ChatGPT launches boom in AI-written e-books on Amazon

https://www.reuters.com/technology/chatgpt-launches-boom-ai-written-e-books-amazon-2023-02-21/

by mirthlessend • 3 years ago

69 81 3 years ago

skilled2• 3 years ago

tjr• 3 years ago

I've asked ChatGPT to write some stories, and I have found the output amusing. I could see reading some of them to children. Maybe they don't make a great deal of sense, but they're still fun. Or perhaps, because they don't make a great deal of sense, that's what makes them fun?

Reason077• 3 years ago

As great as ChatGPT is, the content it generates tends to follow some fairly repetitive patterns & styles, and it's going to be pretty easy to identify unless heavily edited.

However, I also suspect this technology will develop very rapidly: just look at how quickly the AI art scene has evolved since Stable Diffusion came along. Pretty crude at first, but the quality of stuff coming out of it is amazing now.

deegles• 3 years ago

I feel like the biggest impact will be for authors who have an existing body of work... you can train the model on your writing and generate new text in your own style. What takes days could be done in hours.

I'm sure the same could be done for editors... train it on annotated text (original + corrections), use it to generate new edits.

chme• 3 years ago

Sure, but most authors aren't payed for their writing style, they are paid for what they say, for a unique insight, good research, or, if fictional, for a good story arc and suspense. I haven't seen purely AI written pieces that have that. And I am not sure they will with the current approach, which produces mostly bland and generic text. We would need an AI that does some actual creative thinking first.

I think (hope) that AI, in the interim, will provide actual authors ways to get inspired by its random nature. Like painters might start with an ink blob and then paint over it. Or let AI fill in some gaps, like description of people or places, etc.

JohnFen• 3 years ago

Damn, I hadn't thought of that. I was thinking I could stay safe by just sticking with already known authors. But apparently even that won't work.

rikroots• 3 years ago

(Copying my comment over from a different HN ChatGPT thread I commented on this morning - are all these ChatGPT threads getting a bit ... samey?)

As a writer, I'm much happier in the revision/editing stage than in the first draft stage. I have a half-finished novel that's been half-finished for the best part of 8 years now. I'm now thinking that maybe if I feed the draft into <ML-shiny-of-the-day> with suggestions for how I want the next section/chapter to develop, it could generate some draft copy for me. Possibly several different versions. After which I'm in my Happy Editing Place, shaping existing copy to something I like. Repeat and rinse!

The end result would be 100% my work as the ML algorithm/brains/whatever would be generating new copy based on my existing copy and my vision and direction for the novel. And I get the final say on the results. Win-Win!

Veen• 3 years ago

There are services to identify LLM output, like GTPZero and a classifier from OpenAI, but they aren't very reliable even at this early stage in the development of LLMs—lots of false positives and negatives. They'll likely be useless when the tell-tale signs they rely on are ironed out.

https://gptzero.me/

https://openai.com/blog/new-ai-classifier-for-indicating-ai-...

flangola7• 3 years ago

In my experience adding "in the style of a human writer" or "in the style of [author name]" is enough to break detection.

tylersmith3• 3 years ago

If you separate generating the content from stylizing it you can make it much more natural and targeted toward your readers. This generation of models can do a lot but does things best when you do one thing at a time.

EamonnMR2• 3 years ago

Eternal September part 2. Or maybe we'll call the rest of time the Eternal February.

throwaway4aday• 3 years ago

I don't think that's the right term. Eternal September refers to too big of an influx of new people for the current members to inculcate with the local manners, morals, and attitudes resulting in a degradation of an existing culture. Amazon authors are already too diverse and dispersed to have a singular culture. This is more like mass production meets content creation or an assembly line for knowledge work.

joenot443• 3 years ago

Ghostwriting - by humans - has a long tradition, she said, but the ability to automate through AI could turn book writing from a craft into a commodity.

I think writing has already become a commodity. Go on Fiverr and you'll find people offering to write on any topic, fiction and non, for fractions of a cent/word.

The biggest reason I can see someone using ChatGPT to generate a children's book vs paying someone overseas to do it is about $10. Words are cheap, astonishingly cheap, what's not cheap is reputation and credibility. I don't see a big reason for authors to worry, yet.

