Update on KDP Title Creation Limits

https://www.kdpcommunity.com/s/article/Update-on-KDP-Title-Creation-Limits?language=en_US&forum=KDP%20Forum

by ilamont • 3 years ago

219 231 3 years ago

> We require you to inform us of AI-generated content (text, images, or translations) when you publish a new book or make edits to and republish an existing book through KDP. AI-generated images include cover and interior images and artwork. You are not required to disclose AI-assisted content.

hiidrew• 3 years ago

Their distinction:

AI-generated: We define AI-generated content as text, images, or translations created by an AI-based tool. If you used an AI-based tool to create the actual content (whether text, images, or translations), it is considered "AI-generated," even if you applied substantial edits afterwards. AI-assisted: If you created the content yourself, and used AI-based tools to edit, refine, error-check, or otherwise improve that content (whether text or images), then it is considered "AI-assisted" and not “AI-generated.” Similarly, if you used an AI-based tool to brainstorm and generate ideas, but ultimately created the text or images yourself, this is also considered "AI-assisted" and not “AI-generated.” It is not necessary to inform us of the use of such tools or processes.

https://kdp.amazon.com/en_US/help/topic/G200672390#aicontent....

prvc• 3 years ago

Allowing the use of tools to modify the contents erases any clear distinction between the categories.

pcl• 3 years ago

This is really interesting. I imagine that AI-generated art / illustrations for books mostly-text is a pretty compelling thing for authors, for all the same reasons that AI-generated text is of value for non-authors. I wonder how this line will work out in practice.

campbel• 3 years ago

Gee, I sure hope people don't just lie about it...

skepticATX• 3 years ago

It doesn’t matter. It’s garbage content and immediately recognizable as being AI generated.

It is absolutely possible to write a good article or even a good book with AI, but at least for now it’s just as hard, if not harder, than doing it without AI.

But of course people trying to make a quick buck won’t put in the required effort, and they likely don’t even have the ability to create great or even good content.

tyingq• 3 years ago

It is absolutely possible to write a good article or even a good book with AI, but at least for now it’s just as hard, if not harder, than doing it without AI.

How hard is it though, to create a shitty book with AI, that Amazon can't detect was written with AI?

duskwuff5• 3 years ago

It’s garbage content and immediately recognizable as being AI generated.

It's also recognizable by its sheer volume. An "author" who submits several new books every day is clearly not doing their own writing. The AI publishing scam relies on volume -- they can't possibly win on quality, but they're hoping to make up for that by putting so many garbage books on the market that buyers can't find anything else.

gamepsys3• 3 years ago

It’s garbage content and immediately recognizable as being AI generated.

Yea, but the Turning Test is actively being assaulted. Soon we won't know the difference between an uninspired book written by an AI and an uninspired book written by a human.

mostlylurks5• 3 years ago

It doesn’t matter. It’s garbage content and immediately recognizable as being AI generated.

Is it? How do you immediately recognize a book as AI generated before buying it, if the author isn't doing something silly like releasing several books per day/month? And even after you buy a book, how can you distinguish between the book just being terrible and the book being written with extensive use of AI? I don't believe AI can write good books, but I would still like to distinguish those two cases, since the former is just a terrible book, which is perfectly fine, while the latter I would like to avoid. I don't want to waste my limited time reading AI content.

ilamont• 3 years ago

See also: "Tom Lesley has published 40 books in 2023, all with 100% positive reviews"

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35687868

ritzaco• 3 years ago

I remember that one - interestingly the amazon link it goes to shows only 3 books now, all that look real, not the 40 that I remember seeing before.

