A journey into Kindle AI slop hell

https://maxread.substack.com/p/my-kindle-thinks-im-stupid-now

by didgeoridoo • 2 years ago

178 126 2 years ago

maxread.substack.com

I can't help thinking there's a huge opportunity for discussing this side of AI in a more principled way. When something (i.e. AI) is this viscerally annoying, it's tempting to slip into this style of discussion, I get it. But it's......hard to read even when you agree and smile along the way.

"The brief bio read: A little girl with blue eyes and blonde hair leads her friends on a healthy eating mission, culminating in the creation of a neighborhood farmer’s market. Okay. Sort of Triumph of the Will: Bedtime Story for Kids and Adults." (for context, Triumph of the Will is the name of a famous Nazi Germany-produced propaganda documentary)

To flesh it out a bit more with examples, to make it clear it's not cherry-picking:

- "What generative models are being used? What kinds of prompts are generating these texts? I don’t know. I’m not a virgin. As I said, I have a child." (virgin really is a complete non-sequitor here, unless the idea is only virgins use ChatGPT?)

- "But I did want to read about my nice Nazi Youth friend and her farmer’s market journey"

- "More importantly, what is a bedtime story for kids and adults? I am an adult. A bedtime story for an adult is just a real book. I read real books. Or at least, I used to? Basically, did Kindle think I was stupid now?"

lelandfe3• 2 years ago

Have you read many articles from sleep deprived mothers about AI? I appreciated her delirious candor, personally.

refulgentis3• 2 years ago

Apologies, I didn't mean we should silence sleep-deprived mothers. At best, inartful, on my part that it came across that way. I don't think I've ever consciously used pregnancy status/post-partum status, or sleep deprivation, as a prism for analyzing - to my knowledge, I've never used it unconciously either, but I'm faced with the distinct possibility I have, given thats how it came across here.

It just sort of ripped me out of smiling and enjoying the article the reading to hear blonde hair and blue eyes = Nazi propaganda: I have the same (though, little hair left :P ), and little kids in the family who are.

After the virgin reference I scrolled around to check if there was a layer joke where the article was written/edited by AI, thus demonstrating another layer of inappropriate references beyond the "bedtime story for kids and adults"

Then you start thinking "gee...AI art and 'bedtime story for kids and adults' SEO ads...Then my mind starts whirring on "maybe this is good because GenAI makes the monopoly incumbents look horribly bad, mindlessly selling programmatic content to me with programmatic ads on hardware I paid for" - and then I realized that's probably not what the author intended a reader to start thinking, so there's probably another way to poke at this

torginus6• 2 years ago

Honestly these AI books seem to be full of the saccharine sweet uber-PC toxic positivity that AI companies think what a 'safe' and 'aligned' AI should sound like.

This is the main reason why I gave up on using ChatGPT for creative brainstorming.

TheOtherHobbes2• 2 years ago

The problem isn't the AI. The problem is the content distribution systems that corporations have created. AI just happens to make it easier to game+automate some of their systems for instant wins.

Ultimately it's the entitled "I need money fuck you" attitude that enshittifies everything neoliberalism touches, with a toxic blend of desperation (some people really do need the money) and boundless narcissistic opportunism.

Tech has become enmeshed in that, and is a major enabler and amplifier of it. It doesn't have to be, but it's where we are now.

A4ET8a8uTh0• 2 years ago

As always, the problem is people.

thaumasiotes4• 2 years ago

virgin really is a complete non-sequit[u]r here, unless the idea is only virgins use ChatGPT?

The idea is pretty explicit, if you just read the immediately following paragraph:

> I mean I literally could not find the book again. All versions of A Girl’s Quest for Healthy Eating appeared to have vanished, as though it never existed in the first place. (Is Amazon deleting these spammy books as fast as they can be generated? Again, I don’t know. Stop asking me questions for dorks.)

refulgentis3• 2 years ago

I wanted to give a little charity, thank you for making clear that I shouldn't.

dannyobrien• 2 years ago

It actually occurred to me that this style of writing feels mass-generated at this point: it's the default mannerist tone if you were going to knock out a fairly surface assessment of a new online phenomenon.