MDGeist• 3 years ago

I agree, I did much ghostwriting to make money in grad school. A lot of the books I worked on for other people were them exploring a new revenue stream and capitalizing on their existing reputation. The words themselves are not really what sells the work.

fattless• 3 years ago

Somewhat related, and might give insight. This seems like the next step of the "hustle culture" this video explores, definetly worth a watch:

https://youtu.be/biYciU1uiUw

People looking to get rich quick write (or pay sweatshops to write) very low effort, poorly researched books about obscure topics. They put them on amazon, maybe make some money, then repeat. The video explores one of those buyable programs to get you involved in all of that.

Seems like chatGPT is being used as the next tool in this process

mdmglr• 3 years ago

The killer feature the publishing industry and writers bring to the market is curation. That is curation of the facts, story line for brevity, etc. all things ChatGPT cannot do.

misnome2• 3 years ago

This also is a problem though because tools like it can be used to DOS this curation - see e.g. todays Clarkesworld issue (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34875781) - this can be worked around by only curating from known sources... which I can imagine provides a massive barrier to new people.

And of course, if anyone makes something new it'll just be instantly ripped off and redistributed via copyright laundering.

It's hard not to view this as enforced enshittification for everyone, all for the benefit of a few quick bucks for massive corporations.

kthejoker22• 3 years ago

Shouldn't there be a "massive barrier" to new people writing checks notes AI-generated children's books?

I've read now to 4 kids and the vast majority of children's books are terrible. A few are evocative, imaginative, have memorable characters, interesting, thoughtful messages - but most of them are a waste of paper and time.

Most children's books - even the ones more deliberately planned than a ChatGPT textdump - are very lazily conceived and executed.

sublinear2• 3 years ago

Isn't it more like Wyrm Publishing doesn't have the resources to handle this? I'm even suspecting this to be a publicity stunt.

mattferderer2• 3 years ago

With very few exceptions, I have not seen publishers doing that over the past few decades. I see no brevity & the curation of facts is a topic for another day....

skilled2• 3 years ago

So, he used ChatGPT to create a children's book in _4 hours_ and he is now a published author, the very thing he dreamed to become? Please...

"The idea of writing a book finally seemed possible"

There is no mention of the guy being disabled or unable to write himself. It's a complete fluff piece that Reuters failed to properly articulate. They should've started with the Amazon part and then used this guy as an example rather use a pretentious introduction that deserves no praise nor any respect.

rvz2• 3 years ago

So, he used ChatGPT to create a children's book in _4 hours_ and he is now a published author, the very thing he dreamed to become? Please...

Well he is going to find out that his 'books' in the US are essentially in the public domain and are un-copyrightable due to this ruling: [0]

Human authorship is required for obtaining copyright for the books in the US and not when an AI has done the work entirely or has done the majority of the work in both generated text and images and especially when they are crediting an AI as the author or co-author.

[0] https://www.copyright.gov/rulings-filings/review-board/docs/...

Laaas• 3 years ago

I wonder whether this will change when we get self-aware sentient AIs. What if e.g. Koko the gorilla [0] had made a painting? Could they have claimed copyright with their limited sign language capability?

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Koko_(gorilla)

verdverm• 3 years ago

How are you going to show how much a human vs machine wrote? (generally speaking)

2OEH8eoCRo0• 3 years ago

Content got an order of magnitude cheaper to create so now nobody cares about their copyrights and at the same time nobody cares about ripping it off. Strange times.

curiousllama• 3 years ago

That ruling just says a person has to claim copyright. Whoever game the prompt to the AI is the "author" for copyright purposes

mensetmanusman• 3 years ago

Future historians poking their fire with post-historic twigs in a post-nuclear apocalypse: “what were they thinking?”

kevin_thibedeau• 3 years ago

This will make a great money laundering pipeline for criminals. Orange jumpsuit man might just turn a new leaf and become a bookworm.

mguerville• 3 years ago

I've tried a couple of apps that promise to create children stories based on ChatGPT and while it works (-ish) for short stories I think the only way to get a better and longer output that is decent enough to warrant publishing is to be very hands on with the prompts, at which point I'd argue it's possibly considered real creative work and ChatGPT is just a (very powerful) tool, not a full-blown substitute for a writer/author.

shp0ngle• 3 years ago

What’s more, he can also write hundreds of fake reviews on Amazon. Nobody can tell the difference!

