It's common on HN for submissions to get upvoted before comments come in. It's a good sign, actually, if people aren't rushing to post reflexive things. Good comments are reflective, which means they happen after people have had time to process information—such as by reading an article.
I think the problem is < fake books and > Amazons fundamentally broken reviews system.
Seems like the fake review bots are a lot smarter than the anti-measures applied by Amazon. And the fun part is that both parties are probably running on AWS ;)
It took me two tries too; my first guess was "I think the problem is not as bad as fake books and worse than Amazon's fundamentally broken review system", but that didn't make sense.
The symbols < and > are being used as substitutes for the English words "less" and "more", which is not conventional at all, but is related enough to the actual meaning of the symbols that given context and a lot of effort, you can get there. I wouldn't recommend copying the notation; it conflicts pretty badly with the ordinary use of < and >.
ML-generated content can be pretty funny. This is more an example of Amazon being a garbage distributor of crap; this is an example of fraud. I hope there's a followup of what punishments happen with such a grift from one the world's largest companies.
Writing a book about NFTs (IMO a fraud based market in the first place) with it being full of lies is, as the author said, hardly a crime. It's just unethical.
Amazon isn't going to read every letter of every book that it sells, so it's hardly their fault either.
Should Target make sure their products are what they claim to be? If the book was subpar, oh well. If the book is loren ipsum [0], then that's fraud and should be followed up on. But people love Amazon so they can do whatever they want.
Then you might run into the problem that chess has right now: if you happen to write in a style a GPT-3 trained model would write you will be declared a fraud. You might argue, who writes in a style of said model? Obviously: The corpus of data that trained the model. If you are one of them part of your writing ends up in there.
Maybe writing styles are transformed to be more in line with GPT-3 trained models, lets face it. AI writes good prose and people will read more and more generated content and thus adept the style.
"Photoshop for text" was the title of a HN post here just a few days
ago. Many commenters delighted at the idea of being able to highlight
a passage, pull down a menu and "Rewrite Style -> Ernest Hemingway".
Nice people generally only see the immediate utility of a tool in
front of them. It takes a certain mind-set to see the other
"weaponised" implications.
We knew it was coming once "Rooter: A Methodology for the Typical Unification of Access Points and Redundancy" was published back in 2005 (!!!) as a proof that peer review in certain "scientific" conferences and journals does not really exist. This article is a machine-generated nonsense generated by SCIgen. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SCIgen for more details.
This has been a concern of mine for a while; I have also published absolute garbage just to see how far I can take it. I've published music under various pseudonyms, books underneath different pen-names... the list goes on. I've retracted such publications, but it is frightening if one person like myself had the curiosity to try, what is already out there, and, what a well-funded nation-state actor could do.
----
Post-truth, like post-modernism, does not mean an absolute absence of truth, but a decline in confidence in common knowledge, making your own truth the center of your life, rather than a set of values shared by a community.
We now believe that our own truth is somehow better than the "centralized" or "official" truth. We are now free from the institutions and authorities that controlled the truth. But this is an illusion, because the very definition of truth requires trust in something other than you.
Ahh yes, the nation-state funded military-fake-book complex, destabilizing nations the world over. We really need to watch out for nation-states using incoherent technobabble!
Yeah, not sure what the new concern here is. "Nation-states" always have had the ability to manufacture truth out of nothing, they've been doing this since before there were any computers. Why would they need the help of GPT-3? Why would they want to spam incoherent hallucinations? What would they gain out of that when they already have the ability to "manufacture consent" at scale?
It's not even a democratisation of bullshit, non-state actors also don't need GPT-3 to spam nonsense. PR and advertising is all about that and has a history of hundreds if not thousands of years. Maybe the new thing here is that people now realise lying is easy.
The commenter does have a point though; there's a lot of low effort high volume spam on the internet that reinforce certain narratives that cause division, on subjects like gender identity, generational differences, favorite TV shows, wokeism, Brexit, classism, racism, etc. There's actors on both sides of those debates, not because they're particularly leaning towards one or the other, but because the division is causing political shifts and internal strife.
This has already led to the EU starting to fall apart - the UK is out of the EU, Hungary and Poland no longer meet the criteria for having backslid into totalitarianism or at the very least, no longer having a division between the legal and executive branches of law. And it's causing lines to be drawn in the US as well, with calls for secession rising. But the US has been an "us vs them" type of "democracy" for a while now, it probably didn't take much to entrench the sides more deeply.
Anyway, that's online discourse, I'm sure it extends to books too, just less obviously.
One interesting book is Active Measures: The Secret History of Disinformation and Political Warfare by Thomas Rid. It's a history of disinformation, propaganda, and related shenanigans from the Protocols of the Elders of Zion to the 2016 election, mostly focused on the Cold War.
For the most part, it's low-effort manipulations that very occasionally take hold---I can remember the anti-nuclear protests against the deployment of the Pershing II missiles in Europe---but the internet and social media have dropped the bar for "low-effort".
I don't think it's that scary. I mean it's basically spam isn't it? The only thing new is the volume in which you can produce surface-level-indistinguishable spam.
It is now cheaper to produce lots of flowery, meaningless text that is full of definitions. I suspect that the future of literature is more concise and externally-meaningful writing.
Amazon is a terrible marketplace insofar as the rating system isn't sybil proof. this crap slips through the cracks.
Well, what does it matter? What if a market develops for autogenerated junk literature. People can buy and read what they like best. Today a lot of literature is published that I might consider to be "junk". But there are people buying and reading it and enjoying it and that's fine.
Maybe it could create a new genre of literature that is tailored to the reader's interests.
But that 'junk' literature you are describing that people like isn't inherently designed to be deceitful in the sense that people who want something else are its target.
When you replace 'catering to a certain audience by being good at doing something they want' with 'catering to a certain audience by being good at selling them something they don't want' then you have created a system in which supply and demand is no longer operating properly.
If the product is what's desired, why does the creator or the intent of the creator behind it matter? Danielle Steele has written same erotic story for decades and still sells millions. Hallmark makes the same kind of movie every Christmas involving a city girl tired of the city and a farm boy or lumberjack who wants to settle down. I don't see what's wrong with the next big erotic hit or regurgitated romance flick being composed and directed by an AI.
I have not yet hacked a good way to search around it though. It presents a massive time sink for me (not to mention frustration) and is probably multiplied across the population. More and more, when I search for advice, review, explanation, solution, or description, I virtually exclusively get articles/websites/books/sources that at first glance (certainly as far as Google and Bing can tell) are exactly what I am looking for. It then takes several minutes of reading to realize the author (human or not, irrelevant) does not know more about topic than I do. Then I go down the next one on the list, etc.
Quantity CAN make a difference. When there were few such sources, avoiding them was annoying but easy. Today, it's HARD. Tomorrow, it may be impossible with today's tools, and I don't know that we can win such a race.
For this reason, I have tended to rely more and more on recommendations from obviously real people these days, e.g., as found in comments on Reddit, or in the New York Times's Wirecutter. The challenge with this approach is that Reddit seems to be gamed more and more by industry and other PR "bots", which makes it hard to sift wheat from chaff. But if the subreddit is not on a controversial topic, it's still possible to find disinterested recommendations, or so it seems.
Maybe the way to go forward would be something in the vein of a book club? Delegating such a monstrous task to one person will just bury them in the sea of information, so parallelization looks like a good compromise (meet up once a week/month and share worthwhile books you have found).
Unfortunately, generation of garbage information can still far outpace such a system with few nodes...
We have a super-robust set of tools for this for fiction; I'm still chewing through the list generated by 'all Pulitzer prizes for fiction written during my lifetime' - and all of them have been quite good. ('the Orphan Master's Son' so far has been my least favorite, though it was still really quite good. And because these were chosen /at the time/ you get a glimpse into what people were thinking at the time. Mailer's "The Executioner's Song" was a wonderful book in it's own right, but I think was also a historical slice of 'the discourse' at the time.)