Not that there's anything wrong with that! Max Read was one of the people who defined that tone in the 2010s[1], so I'm pretty sure that's what people come to his substack to read. But I must admit, my meta-snark was whispering all through this piece: "Maybe it would have saved time to just type 'Here are some titles of things I have been advertised on Kindle, please knock out 800 words on them in the American Internet Journalist House Style".

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20140429233811/http://www.cision...

b450• 2 years ago

This week’s edition is a guest post about spooky Kindle A.I. slop from Leah Beckmann, an L.A.-based screenwriter and journalist and Chief Kindle Bullshit Correspondent for Read Max.

I had to reread this a couple times before understanding that the guest post - not the A.I. slop - was from Leah Beckmann.

gcp123• 2 years ago

Agreed. First couple paragraphs of the post had me like, wtf am I reading right now? Threw the article into Claude and had it succinctly summarize the key ideas the author was trying to convey. Thankful for the clarity that provided and time it saved me.

rustcleaner2• 2 years ago

This week’s edition is a guest post from Leah Beckmann about spooky Kindle A.I. slop, an L.A.-

Analemma_• 2 years ago

I'm getting more and more convinced that tech people are living in a dangerous bubble re: the generative AI boom. I've been talking to people outside this bubble, and the unanimous response to all the "exciting" AI developments of the last ~3 years has been that their experience of generative AI has been purely negative with no upsides whatsoever. All they see is the content slop, the shitty search results, degraded experiences in e.g. customer service, and so on.

And it's starting to alarm me that nobody in tech appears to care about this and is just going "damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead". That kind of arrogant dismissal of popular mood and forcing unwanted change on people is how resentment and revolution happen.

minimaxir• 2 years ago

Unfortunately, the anti-AI discourse is a vocal minority in the grand scheme of things. As long as engagement metrics are up and the marginal benefits outweigh the marginal costs, the AI slop will continue.

Boomers using Meta AI to create nonsensical images on Facebook and WhatsApp aren't complaining about it on social media.

ks2048• 2 years ago

I'm not sure its Boomers who create these images. It's Boomers who reply "Amen" to a pictures of six-fingered Jesus wrapped in an American flag. (Actually I'm not quite sure - maybe it's just mostly bots replying to other bots...?)

rchaud5• 2 years ago

Boomers aren't making them. They are the captive audience in Facebook groups. I predict that around October, the content on those pages will switch to political stuff (at least for American audiences).

AlexandrB3• 2 years ago

There's already plenty of resentment aimed at "big tech". Gen AI will probably accelerate it.

surfingdino2• 2 years ago

Gen AI is the worst thing that happened to AI research. It is a bullshit generation machine that feeds resentment towards all technologies that make up the broad field of AI.

o11c• 2 years ago

I choose to interpret "Gen AI" along the lines of "Gen X", "Millennial", and "Gen Z".

probably_wrong• 2 years ago

Here's my two hot takes on that topic.

First, you are on HN, a website full of entrepreneurs betting their savings on AI companies. "It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it" [1]. Remember that the CEO of OpenAI used to be the president of HN.

Second, remember NFTs? Bitcoin? Perhaps even MongoDB [2]? Tech lives and dies on hype and AI is the newest one. This too shall pass.

[1] https://quoteinvestigator.com/2017/11/30/salary/

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b2F-DItXtZs

wkat42426• 2 years ago

The President of YC's board, allegedly. Which he never was because that position didn't actually exist until after he left. There's been numerous articles about that recently.

