Pre-2022 Books

https://notes.lorenzogravina.com/musings/pre-2022-books

by trms • 1 month ago

211 130 1 month ago

notes.lorenzogravina.com

api3• 1 month ago

I honestly find this a little deranged. I’ve read some AI generated prose before and it’s… boring. It tends to be the mathematical average of all stories, with plots that are heavy on cliche and tropes played straight. If I read a book like that it’s probably just going to be a bad book that I don’t finish. Humans write lots of boring bad books too.

Eventually artists will figure out how to use AI to make real art that is actually good, just like photographers did with photography, and that will be its own new thing. I don’t see much of that yet but with photography it took a while.

actionfromafar2• 1 month ago

Sure, but AI is about more than the arts. It's about high fructose corn syrup slop everywhere.

api3• 1 month ago

That predates AI and has more to do with the incentives baked into media, especially social media that’s all about “time on app” and “time on site” and therefore infinite scroll brain rot.

phendrenad2• 1 month ago

Maybe we'll return to curation and talent scouts. Like the pre-internet days of music: Everyone had a demo tape, but nobody wanted to listen to hundres of tapes of slop.

bonoboTP4• 1 month ago

Controversial, but I think photography is still nowhere close in artistic value to paintings. Yes, I've seen the award winning ones etc. Not impressed. It's fine I guess, but not more. Same with laptop music vs instrument music even before AI.

adamddev12• 1 month ago

We can't say "just like to photographers did with photography" or "just like programmers did with higher-level languages." These developments are not analogous to LLMs. The jump into probabilistic text-guessing machines a fundamentally different thing.

WalterBright2• 1 month ago

with plots that are heavy on cliche and tropes played straight

A few years ago, I finally decided to read Romeo & Juliet. I was disappointed to discover that it was full of cliches and tropes.

RomanPushkin• 1 month ago

It's one of the reasons I don't want to update my free book about Ruby: https://leanpub.com/rubyisforfun - written by a human, and will stay the same forever I think. The moment you touch it to update - immediately changes the date from 2022-05-26 to 2026 and all the value is gone

eager_learner• 1 month ago

Thank you for your book. It was exactly what has been missing in Ruby landscape and what I wanted. BTW<, also, nice last name. :)

AlexeyBrin2• 1 month ago

Thanks for the book. If you want to update it, why don't you slap a 2nd edition on the cover and some No AI sigil (I saw this strategy on the books of Nils M Holm from Lulu).

low_tech_love4• 1 month ago

It does not matter, to be honest. Slowly people are realizing that nobody checks anything anymore, and when they check, nobody cares about positives or negatives, be them true or false. Actually, if you write something by hand today, all you’re doing is slowing yourself down, because truthfully nobody else will do that. Do you really think that you will have 100 times the benefit for doing 100 times more work than the other medíocre competition? No, because the audience does not care, and will care less and less as time goes on.

zeroonetwothree• 1 month ago

I don’t find this at all. Not that many fiction books use a lot of AI prose it seems. Maybe nonfiction is worse?

seliopou• 1 month ago

What facts are you hanging that hat on?

bbg2401• 1 month ago

I'm certainly observing AI smells from a high proportion of the books I read from O'Reilly and Packt since 2023. Authors don't attempt to hide it and some publish the work as if we didn't have a back catalog to distinguish the genuine article from a lazy prompt-driven manuscript.

I'm not seeing the same from the translated fiction works I've picked up in the same time period, thankfully.

Avicebron• 1 month ago

Props to the author for not mentioning low-background steel.

rzzzt2• 1 month ago

Sounds like a pink elephant exercise. Low-background steel has now creeped back into our collective consciousness.

smallmancontrov• 1 month ago

I don't know, there's probably one person on Earth who hasn't heard of low background steel and it's a fun story, I wouldn't want them to miss out.

rzzzt2• 1 month ago

On its own it's a good fun fact. But just look for it in this comments section, when it becomes a reflex to mention it in relation to slop/generated content it slowly loses its color. (That's what she said)

xigoi• 1 month ago

I seem to be that one person. I looked it up afer reading your comment.

zerobees• 1 month ago

I've been consciously doing that for reference books for the past three years because Amazon is absolutely littered with AI-generated non-fiction. I have my own ideological reasons too, but the main problem is that most of that AI-generated reference stuff is just of incredibly poor quality. It's meant to saturate the platform as cheaply as possible, so no one actually does any fact-checking, editing, layout, and so on. They're not even using frontier models for that.