For Movies, I find that Ebert aligns a lot with my taste. If he says it's good, it's really good. I mean, that doesn't help with recent movies, but there's more than enough of the old good stuff. (There's a lot to be said for consuming old media; it gives it time for critical opinion to stabilize. )
I mean, of course, all of these methods will leave out a lot of really good stuff. But... that's kind of the point; there's way more media than I can consume. There are professional reviewers that can give you more really good media than you could consume in a reasonable lifetime. I'm not quite halfway through the 'Pulitzer prizes awarded in my lifetime' list, and I've started a few years back. (I mean, I was 40 or so by the time I started, and so I had read a few of the books just 'cause they were popular books that people recommend. McCarthy's "The Road" is exactly the sort of thing I like, so I read it before on another person's recommendation. But still, like, you see some really great work outside your genre; I'm not normally a romance novel kinda guy, but Lurie's "Foreign Affairs" was absolutely beautiful, and absolutely not a thing I would have read without this project.)
I haven't completely solved the problem for technical books, just 'cause people who have good up to date knowledge of an area have often built up that knowledge over time. they read some books but those books are long out of date, they've brought their skills up to date with mailing lists, which they then vet based on their knowledge of the reputation of the person posting.
I mean, I think it's pretty easy for the non-perishables, "The C Programming Language" is a thing you should read if you work with computers. But which tomb on docker is up to date enough and pretty good? that can be a difficult question to answer, and is often answered based on the author's reputation for other technical work they do, which usually tells me something about the accuracy of the book, but doesn't tell me if it's well written or if it's up to date enough. (On the other hand, if you are well known for writing a big part of the subsystem I wanna learn, eh, I don't feel too bad about giving you money for a book even if I later decide that the book is not written in a way I find engaging, like, you earned it and I'll buy another book.) And... I dunno. often you can get sample chapters, and that gets you a pretty good idea of how engaging the writing is.
I mean, one way to address it is to start at the base... "go read the gang of four design patterns books, and then use your knowledge of object orientedness to make sense of modern object-oriented configuration management systems" - which does make some sense. But still, I should spend the time to find the tech book awards that match up with my taste.
The fake books in the OP article are all used in garbage NFT scams. They're intended to produce an air of legitimacy for whoever publishes them. Whether they're actually sold or not is meaningless. It's rather all about clickbaitability and their use as a "legitimacy-dressing" surrounding some scammers' call-to-action button.
I think it is somewhat scary that these things can't just be instantly pulled from wherever they're marketed. They're just "tools-of-the-trade" for scammers. They serve no honest purpose.
I think NKRFZ had a video about a weird genre of pro-war fiction that is published en mass in Russia and promoted quite alot, but which does not really sell.
Pro-war fiction? That's like the standard movie for several decades from Rambo to Michael Bay's epics and Top Gun Maverick, and in movie form that has far wider appeal, 10000x the audiences, and is way more glamorous! "weird pro war fiction" would be very low in effectiveness...
Reminds me of the "long tail effect". One work of weird pro war fiction is not enough, but different customised propaganda for every niche might be something.
Rambo is a franchize. Why not roll in all the sequels? All those were huge when we were kids, and Rambo was synonymous with "macho super-soldier killings thousands on his own with bazookas", not "PTSD soldier back home from Vietnam is persecuted by local authority figures".
Everyone should read the book (First Blood by David Morrell). I haven't watched the movies, since in my mind Stallone is type-cast as someone who doesn't seem smart enough to play Rambo. But my recollection from 30+ years ago is that the book is an excellent page-turner and might be the originator of the thriller genre. Also, spoiler alert Rambo dies at the end of the book.
But I imagine that abusing SEO to ensure search results don't show people the results they actually want to see (or maybe "need to see", but that's quite the can of worms to open) is a legitimate tactic in any propaganda machine.
From a culture perspective, I don't think the author worries about nation states. They could always do that. But with GPT etc alsmost everybody can do that.
It can’t be hard to curate and edit the output of the AIs. I imagine that is already happening. AI does the heavy lifting making the cost of production possibly an order of magnitude lower. Couple that with some other AI tools like unifying voice across many sections and fixing grammar mistakes, a nation-state could create a very effective propaganda machine to manipulate their enemies with basic language proficiency.
I did this (wrote pseudo-random crap, not using an AI) in high school English class for a poetry assignment. The teacher said it was amazing work and the best he's read in a long time. He even wrote about it in the progress report sent to my parents. I don't know if he fell for it or if he was just pulling my leg even harder. The man had a sense of humor.
No.[1] Also their name "Matt Martin" is suspiciously generic, making it hard to search for other than the direct link given in the article to the Amazon listing.
Or maybe people will start paying attention to references and provenance, and start looking into sources of information - maybe even more widespread use of cryptographic signatures. Misinformation has always been out there, and so there are tools to deal with it. Perhaps now is our chance to make these tools wide spread.
In an ideal world, I would hope for your statement to be correct. However, our society has changed the value of recognizing duty to recognizing choice. As long as individuals are aware of the choice they are making, they are justified. The fear of truth is caused by the following dilemma: either you choose for yourself or someone else will choose for you. Because of this fear, choosing correctly becomes less important than choosing freely. The choice is justified by the idea of inner truth, in which the role of subjective experiences can outweigh the role of objective experiences.
A choice is not justified just because it is a choice. But without an objective criterion of correction, every choice is irrelevant, because the subjective criterion is also a choice. It can be changed to justify each of the choices, however inconsistent and contradictory they may be. To say that everything is valid is to say that fact checking is a farce. The loss of discernment is an unexpected result of the emancipation of reason.
Yes and getting that or any book was so hard or impossible for the most of the worlds population. So much privilege, but let's compare wrongly that era to AI generated content era
That's indeed post-modernism for you. Didn't Jean Baudrillard say
something similar about communication (the ecstasy of communication?)
in which the wanton act itself substitutes for the meaning of the
act. We've grown to prefer simulations. Form over function. Seeming
right instead of virtue. Meaningful choice is another casualty.
I don't see how references and providence will solve that problem. References are trivial for machine-generated content to add. And the providence of a new author and a new AI are the exact same.
Unless your plan is to require a PhD to publish a book on Amazon on something.
References are used to trace back to source material. Once you've verified that the source material is truthful, you have started building trust in the author. Over time you can trust this author without verifying every single datum they publish. This is how trust works. We do it all the time to more or less of a degree. No PhD required. What's the issue here?
If it's machine generated or not doesn't matter. It's whether the content derives properly from truthful sources. If it's machine generated but true, so what?
I think there’s a good chance it was ghost written by a content farm for someone who wanted to publish a book in a popular category to make a quick buck. I recently learned that this is a soft-scam technique advocated for by a couple of guys called the Mikkelson Twins. They say you can make money by publishing audiobooks on audible by finding a popular topic on audible, then hiring a ghost writing service to write your book, then hire a voice actor to record it, publish it on audible, and then you too can become fabulously wealthy as the Mikkelson Twins claim to be. Except what the Mikkelson Twins actually make money on is selling you on a “money making course” where they tell you to do the above. So there’s all kinds of people trying to follow this method out there, it seems.
This excellent video [1] from Dan Olson at Folding Ideas is in my opinion a fascinating deep dive in to this whole scam. I don’t want to spoil everything in the video, but Dan does an exceptional job exploring how this ghost writing works, and why it produces the kind of nonsense writing that looks like GPT-3 but is actually being done by an overworked human who is trying to write an entire novel in three weeks or so on a topic they haven’t had time to properly research.
I've watched the video as well and wholeheartedly agree! His 'Line Goes Up' documentary about crypto is also exceptional; very critical but in educated and actually nuanced ways (https://youtu.be/YQ_xWvX1n9g).
If you haven’t gone through the entire Olsonverse yet, don’t sleep on “in search of a flat earth”. That was my gateway video to Folding Ideas and it remains stellar.
That was my first too! Really wonderful creator and I did find myself going through his whole back catalog after that! And I agree with the comment upstream, “Line Goes Up” is a masterpiece.
Given the way that OpenAI sources their training corpus and the amount of people using GPT-3 I would not be surprised if GPT-4 winds up getting trained on a large amount of GPT-3 output.
Think about it - the best niche GPT-3 has is generating plausible spam. If you just need a lot of text, but you don't care about what it says[0], you're going to write it using the cheapest possible tool. OpenAI's training corpus is sourced through web crawls, so all of that spam is destined to get recycled back into the next generation of GPT.
[0] For example, if you want to be able to post a bunch of political spam that looks like genuine comments on a web forum. See GPT-4chan[1] as a practical example of this.
[1] A tweaked version of GPT-3 using 4chan's politics board as training corpus.