Not to undermine your point, the techbroism is strong here but facts are facts

rchaud5• 2 years ago

Bitcoin and crypto come with a get-rich-quick stench that turns off most people. AI hype is much more dangerous because it mixes real use cases, to push enthusiastic viewpoints for LLM slop.

luzojeda2• 2 years ago

Did NFTs and Bitcoin indirectly cause a bullish rally such as the one we are seeing on Nvidia? Genuine question here. Because that's what scares me the most, what will happen with Nvidia.

mr_toad• 2 years ago

First, you are on HN, a website full of entrepreneurs

I’m pretty sure the majority of people commenting here aren’t entrepreneurs.

npoc• 2 years ago

Isn't bitcoin at all-time highs? In what way has it died?

ToucanLoucan2• 2 years ago

I'm getting more and more convinced that tech people are living in a dangerous bubble

You don't need the rest of this sentence. They are. Almost everyone I talk to in the Valley of Silicon speaks of broad trends in... I mean, anything really, in how people use technology, in what people need cars for, in what people eat, in what goods typically cost, genuinely any topic of sufficient breadth that escapes the technology itself, as though they have not been on planet earth since roughly 2009. It is astonishing how well insulated from common concerns tech workers are, which is probably how we got shit like Juicero, an incredibly overbuilt, over-spec, ludicrously designed wifi-connected machine to squeeze a fucking bag. And it explains a bunch of their other incredibly stupid ideas, like e-scooters.

This is why, I am sorry, but I simply do not put a lot of stock (literally, and metaphorically) into the opinions of SV's elites. That's like, a bubble in a damn bubble. That's a bubbled subset of people who haven't had a normal experience of being human for who knows how long, inside a bubble of people who largely do not share the same reality as me.

Bringing it back to what I was replying to: you are absolutely right about the common folk's experience with AI. It's an annoying thing being shoved into tons of products they use, that seemingly no one asked for, that doesn't work. And it's a massive, 400 foot tall neon sign, telling them that big tech doesn't give a fuck about them, what they want, or anything else besides sign up for the subscription dumbass.

holtkam2• 2 years ago

Couldn’t one make the argument that EVERYONE is in a bubble of sorts?

I (one of the SV tech workers you mention) was recently in rural Georgia for a cousin’s wedding, where I was shocked to learn that many people in the area considered the previous presidential election to have been stolen. I wanted to scream “you need to get out of your bubble!”

NathanKP• 2 years ago

I'm mostly with you but "other incredibly stupid ideas, like e-scooters" just sounds like a personal vendetta to me. I don't see anything SV specific about e-scooters, not is it a dangerous bubble or stupid to use compact electric powered modes of transport in a dense area.

password54321• 2 years ago

Perplexity is one of the only tools that I think takes great advantage of LLMs strengths (pattern matching, interpolation) while also making up for its weaknesses (hallucinations, lack of ability for novel contribution/thought) by using it for summarisation with search.

wkat42426• 2 years ago

It's not even that special imo. Openwebui does the same locally when you enable search engine integration. It's not really rocket science

BeFlatXIII2• 2 years ago

And it's starting to alarm me that nobody in tech appears to care about this and is just going "damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead". That kind of arrogant dismissal of popular mood and forcing unwanted change on people is how resentment and revolution happen.

Tell that to the schoolchildren who excitedly use AI to do all the busywork for them.

AlexandrB3• 2 years ago

Isn't this going to be crippling once they're in a situation where the actually need some of the skills they skipped learning?

Yodel0914• 2 years ago

Except that schools are making kids do more and more on paper, in class, in order to combat AI usage.

wkat42426• 2 years ago

I think AI has a place in this world. As does virtual reality, the previous hype. The problem with these hypes is, the overstressed business types that think it is the key to the future for everything. Almost nothing is the next internet. And in a year or so when they don't see their 2000% payoff, they will consider it a flop, which will also harm the genuine efforts that were made and usecases where the tech does add value. It's the overexpectations that hurt it.

The problem starts happening when you shoehorn it into a bunch of shit for the sake of it, where it adds no value and often even degrades it. Like what everyone is now doing with AI. Especially Microsoft.

