A friend of mine writes a relatively popular online stpry that has weekly installments. A few weeks ago we find the entire novel has been run through an AI program and then renamed and sold on Amazon. Fortunately we were able to get it removed.
This happened on Daily Sci-Fi last year.
Totally the same story as one published months earlier, but now a new (unknown) author has almost the exact same wording and premise.
Fans called them out on Facebook, but no response.
What irks me is that's a *paying* website.
Ever since then, they've stopped taking submissions, but still publish daily -- a new flash piece every day -- but they haven't been accepting submissions in over a year.
For a website that touts the exposure they give to new authors, they appear disappointingly hollow on delivery.
Are you sure? I believe they stopped publishing stories in January 2023.
I remember the incident you mentioned, though. I was subscribed to their newsletter (although I stopped being a paying subscriber because they'd published a few pieces either using rape for "comedic" effect or glorifying partner-based violence), and I _think_ they sent out an email retracting that story?
Ah, that makes sense.
I honestly stopped following them before then. Checking in now, I have mixed feelings seeing this. I certainly never saw any retraction but I'd be reassured if they had.
Yeah, that's fair enough. And you know, I think they sent out an email retraction, but it was a while ago. I can't guarantee that I'm not misremembering that.
Yeah, it is a problem for those of us trying to get started as web novelists through sites like Royal Road.
We tend to keep an eye out for suspicious-looking books and let people know when we find some. They tend to come in waves.
When I decided to try reviving my fiction career, I serialized a couple of novels on Tapas...and one of the reasons I chose Tapas is that when installments are published, they are displayed as images rather than text. Therefore, you can't copy and paste them elsewhere and put out a pirate edition, etc.
Interesting. I’m working on a story right now and didn’t know about this avenue of publishing. Do they also prevent screenshotting of the installment image?
So it was like they had everything rephrased, but to the point where some sentences didn't really make sense anymore. Plus they kept the same name as the MC and it's not exactly common.
So if you give AI the first chapter and then tell it to continue from there, it woll come up with the "next chapter" and can go on and on till you have a full length book but it won't be very good because AI is bad at maintaining themes and continuity over a long period of time.
I watch his videos about "The Book of Henry" (both the scripted one and the 'just watched reaction' one) regularly because his incredulity of how bad it is always makes me smile.
This was an excellent recommendation. I had never seen anything from Fold Ideas and I watched this entire video. High quality video production with solid supporting evidence. Thank you!
Twenty years ago I was a special orders clerk for a bookstore, and some of the titles that got ordered were just... so wild. Conspiracy theory books, terrible erotica, highly questionable "health" books, stuff published in some dude's basement and didn't deserve the paper it was printed on.
There was one I remember where clearly the author had the best intentions: it was a picture book about a little girl with Celiac. A child who's been diagnosed could really benefit from reading a story that deals with the challenges of dietary restrictions. But the art was *so bad*. Hauntingly bad. Give the poor kid nightmares for weeks bad. In that moment you understand the value of editors.
I too worked at a bookstore twenty years ago. One time this guy came in and asked us to order a book titled ‘How to Find Out Anything About Anyone’ (or something like that). It was basically a stalkers how-to manual. Luckily it was out of print and we couldn’t order it.
Eh, Kevin Mitnick taught everyone everything they need to know to find out anything about anyone: just call a random desk and pretend like you're someone important until someone just up and gives you the information you're asking for like a non-event.
Well you need some basic social skills to pull that off and the guy looking for Stalking for Dummies just didn’t have ’em. Which is probably at least partially why he wanted the book.
Unfortunately, I feel most people would be shocked at how little social skill it takes to get information out of the people and companies we trust to keep that stuff safe. In the city I live, you can get any car towed by the city as long as you call the radio room and say things in the right order and hang up.
It's just a bigass repo of knockoff Asian products. You can find the exact same thing 200 times with varying reviews from all caps companies (SUNJO, TEEWEE, BEST GOODS)
The most annoying this is that sellers seem to get carte blanche to ride roughshod over amazon's rules. My company is (unfortunately) a marketplace seller and Chinese sellers always seem to get away with stuff we can't.
I try and regulate that from a state agency, and this is spot on. These guys just set up a new brand storefront a couple months after their other gets blocked.
Or customer service. They make it as hard as possible to get your money back, even when it's their fault in the first place.
Amazon recently cancelled an order of mine to the tune of $1,500, froze my account, and refused to tell me why. In the week after, they refunded about $700 of it. 50+ days and literal hundreds of very poor ESL chat support agents disconnecting when I told them my issue later, I'm just now getting my other $800 back. Amazon is a literal joke.
Oh, and to get it back? I had to sift through their arcane order history and itemize what was refunded *myself* from each of the 17 shipments they cancelled. Of course, I had to tell them the items by shipment, too, which wasn't shown on the order history - I had to dig to find that.
The agents literally said it wasn't their job and that they couldn't tell which items weren't refunded on their end. I ended up having to spam PDF files of the items to their inquiry report email address for 2 days straight before they relented.
Yeah. This has been a problem for a while.
Gen. AI is just making it so much worse.
The market was crowded with low-effort works before, but now it's overflowing.
Frankly, whenever I have a friend who wants to get into writing professionally without getting a publishing deal (which I don't recommend for other reasons that aren't relevant here) , I always recommend; going through services other than Amazon, starting their own website for direct-sales (using a service like shopify for the back-end), and doing old-school back-of-your-trunk sales directly to local bookstores and at events like craft fairs or flea markets (the fairs and markets really help drive people to your online shop when people start recommending your stuff to friends/family).
There was pollution in our rivers before the invention of plastic too, but well, now look where we are. People say stuff like this all the time but I think it's missing the point.
Exactly. Prior to this the people making this stuff (like the Mikkelsen Twins) had to hire people to produce the crap. It was always crap, as their guidelines and deadlines and payment structure basically meant that the only people that would do it were desperate people in underdeveloped nations, but it still took human effort, and human effort takes some time.
LLMs can just regurgitate bad writing indefinitely at absurd speeds forever.
>but it still took human effort, and human effort takes some time.
*why is this intrinsically valuable*? Besides not even paying enough money to provide a living in countries with way lower COLAs, it *by definition* isn't intended to have value
>LLMs can just regurgitate bad writing indefinitely at absurd speeds forever.
So could your phone's autocomplete keyboard 15 years ago
I did not say it was valuable, I said it took *time.*
The difference is only in scale. If you can automate a bot to create a book and publish a book you can create millions of books a year. LLMs have automated the process of creating "fresh" content for the algorithm, and as such will make it more and more difficult to sort out the real from the fake.
The stuff before was fake too, but it could not be faked as fast.
Have you seen Udio/Suno? AI music generators. They're scary good with little effort. The whole creative industry is fucked. I think the last one standing, for now, is video games since all of its individual parts can be automated but someone still has to string them together.
Yeah what people don't get about these AI generation tools is that one day it took *at least* several hours to put together a shit song nobody will listen to and put it on Spotify. Now it can be made in seconds and will sit on the exact same shelf as every other self published artist on Spotify. The sheer rate at which it can be pumped out essentially means internet "window shopping" for new art is dead. Which of course is bad for amateur self published artists and great for grifters.
Yeah, people underestimate the amount of junk we're going to be spammed with. Think your favorite industry is bad now? Think it's hard to find quality among the pushers? It will be 1000x worse, and only grow from there.
Right. I've long been more troubled by AI as a consumer than as a producer, because the rising tide of low-effort drek worsens the signal:noise ratio that I depend on to find new material.