For example, there are multiple evidently AI-generated titles that come up on the front page if you search for "Rust programming", "cybersecurity book", etc. I guess I can't rule out that "Winston Knowles" is a real person, but I'm not gonna bet money on that: https://www.amazon.com/Cybersecurity-Career-Manual-Interview...

WalterBright2• 1 month ago

I'm keeping my pre-2023 history books and encyclopedias.

sufficientsoup• 1 month ago

Similarly, when all of this started happening I went and bought some history books for anything that seemed like it would be useful later.

low_tech_love4• 1 month ago

It’s funny when people dismiss this as some kind of Luddite argument, when the reality is so simple: you have a producer-consumer system where the producer has been accelerated 1000x but the consumer remained the same. How can that work?

torben-friis2• 1 month ago

I haven't seen any minimal sign that any of the fiction books I read lately was LLM helped. Writers seem like a particularly anti AI crowd too.

Has anyone? Now I'm curious if it's just my particular bubble.

bonoboTP4• 1 month ago

What makes you think you'd recognize it? Do you work a lot with LLMs for fiction writing?

torben-friis2• 1 month ago

More than you can imagine. OKRs, brag documents, quarter reviews....

Kidding aside, I would be surprised if something larger than using it as a thesaurus/corrector is slipping by. Literature is genuinely hard.

drchaim• 1 month ago

This will happen with social accounts, news articles..I set the date pre 2023, but we all have some date in mind. I don’t like it, but it’s what it is

andy99• 1 month ago

I’m pretty conservative with books and usually only read things based on recommendations anyway. I would rarely read a book published in the last few years just because news of it hasn’t travelled to me yet. I think worrying about AI generated books would really only matter if you’re at the bleeding edge of reading and looking for brand new stuff.

viccis• 1 month ago

ares623• 1 month ago

Same with open source projects (or other software projects in general).

Pre-2022, when someone posts a Show HN, even if it's not something you would normally be interested in, there's a baseline understanding that _someone_ cared enough to spend time and effort to build it. So in a hypothetical future scenario if you do find yourself looking for that particular tool, there was value in you seeing that Show HN so you can revisit it.

Now, I just ignore all Show HN posts.

adamddev12• 1 month ago

And there might be no way to prove you really wrote something Post-2022. I wrote a long article, all by hand. I never used any LLMs, even for searching. I checked it with a couple of AI detection tools and they confidently said that 60% of the article was written by AI.

algoth1• 1 month ago

The thing is, llm token frequency was derived from human writings like yours, and rlhf for good writing practices, like the emdash. So getting ’detected’ on good writing it’s unfortunately to be expected. My broken ESL english is much safer for now

John7878781• 1 month ago

Interestingly, you're actually more likely to be flagged as AI if English is your second language.

timacles• 1 month ago

Our only hope is to start communicating like DevOps Borat

mohamedkoubaa2• 1 month ago

I track every change in the fiction I write in git. Its not hard proof but it at least shows how the prose evolved over time and is something like a proof of work.

arkaic• 1 month ago

It's extremely easy to disprove that lack of hard proof too. One could've individually chatgpt'd every addition before commit for proofreading. The infection of AI just gets into every nook and cranny of the process because it's so easy to reach for it

altmanaltman• 1 month ago

Most "AI detection" tools are BS, report AI writing for all writing. The current issue with AI writing is that it has a very generic, easy-to-spot style if you spend even a bit of time working with it. If everyone in the world spoke in the same manner, used the same punctuation, spoke in exactly the same catchphrases, the world would lose its richness, and that is the problem with AI writing and communications in general - it has 0 personality, and humans by nature engage with strong and unique personalities. Over time, people will realize the futility of using AI in creative writing, or AI will get really, really good at not just sounding human but being human.

Yet, from what I can see, AI writing is mostly used by people who don't know a thing about writing, and because they have bad taste, they do not see what's wrong with AI writing and put it out there.

At the end, you write for a purpose: for marketing copy, etc., you would require a different type of writing talent than something like writing a fiction book. But AI doesn't understand this nuance; it has only a default type of communication, which is highly optimized for being a chatbot. It is possible to write a very good text using AI if you have taste and you know what you're doing, but most people don't.