It's great for some stuff, like making summaries. It's not GenAI and if we try to use it as such (as Nadella is doing) the bubble will burst sooner rather than later and that's bad for the tech community as a whole. I find the journey super interesting however from a personal tech interest point of view and I love playing with it locally. But I'm not blind to its glaring limitations and I don't care whether it makes money or not, I'm just into it for the tech. It's the money boys that keep blowing good stuff up.

rchaud5• 2 years ago

VR doesn't have anywhere near the same level of fossil fuel emissions as AI though.

lanstin2• 2 years ago

It's almost like capital has become so big that the investment money sloshing around looking for high returns at the expense of anything else, does not care if excessive capital ruins the early dot.com companies, real estate, crypto, generative AI or anything else.

We need an investor class that just wants to get their 50 pounds a year to maintain the country estate, not one that wants to vacuum up 80% of the economy in short term speculative bubbles.

rchaud5• 2 years ago

The AI power brokers are all getting rich by hyping up the tech to the high heavens, while pooh-pooing AI ethics and safety concerns. Governments are following in lock step so as not to appear "anti-innovation".

I don't see revolution on the cards. Maybe a giant market correction once the hype wears off and pension funds figure out that throwing more H100 GPUs into the mix isn't going to make AGI happen any faster, and that there there's no real road to profitability for startups making shitty genAI chatbots, images and music.

medhir• 2 years ago

Think it’s worth calling out that many people in tech have significant reservations about the reckless push of generative AI into just about every product — the issue is the executive class that insists on chasing hype and potential short-term stock growth over everything else.

joe_the_user• 2 years ago

I actually know two ordinary people who pay to use ChatGPT. One uses it to write sex education policy statement and the other uses it for D&D narrative descriptions.

But I understand lots of people are very annoyed by it and with things like this, reasonably so. The problem that revolution only comes from desperation, not annoyance. If health care, rents, the experience of flying and traffic, global warming and so-forth hasn't produced a revolution, generative AI won't.

And this situation is pretty much what has brought-about the present "death by a thousand paper-cuts" world.

rsynnott3• 2 years ago

_Sex education policy statements_? I mean, how many can one possibly need to write? What does the LLM bring to it?

luzojeda2• 2 years ago

Same. Anecdata I know yadda yadda. But I don't know one single person that is hyped about _consuming_ art or any content generated by AI. Only people producing content with generative AI and expecting a financial benefit are the excited ones. And I might guess they are not that keen into consuming AI generated content as well. It's all about who is the sucker that pays for all the slop.

cageface• 2 years ago

I'd go further and that lately, for the average person, tech is causing at least as many problems as it solves. The public internet is a chaotic mess of scams and ripoffs. Social media is a cesspool that many people still feel obligated to participate in. Dating apps are an exercise in masochism, etc etc.

What actual problems are we solving for these people?

unraveller2• 2 years ago

Highway to the danger boom, baby. You see much more arrogant posts referring to their superior human skills over AI.

The hubris of forcing all social interactions to take place in big tech walled gardens that want to replace you with A.I. is titillating.

timetraveller26• 2 years ago

AI was a mistake

hosh6• 2 years ago

I don't know if it is a mistake, but it's certainly the genie we let out of the bottle. If anything, we're seeing the acceleration of what happens when we have a world view that is founded upon exploitation, be that the land or the people.

unraveller2• 2 years ago

It makes fantasy novels more fantastic and you're complaining? Just ask to see the author's daily github contribution stats next time.

rldjbpin2• 2 years ago

before you go back, which AI stocks will help us ride the wave in the near future?

lelandfe3• 2 years ago

Is Amazon cutting out the author middle man and using A.I. and user data to generate books on its own?

Amazon has done just this elsewhere: https://techcrunch.com/2022/11/29/amazons-alexa-ai-animated-...

