The article premise is relatively banal, but the topic the article describes after, is extremely important (IMO).
This bits:
> Several companies defended their use of AI, telling The Post they use language tools not to replace human writers, but to [...], or to produce content that they otherwise wouldn’t
> We published a celebrity profile a month. Now we can do 10,000 a month.
describe an undergoing mass-transition of (a large amount of) publishing towards a commodity.
Cheap publishing has always existed, but it required somebody to actually write something, therefore, a minimum of creativity/knowledge has always been a requirement. With LLMs, any requirement is gone; publishing can be reduced to sending an input and checking the output.
Just as email caused an explosion in low-value business communication. Before email there were memos, which required a person to dictate the memo to a secretary (usually), then the secretary type it up, then the person to proofread/correct it, then the secretary to retype the final memo, send it to duplicating, and then send the duplicates to the mailroom for distribution to recipients.
Now because email makes all this effortless, we spend half our day (if not more) reading and responding to email, whereas before we might get a few memos a week at most.
AI will hopefully drown in its own output, as there will be too much of it for humans to handle.
> Cheap publishing has always existed, but it required somebody to actually write something, therefore, a minimum of creativity/knowledge has always been a requirement.
Really cheap publishing is churned out in such poor quality that I don't see anyone posessing any creativity or knowledge to speak of wanting to do such mind numbing job. The tabloid articles I sometimes have the misfortune to stumble upon are so devoid of any spark of either, that I genuinely believe that using an AI would improve the quality of it.
> publishing can be reduced to sending an input and checking the output
Checking the output takes a considerable amount of effort if you want it to be factual. Don't trivialise it, it's what is left for humans to do when AI gets to work. For example coding is not much faster with chatGPT than manually, most of the time is spend debugging anyway, not writing code.
Makes me wonder who is going to be reading all this, though I guess costs mean that producing really long-tail (in terms of readership numbers) publications becomes profitable?
But, I'm sure the people who wrote the book mentioned in the article can rest easy: creativity, knowledge, and originality are still valuable, and LLMs are not (yet) able to reproduce those.
A lot of technology disruptions happen by a "bait and switch" approach. A new technology appear that promises to produce something at a much higher efficiency and much lower cost. Only after it already took over the market did people discover that it was not the same product. The disruption, while often has genuine merit, also sneakily changes some fundamental assumptions that people held over the product.
This is not new: for example, products of industrial farming are often significantly different from products of traditional farming. However, it is a better product in the sense of market competition. This mechanism is considered the engine of growth for society.
I think products that consists of human communication are fundamentally different: this assumption of "disruption is good" is more likely to be false. Even existing technology that aim at changing human communications, like emails and social networks, end up having serious negative effects. AI based culture and communication product is changing one of the basic assumptions of human communications: that the communication is produced by a human. I can't help but being sad and pessimistic about that future.
I think I understand what you mean about farming. The toppings you buy at subway that are essentially water in some limp cell matrix bear little resemblance to vegetables. But objectively, modern farming had been providing more and more for us from the neolithic onwards and is responsible for how so many of us can be fed.
A more recent example of bait and switch would be Uber and Airbnb which started with some promise (cheaper, easier to use, more accountability) but once you add in all the chestertons fences that were part of the legacy industries they "disrupted" - safety, paying market wages, profitability, they revert back to the legacy system.
The fascinating thing about is that while we will obviously see a rise of crap overall, organic labor will become even more expensive, because actual expertise and knowledge will be that much rarer.
I try not to see it in absolutes. It appears that it will be a big shift on how things are done, but it will also further change my perception of privacy. Just the other day I read a story about Wendy's doing a test run in their drive through. I shiver at all that information hoovered down at every single step. And here I was thinking Transmetropolitan was a crazy fantasy.
Your negative takeaway is entirely based on perspective. Nothing you mentioned is necessarily negative. Take your mention of email for example. Sure, it’s introduced some new annoyances. Its net effect of providing an instant long-form asynchronous communication is hugely positive.
On the “was this made by a human” front, I think society will adapt. LLMs will introduce bigger problems than email (I’m already dreading the hellscape of fake product reviews) but the net effect will be hugely positive.
The problem comes back to incentives. If LLMs are trained on existing material, but no one pays the person who wrote the original material, we have an incentive conundrum coming.
AIs have such a low cost to producing content that even if everyone agrees human-written is better, the cost to output ratio is hard to compete with. People are already loathe to pay for written content, even if it's written by a Pulitzer-prize winner.
This will result in fewer writers finding it to be a viable source of income, which results in less human-generated content, and soon we'll just find ourselves in some AI-content apocalypse.