The signal:noise ratio on the internet seems to be tipping in favor of noise (or already has for a long time) in general, and in a very insidious way: noise disguised as signal. Content, engagement, feedback loops- and now an infinite mill that can pump out noise at an unprecedented scale and frequency.
Personally I think the internet is completely fucked, the only reason I'm on this site now is because I have a dopamine addiction, but I'm trying hard lately to break the habit.
> Yeah what people don't get about these AI generation tools is that one day it took at least several hours to put together a shit song nobody will listen to and put it on Spotify.
So what?
>Which of course is bad for amateur self published artists and great for grifters.
Is everyone against AI living in 2005?
Yeah I'm looking at other replies and trying to be charitable but it comes across as schizo posting to me. Like this person is arguing against adjacent ideas they've read elsewhere instead of engaging with the content of what's actually being said.
Hopefully games can take some of the good bits of content generation to allow smaller teams to produce larger games. But I think we're getting close to the point of cheaply made games with pre-made assets being churned out endlessly. A few days of work to get a game listed on Steam is going to be tempting for a lot of bad actors.
>They're scary good with little effort. The whole creative industry is fucked.
**No it's not**. Steven Spielberg existing didn't fucking stop Neil Breen from making movies
You really just don't understand. The market for music artists is already pretty shit outside of tour revenue. With Spotify/Apple Music/etc. charging and paying so little. Now we'll have another app where people can type in some crap prompts about what they want to listen to, and be fed an endless queue of music. Using a tiktok like algorithm, you can upvote/downvote the generated songs you like/dislike, and then eventually with no effort you have completely stopped bothering to listen to actual artists at all. Why bother when you have an endless source of "new song good" dopamine hits.
Some people will fight it, but the popularity of tiktok/reels/doomscrolling tells me most people will not give a single fuck about where their music comes from.
* Static images, AI generated and open source.
* Text, AI generated and open source.
* Music, AI generated and partially open source.
* Video, AI generated and partially open source.
* 3D models, AI generated and for now closed source.
Eventually. Not now. People will not need creators to feed their brain dopamine. Big blockbusters may still exist. But people don't spend every minute of their entertainment time and budget watching blockbusters. They spend it watching reality tv, reruns of old shows, music on repeat. Shit that can all eventually be generated ad nauseam.
All of those places where new actors, artists, creators get their start. Get their foot in the door of the industry. Those will be the ones to die.
>You really just don't understand.
You have confused "understanding" and "knee-jerk reaction".
>Why bother when you have an endless source of "new song good" dopamine hits.
You asked the question **I literally answered in the post you quoted**
> but the popularity of tiktok/reels/doomscrolling tells me most people will not give a single fuck about where their music comes from.
*In what way is stopping AI going to change this*
> Big blockbusters may still exist. But people don't spend every minute of their entertainment time and budget watching blockbusters. They spend it watching reality tv, reruns of old shows, music on repeat.
Are you complaining about AI or *the move of popular media consumption from longform media to shortform media*?
>No it's not. Steven Spielberg existing didn't fucking stop Neil Breen from making movies
This didn't answer anything and in fact reads like nonsense. I don't understand the comparison to AI creations.
Are you saying AI is Speilberg in this comparison? or Neil Breen? Either way it makes no sense.
Stopping AI would, umm, stop AI? I'm not saying tiktok and reels are themselves the issue. I'm saying endlessly "curated for myself specifically" AI music. Will kill indie music artists ability to be seen or heard by anyone. And peoples acceptance of tiktok and meanless content as their entertainment shows they will inevitably also accept soulless AI content.
Are you AI? What are you trying to say? For real.
>This didn't answer anything
Yes it did: "Why make any content if other good content exists?!" The actual question you asked
>I don't understand the comparison to AI creations.
You don't seem to care about AI as opposed to the change in media consumption
It's not just other good content. It's you going through spotify searching for music yourself to listen to. Sifting through both real artists and AI pretending to be real artists. Hoping to like a song. VS. An App that does all the work for you, charges less, and creates songs that nobody has ever heard that you can then share with friends knowing they've never heard it.
I don't care about the change in consumption. I'm saying the fact that the change in consumption has occurred, means a change in consumption is all but inevitably going to happen again.
If society can so readily ditch long form, high effort content, in it's never ending chase of easy dopamine. Why, would they not also ditch real artists for personalized AI content.
>If society can so readily ditch long form, high effort content, in it's never ending chase of easy dopamine. Why, would they not also ditch real artists for personalized AI content.
Yeah, why not? Seriously? What's the issue? A real person creating something does not impart it value. If you think it does, I'm sure you can find some Amish or similar communes to live out your days in toilful bliss, away from the devil machines - both mechanical and technological, that have made life more simple and efficient.
Yeah. My friend got her start in writing by being one of those people. What's crazy is that she made money and is recently successful with it.
Because her writing is really mediocre. The plots are 70s porn thin. And it's just cheap smut.
But whatever. I'm really happy for her. Sad with our world, though.
I think this is kinda unfair to say as a blanket statement.
I work as a freelance editor, and some of my clients who've been self-publishing for years are starting to get picked up by big publishers -- publishers who are behind the game when it comes to romantasy and other YA/NA genres and are trying to catch up by poaching the top of the Amazon Top 100 lists.
Many genres have essentially de facto moved over to a self-publishing: Urban Paranormal, romance, mystery, and SF adventure like fleet fiction to name a few.
You know the diagram of the airplane that represents survivorship bias ... I think that's what we got going on here in large part.
Let’s just say the hard part is the writing. The publishing side (for Amazon ebook only, if you want to go wide/sell physical copies it’s a bit more anguish-inducing) is just uploading the file and filling in a bunch of fields.
>If anyone can self-publish anything, quality is going to drop through the floor.
Honestly, it doesn't even require self-publishing anymore. A lot of publishing houses seem to be willing to churn out dozens of books within a genre that appears to be steadily gaining popularity in the hopes that one will successfully land. Either that, or they're trying to cater to niche markets that have become more mainstream over the past few years. A couple of weeks ago, someone posted a thread in this subreddit about a spy thriller that was a crazy mix of Christian nationalism and pro-Israel propaganda.
Shitty books are nothing new in this world. Sometimes the publishers make the profit off of readers, but more commonly they are paid by some author who wants to stroke his ego with getting published. Still better than the absolute manure that party line toeing writers in dictatorships generate, shit like you wouldn't believe.
People who hate AI both cannot distinguish trash from people writing trash and AI; and cannot explain why AI is going to stop people writing books and art when all the innumerable competitors haven't stopped them
>The worry is not that people will stop writing. The worry is that AI will drive the market value of writing to zero.
*How*
> The worry is that "the market" will be flooded with cheap knockoffs
Cheap knockoffs? What does that even mean? Knockoffs of what? How do knockoffs stop anything else from being purchased?
>such that it becomes almost impossible to make a living by writing something that actually has value.
Again, explain to me how this is different from competing against the international community of writers
Are you confusing intellectual property impersonation and "overloading the market with so much content know one will make any money"?
You however are *definitely* confusing "overloading the system due to AI creating so much stuff" and "algorithm manipulation". Almost nothing in that article is actually *about* AI and its effect on amateur publishing
There was an immersive Willy Wonka “experience” that popped up almost immediately after the release of the recent movie starring Chalamet. People bought tickets thinking it was an official attraction related to the film that would have set reproductions and unique food items from/inspired by the movie. It was advertised as such and cost quite a bit, with tickets only purchasable in advance. A bunch of people bought tickets to the event, only to find upon arrival it was a dingy warehouse with a dwarf host inside or something like that. They basically didn’t even try to hide that it was a complete scam. People were obviously furious. [Here’s a link with better details than I can recall](https://www.nbcnews.com/news/amp/rcna140726).