So I guess Amazon is doing something even though I regularly hear complaints from authors that they allow blatant piracy all the time

phh• 3 years ago

Possibly it's the author removing them at the first one star rating to keep their author score high?

bragr• 3 years ago

shows only 3 books now

Those appear to be by different authors with similar names: https://www.amazon.com/s?k=%22tom+lesley%22

kmeisthax• 3 years ago

Amazon has no reason to give a shit about piracy on KDP: they make money either way. But having a load of AI generated garbage on your platform makes it far less valuable. You want your stolen books to actually be good. :P

el_benhameen• 3 years ago

This doesn’t seem surprising. Half of my YouTube ads these days are for some kind of AI+Kindle-based get rich quick scheme.

willio58• 3 years ago

It seems Amazon cares more about polluting search results in Kindle than polluting the search results in their own e-commerce business. I think low-effort books generated by AI are much less detrimental than sketchy physical products being shipped to your door in 2 days or less.

crooked-v• 3 years ago

It's probably about volume rather than quality. Sketchy copycat product lines are still hard limited by the number of factories and shipping operations in existence, while sketchy AI-generated books can easily keep growing exponentially in number for a while.

japhyr3• 3 years ago

It'll be interesting to see where this goes. Amazon has had ML-generated garbage books for years now, and I assume they haven't taken them down because they make money even when they sell garbage.

Maybe there's so much garbage coming in now that they finally have to do something about it? I feel for people trying to learn about technical topics, who aren't aware enough of this issue to avoid buying ML-generated books with high ratings from fake reviews. The intro programming market is full of these scam books.

harles2• 3 years ago

… I assume they haven't taken them down because they make money even when they sell garbage.

I’d be surprised if this is the case. The money they make is probably a rounding error compared even just to other Kindle sales. Much more likely is that they haven’t seen it as a big enough problem - and I’m willing to bet it’s increased multiple orders of magnitude recently.

throe37848• 3 years ago

I knew guy who made "generated" text books in 2010. He would absorb several articles, and loosely stitch them into chapters with some computer scripts and from memory. In a week he would produce 400 pages on new subject. It was mostly coherent and factual (it kept references). Usually it was the only book on market about given subject (like rare disease).

Current auto generated garbage is very different.

plagiarist• 3 years ago

I wouldn't even consider that generated. That's like where useful content and copyright infringement overlap on a Venn diagram.

franze• 3 years ago

explains the CouchDB Book from OReily from that time.

velcrovan• 3 years ago

For several years now, Amazon KDP will block books whose content is already available on the web. I have printed a few books whose content was either CC-BY or public domain due to its age, and in each case my book was automatically blocked in the early stages. I had to submit an appeal that was reviewed by a person in order to proceed.

miohtama• 3 years ago

Garbage books are used for money laundering.

You buy books using stolen credit cards and such.

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/apr/27/fake-books-sol...

hinkley9• 3 years ago

I wonder if that means the Feds made a phone call to Jeff on his private line and said we need to have a little chat.

We can track money laundering when there are X fake books. We can't when there are 10X fake books.

m463• 3 years ago

I was thinking about buying an air fryer. My search came up with cookbooks specific to that air fryer, and I was intrigued. I found a good 5-star book, but then I found that ALL the 5-star reviews were submitted the same day.

I complained, but Amazon defended the book as legitimate, and since I hadn't purchased it, they would not take any action. (to be honest, I assume frontline customer service reps don't have much experience or power)

So I purchased it, complained, got a refund and then they were able to accept my complaint (after passing the complaint higher in the food chain).

Seriously, how hard was it amazon? I guess they're starting to notice.

Take a look at air fryer cookbooks - there are books specific to most makes and models. But everything is ML copypasta all the way up and down - the title, the recipes and the reviews all seem to be generated garbage.

hinkley9• 3 years ago

Ugh. I hate the, "You're not a customer yet so our CRM system won't let me talk to you."

And what happens when my problem is that your system won't let me place an order?

nanidin2• 3 years ago

If I don't get where I want to be with the front door customer service within a decent amount of time, I have always had good success contacting jeff@amazon.com. Their executive support team gets back quickly via email or phone and they really seem to care.

onlyrealcuzzo• 3 years ago

Seriously, how hard was it amazon? I guess they're starting to notice.