Same with most AI image generating models. In 10 years 99% of images on the internet will be AI generated. Would it not regressive for the models to train on their own outputs? Should regulation require AI generated media label itself, or is it the responsibility to train detectors which can intuit the difference between the models and reality better than humans can?
> Except what the Mikkelson Twins actually make money on is selling you on a “money making course” where they tell you to do the above. So there’s all kinds of people trying to follow this method out there, it seems.
How do people still become wealthy selling "money making courses", when enough people have created "money making courses" that they are, themselves, a commodity?
What gets me is; if this was a money making opportunity, and it truly is as simple as they make it out to be, aren’t they literally creating their own competitors in this space by revealing their secret? I’m sure the argument is something like “the market is so vast, that helping others do the same won’t affect my income stream”, but that suggests The correct answer is to scale up, not populate the landscape with completion.
The argument can also be that it actually benefits them by making other people richer and therefore, increasing the amount of their own customers (and the amount of money those customers are willing to spend).
insert a random comment about how "market economy is not a zero-sum game"
Yes. It turns out that there’s a whole lot of aspects of their scheme that would turn off any informed rational person. But there’s enough people who fail that test to keep a constant flow of new customers buying in to their scheme.
In fact much as with “obvious” scams, this becomes a feature: non-marks deselect themselves from the pool at no cost to the scammer, which means the scammer has a much higher average “prospect quality” than a random sampling would give.
Well, it's only logical: what they propose is barely legal and sooner or later, more sooner than later, the scheme will be burnt, so it's better to teach others to make a quick buck than staying in the same place for too long.
I don't think legality is a significant part of the problem – I simply doubt there is really a lot to make regardless of legality.
Most get-rich-quick schemes are really either “make a few pennies here or there, a few $/€/£ if you are lucky, a few 100 if very lucky” or “make-a-bit-slowly-with-lots-of-effort” or both. The rest not included in that “most” are even more completely bunkum, you'll never make anything unless maybe you join the pyramid and resell the scheme.
There is more easy money to be made selling make-money-easily schemes to those that lack critical thinking, than there is to be made via the schemes themselves. Even if no one you sell the scheme to makes anything, even if they all make a loss in the grand scheme of things, the scheme seller still has some revenue.
A scheme seeming illegal/immoral/both might make some marks easier to catch, as they think they are being clever by knowing that crime does in fact sometimes pay so their guard is further lowered due to confirmation bias on this matter.
They are so rich that they are retired but want to pay it forward. But it's not free because they only want to teach people who take it seriously and respect the idea.
Can't tell if this is a joke, but the most likely explanation isn't nearly so noble. They realize that the stream for this particular scam has already run dry (thanks to Audible catching on), but realize that others don't know that yet.
As far as I understood from the video, the Mikkelsen Twins did get rich from that money making scheme, until Audible basically found out and started trying to stop them (most of the books they "published" are not in the page anymore). They milked the cow dry then they made a money making course and created a new way to get money
And now with the competition basically no one who bought their course can actually make money
Or, alternatively, you create a money making course generator generator. If that goes well your next project should be a generator generator generator.
There's a famous old ad where someone put an ad in the newspaper that said "Learn how to make money, send $10 to XXXX". Sending the $10 in got you a letter that said: "place an ad in the newspaper that says "Learn how to make money, sent $10 to [your address]."
You make courses about how to make money making courses.
This reminds me of an episode of Reply All. They ordered some cheap Rolex rip off, it was even worse than they expected. They found out they were all being sold on shopify and that if you sign up for a new account on shopify you'll fairly quickly start getting spam emails helping you setup a shop of all this crap. Then they'd try to sell you on lessons on how to make it more successful. I forgot if the rabbit hole went deeper.
Probably because the ultimate end of these course isn't to make money by yourself, but by engaging in an MLM and let it work.
There's a company engaging in MLM sales paying some news agencies to promote its scheme every day during the news (a subtle sponsor, so to speak; it's on regular TV so SponsorBlock won't help). As my family watched the news from this channel often, I would recognize how it works. It would promote an online course along the lines of "Make Money with a Smartphone" and advertised the course it claimed to cost $249.99 at $2.49 (price may vary, depending on who is the presenter, though the course are the exact same).
The news program is careful not to show the names of the ultimate company offering it, only presenting that this person will be teaching. Sharp-eyed viewer, however, can notice that those adverts intend to direct the prospective "client" to an MLM.
John Oliver (just the presenter, ha!) on Last Week Tonight also did an episode about easy it is for a scam to get a fawning advertorial piece on local TV news segments.
As the saying goes, there’s a sucker born every minute¹.
An important feature of these scams is to frame success and failure as being entirely in your hands: it’s not the system’s fault that you didn’t achieve success, it’s yours and yours alone, you didn’t want it bad enough. Someone who falls in that hole is bound to do it again, this time for a different grift which looks easier. They’ll do as much as it takes until they strike gold, go bankrupt, or finally understand it’s all a scam. That last one can take a long time to come.
In sum, money making courses don’t need an infinite supply of new chumps when they can keep reeling in the same ones. Offer some discounts and rewards for bringing in new members, and you’ve gone full MLM².
Oh, no, I do get why people would buy into money-making courses. I'm basically wondering why the market for money-making courses isn't a winner-take-all market, with the wealthiest course-creators spending their advertising budgets (that they earned by building their money-making-course empire when the field was more green) to outcompete upstarts in the money-making course market. Presumably, people can only be actively trying the techniques of one of these courses at a time — so why aren't most people focused on learning + putting into practice, the techniques of a few very popular courses?
No, I meant, why aren't a few very popular courses the only ones people hear about, such that they're de-facto only focused on those? Money buys advertising / brand recognition; why aren't there big-name money-making-course brands that are outcompeting the new upstarts? Why isn't the market consolidating around the guys who won big first and then reinvested in making their brands the biggest?
Because the techniques don't work, and when people are conned once they are likely to fall for the next con artist selling fundamentally the same thing but with different branding.
A lot of the marketing behind these scams is that they're different than everything you've tried before - the point being is that the number of people who fall for these scams isn't enormous, but they will fall for scams over and over again. Just probably not from the same person selling it.
It's the same as any kind of cult messaging. It's not surprising that the size of a cult designed to exploit people has an upper limit, but it is shocking that the same people will join multiple cults time after time.
But if you know that, then — as a cult leader — why not come up with a scalable approach to founding cults, that all share underlying infrastructure (marketing, accounting, etc) but just use different figure-head cult-leaders, different language, and different outreach techniques; and so form distinct isolated cult communities? Different marques of the same company, in other words — like how every "competing" soap or cereal in the grocery store aisle is still making the same company money in the end.
(I do know at least two real exampless of this meta-approach to scamming: 1. there are meta content-farms, which hire people and train them to run seemingly-independent content-farm YouTube / TikTok / etc channels; and 2. there are serial Kickstarter/IndieGogo scammers, that follow a loop of forming a new shell company, hiring a new actor to pitch a fake idea, steal people's money for it, and disappearing.)
And, while they're at it, why not constantly seek to acquire the pitch+content from smaller, nascent money-making course creators, and run their content through your existing business engine? Why not be the EA of scams?
Being a scammer doesn’t mean you’re a criminal mastermind.
It takes capital, time, and work to become “the EA of scams”, at which point you’re inviting further scrutiny on yourself, meaning even more work (and staff, who you’ll have to trust) to not be in hot water with the law.
Scammers, like the people they scam, are mostly after a quick easy buck. You’re posing “why not” questions as if there’re straightforward to accomplish. They’re not. They take effort and risk without a guarantee of success. Most scammers don’t become “the EA of scams” for the same reasons most game companies don’t become EA.
This is a brilliant (but very sad) video. The ghost writers get about $2500 for a 10,000 word book researched and written in a month. I guess this is cheaper than using GPT-3 and having to prune out the flights of fancy/complete nonsense that GPT-3 can sometimes generate.
Corporate strategy consulting. 1 day to write 5k-10k words on a topic you have to research from scratch is not uncommon. It's all within a broad field of expertise and a sector you're familiar with, but could be products / companies / deals you'd never heard of.
I think the point here was that the ghostwriting is of really low quality. Overnight 10k reports are never groundbreaking or enlightening additions to human knowledge, but they need to be 90%+ accurate and polished enough to inform.
Are those 5k-10k words completely new, or are document templates part of this count?
