It’s bots all the way down at kindle unlimited
It’s bots all the way down at kindle unlimited
Amazon’s Kindle Unlimited bestseller list was full of books with titles like “Apricot bar code architecture” and “Jessica’s Attention” earlier this week.
My title might be a bit hyperbolic, but stuff like this worries me. I love to read and I love reading on a kindle. This has been going on for a while, but it has now reached absurd levels.
It's the Dead Internet Theory in action. While it stays a conspiracy for the Internet as a whole, it is definitely true at particular websites. There are many communities which are just controlled by bots and have no real people there.
The goal for most of the investors in this tech is going to be to crow bar large language model nonsense in to every corner of the internet. At a certain point I can’t help but wonder if they are actively trying to ruin it.
There is no way a modern LLM wrote this stuff. Maybe a medium language model, or a really old LLM. It reads better than a Markov chain's work, I guess.
It really sucks that we're facing the digital equivalent of climate change with regards to the internet and the content economy on top of the decline of the actual economy and actual climate change. It's all so much.
Yeah, I absolutely can't imagine being a writer who is trying to break in this space. Discoverability is going to be a nightmare going forward.
This is my daughter at the moment. Just gone 21, at university studying Creative Writing. Thing is she was doing so well with Biology etc. Changed about 3 months into her first year. She's had a couple of self published books on Amazon, nothing more than a dozen or so sales. She's going to find it hard to find full time work etc. in her chosen field.
I thought about bringing up technical writing, then I realized that it's a possibility that even that job isn't safe within the next 5 years considering the promising development of Spiking Neural Net. This is something I would probably suggests to your daughter at this point that she should probably reconsider her chosen field and try to enter biology or some stable job.
Honest questions: What worthwhile alternatives exist already? If there are none, what can be done? What can be built to improve discoverability of authors while moderating what is visible?
Libraries and some bookstores are great about picking favorites and putting blurbs about them right on the shelf.
Powell's always has great recommendations, I've found lots of fantastic new reads there. I wish everyone had access to one in person, I love that store so much.
I wouldn't classify these books as real competition. Nobody was really prepared for this, but it's a very solvable problem and there's no market for books full of word salad. I can't see Amazon or any store tolerating the existence of a product that doesn't sell.
I think you've misunderstood this. Listen to the two recent episodes of behind the bastards on this topic if you want to get a good handle on it.
This is half the problem: these books ARE selling. I do try to be kind, but I can't deny that there are a lot of idiots in the world who seem to have a fair amount of disposable income.
They are buying these books for their children, or being duped by a pretty front cover, or a synopsis that sounds up their alley.
The books aren't 'word salad' so much as they are simply a cheap facsimile of actual stories. They have the elements of storytelling, munged together into a brain-breaking stew - but they aren't word salad, they just aren't human.
This whole situation is making me fairly uncomfortable, but also making me laugh. I love books. I love literature. The idea that one of the largest retailers in the world: an almost tech-giant that made all of their money flogging books to the masses cannot seem to clear its platform of fake books ghost written by computers with a little unscrupulous human help is simultaneously delicious and disturbing as hell.
I hate amazon with every fiber of my being, but this doesn't feel like a good omen for my children.
What's odd is that this isn't an especially new thing in terms of possibly. Maybe if they wanted some veneer of viability for like, a paragraph or two, but any reader is going to catch on to what's happening pretty fast.
The titles are still nonsense enough that even a simple Markov chain could have made them. So I think the main issue at play is whatever they're doing to exploit themselves to the top of the list.
It's honestly heartbreaking considering how much work it must be to write a book and how scary it is especially with so many influencers and celebrities in the market now already making it harder for real authors to get noticed
The two communities I'm most missing from going cold turkey on Reddit are niche book subgenre subs. I used to check them daily for new book announcements and discussions, and I got literally all of my "fun" book recommendations from those subs.
I guess they have a Discord group which is okay, but I'm not really interested in sitting in a chat room.
So yeah, agreed. Discoverability is a huge problem for authors already, even before AI-written drivel starts filling the Kindle store.
This was a part of the equation when I decided to pursue traditional publishing instead of going the self-publishing route. I wouldn't be competing against other authors for the attention of publishers, I'd be competing against an ocean of ghost-written get-rich-quick schemes and bots. Sometimes gatekeepers serve a real purpose.