It's not hard. It's a cost center, and they're in the business of making money - not providing the best service.

japhyr3• 3 years ago

I'm the author of Python Crash Course, the best selling introductory Python book for some time now. Years ago, someone put out a book listing two authors: Mark Matthes and Eric Lutz. That's just a simple juxtaposition of my name and Mark Lutz, the author of O'Reilly's Learning Python. The subtitle is obviously taken from my book's subtitle as well. I assume the text is an ML-generated mess, but I haven't bought a copy to verify that.

I used to comment on reviews for books like these explaining what was happening, but Amazon turned off the ability to comment on reviews a long time ago.

I've spoken with other tech authors, and almost all of us get emails from people new to programming who have bought these kinds of books. If you're an experienced programmer, you probably know how to recognize a legitimate technical book. But people who are just starting to learn their first language don't always know what to look for. This is squarely on Amazon; they have blocked most or all of the channels for people to directly call out bad products, and they have allowed fake reviews to flourish and drown out authentic reviews.

tiew9Vii• 3 years ago

It’s the same across all big tech. The size/volume for complaint handling doesn’t scale. It’s either filtered out by some machine learning algorithm or some poor person in a 3rd world country getting paid next to nothing who reviews the complaints so quality isn’t of importance.

There been a recent influx of scammers on Facebook local groups. Air con cleaning, car valeting, everyone’s calling out the scammers in the comments yet when you click report to FB the response is we have reviewed the post and it has not breached our guidelines, would you like to block the user.

mortureb3• 3 years ago

In my opinion, all we learn over time is that we need gatekeepers (publishing houses in this case). The general public is a mess.

VancouverMan2• 3 years ago

Such systems just result in content that is terribly bland, or worse, intentionally limited to push specific political narratives.

I'd rather have a much more diverse and interesting set of content to choose from, even if some of it might not be to my liking, and even if I'd have to put some effort into previewing or filtering before I find something I want to consume.

barrysteve5• 3 years ago

The standards for filtering internet data have dropped badly.

Amazon and Google both abuse their filtering systems on a daily basis to effect social change.

We need new companies built with policies to keep the filtering systems rigid, effective and unchanging. We need filterkeepers.

chongli• 3 years ago

I think what we’re seeing here is a symptom of the broader and more fundamental problem of trust in society. We’ve gone from a very high trust society to a very low trust society in just a few decades. We, as technology people, keep searching (desperately) for technical solutions to social problems. It’s not working.

tetrep• 3 years ago

Maybe there's so much garbage coming in now that they finally have to do something about it?

It seems like this is preventative action rather than reactionary, as they say that there hasn't been an increase in publishing volume, "While we have not seen a spike in our publishing numbers..."

ehsankia• 3 years ago

I thought it was more so filled with low quality mechanical turk garbage books.

runamok• 3 years ago

Behind the Bastards did a 2 part episode on how these "books" are preying on children and busy parents: https://www.iheart.com/podcast/105-behind-the-bastards-29236...

Supply54115• 3 years ago

While not exactly the same, the invention of the printing press caused a lot of controversy with the Catholic Church. With the printing press, people could mass produce and spread information relatively easily. I'm sure a lot of it was considered "low quality" (also heretical)[1]. Seems like we're going through similar growing pains now. Yes I know it's different, but it rhymes.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Index_Librorum_Prohibitorum

dougmwne• 3 years ago

I really dislike the comparison. The printing press democratized knowledge. The LLM destroys it. LLM output is perfect white noise. Enough of it will drown out all signal. And the worst part is that it’s impossible to distinguish it from real human output.

I mean think about it. Amazon had to stop publishing BOOKS because it can no longer separate the signal from the noise. The printing press was the birth of knowledge for the people and the LLM is the death.

vosper• 3 years ago

The printing press democratized knowledge

That's true, but it also allowed protestant "heretics" to propagate an idea that caused a permanent schism with the Catholic church, which led to centuries of wars that killed who-knows-how-many people, up to recent times with Northern Ireland.