EamonnMR2• 3 years ago

Are there non-fake Amazon reviews anymore?

gumballindie• 3 years ago

Extra reason to avoid amazon.

rebuilder2• 3 years ago

I’m not so worried about books, because there’s generally a human in the loop between writing a book and publishing it, but how long do we expect search engines to remain useable? Blogspam is already a real issue when it comes to finding stuff via search, I have a bad feeling it’s going to get much harder to find what you need to find as machine learning tools out-SEO humans.

tylersmith3• 3 years ago

It's very easy to get low content book published through Amazon's Direct Publishing platform. I don't really think it's a problem personality, but if you're opinion is premised on publishing being difficult I think it's misplaced.

rebuilder2• 3 years ago

Getting published and marketed to the extent that people actually read your book

rvz2• 3 years ago

There were over 200 e-books in Amazon’s Kindle store as of mid-February listing ChatGPT as an author or co-author, including "How to Write and Create Content Using ChatGPT," "The Power of Homework" and poetry collection "Echoes of the Universe." And the number is rising daily. There is even a new sub-genre on Amazon: Books about using ChatGPT, written entirely by ChatGPT.

Given that these books are published in the US, good luck attempting to copyright something that has been majority outputted or entirely created from an AI like ChatGPT or Stable Diffusion since that is completely un-copyrightable and is instead public domain. [0]

[0] https://www.copyright.gov/rulings-filings/review-board/docs/...

boomchinolo78• 3 years ago

And this is just why people say you should not read anything written in the past century, taken to the 11th degree.

zerop• 3 years ago

Whatever it is, I will suggest to stay away from this kind of contents created by AI. Human creativity replacement should not be sought

cmdialog3• 3 years ago

Some nerd on here called it a human "stranglehold" on creativity and art and it's one of the funniest most brain-dead things I have read about AI. It's like so many of these programmers out here can only see programs and tech, and have completely lost touch with their humanity. Another even went so far as to say that, given enough billions of dollars, AI will be churning out art as good as anything fine arts. It's an unbelievably funny take

emptybits• 3 years ago

lost touch with their humanity

Humanity. Hm. Maybe. But is it possible that some who seek to limit what "humanity" means are also gatekeeping a safe place for themselves while other humans want to move forward and explore? Humans, uniquely, are explorers and triers of crazy new ideas. Is that not an essential part of humanity and art?

IMO, your "nerd" and "brain-dead" insults are a bit immature.

I'm not praising any current AI-generated art. It's so early. Let's see where this goes. If it all falls flat in a few years then the experiment was still essentially a human thing that had to be done IMO.

thundergolfer• 3 years ago

The kind of word you’d expect to come out of the mouth of an A16Z VC shilling their latest hot AI startup.

“Today nearly all creative output comes from creative humans and those humans capture an appallingly high 25% of the economic value. With CreAItive the human stranglehold on creativity has been escaped, 100% of CreAItive’s output is owned by investors.”

boh• 3 years ago

Looks like click farms have expanded into book publishing. The tech revolution of diminishing standards seems to be progressing steadily. You can now ride in your Cruise self-driving car that drives slow and stops in awkward places, while reading a soulless, irrelevant book and look up inaccurate info in Bing. The future really is never as you picture it.

cmdialog3• 3 years ago

AI pollution is no longer the pollution of the future, it is the pollution of today

schainks• 3 years ago

I read that sentence in the voice of a dystopian future cartoon that is forcefully cheerful.

tylersmith3• 3 years ago

This has been going on for a while. They refer to it (themselves) as low-content publishing and it's popular among the same crowd as the content marketing/low-content website ad farms. Before ChatGPT people used tools like Writter AI and Jarvis AI (now Jasper AI), but the newer models are much better and incorporate their own, possibly incorrect, knowledge.

SV_BubbleTime3• 3 years ago

So, Grandma got my little monster a "custom book" recently. It's got monster's name, and friend's name, and grandma's name of course.