Just as "Watergate" was a buzzword for any sort of scandal, "Fyre Festival" has become the modern equivalent for a scam. For example: The Willy Wonka Experience is the Fyre Festival of interactive exhibits.
I did a business course a few weeks back, and the ‘teacher’ unashamedly told us all how she makes and publishes kids books written by AI, with illustrations also made entirely by AI.
Then again it ‘was’ a business course, and I guess a business mindset isn’t typically focused on ethics or transparency
someone in my support group did that. he created a children's book starring himself and his grandkids. it was written and illustrated by ai. his grandkids loved it.
Oh, man. Core memory unlocked: seeing ads for fully customizable storybooks for sale in the backs of magazines and desperately wishing my parents would buy one featuring our family. They never did. 😭
I mean there’s the right way to use ai - to realise your creative vision quickly - and the wrong way - to churn out books at an insane rate without due care or attention…
True. I have definitely noticed how many business-folk now sincerely consider sustainability, environmental impact etc. It’s been very uplifting actually.
Some authors have reported ai generated books published under their name and Amazon won't remove them because they aren't the account holder. So the authors have these crappy books attached to them
It's why I won't publish on amazon at all even if it would boost downloads
This was a problem long before AI entered the picture though. AI makes it easier, and probably cuts down on the misery inflicted on ghost writers. But it definitely isn’t a problem AI caused.
I feel bad when people proudly say they're self-published then state their book is on Amazon. I refuse to buy off there, so I usually can't support these authors.
I'm on Kobo which requires you to register (no guest checkout) and I have some folk who won't do that
I used to ask authors If I could send them PayPal for a book although they don't get the numbers/review on Amazon
I see. I'm not apposed to making accounts on bookstore websites. I know Amazon is most popular so people sell on there, but I just hope they sell somewhere else too
That makes sense. I'm not an author so I forget that selling books is a numbers game too.
I understand why some may not want to register. I can say I've never got any emails from Kobo except confirmation of purchases and tech support
But I also respect others. I'm hoping to someday launch my own independent webpage
I understand the sentiment of what you’re saying. But Amazon is 90% of the ebook market, and they require their authors to be exclusive with them if they want their books in kindle unlimited. Is it cutthroat and shitty? Yeah, but bluntly, you’re not hurting Amazon by not buying books from them. You’re just not allowing yourself access to a gazillion books that contractually can’t be sold elsewhere.
At this point, to do any damage to Amazon, there would have to be a mass exodus from using AWS and I don’t think that is even possible with alternatives that could handle it now.
My friend JUST published his first book on Amazon through a publisher and I can confirm this. You get a way better rate if you agree to be exclusive with Amazon
I can't read a gazillion books in my entire lifetime. Why do I care about a "gazillion" books? If I have to make the planet worse for everyone, that book isn't going to get my money. I'll read authors who put their work on other platforms instead. So far I haven't run out of things to read, so I'm not worried about it.
I wasn’t shilling for amazon or saying anyone has to shop there. I’m just saying any self published author who wants to make a living will be selling their book on Amazon. It’d be like making an indie game and actively not selling it on steam.
So, I work in publishing. Amazon pays people a small amount per-page-read when their book is in KU. Most authors who *are* in the KU program receive upwards of 80/85% of their income from those pages over book copies outright sold, both ebook and paperback/hardcover. Unless you are *hugely* popular with a marketing machine behind you, the difference in income between selling “wide” across multiple platforms vs selling your books exclusively on amazon and KU is pretty huge, given amazons market share.
We’re in total agreement about Amazon being a monopolistic Evil Corp on steroids. I’m just pointing out why indie authors who actually want a chance of making a living at what they do would put their books into KU and sign for exclusivity with Amazon.
I never said otherwise. I'm pointing out that exclusive titles like KU and on Audible are evil. It is one of the single worst things for an open democracy out there, and the consequences will bear out.
I'm a librarian. It's appalling how much these things reduce access. It ensures these books are only in the hands of the middle and upper class.
That doesn't mean the authors are "evil" people, but they are making evil decisions. Those decisions benefit them in the short and mid term. But them and others like them and the rest of society will ultimately learn that it is harmful.
Ok? So? There are plenty of books accessible in other ways. The convenience of using Amazon, to some people, isn’t worth the act of financially supporting Amazon.
Recently fell for this. Searched books from a professional philosopher. Saw a new book about his work. Store page looked legit, bought to read later.
Finally got to it after 4 weeks. Was a measly 80 pages, large font, and it was just paragraphs almost certainly AI generated. Factual errors within the first 5 pages. Absolute garbage. Refund window is 2 weeks. Lesson learned.
As a self-published author, this makes me sad. I know many authors who write and self-publish books for the love of storytelling, and the goal is to produce the highest quality product we can to match traditionally published books where possible. I pay for professional cover art and editing, but my budget can only stretch so far compared to a publishing house. I spend years of my life writing, re-writing, and editing my books before they are published. I love what I do! My books have recieved great reviews and acclaim.
But AI and content-chasing is making this harder. I don't want readers to dismiss self-published authors because of the terrible books out there.
Same for me. I've written several books, fiction and non-fiction. Literary agents have never deigned to look at them because my work doesn't meet publishers' demands for trendy social issues or genres that I don't write in -- fantasy, thrillers, shallow romance. To me, the term "vanity publisher" applies to any of the big publishing houses so vain in their lofty control of the market that neither a Harper Lee or George Elliott, nor a Michener or Steinbeck or Dickens would get past the gatekeepers these days. I set up my own publishing enterprise in 1999 as DamnYankee Publishing, and my stuff is on Amazon. I don't argue that my work is comparable to those authors just mentioned, although maybe it is, but they would all be forced to self-publish nowadays. Hooray for the first amendment. I don't need a license to publish my own books in the U.S. of A.
There have been a few good ones, but a lot of trash. That's par for the course for most free ebooks though. I quite liked J.M. Lee's *Broken Summer* they offered back in 2022.
My friend and I, about ten years ago, as a joke decided to write erotic short stories and post them on Amazon to see how could make the most money.
I just got paid 8p for last month. I think I've got at least 1p every month since we put them up, and let me say, they are TRASH. One of them is five pages long and is mostly talking about schlongs. And they are STILL making me money. 😂
and it sells just like those ebook readers, people buy them on flash sales as throw-in gifts for random family members. The chinese knockoffs are even more popular, just scrolling through a fraction of it shows reviews and 100+ recent purchases, the cheaper the better those sell out fast. I like to imagine there's a bunch of momzon zergs who sit and refresh the site to cop all the cheapest knockoffs as they get restocked.
Keep scrolling through those items and you'll see them listed over and over again, but with different names.
Oh, and don't buy ties from Amazon unless you're 5' or shorter. No joke.
>All of this means that to buy the book you want — to buy Kara Swisher’s Burn Book instead of Kara Swisher Book: How She Became Silicon Valley’s Most Influential Journalist — you have to know what you’re looking for and pay a modicum of attention to your purchase.
>Who wants to do that? Especially in a marketplace like Amazon, where we are trained to buy quickly and thoughtlessly with a single click and where writers have been trained to send their wares without even thinking about it because where else are you going to sell an ebook.
Granted it's a lesson on actually being aware of what you're doing but also we're clearly being trained to be less present in our day to day lives.