By the by, I’ve enjoyed my Kindle a whole lot more since turning on its airplane mode. I connect to WiFi to sync new books to it, but don’t give my Amazon overlords other opportunities to present AI slop from the vaults.

lawlessone• 2 years ago

Create with Alexa,” a new AI tool for kids that generates animated stories

How soon until we find out it's child labour?.. on both ends.

wkat42426• 2 years ago

Well most AIs are only a year or so old!

ulysses1244• 2 years ago

Fantastic quote from the article:

“Is Amazon cutting out the author middle man and using A.I. and user data to generate books on its own? What generative models are being used? What kinds of prompts are generating these texts?

I don’t know. I’m not a virgin. As I said, I have a child.”

baxtr• 2 years ago

I’m pretty relaxed about this. There is absolutely no consumer product whatsoever that amazon has nailed.

Maybe Kindle, but that’s just a store window for them. Alexa is garbage, the fire phone a disaster, and so on.

kalupa• 2 years ago

dramatically improved battery life is also a side-effect of disabled wifi, too

abdullahkhalids• 2 years ago

I have never connected my Kindle to WiFi. Prevents ads and updates. USB is easy enough to transfer files.

vunderba2• 2 years ago

Same. Calibre works pretty seamlessly as well with transferring and converting books to and from mobi/epub with targeted layouts depending on whether you're on a full sized Kindle vs Paperwhite etc.

themadturk2• 2 years ago

I've moved away from Kindle to Kobo (far less locked down), but when I had Kindles I always paid the $20 to get rid of ads. Totally worth it.

nlunbeck• 2 years ago

I remember there being some buzz a few months back around something similar happening with Spotify. Lots of random tracks that looked/sounded suspiciously AI-generated strewn into Spotify-generated playlists.

duskwuff• 2 years ago

That was identified as fraud, and Spotify took action against it.

https://www.billboard.com/pro/spotify-removed-thousands-song...

wiml• 2 years ago

I've been getting these too — they've largely supplanted the plausibly-human-written glurge I used to get (mil-SF and disturbingly specific romance subgenres). I don't think I've given Amazon any reason to believe I'd want them, though. My guess is that these are just the highest-expected-profit books that Kindle has, and it's what you get if Kindle doesn't have a more specific signal for you.

jabroni_salad• 2 years ago

I guess my dozens of followed authors and infinitely expanding TBR list on goodreads that I regularly buy books and 15+ years of purchase history and ratings just can't be used as a signal, because my reccs are full of this nonsense too.

Lately I've noticed that in self pub pulp land authors are trading shoutouts with each other without curation or discretion, but even those are self selecting to a higher degree of 'gives a shit' than what the algo reccs have been offering. I think it has been over a year since I found something off of the 'if you liked X' carousel and that used to be extremely reliable for me.

And like I said, I'm reading pulp. I'm the kind of person who will see 'this is my first ever written work please be nice' as a synopsis and will read the first ten chapters just to see. There's plenty of decent trash around if I look for it but the robots only want me to have the soup at the bottom.

pocketarc• 2 years ago

I guess my dozens of followed authors and infinitely expanding TBR list on goodreads that I regularly buy books and 15+ years of purchase history and ratings just can't be used as a signal, because my reccs are full of this nonsense too.

This is what I don't understand. There is SO much -good- data about us, but recommendations everywhere, by and large, are terrible. You'd think that with all the tracking, with all the pushback on privacy protections and whatnot, that we'd be getting -something- out of it. But I go to Amazon and it tells me "you just bought a printer? here's 10 more printers you might be interested in".

torginus6• 2 years ago

Honestly, I have no problem with airport novel quality books, and the thing is, these tend to be competently written - clearly there's such a huge oversupply of writing talent that even throwaway books are kind of decent. I suspect even people who only manage to sell hundreds of copies have quite a bit of talent and years of practice.

The market doesn't need the flood of this AI garbage as it will make these books utterly impossible to discover and drown the low end in excrement, driving away 'guilty pleasure' readers such as me and you.

crooked-v2• 2 years ago

I don't think I've given Amazon any reason to believe I'd want them, though.

