The question for me is: How do we deal with AI as authors now and in the future?
Should we avoid them, and also the retailers who sell such books?
How do we recognize AI, which is getting better and better, as authors and who will write books completely independently in the future?
Who will even have the ability to do that?
I think we have to deal with it pragmatically and get the information that is useful to us.
That is why I think this book is useful for my work, it complements it and I always read critically anyway.
I dunno if AI is getting that much better, it's real diminishing returns relative to how much money and data they're pumping it with. It's a bit of a boondoggle in the end with ugly political fantasies as part of its sales pitch.
It's one of those things where if people really want to fool you they can put effort in with the prompts they feed it, checking and iterating on the results, and manually touching up the final images... but they could do that with photoshop and older techniques anyways. It's real utility for end users is in quickly and cheaply generating sloppy bulk scams like those amazon books, and with that bulk no effort stuff the styles of image produced tend to be very easy to spot at a glance just from the colour tone and the way everything is edge lit every way at once - then a closer inspection confirms it, with many parts of the image being nonsense, foreground elements merging with background elements, parallel lines being not quite quite, bizarre perspective, and of course the infamous garbled smeary text, weird fingers, and extra teeth.
Actual LLM generated text is a little harder to spot at a glance. Usually it's made obvious from the context of where you're reading it. Any recently written article you'll reach through a search engine has a high probability, and the style of writing you usually see from it is endless preamble. I'm also convinced a chunk of eBay and classified ad item descriptions are AI now, written in an ad copy style as if some junk from the 70s was just manufactured as this season's hottest seller.
But yeah don't feel too embarrassed and try save face by defending that worthless book. It's just how things go, there's always going to be new styles of scams and fraud coming out.
And be cautious about getting swept up in the hype for AI, it is just latest boondoggle and likely not far from collapsing. The remarkable thing is how out of ideas the tech world seems to currently be such that they're all betting the farm on it despite it offering so little to an end user. So much stuff is desperately tied to it now that it's potentially going to be devastating when it does collapse. Like how Nvidia couldn't produce hardware fast enough to meet demand during the bitcoin boom, and it might've tanked their stock when bitcoins collapsed but now they're producing for the AI bubble... but then what? Is the future of tech just going to be forever pretending there's yet another dumb thing that everyone hates and requires a warehouse full of 1000 watt gamer PCs running full blast 24/7? I think even the most credulous investors might start to lose interest at some point.
The internet advertising world has been struggling with a decline in engagement over the last 5 years, and their big AI idea is to juice the stats with fake generated social media users. The comparison being made is to the "pivot to video" stuff from a decade ago that irreparably damaged alot of legacy news media as they gutted writing teams to try address facebook's the fabricated metrics, especially since it is facebook/meta/instagram doing the worst of it again. Desperately chasing the bubble with no real long term strategy, and no long term accountability for anyone making those decisions...
The people often making those decisions are quite... odd. You regularly see comments from them along the lines of "Finally, the computer can take out the tedium from writing/ drawing/ making music/ watching a movie/ having sex/ drinking on a friday night" which perhaps betrays that they think of such things as unenjoyable work, but it's probably more an attempt to depress the value of such work so they can profit off of offering you an inferior machine generated alternative. But I think there's also alot of personal resentment towards the idea of people's skills being valued... or people being liked in general. It's easy to forget that alot of tech guys and tech enthusiasts are horrible little nerds. There's billionaire dweebs out there no joke writing screeds along the lines of "the problem with the world is that women value muscle over intelligence!" and those same people are thrilled by the fantasy of AI putting cool artists and slick writers out of jobs, desperately trying to fund it into reality, and heavily subsidizing access of the tools for crooks and swindlers.
Anyways none of that AI garbage is worth humouring as 'the future' or anything worth putting in the effort to sincerely engage with unless your job involves chasing funding by throwing around buzzwords. Or if you can think of a good scam idea since that's the only real purpose for all that plagarized unreliable and often unintelligible crap, from faked articles to faked engagement metrics to faked markets.