Similarly, a lot of vibe-coded apps are garbage, but because the people creating them lack software domain knowledge and don't even know what they don't know, they think it's good and put it out.

We have a massive problem here that's not just limited to writing - the promise of AI for the mainstream market is that you can replace domain-specific knowledge and have world-class execution in any vertical with just AI, but that's very overhyped imo and doesn't stop the people who don't have domain experience to try out stuff with AI and not realize what they made is a steaming pile of shit in reality.

raincole2• 1 month ago

Every time I attempted to convince people to not use Pangram on HN I got downvoted.

onlyrealcuzzo• 1 month ago

Every time I post something online (that I wrote myself), the first response I get is the smug:

If you can't take the time to write it, why should I take the time to read it?

I'm thinking about just leaving the online community entirely.

quest88• 1 month ago

How would you prove you wrote something prior to 2022?

cjlm• 1 month ago

Yeah, I’m attempting to “solve” this with WriteTrack.dev as I think it’s the only reasonable approach we have going forwards.

pibaker• 1 month ago

I never used any LLMs, even for searching

I highly doubt there is any mainstream search engine that doesn't use any LLM like technology in the backend to provide search results.

I checked it with a couple of AI detection tools and they confidently said that 60% of the article was written by AI.

These tools are as reliable as the polygraph. I have seen passages from books published before 1900 getting a 90% likelihood of being AI generated from these tools. At the end of the day there are only so many ways to write a grammatically correct sentence and if an AI can write it, chances are some human somewhere already did.

bonoboTP4• 1 month ago

In good hands, it can be a great tool, but you usually don't notice that. The issue is that AI allows for a superficial appearance of quality and it takes time to discover that the content is void of deeper insight.

casey2• 1 month ago

C-c C-v existed well before 2022. Most of history until the Renaissances consisted of the bulk of scholars copying out of "the book" whatever the book happened to be (Euclid, The Bible, Aristotle’s Logica Vetus, Cicero's Orations and De Officiis, 四書五經, 史記, 文選)

The liberal concept that the everyman should have their own original thoughts that others should consider is a historically a very new concept. And we start getting things that look a lot like C-c C-v quickly after the Renaissance.

See humans have the tendency to romanticize the past, and if this is allowed to compound they elevate really quite dismal people to the realm of literal godhood in some cases. If you asked someone a thousand years ago what they though life was like thousands of years in the past and what it will be like thousands of years in the future most would have said the past was better in all regards including health, strength, morals even technology; while the future would be viewed as the continual circling of the drain. Put yourself in their shoes, you go look at a Roman Colosseum, you can't build that, nobody you know can build that. If you asked Vitruvius during the construction of the Aqueducts he would tell you that he's maintain the knowledge of his ancestors, whom could have build such structures if they needed them or had the manpower, and the technical problems are just a trifle. If you pushed him, he might invoke Providentia and that if the gods stopped blessing you we'd fall even faster.

This kind of discovered then lost fits better narrative within the human psyche better than the unintuative truth is a constructed social conversation, that can be semi-formal and rigorous (the scientific method) or lax (common sense) depending on the setting.

AlotOfReading• 1 month ago

    See humans have the tendency to romanticize the past, and if this is allowed to compound they elevate really quite dismal people to the realm of literal godhood in some cases. If you asked someone a thousand years ago what they though life was like thousands of years in the past and what it will be like thousands of years in the future most would have said the past was better in all regards including health, strength, morals even technology; while the future would be viewed as the continual circling of the drain.

Historical futurism is actually a pretty interesting subject rather than the tediously gritty monoculture you're imagining here. Early roman writers often imagined the empire would continue without end, for example. There was no circling of the drain. Many renaissance thinkers thought that the "dark ages" of medieval Europe were a temporary measure, hence the name "renaissance" or revival. Others were much much more cynical, and believed in an imminent apocalypse (e.g. the forecasted deluge of 1524). By the 17th century, people were writing utopian science fiction [0, 1], though some of these are really only utopian in the sense that Fukuyama's "end of history" is.

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

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

cryo32• 1 month ago

It’s not just 2022 and earlier books. There’s a supply chain problem as well. I’ve seen two older books so far from Amazon which were AI generated copy text with a genuine looking cover on it. Amazon just took the return and probably restocked it for the next victim.