It's so awful, that it's really hard to believe that it's just a poor translation. It really only makes sense if it was written by an AI. But I question why... It's just not that hard to write a 14 page story about unicorns and special talents.

It seems like more work to have an AI spit it out. It's just variable names for CHILD, FRIEND1, FRIEND2, etc. So, I think it was AI written, but nothing about it makes sense.

tux• 3 years ago

Just did a quick search on Amazon.

"Written by Artificial Intelligence" 2,000 results.

fassssst• 3 years ago

You could use Bing Chat to write periodic children’s books on current events.

asciimov• 3 years ago

The next wave of print journalism is upon us. Soon we will gladly companies to get access to their organically created and edited content slathered in Ads and DRM.

justinlloyd2• 3 years ago

26 years ago I wrote this short story for publication in some random SF zine that later got published elsewhere.

https://justinlloyd.li/blog/the-greatest-story-never-sold/

user-• 3 years ago

I just went down a rabbit hole for the last 30-60 minutes , looking at some of your videos (like your camera setup for your desktop) and your linkedin (impressive), lol. you got some interesting stuff up

justinlloyd2• 3 years ago

Well thank you kindly sir. I had a lot more videos on game development, mathematics, programming, electronics tinkering and a bunch of other stuff at one point in time. Unfortunately YouTube is a cesspool of individuals taking other people's videos, slapping their logo on it and reuploading. I decided I didn't want to play that game anymore.

jmull2• 3 years ago

I want to hate on ChatGPT-written books... But then there's this.

My Prompt (I have endless random ideas like this as I walk the dogs and listen to audio books):

Suggest the plot for a military science fiction book. The galaxy is divided into factions based on their fundamental properties: organic vs. artificial, living vs. dead, good vs. evil, plant vs. animal vs. mineral.

ChatGPT:

Title: "Galactic Rift: The War Between Factions"

In a faraway galaxy, a vast and complex network of planets is divided into factions based on their fundamental properties. The organic and living species have formed an alliance, while the artificial and dead ones have joined forces to control the galaxy. The plant, animal, and mineral factions are split amongst the two alliances, leading to a tense political climate.

Amidst this divide, a brilliant military strategist, General Alara, commands a flagship of the organic alliance, the Stellar Phoenix. She is tasked with leading her crew through dangerous space battles against the ruthless and technologically advanced artificial faction. The stakes are high, as the victor will control the galaxy and its resources.

As General Alara and her team engage in war, they encounter unexpected allies and enemies. They discover that not everything is as it seems, and that the factions are more complex than their fundamental properties suggest. The lines between good and evil are blurred, and each side is driven by their own motivations.

As the war intensifies, General Alara must make difficult decisions that challenge her beliefs and loyalties. She is forced to confront the dark side of her alliance and question whether the organic faction truly represents the good side of the war. Her personal journey is intertwined with the fate of the galaxy, as the war reaches its climactic conclusion.

In "Galactic Rift: The War Between Factions," the reader is taken on a journey through a galaxy filled with political intrigue, space battles, and philosophical questions. The plot explores themes of identity, morality, and the consequences of war. The novel offers a unique take on military science fiction, breaking free from the traditional tropes and challenging the reader's assumptions about good and evil.

Not bad. I'd read that book.

SV_BubbleTime3• 3 years ago

I'm not sure that "writing" is just taking an idea that you were handed and it making it wordier.

Let's see how well the AI actually explores those themes.

jmull2• 3 years ago

I asked it to write the first chapter...

It came back with 550 words, all perfectly OK and pretty much cogent, but it would suck as a chapter of an actual book.

Generally, it had at least two fatal flaws:

(1) it was all cliche. I don't really mind cliche stuff for my walking-the-dogs audiobooks, but it can't be all cliche. There needs to be something in there.

(2) it didn't delve into any details. E.g. there was an important planet, unexpectedly under attack, and a space battle for it. But nothing about why it was important and the space battle was over in a sentence or so. I prompted for more detail on these and got some, but again, it was purely cliche and contained no interesting details.

Also, there was literally nothing following from the dynamic the premise suggests.