(Or something like that, my history's fuzzy, but I think that's generally right?)

peab• 3 years ago

I'm reminded of the Library of Babel

OfSanguineFire2• 3 years ago

The printing press democratized knowledge.

Not for centuries. Due to the expense of the technology and the requirement in some locations for a royal patent to print books, the printing press just opened up knowledge a bit more from the Church and aristocracy to the bourgeoisie, but it did little for the masses until as late as the 1800s.

jedberg3• 3 years ago

If you asked the Church back then, they would tell you that the printing press was the death of truth, because to them only the word of god was truth, and only the church could produce it.

It's all just a matter of perspective.

Yes, right now it looks like white noise, just like back then it looked like white noise which could drown out the religious texts. But we managed to get past it then and I'm sure we'll manage now.

Supply54115• 3 years ago

You could argue that speech is literally noise that drowns out the signals of your environment. If you just babbled, it would be useless, but instead you use it intelligently to communicate ideas. LLM output is a new palette with which humans can compose new signals. We just have to use it intelligently.

Prompt engineering is an example of this. A clever prompt by a domain expert can prime an LLM interaction to yield better information to the recipient in a way that the recipient themselves could not have produced on their own.

rockemsockem• 3 years ago

I really feel like you can't have used any advanced LLMs if you legitimately think the out put "perfect white noise". The results that you can get from an LLM like GPT-4 are incredibly useful and are providing an enormous amount of value to lots of people. It isn't just for generating phony information to spread or having it do your work for you.

I get the most value out of asking for examples of things or asking for basic explanations or intuitions about things. And I get so much value from this that I really think the printing press is the most apt comparison.

pacman2• 3 years ago

I was told publishers dont promote a good book anymore these days. They ask how many instagram followers do you have?

Maybe the self-publishing and BoD will decline in the long term due to ML white noise and publishers are a sign of quality again.

rmbyrro17• 3 years ago

the worst part is that it’s impossible to distinguish it from real human output

Doesn't that make human content look bad in the first place?

If we can't distinguish a Python book written by a human engineer or by ChatGPT, how can we demonstrate objectively that the machine-generated one is so much worse?

courseofaction3• 3 years ago

The LLM does democratize knowledge, but you have to be the user of the LLM, not the target of the user of the LLM.

The LLM is the most powerful knowledge tool ever to exist. It is both a librarian in your pocket. It is an expert in everything, it has read everything, and can answer your specific questions on any conceivable topic.

Yes it has no concept of human value and the current generation hallucinates and/or is often wrong, but the responsibility for the output should be the user's, not the LLM's.

Do not let these tools be owned, crushed and controlled by the same people who are driving us towards WW3 and cooking the planet for cash. This is the most powerful knowledge tool ever. Democratize it.

woah• 3 years ago

It used to be that a scribe would painstakingly copy a manuscript, through the process absorbing the text at a deep level. This same scribe could then apply this knowledge to his own writing, or just understand and curate existing work. The manual labor required to copy at scale employed many scribes, who formed the next generation of thinkers.

With the press, a greasy workman can churn out hundreds of copies an hour, for whichever charlatan or heretic palms him enough coin. The people are flooded with falsehoods by men whose only interest in writing is how many words they can fit on a page, and where to buy the cheapest ink.

The worst part is that it is impossible to distinguish the work of a real thinker from that of a cheap sophist, since they are all printed on the same rough paper, and serve equally well as tomorrow's kindling.

ben_w• 3 years ago

LLM output is perfect white noise.

Not even close to white noise. White noise, in the context of the token space, looks like this:

auceverts exceptionthreat."<ablytypedicensYYY DominicGT portaelight\- titular Sebast Yellowstone.currentThreadrition-zoneocalyptic

which is literally the result of "I downloaded the list of tokens and asked ChatGPT to make a python script to concatenate 20 random ones".