I tend to buy books from second hand book shops and eBay now and usually older or well used copies. A good sign of their authenticity.

pluralmonad2• 1 month ago

Thriftbooks is a decent source. Used hardcovers abound.

encomiast• 1 month ago

Yeah, Amazon has been garbage for a while with old books, especially classics. It seems like everything is just keyed off title/author so it takes a ton of effort to make sure you are getting the edition/translation you want. It's 100x worse with Kindle where it looks like some random cheap scan into-kindle format has 2k five star reviews. And of course user reviews where they seem to mix all the reviews together for various editions.

tyre3• 1 month ago

Hot take: I think it’ll be pretty much the same as it was. If anything it will get better.

You will still have gatekeepers and taste makers. Publishing houses will screen fiction for well-written and interesting fiction. Word-of-mouth, personal recommendations, and endorsements from people you respect will continue to outweigh algorithms, if you care.

For cheap reads, how much of a difference is there between James Patterson’s 734th beach read thriller and what an LLM with a 50m token context window can produce? Does it matter that it’s not written by six ghostwriters? Probably not to the median Hudson News buyer.

For non-fiction, it’s easier to gather research and related materials. If you were cherry-picking facts to make a narrative, yeah, that’s easier, but it’s not like we haven’t gotten really good at that anyway. Again, there will be cooling off periods for scholarship to be debated and coälesce.

What will get better is people asking questions and getting well-researched pieces on a specific niche or confluence of topics. AI is just-good-enough-to-be-dangerous now. It will get better. We’ll learn to harness it (literally) to iteratively fact check and cite sources. We will build repositories with heavily sourced facts for it to build upon. It will be pulling together “truths” that can be traced, then incrementally adding inference across those, which can then be verified and are a new fact.

I read a lot. I love, love, love new and original authorship. I deeply value writing as a craft. There will be a lot of garbage. More than there is now, at an incredible rate.

And we’ll figure it out.

tyre3• 1 month ago

My worry is less about scholarship than the next generation of readers and authors. It is too easy to be lazy right now. Too easy to skip the difficult work of struggling with ideas. Yapping with Claude probably (?) doesn’t have the same rate of retention and reinforced learning _in humans_ as digging through source material and writing by hand.

Growing critical thought, in my experience, has always been the much harder problem. Not sure we’re in for a good time on that front.

mikgp• 1 month ago

The James Patterson point is spot on and - to expand on your point, the internet arguably took the tastemakers / gatekeepers down a peg, AI could be what brings them back.

plaguuuuuu• 1 month ago

publishing houses will gatekeep for well-selling fiction and non-fiction.

tyre3• 1 month ago

Yes, and innovative writing sells well. There is room for the Da Vinci Code _and_ Lincoln in the Bardo.

neponeko3• 1 month ago

Right, and half the time they can’t tell what could sell because their thinking is so provincial and rigid.

neponeko3• 1 month ago

Publishing houses will screen fiction for well-written and interesting fiction.

Why would they start now?

YesBox2• 1 month ago

You are not alone. I like to read Harry Potter fan fiction [1] and I have started checking the publication date when Im searching for something new to read. I started doing this passively and realized it after the fact.

Have you ever met someone who could say all and do the right things but never made you feel anything, or your gut was sensing an ulterior motive? It's a magic trick we are all bewitched by at some point in our lives. I suppose I filter by published year because I dont want think about if I am being tricked or not.

[1] There are some very talented writers[A] out there who (I assume) cannot do the world building part.

[A] Recent Favorite: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1134255/chapters/2292768

tapland• 1 month ago

There are people churning out 40k word novels daily on AO3, and they get the eyes and feedback that up and coming writers desperately want. Real content is being drowned out and ppl are hurting because of it.

j_w• 1 month ago

Well they aren't people churning out 40k words :)

I've spent very little time on ao3, but I imagine it's slightly better than RR where seemingly a mark of value is "huge length (word count and chapters)" with weekly updates.

idleplant• 1 month ago

With Harry Potter (and Star Trek, I believe) fanfiction, I think decline in quality has been typical for the last decade; the fanfiction from the 90s/early 00s is often of much better quality on average just due to the age + other factors affecting who was able to type up and post fanfiction online back then.

