Authors Are Accidentally Leaving AI Prompts In their Novels (404media.co) 43
Several romance novelists have accidentally left AI writing prompts embedded in their published books, exposing their use of chatbots, 404Media reports. Readers discovered passages like "Here's an enhanced version of your passage, making Elena more relatable" in K.C. Crowne's "Dark Obsession," for instance, and similar AI-generated instructions in works by Lena McDonald and Rania Faris.
As it becomes increasingly effortless... (Score:5, Insightful)
...to create stuff using AI, its commercial value will drop to zero
We are still in a transition period where people believe that they can automate their work using AI and sell it as if it was original
This will change quickly
Re:As it becomes increasingly effortless... (Score:4, Insightful)
This is true. The other thing a lot of people need to get thru the last 35 years of economic orthodoxy is that actually "stuff" is the future of economic success.
Things that AI can generate, be books, software, whatever, will approach zero value, while stuff AI can't generate, everything from farm products thur injection molded crap all the way to machines using the most advanced metallurgy or ICs using fanciest photolithography process will still have value.
The future of wealth is in building of actual things, be that with people or capital like robots. The age of the 'information worker' is drawing to close..
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it'll have value, but it will be reduced to and approach the cost of the electricity
Re: As it becomes increasingly effortless... (Score:1)
Did you know that retail electricity rates are typically set by state regulatory commissions explicitly directed by decoupling laws not to use supply and demand in their price-setting?
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Depends on where you are...
I here as example it is supply and demand.
As a consumer you can select from among several hundred plans from more than 20 suppliers.
Some of them are fixed price for a term. Some are fixed price with no expliry, but the supplier can change the price be telling you a given time before and at that point you can change supplier if you want and some are variable with the market rate+fixed margin. The market rate changes hour by hour and is sometimes negative.
The plans also have differe
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Things that AI can generate, be books, software, whatever, will approach zero value
They'll approach zero cost, much like breathable air. That doesn't mean zero value, any more than breathable air has zero value.
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audible is gonna be one the first to find this out the hard way as they replace voice actors with AI and people find out open text-to-voice models can run on their devices for zero cost over the epub.
Not for human authored (Score:2)
The same way that right now people will pay extra for artisan works of art and craft even though technically they may be inferior to stuff from a factory, similarly in the future people will pay a premium - or maybe even simply just pay - for human created works.
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If AI novels are good enough, they will pay as often premium for human novels as they pay for hand-knitted pullovers. Some will more often, some less often. But the human product will be premium and not necessarily better.
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...to create stuff using AI, its commercial value will drop to zero We are still in a transition period where people believe that they can automate their work using AI and sell it as if it was original This will change quickly
You think we don’t already live in a society filled with humans who lie constantly with false appearances, selling it as if it were original? For massive profit and/or gain?
Let me give you a little hint. They’re not real. Nope. Those aren’t either. Or those. Or those. Or any of those.
The last time the carpet matched the drapes was when carpeting was in style. Natural eye color? Nope, contacts. Doesn’t look like her picture? Filters. Hair that long? Nope, extensions.
Sure
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And increasingly personalized. Why buy a finished AI novel, when you can have an interactive one?
You didn't like the direction in the chapter? One click and you get an alternative (and change the whole path the story goes).
AI is not just a way to produce content like we're used to consume it and then distribute it to consumers.
It is a way for consumers to create content to consume without relying on someone to anticipate what they might like, finish producing it and then make an offer and hopefully advertis
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I've seen this firsthand in the art community. Various online artists offering AI-assisted commissions, and even jacking up their prices on the grounds that the AI now makes their art "look better".
And then they're shocked when all their fans just disappear and their Patreon runs dry. Idiots.
A YouTuber I follow that does c64 programming (Score:4, Informative)
Frankly I'm just a bit surprised that that kind of on-demand printing is cheap enough and accessible enough to make these kind of scams viable.
And they were absolutely scams. The information in the books was either completely nonsensical or stolen wholesale from other authors.
Some of the stuff that got stolen was fairly recent, books written in 2020 or 2022.
AI makes it possible to do a whole new world of plagiarism where you can steal somebody's work and it's jumbled around enough you can no longer obviously tell it was stolen.
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And great or not it's still stole from someone. It's automated high scale plagiarism.