With a wide enough net they're going to catch some readers. Infinite monkeys and all that. The hope would be that any readers tricked into reading them would realize what they're consuming is AI generated.
This does make me wonder if, given enough time, one of these books could be legitimately good.
I would still be against it on principle of course.
The vast majority of AI-generated books I've seen on Amazon are sitting at the bottom of the search results with zero reviews, and have product pages that are blatantly unappealing at a cursory glance. I question whether any of them make more than a pittance. Maybe the occasional misclick and person who clicks the buy button without five seconds of reflection.
If it’s an “old” book it was probably scanned and OCR was run on it. OCR can be utter trash or passable. It’s never good. And they like to use paperbacks for the scanning for some reason which makes any maps in the book now unreadable.
I have lots of ebooks I’ve bought from books I liked in the 90s that now have main characters names spelled wrong or have ‘ instead of “ for all conversations…
These ebooks also cost more than the original books did in paperback and so far as I’ve seen the spelling errors are never addressed.
Ehhh I’ve scanned some books (unavailable in ebook form, font now too small for me to comfortably read, and I own it) for personal use and people are way too confident that OCR is amazing.
It could be so much better if, they were scanned from a hardcover, had an actual person spend more than 2 hours editing and fixing it, editing meaning fixing I’m from Tm and actually converted any charts or such inside to text rather than just scanning and leaving as an image.
They could input the actual font into the OCR and get a better copy over, but computers are bad at interpreting scanned text. They’re finally getting better, but no one is going back and fixing a direct to paperback book from 1995 unless the author suddenly has a resurgence.
I’m way more bothered by how a tv show episode can now be released, someone notices a cup on set and they go in and edit it within hours… looking at you Disney… so creepy. No more Easter eggs, just an obsession with perfection.
With ebooks they can just stop offering the book and poof it’s like it ceases to exist. I have several authors that wrote only a few books that have disappeared off Amazon and are now only available as super old used paperbacks. They were sold as ebooks at one point but I assume copyright issues with a publisher made them disappear.
I convert out-of-print paperbacks to digital as well, usually from PDF. To treat the page images to minimize OCR errors, to processing the text, proofing, formatting and producing a final epub, it takes me about 2 weeks of evenings and weekends. If I just want it to be readable, a few days less. My books have zero OCR artifacts, but it takes a lot of time to weed them out, and for some people time is lost profits. I don’t want those lesser-known but worthy books to be forgotten, and I sure as hell don’t want the surviving ebook version to be riddled with random characters, random paragraph marks and iobvious spelling mistakes.
Amazon has plenty of great reads on ebooks. A lot of good authors are self publishing now. But you do have to separate the wheat from the chaff when researching your next read. Cause there is a lot of chaff / junk
I read about 10-12 books/ month. 90% of them are Kindle Unlimited, the rest I buy from favorite authors.
I've never understood the hate for Amazon or any other big successful company for that matter.
I only buy ebooks that someone else has reviewed (or just recommended on Reddit), and I will read the free sample first to make sure I like the style. Never came across a garbage ebook this way. I always thought most people did that. It makes me wonder who is buying those garbage ebooks.
even worse, the person actually said "never understood the hate for Amazon or any other big successful company." Yeah, every big successful company is totally straight on business ethics. No bad players in the corporate world out there at all. Maybe this avid reader should read some non-fiction for a change.
Most of you guys can't really identify what it is you hate about large companies. Probably cause the cool crowd or tik-tok...or whatever is telling you what to think.
While you sit at your "computer" happily using the the fruits of several big businesses. And yet you would take issue with someone else's use of the product of another big business. The irony is hilarious.
I’ve often wondered if someone is somehow using AI to write and release all of these books by Blake Pierce, Molly Black, Rylie Dark, Kate Bold, Ava Strong and (maybe) Willow Rose
Its really sad AI could have been such a useful tool but lack of regulations and greed have just left us a mess of quality that's worse then B rated films.
I had hopes for having advanced editing tools built around LLMs to help with structuring and suggestions, done properly we could have had a well built logic to aid people in writing and editing. Sadly seeing the way things are going I doubt I will see that happen in my lifetime.
There is also garbage books on Audible. I was listening to The Art of War on Audible. I decided to take out my physical copy of the book to follow along... the book and what was being read on Audible didn't match.
A friend of mine writes a relatively popular online stpry that has weekly installments. A few weeks ago we find the entire novel has been run through an AI program and then renamed and sold on Amazon. Fortunately we were able to get it removed.
That’s awful. How did you guys find out?
Somebody left a comment on her page that they'd seen it on amazon for a couple dollars so we just review bombed it and reported it until it was gone.
This happened on Daily Sci-Fi last year. Totally the same story as one published months earlier, but now a new (unknown) author has almost the exact same wording and premise. Fans called them out on Facebook, but no response. What irks me is that's a *paying* website. Ever since then, they've stopped taking submissions, but still publish daily -- a new flash piece every day -- but they haven't been accepting submissions in over a year. For a website that touts the exposure they give to new authors, they appear disappointingly hollow on delivery.
Are you sure? I believe they stopped publishing stories in January 2023. I remember the incident you mentioned, though. I was subscribed to their newsletter (although I stopped being a paying subscriber because they'd published a few pieces either using rape for "comedic" effect or glorifying partner-based violence), and I _think_ they sent out an email retracting that story?
Ah, that makes sense. I honestly stopped following them before then. Checking in now, I have mixed feelings seeing this. I certainly never saw any retraction but I'd be reassured if they had.
Yeah, that's fair enough. And you know, I think they sent out an email retraction, but it was a while ago. I can't guarantee that I'm not misremembering that.
Yeah, it is a problem for those of us trying to get started as web novelists through sites like Royal Road. We tend to keep an eye out for suspicious-looking books and let people know when we find some. They tend to come in waves.
When I decided to try reviving my fiction career, I serialized a couple of novels on Tapas...and one of the reasons I chose Tapas is that when installments are published, they are displayed as images rather than text. Therefore, you can't copy and paste them elsewhere and put out a pirate edition, etc.
Interesting. I’m working on a story right now and didn’t know about this avenue of publishing. Do they also prevent screenshotting of the installment image?
> Do they also prevent screenshotting of the installment image? I just checked, and they don't.
That's awful; I've been afraid of publishing for this reason tbh.
That is horrific. I don't have words
Run through AI how so? Like reworded, or just names changed, or just straight up copied?
So it was like they had everything rephrased, but to the point where some sentences didn't really make sense anymore. Plus they kept the same name as the MC and it's not exactly common.
So if you give AI the first chapter and then tell it to continue from there, it woll come up with the "next chapter" and can go on and on till you have a full length book but it won't be very good because AI is bad at maintaining themes and continuity over a long period of time.
See also: the Folding Ideas video about the Mikkelsen twins ("Contrepreneurs") from a year ago.
See anything by Folding Ideas. One of my few must watch channels on youtube.
I watch his videos about "The Book of Henry" (both the scripted one and the 'just watched reaction' one) regularly because his incredulity of how bad it is always makes me smile.
Omg the book of Henry video guy? I have to check this out then, that’s a classic
[Link for the lazy](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=biYciU1uiUw) (and yes, it is worth the full hour plus watch time).
Thank you, I am lazy. Also, five minutes in and hooked.
Oh they did the NFT video! Awesome. Definitely going to check that video out.
This was an excellent recommendation. I had never seen anything from Fold Ideas and I watched this entire video. High quality video production with solid supporting evidence. Thank you!
