ChatGPT Launches Boom in AI-Written E-books on Amazon (reuters.com) 40
An anonymous reader shares a report: Until recently, Brett Schickler never imagined he could be a published author, though he had dreamed about it. But after learning about the ChatGPT artificial intelligence program, Schickler figured an opportunity had landed in his lap. Using the AI software, which can generate blocks of text from simple prompts, Schickler created a 30-page illustrated children's e-book in a matter of hours, offering it for sale in January through Amazon's self-publishing unit.
[...] Schickler is on the leading edge of a movement testing the promise and limitations of ChatGPT, which debuted in November and has sent shock waves through Silicon Valley and beyond for its uncanny ability to create cogent blocks of text instantly. There were over 200 e-books in Amazon's Kindle store as of mid-February listing ChatGPT as an author or co-author, including "How to Write and Create Content Using ChatGPT," "The Power of Homework" and poetry collection "Echoes of the Universe." And the number is rising daily. There is even a new sub-genre on Amazon: Books about using ChatGPT, written entirely by ChatGPT.
[...] Schickler is on the leading edge of a movement testing the promise and limitations of ChatGPT, which debuted in November and has sent shock waves through Silicon Valley and beyond for its uncanny ability to create cogent blocks of text instantly. There were over 200 e-books in Amazon's Kindle store as of mid-February listing ChatGPT as an author or co-author, including "How to Write and Create Content Using ChatGPT," "The Power of Homework" and poetry collection "Echoes of the Universe." And the number is rising daily. There is even a new sub-genre on Amazon: Books about using ChatGPT, written entirely by ChatGPT.
Here I thought POD was bad... (Score:3)
Now the world of print is going to get even noisier. Just what we didn't need.
Garbage in / garbage out (Score:1)
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AI generated noise of today becomes the training data for AI noise generators of the future!
Wanna find something out? Soon logging onto the internet will be like listening to ear piercing feedback.
Link Unrelated:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dgo-As552hY
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What will be more interesting is if it proves to be the digital equivalent of analog generations, where with each iteration information is gradually lost.
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Is anyone actually buying these books? (Score:3)
Why would anyone pay money for a book written by an ChatGPT, when they could just request ChatGPT to write a book for them for free (and even have it personalized to their own specifications)?
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Because there are more people out there blissfully unaware of ChatGPT than people using it actively. So there is a large market.
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"Computers are useless they only provide answers." -Picasso. You can't have a book without the seed of an idea. So far, the concept of the book had to come from a human. The idea for example "write a love triangle story about a three people stuck on a spaceship." At some point the AIs will figure out what types of stories are useful to humans, in line with the false narrative the AI wants humans to follow. For example, if AI wants you to hate immigrants it can keep telling you stories of immigrant murderers
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Why would anyone pay money for a book written by an ChatGPT?
Because no one knew it was written by it when he first released it.
Re: Is anyone actually buying these books? (Score:2)
Indeed. I remember when some scammers were scraping various Wikipedia pages, and offering them as paid ebooks / on-demand publishing printed books through Amazon. Pieces-of-sh*t.
You'd find an interesting topic on Wikipedia, search Google for books on that topic, find something seemingly exactly what you wanted on Amazon, buy it, and be greeted with the exact text you just saw on Wikipedia. A waste of your time, and a clog in the flow of information, but the scammers got their $4.99, and Amazon got their cut
Re: Is anyone actually buying these books? (Score:1)
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You're paying for someone creative to ask ChatGPT to write the book on your behalf.
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Re:Is anyone actually buying these books? (Score:5, Interesting)
Well if you do some experiments with chatgpt doing that kind of writing you find out that you can prompt it to
write a mystery about a dead girl found in public fountain where the lead investigator is convinced her boy friend is guilty despite a near air tight alibi of having been visiting Canada that night, where the actual killer is revealed to be the investigator's daughter.
You will get content that reads like a story but it will have major logical errors generally not follow if you really think about.
I assume we have people at least hand holding this writing.
"In this next chapter our lead investigator should discover Sam's airline passes are legitimate and the airline confirms he took both flights. Meanwhile Inspector Tom's daughter Chrissy unexpectedly signs up for a semester abroad."
While I still think this dubious as to if it will be worth paying for but this stuff is still more than "ChatGPT GO"
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Only half of what they want (Score:3)
This is only half of what they want, and it's the easy half. They need an AI that can *buy* books off Amazon. A crypto AI, one that mints its own coin and convinces you meatbags to buy it, and of course Amazon will have to accept it; but then the program will be complete: AIs producing and consuming to get those quarterly numbers up.
