Not sure how I feel about this, so thought I'd ask you lot...
MrsVlad bought a travel book ("Living The Artic Coast") off of Amazon and I've just been flicking through it, and something seems "off"...
- No maps or photos, just dense text
- No author biography
- No gushing reviews
- Order no longer exists on Amazon so I can't look it up and a quick Google search only brings up Amazon links, which are dead.
- The publisher's website (reedsy.com) seems to cater for self-publishing authors
- The prose is completely impersonal - there are no anecdotes about the "authors" personal experience. It's just reams and reams of practical information (which I'm itself seems kosher)
Has MrsVlad been conned? I mean, it's potentially useful if the text is actually factually correct and we're unlikely to need to rely on the information.
On the other hand, if this is a custom product for MrsVlad based on her web searches, it pretty damn impressive!
reedsy isnt really a publisher per say, its a market place for the services a self publisher might want, eg designers, editors etc.
It probably is just AI slop, but these kinds of very low quality filler have existed on amazon for a while
Amazon is full of this stuff, I’ve listened to lots of genuine small name authors ranting about it.
Aye mrs100th got a travel guide for a middling sized town outside Munich.
Obviously AI trash, links instead of pictures. Some of which take you to insta photos. Did get her money back though.
Living The Artic Coast
Is that the book about living in a tractor-trailer vehicle by the seaside?
That was possibly a big red flag for quality control of the book.
Slight tangent but today I was listening to a band we saw last night. When the album finished auto play started a song by a bluesy female singer. When I looked to see who it was the suggestion was that it was a label who released older, relatively unheard artists. When I googled the artist and label it turns out that it's AI generated.
I seem to get bombarded on youtube with Chair based excercises with videos of old blokes with 6 packs.
I saw a video about it which was saying it’s deliberately done badly with ai as the normal,people will just skip over the advert but the mugs will watch the whole thing and go to the link to sign up for a monthly sub which is hard to cancel.
If the book has been published by a reputable publisher, it should have an ISBN number, or International Standard Book Number, which should be on the second page, the back of the title page, along with the publisher’s name and address.
Every book I ever worked on had one.
Slight tangent but today I was listening to a band we saw last night. When the album finished auto play started a song by a bluesy female singer. When I looked to see who it was the suggestion was that it was a label who released older, relatively unheard artists. When I googled the artist and label it turns out that it's AI generated.
Try Shazamming it, although that doesn’t always work, the artist has to be in the database, and I used to frequently use it to get info on artists used on TV series soundtracks, and it didn’t recognise lots, especially on Canadian made series.
What was the name of the artist? Might be someone I’ve heard of.
It probably is just AI slop, but these kinds of very low quality filler have existed on amazon for a while
Yes. Amazon have their own print on demand service so you can just copy and paste content from Wikipedia or use AI to write it into their system and they will produce the book and sell it for you. Amazon take a cut, obviously, but an unscrupulous author could probably publish dozens of junk books a year and make decent money from buyers who click without checking the details. You can also just change the title and cover and republish the same junk over and over again.
If the book has been published by a reputable publisher, it should have an ISBN number,
There are loads of predatory publishers who will slap an ISBN on any rubbish for a cut of the sales.
If the book has been published by a reputable publisher, it should have an ISBN number, or International Standard Book Number, which should be on the second page, the back of the title page, along with the publisher’s name and address.
Every book I ever worked on had one.
You can buy 10 ISBNs for £150 or so, no questions asked.
I bought a 'How to get the best out of your Seestar smart telescope' book from Amazon as a kindle download a couple of years ago. It was basically the online manual with a couple of pages tagged on the end about post image processing. I now know that it was AI generated. That was the first and only time I've given a bad review of anything as I can usually find something positive to say, but that was shite.
"I saw a video about it which was saying it’s deliberately done badly with ai as the normal,people will just skip over the advert but the mugs will watch the whole thing and go to the link to sign up for a monthly sub which is hard to cancel."
I watched a youtube video about this! 'Walking taichi' or some other BS!
It's why the Nigerian scammer emails are so OBVIOUSLY fake - you and I will just delete, but properly vulnerable/daft/greedy people will take the bait and carry on.
DrP
Not sure if it's legit but this made me chuckle the other day, total pisstake if it's real! At least give it a token read through!
ChatGPT finally made it into school textbooks
byu/Majestic-Pay-4615 inmildyinteresting
Not sure if it's legit but this made me chuckle the other day, total pisstake if it's real!
I don't think it is.
As far as I can work out the source is a bloke in Nepal who posted this on LinkedIn and has gone very quiet as soon as people started asking him to name the book. Also there's a suspicious gap on the shadow in the bottom right which might once have said "Made with ChatGPT"...
FB is absolutely riddled with AI stories now.
Someone (usually female) is disowned / belittled by her family, there's a scene somewhere (high profile posh place), family discovers that she actually owns said place and is a secret millionaire / CEO.
Or someone (usually female) is mocked at some military base, it turns out she's some incredible special forces sniper / fighter pilot and she shows all her snotty male colleagues up.
It's always published as a third of a story, click on comments for Part 2, then "click link and post "yes please" to read Part 3.
Followed by some dodgy link.and a data scraping exercise of all the idiots posting "yes please " underneath.