I know from experience (of on-line commenting; don't judge) this word count is entirely possible to achieve, but I can't imagine sustaining it long-term, as a part of a job.
From the video, it is $2500 for a 25,000 word book, written in 25 days. That is $100 per day writing 1000 words per day. If this takes you 8 hours per day, that is $12.50 per hour. If you can do this every month, that is $30,000 per year. A comfortable wage for some people, and poverty wages for others. It also seems like a difficult pace to research a topic and write 1000 words per day, and seems like miserable work.
Yes, sorry - 25000 words, too late to edit my comment. But it sounds like miserable work, writing on something you are an expert in, or are interested it sounds like a great way to improve your skills and make a bit of money. But researching, writing, and editing content on a made up topic for some charlatan book publishers sounds aweful.
> I think there’s a good chance it was ghost written by a content farm for someone who wanted to publish a book in a popular category to make a quick buck.
The article literally says
> My first theory was that the writing must have been outsourced to a content farm, where multiple individuals worked on portions of the text without caring to understand the context. But the explanation had a flaw: there’s nothing you can find on the internet if you search for “NFP chemotherapy” or “NTF Strategic Development Group”. The text didn’t merely describe a garbled version of our reality; it invented its own.
Yes, and the parent literally generalizes this one-off observation, puts it in context, and gives examples and even a source with a deep dive on the issue.
I don't understand how you think this is responsive to the issue of fabrication. The article already considered the possibility of the human content farm and concluded it was unlikely on the basis of information that was completely fabricated.
The fact that the commenter proceeded to generalize, show a link, etc is not responsive to that. A responsive answer would be along the lines of "well, a content farm might fabricate too because _____."
"If you find that interesting, you might find this interesting" seems like a perfectly reasonable motivation for an HN comment. I think it's worth forgiving that and enjoying the broader horizons rather than treating HN threads as a way for lots of smart people to try and craft the most definitive statement about one narrow issue, while policing any deviation therefrom.
If I were a content farm I'd probably use text cut and pasted from text models, but I'd never heard of the Mikkelson Twins and it was interesting to learn about them.
Well, it's "responsive" for me. In fact it's your comment that was off-topic and meta, the parent was perfectly on topic and responding on the issue.
>A responsive answer would be along the lines of "well, a content farm might fabricate too because _____."
A responsive answer doesn't need to have a particular formula, much less that one. It just needs to be relevant to the issue and provide more information and/or the commentor's own take (could be just their feelings about the issue too).
My rationale was that, before I had seen this very well produced video, I was not familiar with the way that content farms operated. The idea that words being fabricated means it must be GPT-3 seems spurious to me. A person in a huge hurry, with a poor grasp of the English language, could easily generate fabricated words.
The video I linked is extraordinary in its level of research and quality, and interesting on its own merits. If someone is not fully aware of the extent to which content farms squeeze out content, it’s easy to assume some weird prose is GPT-3. I felt the articles dismissal of the idea of a content farm was too quick, and perhaps they or the readers might not be familiar with how they operate. And so I provided a summary as well as a link to this very high quality investigative source.
Also that, but they still claim that that's what produced the book in OP, a possibility OP only brought up to pretty conclusively rebut. Which means they went on a tangent with their comment based on what they knew without actually finishing the paragraph it was based on.
Of these patients, 44 were treated with HAIC and 20 with sorafenib. HAIC involved cisplatin (50 mg fine powder in 5-10 ml lipiodol) and a continuous infusion of 5-fluorouracil (FU) (1,500 mg/5 days), which is referred to as new 5-FU and cisplatin therapy (NFP).
I suspect the first few chapters were well-written and researched with the rest slowly filling up with bulk filler; I find that with a lot of books, I read the first few chapters, get the gist of it and stop reading. I suspect a lot of people do that.
That said, there's a few books in my library / to-read list that are great content cover to cover. Timeless classics, etc.
Homer Simpson's adage that "you're both right" might really apply in this case.
Outsourcing to a content farm might very well result in lots of the text being rendered by GPT-3 and similar generative AIs. The two are certainly not mutually exclusive.
Wow! Fantastic article. With AI generated stuff I expect we are going to see 99% of the book market saturated with generated nonsense, then collapse as a market for lemons.
Depends what you mean by "99% of the book market". I'm sure the major publishers will not start publishing generated nonsense, and I suspect the small players self-publishing nonsense on Amazon will go away in time.
Of course major publishers may be duped into unintentionally publishing AI generated or part AI generated content by bad authors, but if it's good enough to get through their editing processes, it will hopefully be non-nonsense.
What actually surprises me is that the author bought 11 paper books from Amazon about NFTs. You really need 11 books to understand or write about a single concept? It is a highly controversial ongoing topic. Those 11 books most likely become obsolete exactly on the day after they were written.
Good catch on the one fake book! But I am surprised it was only one. Maybe the author started from that one and will write about the others later.
The author didn't want to "understand a single concept" this way, but rather, as they say themselves, "get familiar with the best-articulated arguments put forward by the proponents of this tech".
The author bought 11 paper books because they wanted to make money posting a meta-review of the literature analyzing the arguments from all of them together. While they probably understood the points after a single book, they would have lacked the complete coverage (and the marketing hook).
I would expect someone writing that to have read the 11 most popular books.
Off topic: Why is everything posted here all of a sudden begging for my email? It feels like every article I click after reading few sentences I get a box begging to sign up for some stupid ass mailing list as if after spending 10 seconds reading their words I had become a fan and absolutely needed more of their bullshit in my life.
If I am interested in hearing more about you, I will find a way to subscribe to your shit otherwise all you manage to do is to get me frustrated and leave.
This time I couldn't even get to reading, I opened the article and had to answer an IM. By the time I got back I was treated with full screen "Type your email to subscribe" box that couldn't even be dismissed without clicking small "Let me read first" link.
Why is simple blog design such ass these days? Why can't I just read the content without being bombarded with pop ups, pop overs, and other crap that has nothing to do with the actual content?
I used to run NoScript back in the day, but way too many websites are just beyond broken without JS. I'm just not going to bother reading bad sites, I am not losing anything of value.
Seriously, I knew someone involved in "published as remainder" business in the 70s. First get good photos, pay someone to write some text, put on sale at inflated price, then put on sale at amazing discount.
Every so often in the last n years I stumbled over "books" which simply contain regurgitated wikipedia content.
And, of course, all those web pages collecting amazon reviews which simulate product review pages. Or, before that, just link farms to products so people could collect referer compensation.
All this is some form of spam, which simply uses search engines to spread instead of email. So the "books" reported here (while somehow "fascinating" just look like the next step of spam/scam evolution to me.
And yes, I see that they are more problematic the "better" they get generated, because more people will think they are genuine works.
I wrote one of those books. That is, a Wikipedia article I largely wrote was plagiarised and published in a book by a scammer. Some time later my words on Wikipedia were tagged as having been plagiarised from the scammer's book. It was clear from wiki timestamps and publication dates what really happened, so it got fixed, but it's irritating that one needs to waste time on things like that (and as far as I know the book is still on Amazon).
I would have expected that. Amazon neither has the staff with expertise to investigate claims nor much interest in removing products that earn them a nice share. Knowledge is fungible nowadays, and in these cases of "fake books" its volatile too.
It's the virtual gold rush on the Internet and companies which supply resources (ebook platforms, search engines, but hardware for crypto mining like graphics cards etc too) to those "miners" profit from what's going on.
> I would have expected that. Amazon neither has the staff with expertise to investigate claims nor much interest in removing products that earn them a nice share
If the book attributes its content to Wikipedia, it’s perfectly legal. The issue then becomes "should Amazon remove low-quality products from their website?" (and the underlying issue is "what does 'low-quality' mean?"), and the response is no because they want to act as a platform.
> If the book attributes its content to Wikipedia, it’s perfectly legal.
Sure, but I remember seeing books which didn't attribute their source. I only noted the "similarity" while searching for info on certain topics. Sorry, I didn't document them, because I just thought, ok, the next scam.
Similar things happened in the past as well. At conferences or trade shows you could find booths selling CDs/DVDs of online content like IETF RFC's, government publications, etc. I could see it as useful for people that had infrequent/spotty network connectivity, but mostly it was preying on people who were unaware of how to obtain these documents on their own.
Occasionally you could find print versions as well, which were sometimes a deal if you took the cost of toner/paper into consideration.