In my experience at least, most of the best content is not produced due to financial incentives. I'd go so far as to say that those financial incentives slowly but surely erode everything they touch, whether it is Youtube influencers chasing ad dollars or Hollywood releasing Avengers: Fast and Furious XVII. I like my large capital projects like Game of Thrones as much as the next guy but they're not at risk from LLMs to begin with and the people who create the best content tend to do it for the love of it hence the starving artist stereotype.
People want to create and whether they do it by putting paper to pen or by curating LLM output until it says or draws what they want it to. I'd rather all this effort spent on worrying about LLMs be spent on promoting the arts and entertainment for its own sake, so it can be funded outside the usual ratrace bullshit.
The hard part is going to be filtering through the content anyway, so why not curate it at the creator level with an extensive arts patronage program!
I would be less concerned about who gets paid, and more concerned about our civilization's long-term decline with human thought leadership. We won't be writing the story of our humanity anymore.
This has nothing to do with ChatGPT and everything to do with Amazon tolerating counterfeits and plagiarism.
Also, how is this a replica if it was released before the original book? Is it just title squatting or has someone stolen his draft and regurgitated it through an LLM?
> This has nothing to do with ChatGPT and everything to do with Amazon tolerating counterfeits and plagiarism.
How can you say that it's got nothing to do with ChatGPT and it is a counterfeit or plagiarized work? I'm not squaring the circle here. Do you believe he didn't produce the counterfeit or plagiarized work using ChatGPT after all?
Perhaps you're saying ChatGPT is just a tool, which would be fair enough, but we frequently condemn toolmakers for enabling criminal behavior: gun manufacturers, pharmaceutical companies producing opioids, etc.
I see in the news today that the city of Baltimore is even suing some car manufacturers for enabling auto theft by not having enough anti-theft precautions.
In that light, wouldn't you say that ChatGPT at least makes it easier to produce counterfeit or plagiarized works, and that even if they are not legally culpable, they are in some sense enabling behavior that would not happen otherwise?
Draft stealing is absolutely a thing that happens. Not infrequently, an author will shop a book around to different publishers, and then a publisher will like the title and pay someone less to rewrite it than buying it and get it to market before the original. There's been a few relatively high profile cases of this in the media over the years.
Same shit happens to scriptwriters and music artists.
Yes, title-squatting a pre-order book. Pre-orders can have information about the table of contents, which makes it easier to churn out chatGPT content.
Personally I think textbooks should not have pre orders.
Speaking of ChatGPT-authored books: The example that someone posted on HN last month ("Tom Lesley has published 40 books in 2023, all with 100% positive reviews" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35687868) is still up on Amazon despite the widespread publicity, fake reviews and all.
Note that AI-generated books have been on the horizon for a long time, well before ChatGPT appeared. Ingram, one of the biggest print-on-demand services in the United States, specifically banned "Books created using artificial intelligence or automated processes" in early 2020 (https://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/industry-news/m...).
Amazon clearly doesn't have a handle on the problem, and its book catalogue and Kindle Unlimited will increasingly be flooded with junk.
They allow self publishing so they are already flooded with junk. I don’t see the problem though since it’s not like you have to actually dig through a pile of books when you have a search engine and can get recommendations from other sources
I searched for childrens bedtime stories on Amazon a few months ago. Found some reasonably priced ones that seemed promising. I used the preview feature before I bought.
They were like ... regurgitated ... crap. I couldn't figure out if they just non-native english speakers writing stories, or if it was sort of AI produced work. It was just horrendous.
I figured that they were just spamming junk and if they caught a few people unaware that bought it then it must be profitable for them.
Self-publishing means people frequently don't have a proofreader or editor, and most adults like to think they wouldn't need a proofreader or editor for a kids book because they're an adult.
There's also a significant trend of people who are dyslexic writing kids books because they want to feel that dyslexia doesn't hold them back from achieving their goals.
Everybody needs a proofreader and editor, especially people who think they don't, or think Grammarly is an adequate substitute for a human being.
The most amusing anecdote is almost everybody says "I don't think it needs much doing", then they get given a manuscript with 1,000+ recommended changes and corrections on a 32 page kids book.
Thanks, Bob, I came here for this comment. Perhaps to NYP it's a rare subject, but to me, it's trivially banal and current. There should be no surprise at all that multiple books with this or extremely similar titles would exist. But outside the tech domain it's understandably obscure, but so is the intended audience when viewed through that lens.
Likewise, the guy is trying to push out a book in an age when people are just going to ask GPT what is X and get a dialog going. (full of hallucinations, but still!)
