad for any product or service that they would be interested in buying.
Honestly, I have no problem with airport novel quality books, and the thing is, these tend to be competently written - clearly there's such a huge oversupply of writing talent that even throwaway books are kind of decent. I suspect even people who only manage to sell hundreds of copies have quite a bit of talent and years of practice.
The market doesn't need the flood of this AI garbage as it will make these books utterly impossible to discover and drown the low end in excrement, driving away 'guilty pleasure' readers such as me and you.
> What else could this sick and twisted mind have cooked up? I wanted more. I clicked on Bette’s author page; this was the only title listed. Through the penumbral fog of half-sleep, squinting one-eyed at my phone, I googled, “a girls.quest for healthy watinf bette santinir.” Even the politely auto-corrected version yielded no meaningful results
> And then things got spooky. When I opened my Kindle again, there, illuminated by the inoffensive whitish glow of my device, was an ad for A Girl’s Quest for Healthy Eating. Only, it was vaguely distorted. Like a spot-the-difference Highlights game, here was the same book with minor discrepancies. This cover featured several little girls, presumably all on healthy eating quests of their own. The page count was slightly different. And most distressing of all, the author's name: Bette Santinir. In other words, Santini plus R. Where had I seen this name before? Oh right: from one minute ago when I misspelled Santini, Santinir.
> As the very editor of this Substack texted me, “If you didn’t have pics of this, I would think you were schizophrenic.”
I really wish the supposed pictures had been included in the piece.
The linked Reddit posts include other people seeing the same pattern, which seems to be to that the same AI-generated works are listed under many different slightly-differently-spelled author names, presumably to show up more in search ranks.
Forget whether it's true. We have here an essay that says, quite explicitly, "if I didn't have pictures of this, I would be called insane". It doesn't include any of the pictures. How does that happen? What's the right conclusion to draw from that?
I've tried to use generative text LLMs myself for story ideas, filling out backstory in characters, etc. No matter how good the model is, no matter how much context you supply or repeat, it will inevitably spiral down into some degree repetition and forgotten story beats.
But hey, at least it's all technically grammatically correct. Most of the time.
What disturbs me more is the thought of lost context in things like code, medical notes, and actually critical workflows.
It's been surprisingly great for filling out parts of my D&D campaign. I wanted to have a cooking show style contest and needed a bunch of dishes to be the competition. Here's one of the results I got:
Underdark Goulash:
Ingredients: Drow's darkstone potatoes (akin to sweet potatoes but darker, and with a slightly bitter tang), glimmerstool mushrooms (glow in the dark and have a smoky flavor), sahuagin seaweed (a deep-sea plant with a salty taste), and roper spices (ground up, they have a robust, gamy flavor).
Description: A hearty dish that pays homage to the unrelenting grit of an Underdark adventure. The darkstone potatoes and glimmerstool mushrooms provide a flavorsome base. The sahuagin seaweed's saltiness is reminiscent of the sea, while the roper spices add an unexpectedly pleasant gamey note. Much like an adventurer finding comfort in the dark caves, sometimes the most uncommon combinations lead to a profound satisfaction.
And they're all this good, like what the hell? How is this thing so creative? And it got exactly the snobby pander to the judges tone I asked for.
The AIs don't have any clue how to make a compelling narrative or interesting characters but for some reason it understands nouns. It comes up with really cool items, settings, shops, interior details that show-don't-tell details I'm looking for. And I can use it to bridge culture gaps when I want some diversity and want to faithfully represent a culture I don't really know — what clothing they would wear, how they would say things, what they would eat for an everyday lunch, different cultural touchstones or family dynamics.
Yeah, I've tried the same thing. Even with very heavy handholding (I think typing it out myself might've been faster) the results were useless beyond a short story.
I thought it was a skill issue though, because I hear others talk about it so much.
I don't know if it is a mistake, but it's certainly the genie we let out of the bottle. If anything, we're seeing the acceleration of what happens when we have a world view that is founded upon exploitation, be that the land or the people.
A company grows big and then turns into shit and this cycle keeps repeating I guess. I love playing games. Ubisoft, EA (in particular) etc are now shit. How long do we have to enjoy Steam (and other Valve products) until it suffers the same fate? Or will it remain good until some influential boss leaves?
I think while praising a business and getting excited we should have their average age in back of our minds.
Steam can't stop recommending me this Banana game despite it obviously being nothing more than a printer of artificially limited inventory items. It's a scam and it has been running for days.
Today I drifted in AI generated dread feeling that half of what I read (including this article) was AI generated -- maybe more since it included AI generated music. Was it due to my recent return from some number of days in the Oregon outback off the grid with no interweb pipes? I knew it was too short a time. I feel a great panicky need to run from an impending Matrix moment.