Alarmingly enough, not even the one- or two-star Amazon reviews caught the garbled nonsense, indicating that not even real people bothered to read the book in detail.
I’m wondering if any person on the planet other than the author of the article read this best-selling book in its entirety. Because even the book’s purported author likely didn’t.
If you thought it was garbage, why would you continue to pour your time into reading it in detail? That's just silly. You throw it in the bin and move on with your life.
That would mean that the reviewer understood the topic and was capable of writing a proper critique? I'm a book lover who reads a lot of fiction and non-fiction and more often than not in the last few years I have the feeling that many reviews are generated by people who read a different book, or didn't understand the one the comment at all.
Makes sense, I suppose. The reviewers of the book in question might then have read the part about chemotherapy “NFPs” and thought that the section is probably accurate and they just didn’t understand it, so they moved on. Which is alarming enough by itself.
Well, if people don’t actually invest any time and effort into consuming the books they buy, then perhaps it is an inevitable adaptation on the part of authors to also not invest any time and effort into creating them.
(The rise of Blinkist et. al. seems to support the idea that many people value being able to say that they have read a book much more highly than actually reading it.)
Are you saying there are zero genuine reviews on Amazon? Or zero genuine reviews for this particular book?
I’m aware of at least one real person who occasionally writes honest reviews of technical books on Amazon: me.
So with enough reviews for a particular one, I’d expect at least some of them to be credible, yes. You can usually tell which ones are not shills or bots.
E.g. in this case, those might be the reviewers who gave a lower rating, and had specific (rather than generic) criticisms.
My surprise here stems from the fact that even they seemed to have skimmed or misread some key sections.
Isn't the "For Dummies" series some sort of trademark? I'm amazed they didn't get sued for using the name. Crap like this devalues the rest of the "for dummies" books.
That book seems to be an actual for "dummies book", written by a doctor of business analytics who teaches at Santa Clara University, for what it's worth. She also authored "DeFi for dummies".
If I had to read any of these books, there's a good chance that the for dummies one is the least bad of the 12, but odds are you are better off reading 0 of these books.
Amazon is full of fake/generated/auto translated books in every category. Just search for any programming language and sort it by release date.
I don't understand why they don't fix this problem.
It's pretty easy to fix and all those sales don't generate a significant amount of revenue for Amazon considering the negative experience for clients.
Such books are pretty easy to spot since the majority of reviews are written by people who have published more than hundreds of reviews.
Going into full tinfoil hat territory: I wonder whether those products are the equivalent of the 'deliberate' spelling and grammatical errors we're all told end up in spam emails to pre-filter out people who probably won't fall for the scam. Amazon doesn't want customers who care about quality, because they leave bad reviews and have a higher return rate.
Affects older books too. I've found books that were very obviously printed scans of library books, including dog-ears, missing pages and the odd pencil lines.
Appears they're printing these on demand on essentially bleached office-grade paper. The orange tint is from the white balance being off.
Seems to be related to the system of third party sellers. Every shop I'm aware of that uses this model has problems with this type of bait-and-switch bullshit.
I wonder if having a swarm of people buy these items, then returning them since they clearly don't match the expected result from the description, would hurt the sellers enough so they would stop doing this sort of scam.
Unfortunately I doubt it. If they are just printing on-demand low-quality books it seems they’d not be badly hurt as their variable costs are cheap paper and cheap ink.
If you could find a book that broke their machine, sort of a Legends of Stuxnet, then you’d get somewhere.
Or if you figured out their business and determined if they sold so many they placed a bulk order for a printing, then place that many orders, they place the bulk order, you stop buying, and then do the mass return.
yeah I saw that too. They take the books from archive.org, it’s public domains books.
It’s essentially legal, and I think it’s not that scammy honestly. People want these books on paper, nobody prints them anymore or has the texts.
edit: I also saw some people selling the OCR from these books, which is far worse. You need to guess the original, especially if it has some latin/german inside English.
I honestly think it would be fine if they were a bit more clear about what you're buying. As it is, you're typically getting nearly no information beyond the title and the publisher.
Making available rare out of print books is a noble goal.
That's exactly it, it doesn't hurt them enough that the products they sell are low quality. For every one person that returns a book (which costs Amazon money), there's a dozen that just won't bother, it's not worth the hassle for them.
But there are other platforms out there (especially for books) that people will prefer if they make it easier to find high-quality content. I’m with the poster you replied to; it would make sense for Amazon to go after these fake products.
It's a particularly bad problem for books, but it's a problem for every product category. Unless Amazon sees people abandoning them in large numbers (personally, I haven't ordered from them in years) they're not going to change.
Amazon is full of low-effort products in every category. If you search for certain consumer goods you'll get several different brand names for the same white-label product, for instance. And lots of people buy them! It's not just an easily-ignored spam problem…
I really hope Amazon's sea of garbage devours Amazon before it destroys the remaining un-Amazon-ified online retailers through unfair competition.
It is the same problem with Facebook: does Mark Zuckerberg leave FB before it crashes (or accepts that The Metaverse is a complete failure).
Does Jeff Bezos change direction and drop the "everything store" strategy by realizing that most of everything is trash and he is destroying the Amazon brand?
To misquote him: your garbage is my opportunity.
He enables competition to use brands as a strategy: we make sure everything we sell is the best. If you shop at our place, you will not be wasting your time.
> I soon discovered that all the books leaned on the same central argument: value is an inherent consequence of scarcity. My rebuttal to that was simple: it’s an exception, not a rule. My kids’ doodles are scarce, but in a gallery, they wouldn’t fetch much. Alas, while this made for a solid Twitter quip, it wasn’t enough for an in-depth post.
Scarcity in economics refers to when the demand for a resource is greater than the supply of that resource. Your kids doodles aren't scarce because there is no demand for them.
How did the author read 11 books on NFT's and not know this lol? The books must have been all very bad or the article author just skimmed thru them.
Ah, remember those times when producing hundred of thousands of books was just a side-gig for a Professor of Management Science?
And he didn't even faked it.
the big question this raises is: how will this affect self publishing and the need for an actual publisher.
i expect that publishers are able to avoid publishing junk like this and therefore are still able to offer some value. whereas self-publishing authors will have to fight to stand out on their own.
It's virtual evolution at work, i.e. spam evolution. It's the Internet Gold Rush (i.e. "make money fast" at work), which we have watched getting "more professional" in the last ten to twenty years. And because those companies which supply resources (ebook platforms, search engines, but also hardware for crypto mining like graphics cards etc) to those "virtual miners" profit from what's going on, we won't see that fixed in the upcoming years.
Generating books instead of spam emails looks more professional so gullible people, who meanwhile (hopefully) did learn that the Nigerian prince isn't a prince, will buy such books (it's written in a book, and book writing is real work you know, so it must be true) to learn about all those fancy new concepts they hear about.
It's actually not that different from all these ads you see, especially if you actually watch recent youtube ads. Due to the current "energy crisis" and the upcoming winter, I've seen videos advertising magical electric heaters, which will "recycle" 85% of the energy used for heating and thus will save you lots of money. It's simple physics that warm air coming out at the front of such a device will be sucked in at its back again, but there's nothing to "recycle" here, to somehow save energy.
BTW, anybody interested in my upcoming book on quantum heating? Quantum heating will even earn you money, because it will generate certain energy efficient by-products which you can sell at your favourite online retailer ;-)
> BTW, anybody interested in my upcoming book on quantum heating? Quantum heating will even earn you money, because it will generate certain energy efficient by-products which you can sell at your favourite online retailer ;-)
As a seller of magic electric recycling heaters who you just bankrupted, let me repay you in kind: everyone, you can easily DIY this "quantum heating" thing: it's just an automated pipeline of GPT-3 to LeanPub and purchasing ads that show up in Quanta Magazine (hence "quantum"), where you run GPT-3 locally so you can keep your home warm with the heat generated by your PC.
> I've seen videos advertising magical electric heaters, which will "recycle" 85% of the energy used for heating and thus will save you lots of money. It's simple physics that warm air coming out at the front of such a device will be sucked in at its back again, but there's nothing to "recycle" here, to somehow save energy.
You sure they couldn't be talking about a heat pump which does have "above 100%" efficiency in a sense?
Because the "energy crisis" is actually a political crisis, i.e. the failure of governments to build enough alternate generators, like solar and wind power during the last decade or two.
