AI-Generated Books of Nonsense Are All Over Amazon's Bestseller Lists
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Amazon’s Kindle Unlimited bestseller list was full of books with titles like “Apricot bar code architecture” and “Jessica’s Attention” earlier this week.

My title might be a bit hyperbolic, but stuff like this worries me. I love to read and I love reading on a kindle. This has been going on for a while, but it has now reached absurd levels.

  • moon_matter@kbin.social
    2·
    1 year ago

    I wouldn’t classify these books as real competition. Nobody was really prepared for this, but it’s a very solvable problem and there’s no market for books full of word salad. I can’t see Amazon or any store tolerating the existence of a product that doesn’t sell.

    • Takatakatakatakatak@lemmy.dbzer0.com
      1·
      1 year ago

      I think you’ve misunderstood this. Listen to the two recent episodes of behind the bastards on this topic if you want to get a good handle on it.

      This is half the problem: these books ARE selling. I do try to be kind, but I can’t deny that there are a lot of idiots in the world who seem to have a fair amount of disposable income.

      They are buying these books for their children, or being duped by a pretty front cover, or a synopsis that sounds up their alley.

      The books aren’t ‘word salad’ so much as they are simply a cheap facsimile of actual stories. They have the elements of storytelling, munged together into a brain-breaking stew - but they aren’t word salad, they just aren’t human.

      This whole situation is making me fairly uncomfortable, but also making me laugh. I love books. I love literature. The idea that one of the largest retailers in the world: an almost tech-giant that made all of their money flogging books to the masses cannot seem to clear its platform of fake books ghost written by computers with a little unscrupulous human help is simultaneously delicious and disturbing as hell.

      I hate amazon with every fiber of my being, but this doesn’t feel like a good omen for my children.

    • Jamie@jamie.moe
      0·
      1 year ago

      What’s odd is that this isn’t an especially new thing in terms of possibly. Maybe if they wanted some veneer of viability for like, a paragraph or two, but any reader is going to catch on to what’s happening pretty fast.

      The titles are still nonsense enough that even a simple Markov chain could have made them. So I think the main issue at play is whatever they’re doing to exploit themselves to the top of the list.