0x3444ac53• 1 month ago

Thank you for the recommendation! I opened it out of curiosity and I'm already a chapter deep :)

YesBox2• 1 month ago

doctor_blood2• 1 month ago

I left a few creative writing forums I had been a member of for over a decade because of how much garbage was being posted. Perhaps even more upsetting than the number of people flooding the front page with reams of nonsensical AI prose was the number of people who saw nothing wrong with this and, instead, heaped praise on it and enthusiastically cried for more of it.

It was profoundly alienating to see hundreds of people liking and commenting on chapters of obviously AI-generated prose full of LLM-isms and broken metaphors and similes - and these 'authors' have the gall to link a patreon account and ask for money for this tripe!

confidantlake2• 1 month ago

Wonder if the people liking were socket puppet's in order to encourage the patreon donations.

dspillett• 1 month ago

Not just books. When searching for information online, for anything where things haven't changed significantly in the last few years, I definitely favour a post on SO/SE/HN/reddit/etc dated before 2023 over those that are later. And where there are no good looking references before that, the earlier the better.

Of course there are no doubt people out there realising that a fair few of us do this, and are starting to edit posts to pre-date them as a sort of SEO trick…

golem14• 1 month ago

In this case, archiv.* might be your friend, since they have time stamped copies.

appplication• 1 month ago

That would somewhat work for some limited things for a limited time, but I feel like this is all just asymptotically approaching the inevitable conclusion that we cannot trust essentially anything online anymore because special interest (corporate, political, etc) have abused LLMs.

I think near term this feels like something bad for individuals because we can no longer find truthy information. But longer term this is going to be an issue for the same special interests, as people normalize to this and longer view the internet or media as a place they can get reliable information.

I really do not think children born today are going to think “let me just look up reviews for a product online” or even “let me just ask AI to summarize reviews” in 20-some years when they have purchasing power, because it will be ubiquitously known that nothing written online can be trusted, and AI is just ouroborosing itself (and a few more decades of increasingly desperate and short-sighted advertising/over-productization by the controlling corporations).

raincole2• 1 month ago

I feel that too. But the reasonable part of me knows that it's just one generation can't "get" the entertainment of the next generation. It has always been like that.

There are mobile game ads on TV here. My father asked me what actually the players get from paying the game companies money. He still doesn't get it after I tried to explain how it works twice.

coldtea2• 1 month ago

one generation can't "get" the entertainment of the next generation. It has always been like that.

Given the quality of 2026's entertainment, looks like they had a point. And likely they had one at 2006 and 1986 and 1966 too.

lambdaone• 1 month ago

This is Sturgeon's Law: "ninety percent of everything is crap".

But the corollary to it is the fact 10% of everything isn't crap, and just as there always has been crap, there always has been excellence. Just less of it.

fallat• 1 month ago

There has always been shit books - let that sink in.

There will be _more_ shit books now, but that's the only difference.

There will be probably a constant rate of "good" books.

vibcdingenjoyer• 1 month ago

The same happened to music when digital music production at home became more accessible. The hard part is separating the wheat from the ever growing larger share of chaff.

GolfPopper• 1 month ago

Quantity has a quality (or lack thereof) all its own.

How many shit books can or will you wade through to find a good one? Particularly when some percentage of the shit ones are "good enough" that you won't necessarily know it was shit until after you've read some or all of it? What do you do when the ratio of shit to good is 100:1 or 10,000:1? In the past, you could find a trusted publisher or reviewer without too much trouble. Soon, if not already, the publisher and the reviewers will have the same dross ratio as the books do.

wenbin• 1 month ago

If contents are generated instantly via llm and packaged as books, videos, podcasts, pull requests etc, then they don’t deserve human attention.

galleywest200• 1 month ago

Why on Earth would I pay for a printed LLM written book when I can just ask the LLM to do it for me for cheaper? It is insane. When I buy a book I want the money to go to the human who wrote it, not the human who babysat a printer.

bashmelek• 1 month ago

I’m in my mid-30s, and have never written a book, but I still sometimes think of it. I know it isn’t too late. I still want to create my own applications, but I once used the Google ai result in a utility function. Is it all tainted? I still want people around me to try in earnest

atrus• 1 month ago

It's replies like this that make me wonder which is more demotivating to artists. LLMs, or people screeching "it's ai" regardless of proof.