No, the biggest problem with LLMs is that the best of them are simultaneously better than untrained humans and yet also nowhere near as good as trained humans — someone, don't remember who, described them as "mansplaining as a service", which I like, especially as it (sometimes) reminds me to be humble when expressing an opinion outside my domain of expertise, as it knows more than I do about everything I'm not already an expert at.

Specific example: I'm currently trying to use ChatGPT-3.5 to help me understand group theory, because the brilliant.org lessons on that are insufficient; unfortunately, while it knows infinitely more than I do about the subject, it is still so bad it might as well be guessing the multiple choice answers (if I let it, which I don't because that would be missing the point of using a MOOC like brilliant.org in the first place).

mrighele• 3 years ago

Amazon had to stop publishing BOOKS because it can no longer separate the signal from the noise.

That's because they are trying very hard not to check what they are selling, hoping that their own users and a few ML algorithms can separate the signal from the noise for them. It seems to me that the approach is no longer working, and they should start doing it by themselves.

__loam4• 3 years ago

People comparing the AI bullshit spigot to the printing press are clowns.

BarryMilo• 3 years ago

You're implying that what is being produced has actual value, the problem is they're acting in patently bad faith. Weep not for the spammers.

gamepsys3• 3 years ago

The rhyme has a lot to do with how existing power structures handle a sudden increase in the amount of written text generated. In this comparison, they both try to apply the breaks. Banned books didn't work well for the Catholic Church. I think increasing QA for Amazon might actually help their book business. Of course, a book seller has a greater responsibility to society than to make money.

Barrin922• 3 years ago

similar growing pains

For what it's worth, these 'growing pains' took the form of the wars of religion in Europe, which in Germany killed up to 30% of the population, that's in relative terms significantly worse than the casualties of World War I and II. So maybe the Catholic Church had a point

lovemenot2• 3 years ago

> So maybe the Catholic Church had a point

Is that really the take-away? If the Catholic Church had not been so belligerent, those wars would not have been needed. Now that we are past that time, we should surely be thanking those combatants who helped disseminate knowledge in spite of the Church whose interest was in hoarding it.

thaumasiotes• 3 years ago

the invention of the printing press caused a lot of controversy with the Catholic Church
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Index_Librorum_Prohibitorum

The example is from the sixteenth century, but the printing press is from the seventh century.

I don't think the Catholic Church bothered to take any notice at all?

langsoul-com• 3 years ago

The incentive system is completely different. The new AI generated content is for a quick buck, just spamming out content because $1 x 10,000 is a lot.

If it was written with the aid of AI, that's different. At least someone tried to make something good and just used avalible tools to enhance the quality.

corethree2• 3 years ago

How do we even know this entire comment thread isn't polluted with AI?

Maybe it doesn't matter. The quality of the work matters more than the process of actualization.

quickthrower23• 3 years ago

In a practical sense: AI generated stuff is crappy and often subtly wrong and it can be generated faster than human generated content. So it becomes untenable to even search for good information.

corethree2• 3 years ago

Then it's good for fiction. Lots of demand for fiction.

Almondsetat• 3 years ago

Livestreams where artists show their creative process and use the streaming platform to immediately sell the thing they produced, just to prove it had human origins.

This is the future

edgarvaldes• 3 years ago

We have realtime filters, avatars, translators, TTS, etc. Soon, all of this will be "good enough" to mimic the proposed solution.

SketchySeaBeast3• 3 years ago

You're only kicking the can down the road.

gz5• 3 years ago

I think we will see tidal waves of 'not-so-good' AI-generated content. Not that AI can't generate or help generate 'good' content, but it will be faster and cheaper to generate 'not-so-good'.

These waves will mainly be in places in which we are the product. And those waves could make those places close to uninhabitable for folks who don't want to slosh through the waves of noise to find the signal.

And in turn that perhaps enables a stronger business model for high quality content islands (regardless of how the content is generated) - e.g. we will be more willing to pay directly for high quality content with dollars instead of time.