With a bunch of prompting I think I could get it to write the book, but I think it would be purely cliche and bland, except possibly where I did some heavy lifting.

mattferderer2• 3 years ago

I've had fun doing bedtime stories by having ChatGPT create a book about a subject & a character names we agree upon. It's a great way to get into reading. In a way, it's similar to choose your own adventure style books. We haven't brought SD into it yet but that would be a fun addition to create images that go with the book.

I've also used ChatGPT to poke fun of family members in a Dr Seuss style short story. Great laugh for the whole family as the short stories have been really good. And people love hearing their names in stories.

I think this gives more people tools to easily create books. Hopefully it improves literature. Much of the books I've read that have been produced in the past few decades have a lot of fluff. Same with video series on Netflix, etc... Plenty of stories created that don't add to character development or the story. Plenty of pages written that don't add to a non-fiction book's value but are meant to add pages to meet a publisher's criteria & come off worse than a college kid increasing font & line spacing.

It'll be interesting to see how these stories compete & which stories get the most recommendations & "authentic likes".

mariushn• 3 years ago

Could you please share a prompt which resulted in a good Dr Seuss style story? Including the (changed) character names. Thanks!

WXLCKNO• 3 years ago

I spent a solid hour with chat GPT writing a story about a guy who meets a talking cat that leads him to a magical word within our world (sort of like the wizarding world being hidden in plain sight in Harry Potter) and it was tons of fun.

It felt like the best "story where you are the hero" ever.

ssnistfajen• 3 years ago

A book is more than 5 short paragraphs of synopsis, especially good books that are worth re-reading. Ideas are cheap and sketching a framework is the easiest part in building something. Fleshing out the details is a task that currently available LLMs aren't yet capable of doing.

Dune can be summarized in similar lengths too, but that's not what made the series a popular sci-fi universe.

kthejoker22• 3 years ago

ED Hirsch is looking more and more prescient every day.

I mean, really, sure: there are a few dozen really clever children's books that come out every year that deserve to be added to the "pantheon" but isn't this area basically saturated?

Imagine you read your child one book a day for their first 5 years, you and they co-read two books a day from age 5 to age 10 and then they move on forever to whatever arbitrary boundary we set for "children's books" versus the rest of literature.

Assuming a modest amount of re-reading your favorites, that's an ambitious local maximum of about 5,000 books.

Realistically, this number is more like 1,000 to 1,500 books. This space is already well curated - Scheherazade has you covered in a single compendium!

There's no way any random ChatGPT production is going to cut into the space.

JustSomeNobody• 3 years ago

Some people want to be authors and some people want to have been an author.

The person who wants to be an author, writes, writes and writes some more.

The person who wants to have been an author takes short cuts. All they're interested in is being able to say, "look what I did".

coding123• 3 years ago

I tried using ChatGPT to write theoretical future episodes of the show 24. The output was extremely drab and focused on re-used concepts. I tried to aid it with specifics like Jack is the president and his first lady is actually the infiltrator. It used that, but it didn't come up with the compelling stuff. So I guess if you want drab content, buy one of these books. If the author on the other hand uses it to take a compelling story line into the paragraphs... maybe.

jaarse• 3 years ago

Search for any popular title on Amazon and down the list you will always find "imposter books", with similar titles, author names and cover designs. Sometimes they blatantly use the authors copyrights, but usually they are just different enough to avoid being taken down. With Amazon not publishing the book until a copy is ordered, there is really no cost of the sellers part ... and if you can get 100 customers to buy the wrong book by mistake ...

My point is that is kind of work is already all over Amazon. The only thing that is changing is there is new production method. But when you can pay someone is a low cost county $10 to make the work, the cost is negligible.

I don't think authors have anything to worry about yet.

sublinear2• 3 years ago

Doesn't the majority of the market already buy based on trusted reviews or familiarity with the author?

Until the quality of the books improves, nobody is buying these except for novelty.

As for stopping the influx of junk, wouldn't it eventually settle down after all but a few names fail to cash in on this?

myth_drannon• 3 years ago

Amazon Kindle Unlimited was already full of crappy books. Especially children's book. Hundreds of books with just images taken from google and nonsense wording.

psiconaut2• 3 years ago

I agree. It is ironic that, at the very least, a LLM will maybe _improve_ the quality of a particular segment of publications.

elemesmedve• 3 years ago

It was already the case that "90% of everything is garbage".

