One of the writers, Bill Johns, age 70, a retired cyber security consultant:
> "Mr. Johns now has 445 books for sale on Amazon. He orders a paperback copy of each one and keeps them on four rotating white bookshelves that are crowded awkwardly next to a couch in his living room. They all feature a photo of him in a serious dark suit — which is A.I. generated. “It was either that or put on a suit and take selfies,” he said."
As a human, I am concerned with these economists.
As in, if these marginal readers actually prefer AI texts, what does that say about human writing?
This is crazy to me. You're 70! Just be retired and fuck off, stop actively making the world a worse place!
People aren't allowed to (not even defame) write about others? Amazon doesn't allow certain books? No, but I imagine most people who actually buy this kind of book (if anyone does) are expecting higher quality.
And on the off chance they're satisfied, everyone wins. Even the author, since apparently the biography is very flattering of her.
I use it to check the spelling and grammas of everything I post on my comedy newsletter[0]. As an ESL speaker, I do need some help with those areas. But the edits it typically recommends are just awful. Hyphen and em dash galore. A/B comparison and analogies that mimic the term “load-bearing”. I have to be extra careful to not let any of that slop slip through. At this point, I’m looking to work with a human editor. The AI is clearly showing not being up to par for it. At least in my experience.
[0] https://open.substack.com/pub/yelluwcomedy/p/the-free-and-wi...
Incidentally, I feel like Cartoon Network predicted our current dystopian future like over a decade ago with one of their joke infomercials: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XQLdhVpLBVE . (It's funny at least!) Thought coins and hiding from bots.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3nlbfZGFKuI
> Donald Rowland, a Suffolk author of nearly 200 books - written under more than 30 pseudonyms - has made a living out of his romantic fiction. Donald churns out more novels than anybody else in the county. He specialises in old-fashioned romance, his heroes and heroines are morally beyond reproach, there is no sex in his novels. The reason for his prolific output is simple - Donald is paid just fifty pounds per book.
It's no wonder they are worried for their lives. The majority of the planet rightfully hate their guts.
Have we?
Where do you see people rejecting them?
Though that does raise an interesting point: what's the difference between writing a book about someone and asking ChatGPT "Tell me the biography of X"? It's the historical meaning and prestige of saying "I wrote a book", even though with Amazon, anyone can write a book and self-publish it.
> Eamon Duede, a philosopher of science at Purdue University and one of the authors of a paper called “Why Slop Matters,” said A.I. brought joy to people who wanted to create something that very few other people would find interesting — like images of their friends in historical scenes.
> “People get an enormous amount of enjoyment and satisfaction out of creating stuff if it’s low effort,” he said. People who want to be creative, but might not be very good at it, can turn to A.I. and find “a bunch of barriers removed.”
I think there needs to be a different frame with which to analyze this scenario. Yes, it's distasteful to sell a book about a living person without their consent. But who are we to deny people the enjoyment of entertaining themselves by researching, brainstorming, and publishing a document/report/book, whatever you want to call it?
I'm glad the author mentioned it in the article, but it's definitely a different world now.
I do wonder about what would happen if the LLM were to hallucinate negative facts about the person.
Like, if some asshat vibe-wrote a biography about me that claimed that I once kicked a sack full of puppies as a child, would I be able to sue the "author" for defamation? At least, would it even be worth it to pursue?
It won't stop the Slop-pocalypse, but at least, then, we're funneling some of that money back to ourselves.
If a person's going to buy some vibe-coded slop about me, at least let it be my vibe-coded slop about me.
The primary sources thing is a different matter; primary and secondary sources serve different purposes.
> Because romance sells, the professors thought it would be the genre most susceptible to A.I. intervention, but instead it was nonfiction...
I've been working mostly in erotica but have shifted to some nonfiction series lately.
I stopped for a while, but Fable and GPT 5.6 Sol have reinvigorated me.
I use Claude Code and other CLIs to manage the process, create first drafts, covers, research, etc. I heavily edit most things before I publish it.
The first question is probably one of profitability. So far I have made a little over $40, compared to probably $800 in AI subscription fees. So from that point of view it's been an absolute disaster.
If anyone is curious, I'd be happy to talk about any of it.
And that mention also gets to why authors often seek authorisation and why subjects often authorise them: Authors gain access to the subject and/or often their material, while the subject or their estates gains some control over how they are portrayed.