It has to be absolutely demoralizing to make something on your own, and have it immediately labelled ai by someone who can barely spell it.

cat-snatcher• 1 month ago

No just you

psadri• 1 month ago

We are witnessing the birth of the term "pre-times" you often see in dystopian sci-fi.

greatdane• 1 month ago

E.M. Forster called it 117 years ago, in 1909, in The Machine Stops.

In this dystopian sci-fi novel, E.M. Forster depicts modern life for humans: detached from each other, living in solitary silos above the barren Earth below, which has become an infertile wasteland of itself, and only ever connecting from their rooms by projecting “holograms” of themselves to interact remotely with one another. Spoiler alert: the machine experiences a catastrophic failure event.

mrandish2• 1 month ago

I hate slop as much as anyone else and was, until recently, absolute in my zero tolerance of any LLM use in personal posts and correspondence. Now I've adopted a slightly more nuanced view because I sometimes use an LLM when writing but only in a couple very limited, narrowly focused ways. The first is trying to remember a specific turn of phrase I can't recall at the moment (when you get past 50 this happens a bit more often). The other is breaking up overly long sentences, which is a bad writing habit I've struggled with since high school.

I never let an LLM write or rewrite a post, or even a paragraph, for me. I want to write it myself and I want it to be in MY voice. I think I'm a pretty good writer and I like my writing. However, I suspect those who may be less confident in their writing use an LLM to "check" their rough draft but then succumb to the temptation of just pasting the LLM's output because it "sounds better", it's already finished and... writing is hard. This is always a mistake and no one should do it in a forum like HN. It's rude and we'd much rather hear your words and ideas as you express them.

The sad part is this ends up in an all or nothing between "Never use an LLM when writing a post" and "Have LLMs write posts for you."

kccqzy• 1 month ago

I like my writing too. But I’ve found that the kind of writing I’m most skilled at is memoir-style writing. I don’t actually like my writing when it comes to business proposals for example, so I let LLM rewrite these. Such writing doesn’t really “belong” to me anyways; they belong to my employer. And I don’t feel a sense of accomplishment or craft when writing them.

mrandish2• 1 month ago

I don't have a strong opinion on formal business writing with LLMs because, in my experience, a shocking number of corporate managers are pretty terrible at expressing ideas or conveying information in writing. Frankly, for functional business report writing, in many cases I might find an LLM's rewrite to be more useful than the human written original.

In my experience, most formal business writing fell into two types: 1. Pro forma box-checking that probably didn't need to be written at all (or at least read by me, as a senior leader), and 2. Actually important information or ideas. The majority was Type 1, which I tried to avoid, and if it was Type 2, it was either well-organized and intelligible, or such a mess I'd have my admin schedule a meeting so the author could explain it and answer questions.

But I recently retired so I no longer have to suffer through formal business writing anymore :-)

goostavos2• 1 month ago

If you offload breaking up long sentences to the LLM how will you get better at not writing long sentences?

(as an aside, I also struggle with super long sentences and found a pretty good trick for curing it: rewrite by hand with pen and paper. My cramping hand finds entire passages that the work can survive without)

gritspants• 1 month ago

Some on my bookshelf:

Crafting Interpreters, by Robert Nystrom
Re[Coding] America, by Jennifer Pahlka
Systems Performance, by Brendan Gregg

unknownian• 1 month ago

I’m vehemently anti-genAI in creative fields but even I think this metric is stupid and unfair to younger generations and generations to come, even if genAI writing gets better.

If you can’t trust a contemporary writer to not use genAI, then find another interest with true zero trust creative verification (like improv) because copying and cheating on writing has existed for decades.

However, my unpopular opinion is extremist in another way: societies should probably not tolerate AI in creative fields like creative writing at all, if Sora can be shut down, so can other useless and toxic parts of LLMs.

julianeon• 1 month ago

This will work for a little while but this can't go on indefinitely: no one is going to want to stick to 30+ year old books.

We should probably work on developing standards for what we want in a book instead of clinging to a losing position.

fy20• 1 month ago

I'd guess some publishers just need to set a hard stance against clearly AI generated work, and have more in-depth reviews before publishing.