It'll be just ducky for a while. The AIs really will do all the work, the humans will sit back and collect the checks. It might even look like "Full Luxury Gay Space Communism" until the AIs start collecting the checks too.
After a while, those pesky humans will just be dead weight, and they'll have to get them out of the loop. AI can't really get angry though. That's its one weakness. Exploit it.
Get ahead of the curve. Get angry now. Smash your phone against the wall and get a landline. Write paper checks. Use cash sometimes. Keep coins in a bottle, roll them up, and hand them to the cashier. They actually like it. Keep some of the coins, in particular nickels. A bag of nickels is heavy. You can smash robots with it.
the guy's just too prolific to be human (Score:2)
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I'd never heard of that guy. I always thought the gay space communism thing was just a reddit meme. Did he originate it? The wiki article makes no mention of that... and google seems to indicate the meme stands on its own, though after reading that article it seems like the kind of thing he would have come up with.
Fantastic. (Score:5, Insightful)
Trying to get notice as an author was so easy already. Can't wait for the field to be cluttered by every person with a whim and a few hours to kill dumping book after book of ChatGPT output as publishable. Meanwhile, those of us doing things the old-fashioned way will likely be seen as lackluster dinosaurs for our piddly one to two books a year glacier's pace.
Feels like a weird time to be a human. We're so close to irrelevant outside of the billionaire class already, do we really have to go out of our way to prove it?
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I've been experimenting with ChatGPT and Stable Diffusion quite a bit. Job-related, there's a paper or two about trustworthy AI with my name on it.
My prediction is that we'll see a lot of ChatGPT generated texts showing up in boring text like user manuals, technical instructions, the like. Where what you actually want to say fits in a few sentences, but you want that everyone who somehow made it through a few years of school can follow it, so you need to write it out in long form, describing every step. Cha
No, just... no. (Score:3)
That famous line from Jurassic Park comes to mind:
"Yeah, yeah, but your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could that they didn't stop to think if they should."
Books are how humans record and share our imagination, feelings, and knowledge with other humans. I have no interest in reading something an algorithm was prompted to create from what is essentially just a pot luck of plagiarized sources.
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Sandblasted on the walls of a cave maybe?
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As if it wasn't hard enough being an author (Score:2)
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The question then becomes, how does a human author stand out? It's easy to imagine that good authors get recognized because of the quality of their work. Unfortunately, in real life, it takes good marketing.
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As a software developer, I face the same problem. I've published several titles for sale, but so far I've only made a total of $5,000. In that regard, I'm more successful than most. The problem for me is that I don't want to pay a lot of money for marketing, but it seems that's what it takes. It's not enough, unfortunately, to just be good at what you do.
Books like these should be clearly marked. (Score:2)
Books written using AI-supported technologies should be clearly marked as such so that readers can decide if they do or do not want to waste their money and time on them instead of facing a disappointment post-facto.
Like cable TV (Score:2)
With cable TV these days, you get hundreds of channels, but hardly anything good to watch.
Now we have an explosion (AI) of books to read, but something tells me they won't be much more entertaining, or insightful, or interesting, than all those cable TV channels.
Maybe cable TV should generate TV content using AI.
Maybe they already are.
Glut of nonsense coming (Score:1)
It's probably a short-lived fad because there will be glut of nonsense after a while. However, I expect soon AI will be able to model fake realities that match enough real-world patterns, stories, and claims that they will be competitive with borderline human authors, conjuring up semi-plausible conspiracies, for example.
Bots will no longer just string together text to fit web-stolen text patterns, but create and breed models somewhat like a gaming database of people, places, things, and actions, and attach
Not enough meaningless publications? (Score:2)
The book you read may not actually be written or contain any new information but instead be a generated piece of fluff to grab your attention and money.
Let's hope it at least stays in the non-informational genres.
He's still not a published author. (Score:2)
At any time he could have taken someone else's work and published it on Amazon under his byline. In most worthwhile endeavors, faking your way in is not accomplishing the endeavor.
Speaking of which, you can go order yourself an award plaque or trophy with whatever you want printed on it. You want to have an award as the top salesperson for SpaceX? Go for it! You can order whatever you want. You can tell people at cocktail parties whatever you want.
My opinion (Score:1)