In that scenario, AI could be a_good_thing in helping to spin a flywheel for high quality content.

rwmj• 3 years ago

Assuming not too many people die eating mushrooms while we're waiting: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/sep/01/mushroom-...

hinkley9• 3 years ago

Common foraging rhetoric is that you need two independent sources asserting that a wild food is edible. Ones that cite neither each other or the same chain of citations. And preferably a human who says, "I've been eating these for years and no problems." or scientists who did recent blood work to make sure you aren't destroying your organs by eating [1].

In a world with fake books, it would be quite easy for two books to contain the same misinformation or mis-identification (how many times have I found the wrong plant in a google image search? More times than I care to count). Two fake books putting the wrong mushroom picture next to a mushroom because they were contiguous on some other page and you have dead people.

[1] In the ten years since I started working with indigenous plants, wild ginger (asarum caudatum), has gone from quasi-edible to medicinal to don't eat. More studies show subtler wear and tear on the organs (wikipedia lists it as carcinogenic!) and it is recommended now that you don't eat them at all, even for medicinal purposes. I'm not sure I own a foraging or native species book younger than 5 years, and many are older.

omnicognate4• 3 years ago

Except they shouldn't be islands. Unify/standardise the payment mechanism, make it frictionless and only for content consumed. There's no technical reason you shouldn't see an article on hn or wherever, follow the link and read it and pay for it without having set up and pay for a subscription for the entire publication or jump through hoops. It should be a click at most.

There will always be a place for subscriptions, but people want the hypertext model of just following a link from somewhere and there is absolutely no technical reason for that to be incompatible with paying for content. The idea that ads are the only way to fund the web needs to be challenged, and generative AI might just provide the push for that to finally happen.

Or maybe there will be no such crisis and it'll just make the whole thing even more exploitative and garbage-filled.

munificent4• 3 years ago

There's no technical reason you shouldn't see an article on hn or wherever, follow the link and read it and pay for it without having set up and pay for a subscription for the entire publication or jump through hoops. It should be a click at most.

People have been saying this and building startups on this and having those startups crash and burn for decades.

It's not a technical problem. It's a psychology problem.

Paying after you've read an article doesn't provide the immediate post purchase gratification to make it an inpulse purchase [0]. The upside of paying for an article you've already read is more like a considered purchase [1]. But the amount of cognitive effort worth putting into deciding whether or not to pay for the article is often less than the value you got from the article itself. So it's very hard for people to force themselves to decide to commit to these kinds of microtransactions. See also [2].

It's just a sort of cognitive dead zone where our primate heuristics don't work well for the technically and economically optimal solution. It's sort of like why you can't go into a store and buy a stick of gum.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impulse_purchase

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Considered_purchase

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bounded_rationality

pixl972• 3 years ago

It should be a click at most.

Welcome to new and interesting ways to defraud people over the internet for money school of thought.

At least with Amazon it's a "one and done shop" of who I spent my money with when I bought something.

Imagine tomorrow with your click to pay for random links on the internet you suddenly have 60,000 1 cent charges. They all appear to go different places and to get a refund you need to challenge each one.

cellu• 3 years ago

Why do people read contemporary books is something I can’t really get my head around. There’re so many classics to keep people busy for life - and are 100% guaranteed to be insightful and pleasurable.

bwb• 3 years ago

Contemporary books are just new classics. It is like asking why read :)

rustymonday• 3 years ago

Should people stop telling new stories? A century from now the best books of today will be classics. Books can act as a time capsule of a certain time and place and mode of life. And that has value.

OfSanguineFire2• 3 years ago

There’s a distinct demographic in the contemporary-fiction-reading community, as can be seen in corners of Goodreads or Instagram, that demands new fiction to tell the stories of groups not covered, or supposedly unfairly covered, in that classic literature: LGBT, BIPOC, the working class, etc. In fact, they might even deny that the classics are “insightful and pleasurable” due to these social concerns.

timeagain2• 3 years ago

That’s really weird. People are making all kinds of books and stories. And stories are relevant to their time. The matrix wouldn’t be written in 1900, a tale of two cities wouldn’t be written in 1200, …

It is true though that if you have a culturally diverse set of friends and are open to their experiences and opinions, a lot of “the classics” start to smell bad. Imagine being black and reading Grapes of Wrath. You might think the situation of the main characters as humorous or infantile, considering how relatively fortunate they are.