Amazon recommendations have always been borderline useless at best, even before they became a drop-shipping crap hub.

hosh6• 2 years ago

Royal Road is one of the platforms for indie authors to publish serialized web novels. Many people use that to jump into a full time writing career -- successful new serials get on a ladder, paetrons get set up, and when enough chapters are written, they get edited and published to Kindle. The publication to Kindle Unlimited ends up with the books getting stubbed. In return though, you have a kind of presale so you know people like reading the work, and a sufficient fan base to appeal for support for a successful launch on KU.

One of the things I've been seeing the authors reporting to their subscribers are people stealing that work by scraping the chapters, running it through LLM, and then publishing it on KU. Authors have been adding watermarks into the text, though I don't know how successful that is.

(On the other hand, many authors use generative image AI to create covers, which has angered artists whose work has been sucked up by the generative AI machine).

torginus6• 2 years ago

I really want to like Royalroad, as it's full of well-written stuff, made by clearly passionate and talented authors, but I can't help but notice that everything seems to some sort of Isekai/LitRPG/Progression novel where the protagonist fights anime-style battles and gets progressively more powerful, with sometimes numerical stats increasing, as presented by stat blocks in the story.

This genre was completely unknown to me before I discovered RR, and I'm suprised how ubiquitous it is.

Is this what young people want nowadays? The genre seems to have crossed over from Asian culture, with many novels being translations of Chinese/Korean ones.

TheOtherHobbes2• 2 years ago

That's genre fiction - a formula, with some reader-insert gratification. A site like RR is specifically aimed at readers who want those kinds of stories.

Other fiction markets are the same. Mysteries, fantasy, thrillers, romance, all have their tropes and sub-tropes. Most don't have an RR equivalent because they're marketed through other communities, like TikTok for romance.

Original fiction that doesn't follow strict genre rules and expectations is a very hard sell today - but I'm not sure that's ever been untrue.

vunderba2• 2 years ago

Isekai (e.g. wish fulfillment + power fantasy) is absurdly popular in the anime/manga industry so I guess I'm rather unsurprised that its leaking over to more traditional novels as well.

LordDragonfang• 2 years ago

As a (perhaps not-so-young) consumer of several RR stories in those exact genres, yes. It's a fun genre that really tickles the same part of my brain that building munchkins in D&D does. Progression fantasy is just very satisfying to read.

(In case anyone is looking for recommendations, Mother of Learning is the best all-around, Delve is probably my favorite, and Worth the Candle is incredible if you can stomach how much of a crapsack world the protagonist is dragged through)

jtolmar• 2 years ago

LitRPG fans aren't all young people, it's also weirdly popular with middle-aged women with fond memories of playing World Of Warcraft.

I don't think the phenomenon is young people these days, so much as every online fiction site slowly narrowing in on one subgenre over everything else, and Royal Road's being trashy power fantasies.

I'm on a discord where authors discuss these things, and they talk a lot about the RR community and the hoops they need to jump through to match that specific group's specific tastes, because it's one of the niches where the money is right now.

Aerroon4• 2 years ago

Is this what young people want nowadays?

Yes, but it's not just young people.

The genre seems to have crossed over from Asian culture, with many novels being translations of Chinese/Korean ones.

You can basically trace a lot of the web novel versions back to anime/manga/light novels. (Maybe the reason is that in Asia these are also web novel, eg Shousetsuka ni Narou.)

However, this kind of a genre is and was popular in the west independently of that. Edgar Rice Burroughs wrote A Princess of Mars in 1912. It hits onto most of the same ideas these more modern stories do.

idlemach• 2 years ago

One factor you may be missing in the prevalence of Isekai/LitRPG/Progression Fantasy novels on RoyalRoad is that the original purpose of the site was to translate Legendary Moonlight Sculptor, a novel about a Virtual Reality MMORPG called Royal Road which was emblematic of the genre. From there, people started publishing fan fiction of the story, then their own similar novels, and more. The audience for the genre never left and is still the largest on the site, even if now there are other genres as well.

hosh6• 2 years ago

Progressive fantasy is what RR is known for, and many series like that launch from there. There are others that are progressive fantasy adjacent. Progressive fantasy covers litrpg (and its many variants including 4x rpgs), so-called “cultivation” fantasy (wuxia, xianxia, etc). It shouldn’t be surprising since fighting animes have been around for a long time, and now isekai animes are now the rage, and those all overlap into progressive fantasy. There is a subreddit for this.