Getting this juicy PR is the best thing that ever happened to him.
I can't find "Automating DevOps with GitLab CI/CD Pipelines" by Marie Karpos on Amazon.com. I'm guessing Cowell's publisher (Pakt) had something to do with that. Or maybe Amazon took it down to avoid more bad press?
I don't understand how companies that use fully automated AI to churn out content can survive long term. Why wouldn't I just go straight to the AI to get what I want?
Also, I see an opportunity for publishing brands to set themselves apart from AI generated stuff and charge a premium for that. There might be fewer of them in the future (e.g. I don't mind reading auto-generated celebrity profiles) but I predict the New Yorker and The Atlantic will exist a decade from now.
The amount of value that ChatGPT has given me is enough where I don't care at all if my own tutorials and documentation has been scraped to expand the model's knowledge. I'm not profiting off my work either way, and if helps people understand things it's honestly a plus.
Although I definitely understand the frustration from people having their copyrighted material used to compete against them, the pushback from artists against image generation from copyrighted data sets is 100% warranted.
how is that a replica? it's just another book with the same title? the chosen title "Automating DevOps with GitLab CI/CD Pipelines" is so dull that I'm not surprised it was generated by the AI as well, probably not even the latest tech for that. I'd expect ChatGPT to come up with a better title
[+] [-] pizza234|2 years ago|reply
This bits:
> Several companies defended their use of AI, telling The Post they use language tools not to replace human writers, but to [...], or to produce content that they otherwise wouldn’t
> We published a celebrity profile a month. Now we can do 10,000 a month.
describe an undergoing mass-transition of (a large amount of) publishing towards a commodity.
Cheap publishing has always existed, but it required somebody to actually write something, therefore, a minimum of creativity/knowledge has always been a requirement. With LLMs, any requirement is gone; publishing can be reduced to sending an input and checking the output.
"Interesting" times!
[+] [-] ctvo|2 years ago|reply
I'll pay extra for a guarantee (somehow, this is your value proposition) that it was written by a human without the help of generative AI.
[+] [-] SoftTalker|2 years ago|reply
Now because email makes all this effortless, we spend half our day (if not more) reading and responding to email, whereas before we might get a few memos a week at most.
AI will hopefully drown in its own output, as there will be too much of it for humans to handle.
[+] [-] senko|2 years ago|reply
Really cheap publishing is churned out in such poor quality that I don't see anyone posessing any creativity or knowledge to speak of wanting to do such mind numbing job. The tabloid articles I sometimes have the misfortune to stumble upon are so devoid of any spark of either, that I genuinely believe that using an AI would improve the quality of it.
[+] [-] visarga|2 years ago|reply
Checking the output takes a considerable amount of effort if you want it to be factual. Don't trivialise it, it's what is left for humans to do when AI gets to work. For example coding is not much faster with chatGPT than manually, most of the time is spend debugging anyway, not writing code.
[+] [-] andrewjl|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Findeton|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ResearchCode|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] throwuwu|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] clnq|2 years ago|reply
Of course, with capitalistic incentives, we will use it for spam and garbage.
[+] [-] JustSomeNobody|2 years ago|reply
This is just using computers to do the same. Now anyone can write the next Borne novel.
[+] [-] kzz102|2 years ago|reply
This is not new: for example, products of industrial farming are often significantly different from products of traditional farming. However, it is a better product in the sense of market competition. This mechanism is considered the engine of growth for society.
I think products that consists of human communication are fundamentally different: this assumption of "disruption is good" is more likely to be false. Even existing technology that aim at changing human communications, like emails and social networks, end up having serious negative effects. AI based culture and communication product is changing one of the basic assumptions of human communications: that the communication is produced by a human. I can't help but being sad and pessimistic about that future.
[+] [-] version_five|2 years ago|reply
A more recent example of bait and switch would be Uber and Airbnb which started with some promise (cheaper, easier to use, more accountability) but once you add in all the chestertons fences that were part of the legacy industries they "disrupted" - safety, paying market wages, profitability, they revert back to the legacy system.
[+] [-] A4ET8a8uTh0|2 years ago|reply
I try not to see it in absolutes. It appears that it will be a big shift on how things are done, but it will also further change my perception of privacy. Just the other day I read a story about Wendy's doing a test run in their drive through. I shiver at all that information hoovered down at every single step. And here I was thinking Transmetropolitan was a crazy fantasy.
[+] [-] comfypotato|2 years ago|reply
On the “was this made by a human” front, I think society will adapt. LLMs will introduce bigger problems than email (I’m already dreading the hellscape of fake product reviews) but the net effect will be hugely positive.