Baeocystin2• 3 years ago

What's the name of the law where the longer something has already been around, the longer it will likely stay around in the future?

I've found that it definitely applies to books. Starting at a ~20 year horizon is a surprisingly good filter for quality.

savoyard• 3 years ago

What's the name of the law where the longer something has already been around, the longer it will likely stay around in the future?

The Lindy effect.

gamepsys3• 3 years ago

I think the risk of reading a suboptimal book is not greater than the risk of not allowing myself to be exposed to different voices.

carlosjobim• 3 years ago

One of the best books I read last year was the story of the rescue of the football team that was trapped in a flooded cave in 2018 – written by cave diver Rick Stanton, who found the team and led the rescue. How would that account have been written into a book before it happened?

barrysteve5• 3 years ago

Yes, and there's been a drop in quality since then too. The 1800-1940s really saw literature as the high water mark for quality media and it shows.

Finding deeply valuable and high quality books is much rarer in today's crop of authors. The best minds are rarely making the medium of literature their highest good, but are instead chasing dollars and relations with the rich and famous.

harles2• 3 years ago

The title of this story doesn’t seem to match the content. This seems like a proactive move to prevent individual publishers from spamming many many submissions - and even then, they’re willing to make exceptions.

While we have not seen a spike in our publishing numbers, in order to help protect against abuse, we are lowering the volume limits we have in place on new title creations. Very few publishers will be impacted by this change and those who are will be notified and have the option to seek an exception.

dzink• 3 years ago

Strategically, AI generated content is a boon for platforms like Amazon.

1. The more content there is, the more you can't reliably get good stuff without reviews, the more centralized distribution platforms with reviews and rankings are needed. 2. Even if people are making fake books for money laundering, Amazon gets a cut of all sales, laundered or not.

Just like Yahoo's directory once upon a time though, and Movie theaters, the party gets ruined when most people learn they can use AI to generate custom stories at home and/or converse with the characters and interact in far more ways than currently possible. Content is going from king to commodity.

blibble3• 3 years ago

amazon's reviews and rating are completely garbage and have been for some time

fuddle• 3 years ago

About time, YouTube is full of videos about making eBook's with ChatGPT. e.g "Free Course: How I Made $200,000 With ChatGPT eBook Automation at 20 Years Old" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Annsf5QgFF8

hinkley9• 3 years ago

How do we...

I'm not entirely sure how to word this question.

How do we make sure that most of the people we talk to are at least humans if not necessarily the person we expect them to be? And I'm not saying that like a cartoonish bad guy in a movie who hates artificial intelligence and augmented humans.

How do I not get inundated by AI that's good at trolling. How do I keep the social groups I belong to from being trolled?

These questions keep drawing me back to the concept of Web of Trust we tried to build with PGP for privacy reasons. Unless I've solicited it, I really only want to talk to entities that pass a Turing Test. I'd also like it if someone actively breaking the law online were actually affected by the deterrence of law enforcement, instead of being labeled a glitch or a bug in software that can't be arrested, or even detained.

It feels like I want to talk to people I know to be human (friends, famous people - who might actually be interns posing as their boss online), and people they know to be human, and people those people suspect to be human.

I have long term plans to set up a Wiki for a hobby of mine, and I keep getting wrapped around the axle trying to figure out how to keep signup from being oppressive and keep bots from turning me into an SEO farm.

timeagain2• 3 years ago

This is only a problem for someone terminally online. The vast majority of people talk to their friends and coworkers in person.

invalidptr• 3 years ago

This is a problem for anyone who is not actively vigilant about the information they consume. A family member (who I would not describe as "terminally online") came to me today in a panic talking about how some major event had just occurred and how social order was beginning to collapse. I quickly glanced at the headlines on a few major news outlets and realized that they just saw some incendiary content designed to elicit that reaction. I calmed them down and walked them through a process they could use to evaluate information like that in the future, and they were a little embarrassed.