Other platforms will have other types of serials. I just don’t know them off the top of my head. My wife reads a romance serial somewhere else.

m463• 2 years ago

I read a few of these on kindle, some are ok, but some are just not very good at all.

and they seem to seamlessly run into another genre called haremlit where the main character easily collects partners left and right.

Now I tend to shy away from kindle unlimited and books with warnings about "unconventional relationships" (in my experience both mostly mean poor writing quality)

If anyone has their own tips for picking not-a-waste-of-time books, I'd like to know.

WereAllMadHere• 2 years ago

I don't think there's a comparison between the AI book scraping and the generated covers.

One is using a tool to create a new artwork, one is using a tool for plagiarism.

pizzalife• 2 years ago

One is using a tool to create a new artwork, one is using a tool for plagiarism.

Is it "new artwork", though? That's the big question. I would say both are tools for plagiarism.

hosh6• 2 years ago

That is not how the artists I have talked to see it. Many are very angry about it. When I asked one about the generated cover, she came right back with, why didn’t the author reach out to work with them?

And now, DeviantArt is collapsing, as artists flee, and content is being dominated by automated generative AI spamming out content.

Now, I understand the frustration of someone able to see something in their head and is unable to put it into drawing. Storywriting is already an all-consuming discipline … but so is anything creative.

NBJack• 2 years ago

I've tried to use generative text LLMs myself for story ideas, filling out backstory in characters, etc. No matter how good the model is, no matter how much context you supply or repeat, it will inevitably spiral down into some degree repetition and forgotten story beats.

But hey, at least it's all technically grammatically correct. Most of the time.

What disturbs me more is the thought of lost context in things like code, medical notes, and actually critical workflows.

surfingdino2• 2 years ago

But hey, at least it's all technically grammatically correct. Most of the time.

Unless you use it to translate or feed it languages other than English. It's mostly crap.

Aerroon4• 2 years ago

Yeah, I've tried the same thing. Even with very heavy handholding (I think typing it out myself might've been faster) the results were useless beyond a short story.

I thought it was a skill issue though, because I hear others talk about it so much.

Spivak• 2 years ago

It's been surprisingly great for filling out parts of my D&D campaign. I wanted to have a cooking show style contest and needed a bunch of dishes to be the competition. Here's one of the results I got:

Underdark Goulash:

Ingredients: Drow's darkstone potatoes (akin to sweet potatoes but darker, and with a slightly bitter tang), glimmerstool mushrooms (glow in the dark and have a smoky flavor), sahuagin seaweed (a deep-sea plant with a salty taste), and roper spices (ground up, they have a robust, gamy flavor).

Description: A hearty dish that pays homage to the unrelenting grit of an Underdark adventure. The darkstone potatoes and glimmerstool mushrooms provide a flavorsome base. The sahuagin seaweed's saltiness is reminiscent of the sea, while the roper spices add an unexpectedly pleasant gamey note. Much like an adventurer finding comfort in the dark caves, sometimes the most uncommon combinations lead to a profound satisfaction.

And they're all this good, like what the hell? How is this thing so creative? And it got exactly the snobby pander to the judges tone I asked for.

The AIs don't have any clue how to make a compelling narrative or interesting characters but for some reason it understands nouns. It comes up with really cool items, settings, shops, interior details that show-don't-tell details I'm looking for. And I can use it to bridge culture gaps when I want some diversity and want to faithfully represent a culture I don't really know — what clothing they would wear, how they would say things, what they would eat for an everyday lunch, different cultural touchstones or family dynamics.

nop_slide• 2 years ago

Hit up support and ask them to remove the lock screen ads, even if you didn't buy the "ad free" kindle support usually does it.