I can't help thinking there's a huge opportunity for discussing this side of AI in a more principled way. When something (i.e. AI) is this viscerally annoying, it's tempting to slip into this style of discussion, I get it. But it's......hard to read even when you agree and smile along the way.
"The brief bio read: A little girl with blue eyes and blonde hair leads her friends on a healthy eating mission, culminating in the creation of a neighborhood farmer’s market. Okay. Sort of Triumph of the Will: Bedtime Story for Kids and Adults." (for context, Triumph of the Will is the name of a famous Nazi Germany-produced propaganda documentary)
To flesh it out a bit more with examples, to make it clear it's not cherry-picking:
- "What generative models are being used? What kinds of prompts are generating these texts? I don’t know. I’m not a virgin. As I said, I have a child." (virgin really is a complete non-sequitor here, unless the idea is only virgins use ChatGPT?)
- "But I did want to read about my nice Nazi Youth friend and her farmer’s market journey"
- "More importantly, what is a bedtime story for kids and adults? I am an adult. A bedtime story for an adult is just a real book. I read real books. Or at least, I used to? Basically, did Kindle think I was stupid now?"
Apologies, I didn't mean we should silence sleep-deprived mothers. At best, inartful, on my part that it came across that way. I don't think I've ever consciously used pregnancy status/post-partum status, or sleep deprivation, as a prism for analyzing - to my knowledge, I've never used it unconciously either, but I'm faced with the distinct possibility I have, given thats how it came across here.
It just sort of ripped me out of smiling and enjoying the article the reading to hear blonde hair and blue eyes = Nazi propaganda: I have the same (though, little hair left :P ), and little kids in the family who are.
After the virgin reference I scrolled around to check if there was a layer joke where the article was written/edited by AI, thus demonstrating another layer of inappropriate references beyond the "bedtime story for kids and adults"
Then you start thinking "gee...AI art and 'bedtime story for kids and adults' SEO ads...Then my mind starts whirring on "maybe this is good because GenAI makes the monopoly incumbents look horribly bad, mindlessly selling programmatic content to me with programmatic ads on hardware I paid for" - and then I realized that's probably not what the author intended a reader to start thinking, so there's probably another way to poke at this
You didn’t come off as wanting this silenced - I just mean that I liked having a different voice on HN. We see a lot of arch, academic analysis here. Loopy, sometimes crass mom encounters AI books was a fun share from OP.
I bet you can imagine what her reaction might be if she read this thread :)
> virgin really is a complete non-sequit[u]r here, unless the idea is only virgins use ChatGPT?
The idea is pretty explicit, if you just read the immediately following paragraph:
>> I mean I literally could not find the book again. All versions of A Girl’s Quest for Healthy Eating appeared to have vanished, as though it never existed in the first place. (Is Amazon deleting these spammy books as fast as they can be generated? Again, I don’t know. Stop asking me questions for dorks.)
It actually occurred to me that this style of writing feels mass-generated at this point: it's the default mannerist tone if you were going to knock out a fairly surface assessment of a new online phenomenon.
Not that there's anything wrong with that! Max Read was one of the people who defined that tone in the 2010s[1], so I'm pretty sure that's what people come to his substack to read. But I must admit, my meta-snark was whispering all through this piece: "Maybe it would have saved time to just type 'Here are some titles of things I have been advertised on Kindle, please knock out 800 words on them in the American Internet Journalist House Style".
Honestly these AI books seem to be full of the saccharine sweet uber-PC toxic positivity that AI companies think what a 'safe' and 'aligned' AI should sound like.
This is the main reason why I gave up on using ChatGPT for creative brainstorming.
The problem isn't the AI. The problem is the content distribution systems that corporations have created. AI just happens to make it easier to game+automate some of their systems for instant wins.
Ultimately it's the entitled "I need money fuck you" attitude that enshittifies everything neoliberalism touches, with a toxic blend of desperation (some people really do need the money) and boundless narcissistic opportunism.
Tech has become enmeshed in that, and is a major enabler and amplifier of it. It doesn't have to be, but it's where we are now.
while highly unethical and a nuisance to navigate as a user, i respect the hustle compared to drop shipping bs people speak about on social media.
the bottom line is that economically these are the parties most likely to find a way to filter out ai-generated content going forward. or they will die trying.
One of the things I've been seeing the authors reporting to their subscribers are people stealing that work by scraping the chapters, running it through LLM, and then publishing it on KU. Authors have been adding watermarks into the text, though I don't know how successful that is.
(On the other hand, many authors use generative image AI to create covers, which has angered artists whose work has been sucked up by the generative AI machine).