> You sure they couldn't be talking about a heat pump [...]
I'm really sure, because the videos show people unpacking a small electrical heater after telling you that "a student" or "an engineer" developed this glorious device in their spare time, ... And last but not least because we built our house with a heat pump and heat exchanging ventilation[*] more than a decade ago, so I'm aware of the concepts.
> Because the "energy crisis" is actually a political crisis, i.e. the failure of governments to build enough alternate generators, like solar and wind power during the last decade or two.
Aha, I see. A bit late for that now though, so now it's an energy crisis. I wish it were seen as a political crisis but pretty much everyone here just blames Russia and there aren't many (if any in some countries) consequences...
> I'm really sure, because the videos show people unpacking a small electrical heater after telling you that "a student" or "an engineer" developed this glorious device in their spare time, ...
Certainly energy crisis is of political nature, but let's say Germany invested massively in the renewables. It's just not the best source of energy in most places in terms of return on investment. Not to mention the intermittency problem. If they just didn't close their nuclear reactors, Germany would be in much better position to weather off the crisis.
France and Germany recently agreed to help each other over the winter. While France will provide gas to Germany, Germany will provide electricity to France (the country with all these nuclear reactors ;-0)
Regarding the "return on investment" nuclear power is way more expensive than other forms of energy, if you add the (hidden) cost of storage and disposal of nuclear waste. Which could have been known for a long time, cf.
370 comments
[ 4.5 ms ] story [ 346 ms ] threadhttps://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33313447
let's see what happens.
It got 7 points and then flagged.
Then again maybe this is a bad test. Perhaps just reposting the above story in a way to dissuade human upvoters would be the right approach.
Then I'd have to withhold it for a couple hours and reveal it later
It's common on HN for submissions to get upvoted before comments come in. It's a good sign, actually, if people aren't rushing to post reflexive things. Good comments are reflective, which means they happen after people have had time to process information—such as by reading an article.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33303565
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...
Seems like the fake review bots are a lot smarter than the anti-measures applied by Amazon. And the fun part is that both parties are probably running on AWS ;)
I think the problem is [left] fake books and [Quote sign] Amazons...
Okay, on the third try I read less and more. Still, it felt ugly.
The symbols < and > are being used as substitutes for the English words "less" and "more", which is not conventional at all, but is related enough to the actual meaning of the symbols that given context and a lot of effort, you can get there. I wouldn't recommend copying the notation; it conflicts pretty badly with the ordinary use of < and >.
Amazon isn't going to read every letter of every book that it sells, so it's hardly their fault either.
[0] https://hipsum.co/
I wonder how hard would it be to train a model that given a longer passage of text could tell with a high certainty that it’s machine generated?
Nice people generally only see the immediate utility of a tool in front of them. It takes a certain mind-set to see the other "weaponised" implications.
Edit: Russian wikipedia article on that article contains references to even earlier, pre-computer, cases, as early as 1965, when meaningless texts or talks got published in scientific journals or conference proceedings. See https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/Корчеватель_(статья) and also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_scholarly_publishing_s...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=biYciU1uiUw
It is a great and informative watch.
----
Post-truth, like post-modernism, does not mean an absolute absence of truth, but a decline in confidence in common knowledge, making your own truth the center of your life, rather than a set of values shared by a community.
We now believe that our own truth is somehow better than the "centralized" or "official" truth. We are now free from the institutions and authorities that controlled the truth. But this is an illusion, because the very definition of truth requires trust in something other than you.
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/philosophy/comments/j5gyp5/the_sear...
If so, long time no see. Hope all is well.
It's not even a democratisation of bullshit, non-state actors also don't need GPT-3 to spam nonsense. PR and advertising is all about that and has a history of hundreds if not thousands of years. Maybe the new thing here is that people now realise lying is easy.
This has already led to the EU starting to fall apart - the UK is out of the EU, Hungary and Poland no longer meet the criteria for having backslid into totalitarianism or at the very least, no longer having a division between the legal and executive branches of law. And it's causing lines to be drawn in the US as well, with calls for secession rising. But the US has been an "us vs them" type of "democracy" for a while now, it probably didn't take much to entrench the sides more deeply.
Anyway, that's online discourse, I'm sure it extends to books too, just less obviously.
For the most part, it's low-effort manipulations that very occasionally take hold---I can remember the anti-nuclear protests against the deployment of the Pershing II missiles in Europe---but the internet and social media have dropped the bar for "low-effort".
It is now cheaper to produce lots of flowery, meaningless text that is full of definitions. I suspect that the future of literature is more concise and externally-meaningful writing.
Amazon is a terrible marketplace insofar as the rating system isn't sybil proof. this crap slips through the cracks.
Maybe it could create a new genre of literature that is tailored to the reader's interests.
When you replace 'catering to a certain audience by being good at doing something they want' with 'catering to a certain audience by being good at selling them something they don't want' then you have created a system in which supply and demand is no longer operating properly.
Quantity CAN make a difference. When there were few such sources, avoiding them was annoying but easy. Today, it's HARD. Tomorrow, it may be impossible with today's tools, and I don't know that we can win such a race.
Unfortunately, generation of garbage information can still far outpace such a system with few nodes...
For Movies, I find that Ebert aligns a lot with my taste. If he says it's good, it's really good. I mean, that doesn't help with recent movies, but there's more than enough of the old good stuff. (There's a lot to be said for consuming old media; it gives it time for critical opinion to stabilize. )
I mean, of course, all of these methods will leave out a lot of really good stuff. But... that's kind of the point; there's way more media than I can consume. There are professional reviewers that can give you more really good media than you could consume in a reasonable lifetime. I'm not quite halfway through the 'Pulitzer prizes awarded in my lifetime' list, and I've started a few years back. (I mean, I was 40 or so by the time I started, and so I had read a few of the books just 'cause they were popular books that people recommend. McCarthy's "The Road" is exactly the sort of thing I like, so I read it before on another person's recommendation. But still, like, you see some really great work outside your genre; I'm not normally a romance novel kinda guy, but Lurie's "Foreign Affairs" was absolutely beautiful, and absolutely not a thing I would have read without this project.)
I haven't completely solved the problem for technical books, just 'cause people who have good up to date knowledge of an area have often built up that knowledge over time. they read some books but those books are long out of date, they've brought their skills up to date with mailing lists, which they then vet based on their knowledge of the reputation of the person posting.
I mean, I think it's pretty easy for the non-perishables, "The C Programming Language" is a thing you should read if you work with computers. But which tomb on docker is up to date enough and pretty good? that can be a difficult question to answer, and is often answered based on the author's reputation for other technical work they do, which usually tells me something about the accuracy of the book, but doesn't tell me if it's well written or if it's up to date enough. (On the other hand, if you are well known for writing a big part of the subsystem I wanna learn, eh, I don't feel too bad about giving you money for a book even if I later decide that the book is not written in a way I find engaging, like, you earned it and I'll buy another book.) And... I dunno. often you can get sample chapters, and that gets you a pretty good idea of how engaging the writing is.
I mean, one way to address it is to start at the base... "go read the gang of four design patterns books, and then use your knowledge of object orientedness to make sense of modern object-oriented configuration management systems" - which does make some sense. But still, I should spend the time to find the tech book awards that match up with my taste.
An ocean is "basically water" but the experience of being alone in the middle of the ocean is fundamentally different from standing in a puddle.
I think it is somewhat scary that these things can't just be instantly pulled from wherever they're marketed. They're just "tools-of-the-trade" for scammers. They serve no honest purpose.
Release crap books nobody will read, or fill Soundcloud with bad music?
I suspect the commenter is either ignorant or just decided to roll in all the terrible sequels...
But I imagine that abusing SEO to ensure search results don't show people the results they actually want to see (or maybe "need to see", but that's quite the can of worms to open) is a legitimate tactic in any propaganda machine.
1: https://www.amazon.com/Matt-Martin/e/B09R7QSRN8/
A choice is not justified just because it is a choice. But without an objective criterion of correction, every choice is irrelevant, because the subjective criterion is also a choice. It can be changed to justify each of the choices, however inconsistent and contradictory they may be. To say that everything is valid is to say that fact checking is a farce. The loss of discernment is an unexpected result of the emancipation of reason.
Those were simpler times.
But in case you still don't get the joke, no the OP is not written by AI. Instead, it is a common point of view.