This is going to be the real result of the large language model hype train, massive floods of basically worthless “content” made simply to pump metrics and fool investors.
I’m not saying that there is no useful applications for the tech just that none of those are particularly marketable nor do they generate a lot of monetizable utility.
And more importantly it’s not AI anymore than auto complete, spell check are. People insisting otherwise almost seem like they’re trying to start cults.
"Meanwhile the government" by Rentlar
The company was founded in the late afternoon by its founder in a rush to create a more prominently displayed flag. I don't want your kids to know when you get to work.
...View this and much more riveting writing coming soon to the Amazon Bestsellers list!
Be the change you want to see in the world!
I had to pull my kindle unlimited membership… it’s just a pile of crap.
I had kindle unlimited a decade ago and it was decent. Lots of good sci-fi and fantasy.
Then overnight the entire catalog became "shape shifting billionaire stepbrother bear" and other trash. It's like browsing your spam folder.
So like the rest of Amazon then? Never used kindle, but Amazon for physical goods has been a dumpster fire for a while - completely overrun with dropshipped garbage, to the extent that it's actually difficult now to find quality stuff in the sea of "brands" with random string of capital letter names, all using the same poorly photoshopped image...
"Folding Ideas" does amazing work on YouTube around exposing grifters in well structured, long form explanations of their grifts.
One of their videos looked into a group of growth hustler type folks, a pair of twins. Part of their scam was automating the process of creating fake books like this from start to finish to sell them online for passive income.
Highly recommend anything this channel creates. Worth your time to have a focused sit to watch the journey unfold (especially if interested in the main subject of this post).
I fully second this. Folding Ideas is a first-class educator. I would still be completely in the dark on NFTs and Crypto without him, and "In Search of a Flat Earth" completely changed my perspective on flat earth adherents (i.e., I am much less amused by it).
I, for one, can’t wait to read Apricot bar code architecture
Sounds like an indie band
I, too, have snorted scornfully at this shameful state of affairs.
Anyone that buys anything from Amazon is also part of the problem. Support your local bookshop while you still can.
I mean, most of my reading comes from authors who are literally only on amazon. And they're only on amazon because it's impossible to make a living trying to sell your book anywhere else. Brandon Sanderson has brought attention to this issue.
I'm supporting indie authors in a sub-genre that you literally can't even find in a physical bookstore. I get that bookstores are hurting, but I had to make a choice between small time authors and small time book stores.
A store cannot survive on good will alone unfortunately. As much as I like my local bookstore, Amazon provides more content in more formats. It's just better from every angle.
Don't worry, your utopian vision of streets full of closed shops and associated tumbleweed will be here soon enough.
Behind the Bastards just did a two-parter on this phenomenon but with children’s “books.” Icky stuff. Great episodes, but ugh that this is even a thing.
Part One: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/behind-the-bastards/id1373812661?i=1000617646703
Part Two: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/behind-the-bastards/id1373812661?i=1000617949358
Well, that's all the more reason to not try to monetize through Amazon. But Patreons seem to only be about 0.5% of the people who Follow a story on Royal Road. Well, I'll have to keep working on more incentives I guess.
Welp..this is a problem we have to expect now. What a time to be alive. The scary part is this is basically gen 1. Wait till the books are actually good
When I first heard of the Elon and Zuckerberg cage match, I assumed it was some deep fake thing. I literally had my first experience of not knowing if something was real or AI. I just assumed it was AI. Not until days later did I know it was a real thing.
We should stop making rankings of books...
If this indeed breaks Amazon then at least that is one silver lining of AI. It's a shame indie authors are losing their platform, but they'll find another.
It would make it even more important to have sites like Goodread where books are recommended by communities.
There's even a federated alternative, BookWyrm!
...I guess these days the Fediverse is my hammer of choice, and every problem with the internet is a nail.
I don't think these particular books are even generated by large language models - from the examples the content is just meaningless nonsense.
I didn’t totally get it. So, people are using AI to generate fake books, but how are the fake books getting into the top 100?
Likely bots recommending them.
I would like to peruse a copy of apricot bar code architecture! Surely, it must be one of the books of all time!
Indeed. Written by one of the writers.
What I don't understand is who is downloading and reading these books?
More bots
My guess is: adventurous readers who are intrigued by a small snippet, then figure it out on page 2 after they've bought it already.
