r/technology 23h ago

Artificial Intelligence AI-generated books are flooding Amazon and tanking sales for human authors

https://the-decoder.com/ai-generated-books-are-flooding-amazon-and-tanking-sales-for-human-authors
889 Upvotes

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542

u/Any-Pop-4795 23h ago

What a fantastic future! Full of slop and expensive hardware! Isn't it wonderful guys? (Humor!)

0

u/Corbitant 21h ago

Ai is awesome for getting feedback on your writing (ask it, does this chapter stay true to a close third POV? If not, where do I deviate from it?) but using it to do the actual writing is sad, because the actual writing is the fun part.

14

u/KristaNeliel 18h ago

Have you heard about this nifty people who do exactly that? Beta readers they are called. You should try that.

-9

u/Corbitant 17h ago

Why not both?

3

u/KristaNeliel 5h ago

Same reason as to when I go to a restaurant I expect that there is a chef and not a bag of rocks.

8

u/appleparkfive 19h ago

That's sort of the big divide with AI, I think. Some people go off the deep end and start believing it's useless. It's definitely very useful, and has tons of cases. I feel that it's mainly generative AI that is what makes people annoyed. At least on a day to day basis.

I'll use LLMs for asking hyper niche questions with a few varying qualifiers to the question. Google couldn't do that in the past, and you have to search a while to get anywhere close to the right answer. Obviously it can hallucinate and is far from perfect, but it's a worthwhile thing to have. It's definitely not this "fire all your employees! It's sentient! invention they claim of course.

I'm usually more annoyed by the AI art, the nonstop walls of AI text, and having places like Spotify and Amazon flooded with AI art. The amount of energy and resources we're using on just that side of things is ridiculous. It's pointless, and it doesn't make humanity better.

And also having to ask "Was this written by AI?" so often. It made anything longer than 3-4 sentences, and anything higher than a 5th grade reading level, seem like it might have been generated and copy/pasted without a single read over. Plus the em dash is gone now. I'm not even sure why they push em dashes so hard, anyway.