[+] [-] CKMo|2 years ago|reply
AIs have such a low cost to producing content that even if everyone agrees human-written is better, the cost to output ratio is hard to compete with. People are already loathe to pay for written content, even if it's written by a Pulitzer-prize winner.
This will result in fewer writers finding it to be a viable source of income, which results in less human-generated content, and soon we'll just find ourselves in some AI-content apocalypse.
[+] [-] akiselev|2 years ago|reply
People want to create and whether they do it by putting paper to pen or by curating LLM output until it says or draws what they want it to. I'd rather all this effort spent on worrying about LLMs be spent on promoting the arts and entertainment for its own sake, so it can be funded outside the usual ratrace bullshit.
The hard part is going to be filtering through the content anyway, so why not curate it at the creator level with an extensive arts patronage program!
[+] [-] hosh|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] stocknoob|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] eastbound|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] senko|2 years ago|reply
Also, how is this a replica if it was released before the original book? Is it just title squatting or has someone stolen his draft and regurgitated it through an LLM?
[+] [-] gumballindie|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] karaterobot|2 years ago|reply
How can you say that it's got nothing to do with ChatGPT and it is a counterfeit or plagiarized work? I'm not squaring the circle here. Do you believe he didn't produce the counterfeit or plagiarized work using ChatGPT after all?
Perhaps you're saying ChatGPT is just a tool, which would be fair enough, but we frequently condemn toolmakers for enabling criminal behavior: gun manufacturers, pharmaceutical companies producing opioids, etc.
I see in the news today that the city of Baltimore is even suing some car manufacturers for enabling auto theft by not having enough anti-theft precautions.
In that light, wouldn't you say that ChatGPT at least makes it easier to produce counterfeit or plagiarized works, and that even if they are not legally culpable, they are in some sense enabling behavior that would not happen otherwise?
[+] [-] hammyhavoc|2 years ago|reply
Same shit happens to scriptwriters and music artists.
[+] [-] diebeforei485|2 years ago|reply
Personally I think textbooks should not have pre orders.
[+] [-] ilamont|2 years ago|reply
Note that AI-generated books have been on the horizon for a long time, well before ChatGPT appeared. Ingram, one of the biggest print-on-demand services in the United States, specifically banned "Books created using artificial intelligence or automated processes" in early 2020 (https://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/industry-news/m...).
Amazon clearly doesn't have a handle on the problem, and its book catalogue and Kindle Unlimited will increasingly be flooded with junk.
[+] [-] throwuwu|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] falcolas|2 years ago|reply
And our compensation for this is increased KU subscription prices.
[+] [-] david422|2 years ago|reply
They were like ... regurgitated ... crap. I couldn't figure out if they just non-native english speakers writing stories, or if it was sort of AI produced work. It was just horrendous.
I figured that they were just spamming junk and if they caught a few people unaware that bought it then it must be profitable for them.
[+] [-] hammyhavoc|2 years ago|reply
Self-publishing means people frequently don't have a proofreader or editor, and most adults like to think they wouldn't need a proofreader or editor for a kids book because they're an adult.
There's also a significant trend of people who are dyslexic writing kids books because they want to feel that dyslexia doesn't hold them back from achieving their goals.
Everybody needs a proofreader and editor, especially people who think they don't, or think Grammarly is an adequate substitute for a human being.
The most amusing anecdote is almost everybody says "I don't think it needs much doing", then they get given a manuscript with 1,000+ recommended changes and corrections on a 32 page kids book.
[+] [-] RobertDeNiro|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] JohnFen|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jasonm23|2 years ago|reply
Likewise, the guy is trying to push out a book in an age when people are just going to ask GPT what is X and get a dialog going. (full of hallucinations, but still!)
Getting this juicy PR is the best thing that ever happened to him.
[+] [-] meow_mix|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] simonw|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] squarefoot|2 years ago|reply
Next step will be creating celebrities that do not exist, and I don't mean Hatsune Miku or similar virtual ones.
[+] [-] WalterBright|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bluescrn|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Paul-Craft|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] anonymousiam|2 years ago|reply
It probably helps that Bezos is the majority shareholder of both The Post and Amazon.
[+] [-] zwieback|2 years ago|reply
Also, I see an opportunity for publishing brands to set themselves apart from AI generated stuff and charge a premium for that. There might be fewer of them in the future (e.g. I don't mind reading auto-generated celebrity profiles) but I predict the New Yorker and The Atlantic will exist a decade from now.
[+] [-] andrewstuart|2 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] danjoredd|2 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] bookofjoe|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] diebeforei485|2 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] kevin_thibedeau|2 years ago|reply