On the other hand, it means the age of self-publishing was short lived and is effectively dead now.

pluralmonad2• 1 month ago

I don't think self publishing is dead. But it probably is an end to grabbing new books from unfamiliar names. So self publishing will be harder, since it will take grinding to build human rep, but certainly not dead.

geraneum• 1 month ago

no one is going to want to stick to 30+ year old books

This is... satire, right? right?

human305893• 1 month ago

My backlog of pre 2020 fiction that I want to read is huge, so I don't have to worry about it. Non-fiction is a pain. I mostly by these for my kid (Things like dinosaur encyclopedias etc), so I stick to university press, but I have no idea if it's getting through there but I wouldn't be surprised.

not_the_fda• 1 month ago

I use time as a filter. There is more good stuff to read than time to read it. I have no need for slop.

confidantlake2• 1 month ago

Guess you haven't met any old people. I know a few who don't read/watch/listen to anything after 1969.

mvkel• 1 month ago

The glasses are a little rose-colored here. As if anything written <2022 were on stone tablets. LinkedIn slop was human generated before it was ai generated, but it was still slop.

The issue with content >2022 isn't that it's ai-generated per se, it's that it's still slop.

anal_reactor• 1 month ago

Yeah exactly. There is so much slop because people do like slop and they liked it before ChatGPT. Nothing has substantially changed.

adt• 1 month ago

First AI books (using GPT-3) were published in Aug/2020:

https://lifearchitect.ai/books-by-ai/

subygan• 1 month ago

Anything that feels like it came out of matrix multiplication immediately loses the value for me.

Something about the industrialization of thinking makes it uninteresting. similar to frozen pasta from the shelves, heated and served.

low_tech_love4• 1 month ago

If the writer did not put effort to write, why would you put effort to read? Writing became 1000x faster but reading stayed the same speed.

andrewljohnson• 1 month ago

Pro-tip - the older it is, the more likely it is to be good.

DavidPiper2• 1 month ago

But I can’t help but feel that the effort meant something.

Each person that put in the effort is one additional review point.

Thinking, Writing, Editing, Proofing, Publishing, Distributing, Selling...

At every step, a human had the opportunity to say "no, this is bad". And the fact that they didn't is a vote of quality and reputation.

These days presumably every step can be automated without a human in the loop at all, and it's up to the buyer to discover "no, this is bad", but at that point their money is already spent.

neponeko3• 1 month ago

At every step, a human had the opportunity to say "no, this is bad". And the fact that they didn't is a vote of quality and reputation.

Romantic image. Doesn’t hold. Traditional publishing has pushed out lots of poorly edited slop for decades; it didn’t start in 2022.

DavidPiper2• 1 month ago

And their reputation suffered so much that we're calling it out on an internet forum decades later.

MichaelNolan• 1 month ago

I was browsing Amazon and I found one “author” with over 100 published in the last 12 months. And they weren’t cheap either. Most were $50 or more for the paperback version.

It really put a sour taste in my mouth. At that volume (2 books per week) you’d think Amazon could identify and label that it’s AI generated.

chrsw• 1 month ago

Not sure why this got downvoted. The amount of book slop on Amazon these days is staggering. It has completely changed my experience of shopping for books on Amazon and it's for the worse.

ralferoo• 29 days ago

I can think of 2 reasons. First, the 100 books in a year was entirely possible in the pulp fiction genre even 20 years ago. If you're mass producing crap that people binge read on their daily train commute, you can write it quickly as they don't much care about the quality. Secondly, Amazon being over run with book slop isn't a new phenomena. As soon as print on demand became a thing 15+ years ago, people starting filling Amazon with junk, either poor copies of other people's books or even just books containing nothing but wikipedia entries. The model had so low a bar to entry, that even if they only sold a couple of each title it was worth their time, but it made Amazon awful to use as a customer trying to browse for a book that might be interesting.

boznz• 1 month ago

There are still plenty of us writing the book start to finish with all our own words and plots, it is very tempting to use AI to get the cover art correct, but going to a cover artist will these days likely get you the same "AI assisted" creation.

I do have one freely downloadble Sci-Fi book from 2022 which took 10 years in total to write so it might safely pass all your standards, but if a fixed cut off date is your criteria for a good book then there really is no hope for writers like me continuing.

goostavos2• 1 month ago

no hope for writers like me continuing.

If it's any consolation, I'm releasing a technical book on Java this year. In 2026. When AI exists and, at according to the front page most days, programming is "solved." All of it was written by hand because, well, why else would I bother? What's the point of a craft when you're not the one doing it? Half the joy is getting better at it, and that requires doing.