Now with AI humanity can achieve 99.999%.

psiconaut2• 3 years ago

The second iteration will be interactive books - like that forsaken episode of Black Mirror was exploring. Taking us one step closer to "Diamond Age". Human connection doesn't necessarily has to be in the plot - the human behind can be at any extra layer.

To be honest, I see a continuum between using spellchecker, grammarly, or anything that comes above. You seed the intention, and you get an improved result - by means of huge datasets.

In a way, the hollywood machinery has been doing A/B testing on the likelihood to get a human brain hooked on the way to tell a story - structurally, there are not so many different stories. This only removes the need to have monkeys at the typing machine.

And yes, I'm being slightly sarcastic. But only a tiny bit. That way you can be sure it's a human writing this.

photochemsyn• 3 years ago

With a little prodding it seems you can generate a wide variety of content from ChatGPT. Although its default mode does seem to have some political-ideological biases, after having a discussion with it about Philip K. Dick's "The Man in the High Castle" I got it to write a positive story about a communist revolution in the United States, which overthrows a corporate-backed fascist dictatorship:

"...the real power lay with a small group of corporate interests that had eagerly collaborated with the fascist regimes. These corporate interests, which had significant holdings in the pharmaceutical, fossil fuel, armaments, and banking sectors, saw the rise of the fascist leaders as an opportunity to consolidate their monopoly power and increase their profits. They willingly supported the regimes, providing financial backing, technology, and expertise, in exchange for exclusive contracts and favorable treatment."
"However, not everyone was content with the status quo. A heroic communist leader, recognizing the grave threat to democracy and social justice posed by the corporate-backed fascist regimes, began to organize a resistance movement. She saw that the only way to defeat the fascists and corporate interests was to implement socialism and build a society that valued human dignity and the common good."

I have little doubt that if one first held a discussion with ChatGPT regarding Ayn Rand's "The Fountainhead" and the works of Milton Friedman one could get it to generate content of a quite different flavor. In other words, there's no need for political ideologues to starting having apoplepctic fits over this. Although now that I think of it, perhaps referring to apoplexy in this derogatory manner is ableist, hence this post must be censored...?

Bjorkbat• 3 years ago

This is really just the latest is a list of reasons why I no longer consider reading by itself to be an intellectual past-time. The line between books and content is "blurring", and has been well-before ChatGPT. You could "write a book" with a modest budget using a team of ghostwriters on Fiverr. Splurge a bit more and you could commission some illustrations from a desperate artist in a country with significantly less purchasing power than the US. Instructional ebooks are little more than blog posts.

I mean, obviously, reading isn't bad, it's just that I have suspicions about anyone who prides themselves of being an avid reader.

That all being said, you'd be surprised by the money that exists out there. Coworker of mine had a wife who wrote erotic fiction in ebook formats. She made about $80,000 a month doing that, though about half of that went to advertising, and another chunk of money went to employing a bunch of ghostwriters, not to mention hiring models to do photoshoots for book covers. Still, that's nearly $1 million every year before taxes and expenses. Can you truly say your startup is doing better?

dorchadas• 3 years ago

This might sound gate-keepy and elitist (and, y'know what, it is, and I openly admit to it because I don't think it's necessarily bad), but I 100% agree. Not all reading is quality reading, and if you're just rushing through whatever YA novel is hot right now, it's not the same as sitting down and reading literature. Or working through dense non-fiction work à la Adler. It's nothing more engaging than binging Netflix or Marvel movies, but they certainly think it is.

It's also funny as this reminds me how little r/books actually talks about books. It's mostly validating each other for never challenging themselves, and - shock - "I read a classic and it's actually good".

camoufleur• 3 years ago

Has reading fiction ever been considered an 'intellectual' past time?

loandbehold• 3 years ago

Movies are next. Soon you will be able to generate a whole movie in a fraction of a second with a single prompt. And it will be more novel and creative than garbage coming out of Hollywood.

yegle• 3 years ago

Head First Novel Writing with ChatGPT.

ChatGPT launches boom in AI-written e-books on Amazon

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