The concern isn't necessarily for you. It's for the large swaths of people who are less equipped to filter through noise like this.

hinkley9• 3 years ago

I don't trust my friends for medical advice. Some of them trust me for plant advice, and they really probably shouldn't. I am very stove-piped.

We have two and a half generations of people right now most of whom think "I did the research" means "I did half as much reading as the average C student does for a term paper, and all of that reading was in Google."

And Alphabet fiddles while Google burns. This is going to end in chaos.

munificent4• 3 years ago

That was the solution that came to mind to me too, but it doesn't work either.

Even if you're never online and only talk to people in person... over time those people will be increasingly informed by LLM-generate pseudo-knowledge. We aren't just training the AIs. They're training us back.

If you want to live in a society where the people you interact with have brains mostly free of AI-generated pollution, then I'm sorry but that world isn't going to be around much longer. We are entering the London fog era of the Information Age.

mostlylurks5• 3 years ago

This is only a problem for someone terminally online.

Is it? Even those whose social life is entirely IRL, they still have to increasingly interact with various businesses, banks, healthcare providers, the government, and often more distant collegues through online services. Do I want these to go through LLM chatbots? No. Can I ensure that I'm speaking to an actual human if the communication is text based? Not really.

vorpalhex• 3 years ago

Meet people in real life. This problem is trivially solved by just using meatspace.

Alternatively for sign ups, tell them to contact you and ask. Chat with them a moment. Ask them about their hobbies and family.

ethanbond• 3 years ago

Using meatspace doesn't solve the problem, using meatspace exclusively solves the problem. And it's not a great one given, you know, how much of the world "happens" online now.

romseb• 3 years ago

There is some irony in Sam Altman bringing us the cause (AI) and purported solution (Worldcoin) for your problem at the same time.

hinkley9• 3 years ago

It's what ad men do. Point out there's a problem, offer you the solution.

kiicia• 3 years ago

we don't, check Boltzmann brain https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boltzmann_brain

freediver• 3 years ago

This is just a tip of the iceberg, compared to what we are heading into with the web. Very concerning.

I would go long the value of genuine human writing, aka the 'small web'.

cogman10• 3 years ago

Here's a pretty good article about the problem with AI generated books. "AI Is Coming For Your Children" [1]

[1] https://shatterzone.substack.com/p/ai-is-coming-for-your-chi...

neilv• 3 years ago

This sounds like a commendable move by Amazon. I especially like the idea of requiring disclosure of use of "AI".

bern4444• 3 years ago

It seem that as a society we are coming to realize that enabling anyone to do anything on their own and at anytime isn't the best of ideas.

Verifiability and authenticity matter and are valuable. Amazon has long had a problem of fake reviews. This issue with kindle books seems an extension of that. Massive centralized platforms like Amazon makes fraud more likely and is bad for the consumer.

The "decentralization" that we need as a society is not in the form of any crypto based technical capability but simply for the size of the massive players to be reduced so competition can reemerge and give consumers more options on where and how to spend their dollars. Other E-book stores may just pop up that develop relationships with publishers and disallow independent publishing if amazon were forced to be broken up.

I hope the FTC can begin finding a strategy to force some of these massive corporations to split making it more likely for there to be more competition.

ggm• 3 years ago

Mushroom picking guides on AI "what could possibly go wrong"

idomajid• 3 years ago

Finally, I hope those garbage books will slightly decrease from there.

pseingatl• 3 years ago

If KDP required an ISBN it would cut down on the garbage books. In the US at least, ISBN's cost money.

fragmede• 3 years ago

they're not that much but you can just get an Australian one for free

unmole• 3 years ago

So, what are the actual limits?

Update on KDP Title Creation Limits

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