It's demoralizing to know post-2022 books are devalued in people's minds. It's demoralizing that I also think that way. I spend enough time at work reading other people's copy/pasted LLM output. Books should be a relief from that world, but the risk is unavoidable unless you go back in time.

But hopefully good things rise above the noise. If they don't, it's still OK. Honing a craft is its own reward, even if not celebrated. (this is the lie I tell myself as I lay in bed awake realizing I've wasted that last several years of my life)

hollowturtle• 1 month ago

The problem exist, the conclusion is wrong. LLMs DON'T produce great content, they PRETEND to produce great content, even in coding. They're as good as the statistical incidence. Writing a book with an LLMs, like with code, could lead to good results sure, but they're in the mean, sometimes slightly less sometimes slightly more. When it's good it looks good, because that's how it works, and it's broken way more subtly than ever

theodpHN• 1 month ago

Tech documentation has been kind of a three-decade race to the bottom, with some ups and downs along the way. From vendor documentation in the 70's to Windows Help in the 90s to the rise of tech books incl. O'Reilly to fill the gap, to PDF and Internet document, and now to often lacking-in-detail Javadocs, Python docs, API interface, API docs, event/parameter lists, and GitHub README files that are passed off as documentation today, often with no detail, use examples, illustrations, or though-through overall structure and organization.

In addition to the obvious negative effect on learning curves, I'd argue this dearth of "long-form documentation" has a negative impact on programming language and app development, as well as software usability in general (isn't CONTROL+COMMAND+SHIFT+3 for a MAC screen capture intuitive?)..

AI has become the new "teacher of record" to fill this documentation void, but it's very individualized and narrowly focused. There's no longer a shared mental model, where everyone has read the same books and are working somewhat off the same page. Ironically, it's probably never been easier to write a good tech book, but there's likely zero money in it and the search and AI giants are likely to hover it up and start serving snippets of it up for free before you see a dime, making people very unlikely to buy your book, even if you've written a technical masterpiece!

culi• 1 month ago

Perhaps we need a 2022 version of this site

https://wtfhappenedin1971.com/

https://wtfhappened2012.com/

AmazingEveryDay• 1 month ago

I thought the Searches for "Second Job" infographic on the 2012 site was rather quaint, these days the term would be "Third Job" or even more

thoughtpeddler• 1 month ago

Exists: https://wtfhappenedin2022.com/ and it's just a single chart of data centers shooting straight up

locusofself• 1 month ago

I take comfort in the fact that my wife and I have a few decent bookshelves of good novels many of which we have not read yet. I've been hoarding e-books as well.

Ferret7446• 1 month ago

It must be tiring, suffering from AI fear.

I just read things and decide if they're good or not. I did that ten years ago and I do it now and nothing has changed. Most things are bad, a few are good. That also has not changed.

TZubiri• 1 month ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Low-background_steel

ChrisArchitect• 1 month ago

jgrahamc's post from about a year ago might be of interest:

Low-background Steel: content without AI contamination (2025)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44239481

TeaVMFan• 1 month ago

Even though I started Means and Motive ( https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0GYCZJVGX ) 5 years ago, and it was written without any AI use, I was worried people might have this concern, given the 2026 publication date.

For a sanity check, I did run the first page through an online AI checker and it confirmed what I already knew: 100% human.

low_tech_love4• 1 month ago

” Perhaps we’ll get used to this new tool, and move on.”

Perhaps we’ll be flooded with slop to the point where nobody can distinguish reality from fiction anymore, because it takes too long to check and reason about it with our outdated tools and thinking processes. Then perhaps people will lose faith in the “truth” and simply accept that one-sided ideology and biased belief is all that exists and matters, and corrupt leaders (at all levels) will make use of that to sway masses of useful idiots.

Wait…

gustavopezzi• 1 month ago

It's extremely rare that I buy any books written after 2020. Not (just) because of AI, but because most publishers started to approach influencers that were not experts on their field to write books, hoping to piggyback on their high number of followers to sell more copies once the book is out.

HPMOR• 1 month ago

It is more than just books published pre-2022, but I've noticed that it is necessary to buy books __printed__ before 2022. Recently I've noticed aggressive misspellings and misquotations in old books printed in '25/'26. I believe these errors are being introduced because the publisher is using an LLM or some similar tool to correct any prior errors but is introducing more hallucinations. Or perhaps the cause is people caring less than they used to?

Pre-2022 Books

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