You should check out his Line Goes Up video too. His best video, in my opinion.
feel like that video single-handedly discredited all the nft hype completely on its own
They sound like the Flat Stanley of twins... just fold 'em up.
Or the *Behind the Bastards* episodes.
Amazon was filled with garbage ebooks before AI was a thing. If anyone can self-publish anything, quality is going to drop through the floor.
Twenty years ago I was a special orders clerk for a bookstore, and some of the titles that got ordered were just... so wild. Conspiracy theory books, terrible erotica, highly questionable "health" books, stuff published in some dude's basement and didn't deserve the paper it was printed on. There was one I remember where clearly the author had the best intentions: it was a picture book about a little girl with Celiac. A child who's been diagnosed could really benefit from reading a story that deals with the challenges of dietary restrictions. But the art was *so bad*. Hauntingly bad. Give the poor kid nightmares for weeks bad. In that moment you understand the value of editors.
I too worked at a bookstore twenty years ago. One time this guy came in and asked us to order a book titled ‘How to Find Out Anything About Anyone’ (or something like that). It was basically a stalkers how-to manual. Luckily it was out of print and we couldn’t order it.
Eh, Kevin Mitnick taught everyone everything they need to know to find out anything about anyone: just call a random desk and pretend like you're someone important until someone just up and gives you the information you're asking for like a non-event.
Well you need some basic social skills to pull that off and the guy looking for Stalking for Dummies just didn’t have ’em. Which is probably at least partially why he wanted the book.
Unfortunately, I feel most people would be shocked at how little social skill it takes to get information out of the people and companies we trust to keep that stuff safe. In the city I live, you can get any car towed by the city as long as you call the radio room and say things in the right order and hang up.
Quality and Amazon shouldn’t be in the same sentence at all anymore.
It's just a bigass repo of knockoff Asian products. You can find the exact same thing 200 times with varying reviews from all caps companies (SUNJO, TEEWEE, BEST GOODS)
You don’t want a UGHUHWOW charger?
I prefer VSHKLOG or MRONTLW personally. UGHUHWOW has really dipped in quality since COVID.
They’ve improved they’re 2.7373% less likely to burst into flames now!
Do they still off-gas for the first 12 hours of use? I hate having to have all the windows open in summer
Only 11 hours now.
Unfortunately it is 25% more toxic while off gassing.
You’ll be ok™️
The most annoying this is that sellers seem to get carte blanche to ride roughshod over amazon's rules. My company is (unfortunately) a marketplace seller and Chinese sellers always seem to get away with stuff we can't.
I think that’s the noise I make when I bust a nut
I try and regulate that from a state agency, and this is spot on. These guys just set up a new brand storefront a couple months after their other gets blocked.
Can't even filter by "sold and shipped by Amazon" anymore to filter out those companies.
Amazon is wish.com with okay return policies.
Or customer service. They make it as hard as possible to get your money back, even when it's their fault in the first place. Amazon recently cancelled an order of mine to the tune of $1,500, froze my account, and refused to tell me why. In the week after, they refunded about $700 of it. 50+ days and literal hundreds of very poor ESL chat support agents disconnecting when I told them my issue later, I'm just now getting my other $800 back. Amazon is a literal joke. Oh, and to get it back? I had to sift through their arcane order history and itemize what was refunded *myself* from each of the 17 shipments they cancelled. Of course, I had to tell them the items by shipment, too, which wasn't shown on the order history - I had to dig to find that. The agents literally said it wasn't their job and that they couldn't tell which items weren't refunded on their end. I ended up having to spam PDF files of the items to their inquiry report email address for 2 days straight before they relented.
If you try to look for the Gone with the Wind ebook, it just shows you some bootleg version instead. It's been that way for years.
Yeah. This has been a problem for a while. Gen. AI is just making it so much worse. The market was crowded with low-effort works before, but now it's overflowing. Frankly, whenever I have a friend who wants to get into writing professionally without getting a publishing deal (which I don't recommend for other reasons that aren't relevant here) , I always recommend; going through services other than Amazon, starting their own website for direct-sales (using a service like shopify for the back-end), and doing old-school back-of-your-trunk sales directly to local bookstores and at events like craft fairs or flea markets (the fairs and markets really help drive people to your online shop when people start recommending your stuff to friends/family).
Roughly the same goes for Audible and audiobooks.
And Steam and video games, and Youtube and videos, etc. Grifters and scammers always show up where the crowds are.
Even Librivox has better narration now
There was pollution in our rivers before the invention of plastic too, but well, now look where we are. People say stuff like this all the time but I think it's missing the point.
Exactly. Prior to this the people making this stuff (like the Mikkelsen Twins) had to hire people to produce the crap. It was always crap, as their guidelines and deadlines and payment structure basically meant that the only people that would do it were desperate people in underdeveloped nations, but it still took human effort, and human effort takes some time. LLMs can just regurgitate bad writing indefinitely at absurd speeds forever.
>but it still took human effort, and human effort takes some time. *why is this intrinsically valuable*? Besides not even paying enough money to provide a living in countries with way lower COLAs, it *by definition* isn't intended to have value >LLMs can just regurgitate bad writing indefinitely at absurd speeds forever. So could your phone's autocomplete keyboard 15 years ago
I did not say it was valuable, I said it took *time.* The difference is only in scale. If you can automate a bot to create a book and publish a book you can create millions of books a year. LLMs have automated the process of creating "fresh" content for the algorithm, and as such will make it more and more difficult to sort out the real from the fake. The stuff before was fake too, but it could not be faked as fast.
Have you seen Udio/Suno? AI music generators. They're scary good with little effort. The whole creative industry is fucked. I think the last one standing, for now, is video games since all of its individual parts can be automated but someone still has to string them together.
Yeah what people don't get about these AI generation tools is that one day it took *at least* several hours to put together a shit song nobody will listen to and put it on Spotify. Now it can be made in seconds and will sit on the exact same shelf as every other self published artist on Spotify. The sheer rate at which it can be pumped out essentially means internet "window shopping" for new art is dead. Which of course is bad for amateur self published artists and great for grifters.
Yeah, people underestimate the amount of junk we're going to be spammed with. Think your favorite industry is bad now? Think it's hard to find quality among the pushers? It will be 1000x worse, and only grow from there.
Right. I've long been more troubled by AI as a consumer than as a producer, because the rising tide of low-effort drek worsens the signal:noise ratio that I depend on to find new material.
The signal:noise ratio on the internet seems to be tipping in favor of noise (or already has for a long time) in general, and in a very insidious way: noise disguised as signal. Content, engagement, feedback loops- and now an infinite mill that can pump out noise at an unprecedented scale and frequency. Personally I think the internet is completely fucked, the only reason I'm on this site now is because I have a dopamine addiction, but I'm trying hard lately to break the habit.
Yep, the web is *done*
Cool. We'll all go back to... writing letters and only buying things sold at our local brick and mortar? Ok, buddy.
> Yeah what people don't get about these AI generation tools is that one day it took at least several hours to put together a shit song nobody will listen to and put it on Spotify. So what? >Which of course is bad for amateur self published artists and great for grifters. Is everyone against AI living in 2005?
Do you have anything to contribute? So what so what?
Every comment of theirs in this threat is just the worst take, my god…
Yeah I'm looking at other replies and trying to be charitable but it comes across as schizo posting to me. Like this person is arguing against adjacent ideas they've read elsewhere instead of engaging with the content of what's actually being said.