Re:A YouTuber I follow that does c64 programming (Score:4, Interesting)
FWIW the original guides to programming in the early 1980s were slop too, it's just a human wrote most of them.
A typical "How to program your Commodore 64" book in 1982 was a direct copy of a book called "How to program your Sinclair ZX Spectrum." The original author would go through the book with a manual for the Commodore 64 and change anything they could easily see needed changing. Most of the sample programs were "Guess my number" or variants thereof, because those required virtually no system features that varied and were substantially different on a ZX81, Oric Atmos, or BBC Micro - no graphics, no colour, just plain text output. Even information about string handling and arrays were completely inaccurate because the ZX81 and VIC 20 had radically different ideas about how to make a substring and the author didn't know or really care that much.
So... a modern book on programming a Commodore 64 being slop? They probably trained it on the originals...
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"Frankly I'm just a bit surprised that that kind of on-demand printing is cheap enough and accessible enough to make these kind of scams viable."
Search for cell phone covers. You'll find them with every motive you want. Most the time you see from the preview that it is a low-resolution motive automatically downloaded from social media (or whereever). Of course they do not have thousands of phone covers with "The OSI-model as shown in Wikipedia" and other motives nobody would ever buy, but they print the cov
Is this being factored into productivity stats? (Score:1)
Is it possible productivity is being kept up by AI while workers take more siestas?
Copying and copyright? (Score:3)
Since AI's often don't create copyrightable works (depending on the depth of the prompts), what's to stop someone ripping off the prompter's work?
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Since AI's often don't create copyrightable works (depending on the depth of the prompts), what's to stop someone ripping off the prompter's work?
What about recursive use? An AI reads an AI generated book as part of its training. The prompters work may be more difficult to spot.
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Re: Copying and copyright? (Score:2)
Amazon's ebook market is a wretched hive of scum and villainy. Cory Doctorow has had a few choice words to say about how little the sellers respect copyright and how little Amazon did to remove clones of his books.
https://doctorow.medium.com/wh... [medium.com]
Here's an enhanced version of your post... (Score:2)
Here's an enhanced version of your post, making your slashdot post more relatable.
For anything generated or influenced by AI, we need a simple disclaimer to keep things transparent.
Robot: summarize this trashy romance novel! (Score:1)
If an AI reads the AI-generated book for me while I go cut the grass or get my garden ready for planting...did a tree really fall in the woods?
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On the other hand if AI can write a novel and deliver it as a radio play for you to listen to while you cut your grass and prepare you garden, is worth paying people to have any role in that production?
Assuming the AI's output is actually good/enjoyable?
Re: Robot: summarize this trashy romance novel! (Score:1)
Nah...I'd have the AI listen to it and give me the gist while I do something else...
Editor failure (Score:3)
This is mainly a failure of the editor. How could a minimally capable editor not catch this? Either the editor was incompetent or there was no editor.
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Almost exactly, have they hived the editing process off to an AI?
I'd be strongly tempted to stop reading works from that publishing house.
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I'm going with the 'editor was let go to improve shareholder value' option.
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Yeah, I was wondering if all these novels are perchance self-published dross on Amazon.
Re: Editor failure (Score:2)
Perhaps people should demand a refund for the book. Thoughtful editing is actually a large part of the cost of getting a book published!
Prompt? (Score:3)
Not to nitpick, but if we're going to pinpoint a specific issue, it should probably describe the correct one. Both TFA and TFS only show an example of an AI response being left in the published text. The prompt itself was not included, although the problematic part of the response that was copied into the finished product happens to summarize the model's interpretation of the prompt. (Not that either is good, but it's at least more understandable how this one might have happened...)
Are authors leaving poison pills in book? (Score:2)
my personal rules have been updated (Score:1)
Mark the years 1930, 1950, 1980, 2020 (Score:2)
We should mark the years as demarcation points when literature and writing in general changed.
1930 - The short sentence lengths in Hemingway's novels start ending the complex, comma heavy early literature
1950 - Start of darker post-WWII noir novels, and slipping far downward towards the lowest common low-brow denominator for what once was called pulp or railway novels
1980 - When most of the novelists careers who started after WWII aged out and, importantly, when the common dictionary started removing 'obsol