It worked for me.

mhx1138• 2 years ago

I wish that worked on echo show. That thing is infuriating. Don’t get it unless you’re cool with ads in your home.

themadturk2• 2 years ago

I turn mine on at Christmas to act as a speaker for my phone, so we can listen to my choice of seasonal music during present-opening.

smusamashah• 2 years ago

A company grows big and then turns into shit and this cycle keeps repeating I guess. I love playing games. Ubisoft, EA (in particular) etc are now shit. How long do we have to enjoy Steam (and other Valve products) until it suffers the same fate? Or will it remain good until some influential boss leaves?

I think while praising a business and getting excited we should have their average age in back of our minds.

Aerroon4• 2 years ago

Probably until Steam becomes publicly traded.

Maken2• 2 years ago

Steam can't stop recommending me this Banana game despite it obviously being nothing more than a printer of artificially limited inventory items. It's a scam and it has been running for days.

thaumasiotes4• 2 years ago

What else could this sick and twisted mind have cooked up? I wanted more. I clicked on Bette’s author page; this was the only title listed. Through the penumbral fog of half-sleep, squinting one-eyed at my phone, I googled, “a girls.quest for healthy watinf bette santinir.” Even the politely auto-corrected version yielded no meaningful results
And then things got spooky. When I opened my Kindle again, there, illuminated by the inoffensive whitish glow of my device, was an ad for A Girl’s Quest for Healthy Eating. Only, it was vaguely distorted. Like a spot-the-difference Highlights game, here was the same book with minor discrepancies. This cover featured several little girls, presumably all on healthy eating quests of their own. The page count was slightly different. And most distressing of all, the author's name: Bette Santinir. In other words, Santini plus R. Where had I seen this name before? Oh right: from one minute ago when I misspelled Santini, Santinir.
As the very editor of this Substack texted me, “If you didn’t have pics of this, I would think you were schizophrenic.”

I really wish the supposed pictures had been included in the piece.

crooked-v2• 2 years ago

The linked Reddit posts include other people seeing the same pattern, which seems to be to that the same AI-generated works are listed under many different slightly-differently-spelled author names, presumably to show up more in search ranks.

thaumasiotes4• 2 years ago

Forget whether it's true. We have here an essay that says, quite explicitly, "if I didn't have pictures of this, I would be called insane". It doesn't include any of the pictures. How does that happen? What's the right conclusion to draw from that?

Sloppy• 2 years ago

Today I drifted in AI generated dread feeling that half of what I read (including this article) was AI generated -- maybe more since it included AI generated music. Was it due to my recent return from some number of days in the Oregon outback off the grid with no interweb pipes? I knew it was too short a time. I feel a great panicky need to run from an impending Matrix moment.

rednafi• 2 years ago

The intro section before the main article was worse than slop.

Loved Leah’s writing otherwise.

beefnugs• 2 years ago

So after experiencing this nightmare she will still give her son a reading tablet someday?

hoseja• 2 years ago

What kinds of prompts are generating these texts?
I don’t know. I’m not a virgin. As I said, I have a child.
But I did want to read about my nice Nazi Youth friend and her farmer’s market journey

Are they capable of writing without snark?

Havoc2• 2 years ago

I guess snark is their brand

Havoc2• 2 years ago

AI is still pretty terrible at maintaining coherence over long texts.

rldjbpin2• 2 years ago

amazon has another battle on ai-generated listings on their marketplace as it is (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38969417).

while highly unethical and a nuisance to navigate as a user, i respect the hustle compared to drop shipping bs people speak about on social media.

the bottom line is that economically these are the parties most likely to find a way to filter out ai-generated content going forward. or they will die trying.

A journey into Kindle AI slop hell

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