Unless your plan is to require a PhD to publish a book on Amazon on something.
Although machine generated content will make the misinformation problem much worse.
This excellent video [1] from Dan Olson at Folding Ideas is in my opinion a fascinating deep dive in to this whole scam. I don’t want to spoil everything in the video, but Dan does an exceptional job exploring how this ghost writing works, and why it produces the kind of nonsense writing that looks like GPT-3 but is actually being done by an overworked human who is trying to write an entire novel in three weeks or so on a topic they haven’t had time to properly research.
[1] https://youtu.be/biYciU1uiUw
Think about it - the best niche GPT-3 has is generating plausible spam. If you just need a lot of text, but you don't care about what it says[0], you're going to write it using the cheapest possible tool. OpenAI's training corpus is sourced through web crawls, so all of that spam is destined to get recycled back into the next generation of GPT.
[0] For example, if you want to be able to post a bunch of political spam that looks like genuine comments on a web forum. See GPT-4chan[1] as a practical example of this.
[1] A tweaked version of GPT-3 using 4chan's politics board as training corpus.
How do people still become wealthy selling "money making courses", when enough people have created "money making courses" that they are, themselves, a commodity?
insert a random comment about how "market economy is not a zero-sum game"
Most get-rich-quick schemes are really either “make a few pennies here or there, a few $/€/£ if you are lucky, a few 100 if very lucky” or “make-a-bit-slowly-with-lots-of-effort” or both. The rest not included in that “most” are even more completely bunkum, you'll never make anything unless maybe you join the pyramid and resell the scheme.
There is more easy money to be made selling make-money-easily schemes to those that lack critical thinking, than there is to be made via the schemes themselves. Even if no one you sell the scheme to makes anything, even if they all make a loss in the grand scheme of things, the scheme seller still has some revenue.
A scheme seeming illegal/immoral/both might make some marks easier to catch, as they think they are being clever by knowing that crime does in fact sometimes pay so their guard is further lowered due to confirmation bias on this matter.
I might point to a dozen other parts of the situation as "barely legal scam", but why that part?
And now with the competition basically no one who bought their course can actually make money
Second, money making courses, don't work. So people tend to buy another and another, to get to the mythical "good" one...
This reminds me of an episode of Reply All. They ordered some cheap Rolex rip off, it was even worse than they expected. They found out they were all being sold on shopify and that if you sign up for a new account on shopify you'll fairly quickly start getting spam emails helping you setup a shop of all this crap. Then they'd try to sell you on lessons on how to make it more successful. I forgot if the rabbit hole went deeper.
https://gimletmedia.com/shows/reply-all/dvhe3l
There's a company engaging in MLM sales paying some news agencies to promote its scheme every day during the news (a subtle sponsor, so to speak; it's on regular TV so SponsorBlock won't help). As my family watched the news from this channel often, I would recognize how it works. It would promote an online course along the lines of "Make Money with a Smartphone" and advertised the course it claimed to cost $249.99 at $2.49 (price may vary, depending on who is the presenter, though the course are the exact same).
The news program is careful not to show the names of the ultimate company offering it, only presenting that this person will be teaching. Sharp-eyed viewer, however, can notice that those adverts intend to direct the prospective "client" to an MLM.
An important feature of these scams is to frame success and failure as being entirely in your hands: it’s not the system’s fault that you didn’t achieve success, it’s yours and yours alone, you didn’t want it bad enough. Someone who falls in that hole is bound to do it again, this time for a different grift which looks easier. They’ll do as much as it takes until they strike gold, go bankrupt, or finally understand it’s all a scam. That last one can take a long time to come.
In sum, money making courses don’t need an infinite supply of new chumps when they can keep reeling in the same ones. Offer some discounts and rewards for bringing in new members, and you’ve gone full MLM².
¹ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/There%27s_a_sucker_born_every_...
² https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multi-level_marketing
Because that entails hard work.
A lot of the marketing behind these scams is that they're different than everything you've tried before - the point being is that the number of people who fall for these scams isn't enormous, but they will fall for scams over and over again. Just probably not from the same person selling it.
It's the same as any kind of cult messaging. It's not surprising that the size of a cult designed to exploit people has an upper limit, but it is shocking that the same people will join multiple cults time after time.
(I do know at least two real exampless of this meta-approach to scamming: 1. there are meta content-farms, which hire people and train them to run seemingly-independent content-farm YouTube / TikTok / etc channels; and 2. there are serial Kickstarter/IndieGogo scammers, that follow a loop of forming a new shell company, hiring a new actor to pitch a fake idea, steal people's money for it, and disappearing.)
And, while they're at it, why not constantly seek to acquire the pitch+content from smaller, nascent money-making course creators, and run their content through your existing business engine? Why not be the EA of scams?
It takes capital, time, and work to become “the EA of scams”, at which point you’re inviting further scrutiny on yourself, meaning even more work (and staff, who you’ll have to trust) to not be in hot water with the law.
Scammers, like the people they scam, are mostly after a quick easy buck. You’re posing “why not” questions as if there’re straightforward to accomplish. They’re not. They take effort and risk without a guarantee of success. Most scammers don’t become “the EA of scams” for the same reasons most game companies don’t become EA.
I have to write 10,000 words overnight occasionally in my role.
If it’s $2500 for 10k words, maybe I should be ghostwriting…
I think the point here was that the ghostwriting is of really low quality. Overnight 10k reports are never groundbreaking or enlightening additions to human knowledge, but they need to be 90%+ accurate and polished enough to inform.
I know from experience (of on-line commenting; don't judge) this word count is entirely possible to achieve, but I can't imagine sustaining it long-term, as a part of a job.
Just choose the templates and fill in your names and numbers.
It's not that they care about much fidelity to the subject or going deep anyway.
And half of the work or more is rewritting (sometimes not even that) other sources, like online articles and such
It probably hardly takes 8 hours a day. More like 3-4 or even 2. 8 hours for 1000 words is for much higher quality 1000 words...
Actually they get $250 for 25,000. The $2500 is what they should get.
The article literally says
> My first theory was that the writing must have been outsourced to a content farm, where multiple individuals worked on portions of the text without caring to understand the context. But the explanation had a flaw: there’s nothing you can find on the internet if you search for “NFP chemotherapy” or “NTF Strategic Development Group”. The text didn’t merely describe a garbled version of our reality; it invented its own.
Yes, and the parent literally generalizes this one-off observation, puts it in context, and gives examples and even a source with a deep dive on the issue.
The fact that the commenter proceeded to generalize, show a link, etc is not responsive to that. A responsive answer would be along the lines of "well, a content farm might fabricate too because _____."
But that's not the form of the comment. It begins with "I think there’s a good chance it was ghost written by a content farm"!
can't a comment not reiterate in its opening statement what the author already said (to e.g. show the commentor's aggrement)?
this is too formulaic and pedantic a response
That is precisely what the original commenter did:
> (…) exploring how this ghost writing works, and why it produces the kind of nonsense writing that looks like GPT-3 but is actually (…)
>A responsive answer would be along the lines of "well, a content farm might fabricate too because _____."
A responsive answer doesn't need to have a particular formula, much less that one. It just needs to be relevant to the issue and provide more information and/or the commentor's own take (could be just their feelings about the issue too).
The video I linked is extraordinary in its level of research and quality, and interesting on its own merits. If someone is not fully aware of the extent to which content farms squeeze out content, it’s easy to assume some weird prose is GPT-3. I felt the articles dismissal of the idea of a content farm was too quick, and perhaps they or the readers might not be familiar with how they operate. And so I provided a summary as well as a link to this very high quality investigative source.
That said, there's a few books in my library / to-read list that are great content cover to cover. Timeless classics, etc.
Outsourcing to a content farm might very well result in lots of the text being rendered by GPT-3 and similar generative AIs. The two are certainly not mutually exclusive.
Of course major publishers may be duped into unintentionally publishing AI generated or part AI generated content by bad authors, but if it's good enough to get through their editing processes, it will hopefully be non-nonsense.
Good catch on the one fake book! But I am surprised it was only one. Maybe the author started from that one and will write about the others later.
I would expect someone writing that to have read the 11 most popular books.
If I am interested in hearing more about you, I will find a way to subscribe to your shit otherwise all you manage to do is to get me frustrated and leave.