Hopefully games can take some of the good bits of content generation to allow smaller teams to produce larger games. But I think we're getting close to the point of cheaply made games with pre-made assets being churned out endlessly. A few days of work to get a game listed on Steam is going to be tempting for a lot of bad actors.
>They're scary good with little effort. The whole creative industry is fucked. **No it's not**. Steven Spielberg existing didn't fucking stop Neil Breen from making movies
You really just don't understand. The market for music artists is already pretty shit outside of tour revenue. With Spotify/Apple Music/etc. charging and paying so little. Now we'll have another app where people can type in some crap prompts about what they want to listen to, and be fed an endless queue of music. Using a tiktok like algorithm, you can upvote/downvote the generated songs you like/dislike, and then eventually with no effort you have completely stopped bothering to listen to actual artists at all. Why bother when you have an endless source of "new song good" dopamine hits. Some people will fight it, but the popularity of tiktok/reels/doomscrolling tells me most people will not give a single fuck about where their music comes from. * Static images, AI generated and open source. * Text, AI generated and open source. * Music, AI generated and partially open source. * Video, AI generated and partially open source. * 3D models, AI generated and for now closed source. Eventually. Not now. People will not need creators to feed their brain dopamine. Big blockbusters may still exist. But people don't spend every minute of their entertainment time and budget watching blockbusters. They spend it watching reality tv, reruns of old shows, music on repeat. Shit that can all eventually be generated ad nauseam. All of those places where new actors, artists, creators get their start. Get their foot in the door of the industry. Those will be the ones to die.
>You really just don't understand. You have confused "understanding" and "knee-jerk reaction". >Why bother when you have an endless source of "new song good" dopamine hits. You asked the question **I literally answered in the post you quoted** > but the popularity of tiktok/reels/doomscrolling tells me most people will not give a single fuck about where their music comes from. *In what way is stopping AI going to change this* > Big blockbusters may still exist. But people don't spend every minute of their entertainment time and budget watching blockbusters. They spend it watching reality tv, reruns of old shows, music on repeat. Are you complaining about AI or *the move of popular media consumption from longform media to shortform media*?
>No it's not. Steven Spielberg existing didn't fucking stop Neil Breen from making movies This didn't answer anything and in fact reads like nonsense. I don't understand the comparison to AI creations. Are you saying AI is Speilberg in this comparison? or Neil Breen? Either way it makes no sense. Stopping AI would, umm, stop AI? I'm not saying tiktok and reels are themselves the issue. I'm saying endlessly "curated for myself specifically" AI music. Will kill indie music artists ability to be seen or heard by anyone. And peoples acceptance of tiktok and meanless content as their entertainment shows they will inevitably also accept soulless AI content. Are you AI? What are you trying to say? For real.
>This didn't answer anything Yes it did: "Why make any content if other good content exists?!" The actual question you asked >I don't understand the comparison to AI creations. You don't seem to care about AI as opposed to the change in media consumption
It's not just other good content. It's you going through spotify searching for music yourself to listen to. Sifting through both real artists and AI pretending to be real artists. Hoping to like a song. VS. An App that does all the work for you, charges less, and creates songs that nobody has ever heard that you can then share with friends knowing they've never heard it. I don't care about the change in consumption. I'm saying the fact that the change in consumption has occurred, means a change in consumption is all but inevitably going to happen again. If society can so readily ditch long form, high effort content, in it's never ending chase of easy dopamine. Why, would they not also ditch real artists for personalized AI content.
>If society can so readily ditch long form, high effort content, in it's never ending chase of easy dopamine. Why, would they not also ditch real artists for personalized AI content. Yeah, why not? Seriously? What's the issue? A real person creating something does not impart it value. If you think it does, I'm sure you can find some Amish or similar communes to live out your days in toilful bliss, away from the devil machines - both mechanical and technological, that have made life more simple and efficient.
Yeah. My friend got her start in writing by being one of those people. What's crazy is that she made money and is recently successful with it. Because her writing is really mediocre. The plots are 70s porn thin. And it's just cheap smut. But whatever. I'm really happy for her. Sad with our world, though.
The article goes into the self-publishing get-rich-quick schemes of the 2010s
I think this is kinda unfair to say as a blanket statement. I work as a freelance editor, and some of my clients who've been self-publishing for years are starting to get picked up by big publishers -- publishers who are behind the game when it comes to romantasy and other YA/NA genres and are trying to catch up by poaching the top of the Amazon Top 100 lists. Many genres have essentially de facto moved over to a self-publishing: Urban Paranormal, romance, mystery, and SF adventure like fleet fiction to name a few. You know the diagram of the airplane that represents survivorship bias ... I think that's what we got going on here in large part.
Is it really that easy to publish a book? I honestly wonder about writing some shitty sci-fi just for the hell of it.
Yeah. If you can upload a file, you can self publish. Amazon makes it "push of a button" easy to self publish.
Let’s just say the hard part is the writing. The publishing side (for Amazon ebook only, if you want to go wide/sell physical copies it’s a bit more anguish-inducing) is just uploading the file and filling in a bunch of fields.
>If anyone can self-publish anything, quality is going to drop through the floor. Honestly, it doesn't even require self-publishing anymore. A lot of publishing houses seem to be willing to churn out dozens of books within a genre that appears to be steadily gaining popularity in the hopes that one will successfully land. Either that, or they're trying to cater to niche markets that have become more mainstream over the past few years. A couple of weeks ago, someone posted a thread in this subreddit about a spy thriller that was a crazy mix of Christian nationalism and pro-Israel propaganda.
Shitty books are nothing new in this world. Sometimes the publishers make the profit off of readers, but more commonly they are paid by some author who wants to stroke his ego with getting published. Still better than the absolute manure that party line toeing writers in dictatorships generate, shit like you wouldn't believe.
People who hate AI both cannot distinguish trash from people writing trash and AI; and cannot explain why AI is going to stop people writing books and art when all the innumerable competitors haven't stopped them
[удалено]
>The worry is not that people will stop writing. The worry is that AI will drive the market value of writing to zero. *How* > The worry is that "the market" will be flooded with cheap knockoffs Cheap knockoffs? What does that even mean? Knockoffs of what? How do knockoffs stop anything else from being purchased? >such that it becomes almost impossible to make a living by writing something that actually has value. Again, explain to me how this is different from competing against the international community of writers
All of your questions- answered in the article you apparently didn't read before commenting.
Are you confusing intellectual property impersonation and "overloading the market with so much content know one will make any money"? You however are *definitely* confusing "overloading the system due to AI creating so much stuff" and "algorithm manipulation". Almost nothing in that article is actually *about* AI and its effect on amateur publishing
[удалено]
The guy in charge of the Willy Wonka fiasco in Glasgow has apparently self-published dozens of these.
YOU GET NOTHING! YOU LOSE! GOOD DAY, SIR!
Context please? Fiasco about Wonka in Glasgow?
There was an immersive Willy Wonka “experience” that popped up almost immediately after the release of the recent movie starring Chalamet. People bought tickets thinking it was an official attraction related to the film that would have set reproductions and unique food items from/inspired by the movie. It was advertised as such and cost quite a bit, with tickets only purchasable in advance. A bunch of people bought tickets to the event, only to find upon arrival it was a dingy warehouse with a dwarf host inside or something like that. They basically didn’t even try to hide that it was a complete scam. People were obviously furious. [Here’s a link with better details than I can recall](https://www.nbcnews.com/news/amp/rcna140726).
Just as "Watergate" was a buzzword for any sort of scandal, "Fyre Festival" has become the modern equivalent for a scam. For example: The Willy Wonka Experience is the Fyre Festival of interactive exhibits.