An "unauthorized" biography is not necessarily suspect but it is kind of a subgenre. Consider the difference between Isaacson's Musk biography and the work done by Kate and Ryan for Character Limit (https://www.amazon.com/Character-Limit-Elon-Destroyed-Twitte...) - not exactly a biography but the legwork is fundamentally different, reportorial or even adversarial where the narrative gets challenged, as opposed to accepted by the "authorized" Isaacson.
But we'd like to think the crowdsourced editing process gives it some more trustworthiness than a random person self-publishing a book
- Access to records, correspondence, and journals in the subject's possession
- explicit endorsement from the subject encourages their family, friends and colleagues to work with the author.
- Opportunities for the subject themselves to fact-check and contextualize the research.
That must be balanced against the fact that authorization also often provides the subject an opportunity to review the content, giving them a hand in crafting the narrative and/or suppressing unflattering details.
> If anyone is curious, I'd be happy to talk about any of it.
So you've spent $750 to publish AI slop.
I guess my question is... why? Why are you doing this? Like, what do you get out of it?
What internal drive moves you forward?
What sense of ownership/pride do you feel when you consider one of your works as "done"?
What would you do differently, if you were back at the starting block and had a budget of $800 to spend on writing nonfiction?
It was another outlet to explore using AI outside of my 9-5 programming. I've experimented with building custom agents to write stories, custom memory storage methods, custom workflows, etc. I've also used AI to write content management systems and experiment with that.
Like with software, even if "slop", there's a particular joy to having an idea come to life very very quickly. I can start with a premise, a character, a few scene ideas, and get a workable draft.
For some of my ideas (outside of erotica), there are no books that I can find that cover what I'm interested in. So in another sense it's like using AI to do research for my own enjoyment, but I'm also tightening it up and publishing it.
> What sense of ownership/pride do you feel when you consider one of your works as "done"?
It's diminished compared to things I've done completely by myself. But it's non-zero and it's positive. I've actually shipped products rather than sitting on them, and there's joy and pride in that.
But I do still put a lot of work into it, both on the software side managing it, but also manually hand-editing it. I rewrite things until it doesn't feel like AI to me, even if I also use AI to make some of those edits.
> What would you do differently, if you were back at the starting block and had a budget of $800 to spend on writing nonfiction?
The lessons are very similar to other lessons on here around software projects.
Like with game development, don't spend your time on the engine. I'd spend less time building scaffolding and structure software.
I'd also be more patient and wait for weekly resets instead of bumping up to the higher tier.
I'd also stick to fewer projects more closely until completion -- I have a queue of about 80 some books to go through before I can publish them.
And then I'd say spend more time on the marketing side of things.
Human review is the bottleneck at my office. I think software will be more and more AI written but also more and more AI validated.
For my nonfiction series, I have attempted adversarial agent fact checking, and I rerun it with newer models as they come out.
So: little human review of citations. I didn't expect this thread to shine on me favorably, but perhaps it's interesting to some.
Refusing data centers is a truly bipartisan issue where you even have say republican activists in Texas [1] vowing to vote for Talerico because of his anti-AI stances. It's definitely the easiest layup if you're running for office this cycle.
There's a book that recently came out that discusses these stories in detail:
https://www.upress.umn.edu/9781517917739/techno-negative/
You can only harass, poison, and kill a population for so long before they break then fight back. It's only going to get worse too as communities are making life even harder for people already on the knife's edge.
This is all easily preventable too but we see how tech leaders respond to being told no or forced to pay taxes to provide welfare services to communities.
[1] https://therealnews.com/data-centers-are-not-a-red-state-or-...
Intangibles and unpaid work get ignored not because they cannot be included but because doing so is harder.
Majority of artists hate it. Celebrities routinely comment how much they hate it. It's become a punchline to describe anything that sucks.
I'm sorry but force feeding something that is deeply unpopular ain't working. If it was, companies like OpenAI + Anthropic wouldn't be trying to so hard to expand their fill of corporate welfare.
You're in a bubble, like most of tech.
I wish that I could doomscroll literature instead of short videos, but the economics apparently don't work out.
Neat!
For the authors who are in it for the game, writing bottom of the barrel airport checkout line garbage, they were already trying to game people’s attention and they lost to a robot.
Which group of leaders do tech workers at big tech look up to again?
My experiments with AI writing are additive. Nothing I do with AI prevents human writers from writing.
I do think there's an argument that AI floods the field and makes human writing harder to find, and overall diminishes the commons.
But I want to provide value and am trying to with my experiments. The market will decide over time.