This time I couldn't even get to reading, I opened the article and had to answer an IM. By the time I got back I was treated with full screen "Type your email to subscribe" box that couldn't even be dismissed without clicking small "Let me read first" link.
Why is simple blog design such ass these days? Why can't I just read the content without being bombarded with pop ups, pop overs, and other crap that has nothing to do with the actual content?
If your content is worth money you will make money, but most content is definitely not worth even my time.
And, of course, all those web pages collecting amazon reviews which simulate product review pages. Or, before that, just link farms to products so people could collect referer compensation.
All this is some form of spam, which simply uses search engines to spread instead of email. So the "books" reported here (while somehow "fascinating" just look like the next step of spam/scam evolution to me.
And yes, I see that they are more problematic the "better" they get generated, because more people will think they are genuine works.
I would have expected that. Amazon neither has the staff with expertise to investigate claims nor much interest in removing products that earn them a nice share. Knowledge is fungible nowadays, and in these cases of "fake books" its volatile too.
It's the virtual gold rush on the Internet and companies which supply resources (ebook platforms, search engines, but hardware for crypto mining like graphics cards etc too) to those "miners" profit from what's going on.
If the book attributes its content to Wikipedia, it’s perfectly legal. The issue then becomes "should Amazon remove low-quality products from their website?" (and the underlying issue is "what does 'low-quality' mean?"), and the response is no because they want to act as a platform.
Sure, but I remember seeing books which didn't attribute their source. I only noted the "similarity" while searching for info on certain topics. Sorry, I didn't document them, because I just thought, ok, the next scam.
Occasionally you could find print versions as well, which were sometimes a deal if you took the cost of toner/paper into consideration.
I’m wondering if any person on the planet other than the author of the article read this best-selling book in its entirety. Because even the book’s purported author likely didn’t.
(The rise of Blinkist et. al. seems to support the idea that many people value being able to say that they have read a book much more highly than actually reading it.)
Like i totally get people lying about reading Finnegan's wake, but who is impressed by a weird intro to NFT book? Maybe it depends on social circle.
You treat Amazon reviews as credible information?
Wow!
I’m aware of at least one real person who occasionally writes honest reviews of technical books on Amazon: me.
So with enough reviews for a particular one, I’d expect at least some of them to be credible, yes. You can usually tell which ones are not shills or bots.
E.g. in this case, those might be the reviewers who gave a lower rating, and had specific (rather than generic) criticisms.
My surprise here stems from the fact that even they seemed to have skimmed or misread some key sections.
The "NFTs for Dummies" book is presumably not nonsense, or at least no more so than the subject matter demands.
If I had to read any of these books, there's a good chance that the for dummies one is the least bad of the 12, but odds are you are better off reading 0 of these books.
I'd argue Wiley already did that themselves. They sell the Dummies brand to any company with a large checkbook. See:
- https://www.intel.com/content/dam/support/us/en/programmable...
- https://www.oracle.com/a/ocom/docs/oracle-cloud-erp-for-dumm...
- https://www.ibm.com/downloads/cas/GB8ZMQZ3
I don't understand why they don't fix this problem. It's pretty easy to fix and all those sales don't generate a significant amount of revenue for Amazon considering the negative experience for clients.
Such books are pretty easy to spot since the majority of reviews are written by people who have published more than hundreds of reviews.
https://www.marginalia.nu/shitty-book/pencil2.webp
https://www.marginalia.nu/shitty-book/fadeout.webp
https://www.marginalia.nu/shitty-book/pencil.webp
Appears they're printing these on demand on essentially bleached office-grade paper. The orange tint is from the white balance being off.
Seems to be related to the system of third party sellers. Every shop I'm aware of that uses this model has problems with this type of bait-and-switch bullshit.
If you could find a book that broke their machine, sort of a Legends of Stuxnet, then you’d get somewhere.
Or if you figured out their business and determined if they sold so many they placed a bulk order for a printing, then place that many orders, they place the bulk order, you stop buying, and then do the mass return.
It’s essentially legal, and I think it’s not that scammy honestly. People want these books on paper, nobody prints them anymore or has the texts.
edit: I also saw some people selling the OCR from these books, which is far worse. You need to guess the original, especially if it has some latin/german inside English.
Making available rare out of print books is a noble goal.
Because they act as a platform an the platform makes a living by its transactions and not by the quality of the content.
I really hope Amazon's sea of garbage devours Amazon before it destroys the remaining un-Amazon-ified online retailers through unfair competition.
Does Jeff Bezos change direction and drop the "everything store" strategy by realizing that most of everything is trash and he is destroying the Amazon brand?
To misquote him: your garbage is my opportunity.
He enables competition to use brands as a strategy: we make sure everything we sell is the best. If you shop at our place, you will not be wasting your time.
Tools on amazon have same problem, so many fakes, they get reported and company just pops up with different name.
Amazon pays users who publish hundreds of reviews. It gives Amazon credibility to other users.
Scarcity in economics refers to when the demand for a resource is greater than the supply of that resource. Your kids doodles aren't scarce because there is no demand for them.
How did the author read 11 books on NFT's and not know this lol? The books must have been all very bad or the article author just skimmed thru them.
Interesting article other than that tho.
It seems that you have not even bothered to skim the article...
https://singularityhub.com/2012/12/13/patented-book-writing-...
https://patents.google.com/patent/US7266767B2/en
https://www.icongrouponline.com/
i expect that publishers are able to avoid publishing junk like this and therefore are still able to offer some value. whereas self-publishing authors will have to fight to stand out on their own.
Generating books instead of spam emails looks more professional so gullible people, who meanwhile (hopefully) did learn that the Nigerian prince isn't a prince, will buy such books (it's written in a book, and book writing is real work you know, so it must be true) to learn about all those fancy new concepts they hear about.
It's actually not that different from all these ads you see, especially if you actually watch recent youtube ads. Due to the current "energy crisis" and the upcoming winter, I've seen videos advertising magical electric heaters, which will "recycle" 85% of the energy used for heating and thus will save you lots of money. It's simple physics that warm air coming out at the front of such a device will be sucked in at its back again, but there's nothing to "recycle" here, to somehow save energy.
BTW, anybody interested in my upcoming book on quantum heating? Quantum heating will even earn you money, because it will generate certain energy efficient by-products which you can sell at your favourite online retailer ;-)
As a seller of magic electric recycling heaters who you just bankrupted, let me repay you in kind: everyone, you can easily DIY this "quantum heating" thing: it's just an automated pipeline of GPT-3 to LeanPub and purchasing ads that show up in Quanta Magazine (hence "quantum"), where you run GPT-3 locally so you can keep your home warm with the heat generated by your PC.
Why do you put that in quotes?
> I've seen videos advertising magical electric heaters, which will "recycle" 85% of the energy used for heating and thus will save you lots of money. It's simple physics that warm air coming out at the front of such a device will be sucked in at its back again, but there's nothing to "recycle" here, to somehow save energy.
You sure they couldn't be talking about a heat pump which does have "above 100%" efficiency in a sense?
Because the "energy crisis" is actually a political crisis, i.e. the failure of governments to build enough alternate generators, like solar and wind power during the last decade or two.
> You sure they couldn't be talking about a heat pump [...]
I'm really sure, because the videos show people unpacking a small electrical heater after telling you that "a student" or "an engineer" developed this glorious device in their spare time, ... And last but not least because we built our house with a heat pump and heat exchanging ventilation[*] more than a decade ago, so I'm aware of the concepts.
[*] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plate_heat_exchanger
Edit: complete a sentence.
Aha, I see. A bit late for that now though, so now it's an energy crisis. I wish it were seen as a political crisis but pretty much everyone here just blames Russia and there aren't many (if any in some countries) consequences...
> I'm really sure, because the videos show people unpacking a small electrical heater after telling you that "a student" or "an engineer" developed this glorious device in their spare time, ...
Amazing that this shit is legal...
https://www.business-standard.com/article/international/fran...
Regarding the "return on investment" nuclear power is way more expensive than other forms of energy, if you add the (hidden) cost of storage and disposal of nuclear waste. Which could have been known for a long time, cf.
The Hidden Costs of Nuclear Power (RICHARD W. ENGLAND, 1979) https://www.jstor.org/stable/40719811
The High and Hidden Costs of Nuclear Power -- An industry hooked on subsidies from governments (Henry Sokolski, 2010) https://www.hoover.org/research/high-and-hidden-costs-nuclea...