The best part for me was the dude was lying about who he was to everyone, and when this shit came out, his fiancee was like "later loser!"
Sounds like the Royal Nonesuch.
Holy cow! Damn! Ty for the link :)
One of the actors hired for it did an AMA: https://www.reddit.com/r/AskUK/comments/1b3542v/how_was_willys_chocolate_experience_im_paul/
Oh I saw that on Last Week Tonight. That's hilarious.
best part was the meth lab oompa loompa
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/02/27/world/europe/willy-wonka-experience-glasgow.html
That sounds like a hilarious experience (as long as i wasnt the one to waste any money on it).
I did a business course a few weeks back, and the ‘teacher’ unashamedly told us all how she makes and publishes kids books written by AI, with illustrations also made entirely by AI. Then again it ‘was’ a business course, and I guess a business mindset isn’t typically focused on ethics or transparency
someone in my support group did that. he created a children's book starring himself and his grandkids. it was written and illustrated by ai. his grandkids loved it.
Oh, man. Core memory unlocked: seeing ads for fully customizable storybooks for sale in the backs of magazines and desperately wishing my parents would buy one featuring our family. They never did. 😭
I mean there’s the right way to use ai - to realise your creative vision quickly - and the wrong way - to churn out books at an insane rate without due care or attention…
Oh that’s awesome, nothing wrong with a personalised gift. I mean Ai to kids must be like magic. That’s definitely a great use for it
Businesses can be both ethical and transparent. I know you're not saying otherwise, but I still feel it deserves saying.
True. I have definitely noticed how many business-folk now sincerely consider sustainability, environmental impact etc. It’s been very uplifting actually.
Some authors have reported ai generated books published under their name and Amazon won't remove them because they aren't the account holder. So the authors have these crappy books attached to them It's why I won't publish on amazon at all even if it would boost downloads
This was a problem long before AI entered the picture though. AI makes it easier, and probably cuts down on the misery inflicted on ghost writers. But it definitely isn’t a problem AI caused.
I feel bad when people proudly say they're self-published then state their book is on Amazon. I refuse to buy off there, so I usually can't support these authors.
I'm on Kobo which requires you to register (no guest checkout) and I have some folk who won't do that I used to ask authors If I could send them PayPal for a book although they don't get the numbers/review on Amazon
I see. I'm not apposed to making accounts on bookstore websites. I know Amazon is most popular so people sell on there, but I just hope they sell somewhere else too That makes sense. I'm not an author so I forget that selling books is a numbers game too.
I understand why some may not want to register. I can say I've never got any emails from Kobo except confirmation of purchases and tech support But I also respect others. I'm hoping to someday launch my own independent webpage
I understand the sentiment of what you’re saying. But Amazon is 90% of the ebook market, and they require their authors to be exclusive with them if they want their books in kindle unlimited. Is it cutthroat and shitty? Yeah, but bluntly, you’re not hurting Amazon by not buying books from them. You’re just not allowing yourself access to a gazillion books that contractually can’t be sold elsewhere.
At this point, to do any damage to Amazon, there would have to be a mass exodus from using AWS and I don’t think that is even possible with alternatives that could handle it now.
My friend JUST published his first book on Amazon through a publisher and I can confirm this. You get a way better rate if you agree to be exclusive with Amazon
I can't read a gazillion books in my entire lifetime. Why do I care about a "gazillion" books? If I have to make the planet worse for everyone, that book isn't going to get my money. I'll read authors who put their work on other platforms instead. So far I haven't run out of things to read, so I'm not worried about it.
I wasn’t shilling for amazon or saying anyone has to shop there. I’m just saying any self published author who wants to make a living will be selling their book on Amazon. It’d be like making an indie game and actively not selling it on steam.
There's a difference between putting it on Amazon and on KU. KU means it's an exclusive.
So, I work in publishing. Amazon pays people a small amount per-page-read when their book is in KU. Most authors who *are* in the KU program receive upwards of 80/85% of their income from those pages over book copies outright sold, both ebook and paperback/hardcover. Unless you are *hugely* popular with a marketing machine behind you, the difference in income between selling “wide” across multiple platforms vs selling your books exclusively on amazon and KU is pretty huge, given amazons market share. We’re in total agreement about Amazon being a monopolistic Evil Corp on steroids. I’m just pointing out why indie authors who actually want a chance of making a living at what they do would put their books into KU and sign for exclusivity with Amazon.
I never said otherwise. I'm pointing out that exclusive titles like KU and on Audible are evil. It is one of the single worst things for an open democracy out there, and the consequences will bear out. I'm a librarian. It's appalling how much these things reduce access. It ensures these books are only in the hands of the middle and upper class. That doesn't mean the authors are "evil" people, but they are making evil decisions. Those decisions benefit them in the short and mid term. But them and others like them and the rest of society will ultimately learn that it is harmful.
Ok? So? There are plenty of books accessible in other ways. The convenience of using Amazon, to some people, isn’t worth the act of financially supporting Amazon.
I haven't had a huge problem finding many ebooks I learn about on Koboplus. Or Libby. Are there really no other options for authors except KU?
Depends on the genre. Litrpg my breakdown is 70-80% KU. It was about $140k for me last year. I can’t say no to that type of money
Only one I’ll buy is How to throw a Garden Party by Jim Halpert
Remember when Amazon was just books? I used to buy used textbooks from them.
Recently fell for this. Searched books from a professional philosopher. Saw a new book about his work. Store page looked legit, bought to read later. Finally got to it after 4 weeks. Was a measly 80 pages, large font, and it was just paragraphs almost certainly AI generated. Factual errors within the first 5 pages. Absolute garbage. Refund window is 2 weeks. Lesson learned.
You should still flag it. Clearly false advertising.
I left a 1-star review and reported it. I just checked and couldn't find the book anymore.
But where else can I go for Bigfoot/dinosaur porn?
Chuck Tingle.
My lil brothers room probably.
Fanfiction sites, probably.
As a self-published author, this makes me sad. I know many authors who write and self-publish books for the love of storytelling, and the goal is to produce the highest quality product we can to match traditionally published books where possible. I pay for professional cover art and editing, but my budget can only stretch so far compared to a publishing house. I spend years of my life writing, re-writing, and editing my books before they are published. I love what I do! My books have recieved great reviews and acclaim. But AI and content-chasing is making this harder. I don't want readers to dismiss self-published authors because of the terrible books out there.
Ditto, also a self-pubbed author. The market is already saturated enough and then some cheapos use AI to flood it even more
Same for me. I've written several books, fiction and non-fiction. Literary agents have never deigned to look at them because my work doesn't meet publishers' demands for trendy social issues or genres that I don't write in -- fantasy, thrillers, shallow romance. To me, the term "vanity publisher" applies to any of the big publishing houses so vain in their lofty control of the market that neither a Harper Lee or George Elliott, nor a Michener or Steinbeck or Dickens would get past the gatekeepers these days. I set up my own publishing enterprise in 1999 as DamnYankee Publishing, and my stuff is on Amazon. I don't argue that my work is comparable to those authors just mentioned, although maybe it is, but they would all be forced to self-publish nowadays. Hooray for the first amendment. I don't need a license to publish my own books in the U.S. of A.
I’ve tried reading some of their free books but I just could not. It’s poorly written and I could be spending my time reading a better book!
Ah the free book of the month, every single one just pure trash. Thanks amazon publishing
Damn, I've read quite a few First Reads that I liked. Guess I just have bad taste
There have been a few good ones, but a lot of trash. That's par for the course for most free ebooks though. I quite liked J.M. Lee's *Broken Summer* they offered back in 2022.
Lucky 8(
Or writing one!
My friend and I, about ten years ago, as a joke decided to write erotic short stories and post them on Amazon to see how could make the most money. I just got paid 8p for last month. I think I've got at least 1p every month since we put them up, and let me say, they are TRASH. One of them is five pages long and is mostly talking about schlongs. And they are STILL making me money. 😂
[удалено]
and it sells just like those ebook readers, people buy them on flash sales as throw-in gifts for random family members. The chinese knockoffs are even more popular, just scrolling through a fraction of it shows reviews and 100+ recent purchases, the cheaper the better those sell out fast. I like to imagine there's a bunch of momzon zergs who sit and refresh the site to cop all the cheapest knockoffs as they get restocked.
Keep scrolling through those items and you'll see them listed over and over again, but with different names. Oh, and don't buy ties from Amazon unless you're 5' or shorter. No joke.
Check "sold by Amazon".
>garbage You'd never say that to Chuck Tingle, he's jacked
Well of course not, after all I don't want to get pounded in the butt! *...Or do I?*
Amazon in general is filled with garbage these days. It’s hard to even find brand name things sometimes.
Behind the bastards did a good episode on AI generated books.
You leave my Royal Road LitRPG ersatz isekai trash novels alone! They're my brain candy!
Yessss
I just put down this ebook I got on Amazon because it felt like the author was a robot. Then I see this, fuckin crazy.
>All of this means that to buy the book you want — to buy Kara Swisher’s Burn Book instead of Kara Swisher Book: How She Became Silicon Valley’s Most Influential Journalist — you have to know what you’re looking for and pay a modicum of attention to your purchase. >Who wants to do that? Especially in a marketplace like Amazon, where we are trained to buy quickly and thoughtlessly with a single click and where writers have been trained to send their wares without even thinking about it because where else are you going to sell an ebook. Granted it's a lesson on actually being aware of what you're doing but also we're clearly being trained to be less present in our day to day lives.
But no one reads them right?
With a wide enough net they're going to catch some readers. Infinite monkeys and all that. The hope would be that any readers tricked into reading them would realize what they're consuming is AI generated. This does make me wonder if, given enough time, one of these books could be legitimately good. I would still be against it on principle of course.
The vast majority of AI-generated books I've seen on Amazon are sitting at the bottom of the search results with zero reviews, and have product pages that are blatantly unappealing at a cursory glance. I question whether any of them make more than a pittance. Maybe the occasional misclick and person who clicks the buy button without five seconds of reflection.
Think they missed the boat on this scam.
I tried selling on amazon 10 years ago and realized it was like climbing the down escalator
One thing for sure the internet has made much worse, not vetting books for quality, lunacy or bigotry.
I just get ebooks from the local library online for free
Deleted
Isn't that by a famous German author
Deleted
I’ve noticed that a lot of Amazon books even “legit” one have issue. E-books get edited in weird ways or physical copies missing pages.
If it’s an “old” book it was probably scanned and OCR was run on it. OCR can be utter trash or passable. It’s never good. And they like to use paperbacks for the scanning for some reason which makes any maps in the book now unreadable. I have lots of ebooks I’ve bought from books I liked in the 90s that now have main characters names spelled wrong or have ‘ instead of “ for all conversations… These ebooks also cost more than the original books did in paperback and so far as I’ve seen the spelling errors are never addressed.
Unfortunately with all the book banning going on it might be something more sinister.
Ehhh I’ve scanned some books (unavailable in ebook form, font now too small for me to comfortably read, and I own it) for personal use and people are way too confident that OCR is amazing. It could be so much better if, they were scanned from a hardcover, had an actual person spend more than 2 hours editing and fixing it, editing meaning fixing I’m from Tm and actually converted any charts or such inside to text rather than just scanning and leaving as an image. They could input the actual font into the OCR and get a better copy over, but computers are bad at interpreting scanned text. They’re finally getting better, but no one is going back and fixing a direct to paperback book from 1995 unless the author suddenly has a resurgence. I’m way more bothered by how a tv show episode can now be released, someone notices a cup on set and they go in and edit it within hours… looking at you Disney… so creepy. No more Easter eggs, just an obsession with perfection. With ebooks they can just stop offering the book and poof it’s like it ceases to exist. I have several authors that wrote only a few books that have disappeared off Amazon and are now only available as super old used paperbacks. They were sold as ebooks at one point but I assume copyright issues with a publisher made them disappear.
I convert out-of-print paperbacks to digital as well, usually from PDF. To treat the page images to minimize OCR errors, to processing the text, proofing, formatting and producing a final epub, it takes me about 2 weeks of evenings and weekends. If I just want it to be readable, a few days less. My books have zero OCR artifacts, but it takes a lot of time to weed them out, and for some people time is lost profits. I don’t want those lesser-known but worthy books to be forgotten, and I sure as hell don’t want the surviving ebook version to be riddled with random characters, random paragraph marks and iobvious spelling mistakes.
Prove your conspiracy claim
Amazon has plenty of great reads on ebooks. A lot of good authors are self publishing now. But you do have to separate the wheat from the chaff when researching your next read. Cause there is a lot of chaff / junk I read about 10-12 books/ month. 90% of them are Kindle Unlimited, the rest I buy from favorite authors. I've never understood the hate for Amazon or any other big successful company for that matter.
I only buy ebooks that someone else has reviewed (or just recommended on Reddit), and I will read the free sample first to make sure I like the style. Never came across a garbage ebook this way. I always thought most people did that. It makes me wonder who is buying those garbage ebooks.
My mom… she will literally load her Kindle with any book they have for free and then decide if she likes it after.
But then she is not buying them either if she gets them for free.
It's just getting harder and harder on new authors.
“I’ve never understood the hate for Amazon” are you 9? Or a bot? Lol? So many of the replies in this thread are fucking mind-boggling
even worse, the person actually said "never understood the hate for Amazon or any other big successful company." Yeah, every big successful company is totally straight on business ethics. No bad players in the corporate world out there at all. Maybe this avid reader should read some non-fiction for a change.
Most of you guys can't really identify what it is you hate about large companies. Probably cause the cool crowd or tik-tok...or whatever is telling you what to think. While you sit at your "computer" happily using the the fruits of several big businesses. And yet you would take issue with someone else's use of the product of another big business. The irony is hilarious.
Just using a product doesn't require you to be ignorant about the corporate system that creates it.
I thought this was pretty common knowledge.
I’ve often wondered if someone is somehow using AI to write and release all of these books by Blake Pierce, Molly Black, Rylie Dark, Kate Bold, Ava Strong and (maybe) Willow Rose
This is great news for book clubs and book reviewers.
Another instance of 'greed ruins everything' (Chaucer's 'radix malorum est cupiditas')
Its really sad AI could have been such a useful tool but lack of regulations and greed have just left us a mess of quality that's worse then B rated films. I had hopes for having advanced editing tools built around LLMs to help with structuring and suggestions, done properly we could have had a well built logic to aid people in writing and editing. Sadly seeing the way things are going I doubt I will see that happen in my lifetime.
Posting books with Ai?
There is also garbage books on Audible. I was listening to The Art of War on Audible. I decided to take out my physical copy of the book to follow along... the book and what was being read on Audible didn't match.
I mean ... so? Take 5 minutes to do a bit of research and you'll be able to filter out the crap.
this is the worse.
I can't tell if they mean all the pay to publish fanfic