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.

    • It’s honestly heartbreaking considering how much work it must be to write a book and how scary it is especially with so many influencers and celebrities in the market now already making it harder for real authors to get noticed

    •  Baggins   ( @baggins@beehaw.org ) 
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      141 year ago

      This is my daughter at the moment. Just gone 21, at university studying Creative Writing. Thing is she was doing so well with Biology etc. Changed about 3 months into her first year. She’s had a couple of self published books on Amazon, nothing more than a dozen or so sales. She’s going to find it hard to find full time work etc. in her chosen field.

      • I thought about bringing up technical writing, then I realized that it’s a possibility that even that job isn’t safe within the next 5 years considering the promising development of Spiking Neural Net. This is something I would probably suggests to your daughter at this point that she should probably reconsider her chosen field and try to enter biology or some stable job.

        • I dunno, people have been trying to automate technical writing for at least 30 years. The results have been mostly garbage. I’m not sure an LLM is going to understand what’s going on any better than the folks doing this work now, it tends to involve lengthy discussions.

              • As in actual world, providing context to physics of things, providing logical association/evaluation, and so go on. It is basically something that supposed to help LLM get closer to understanding the “world” rather than just spewing out whatever the training dataset give it. It does have a direct implication for technical writing, because with stronger understanding of the things you wanted to write about in technical writing, LLM with World Model would basically auto-fill that.

                This is something that the researchers are pretty much all hand on deck working on to create.

                One example of the research involving this

        • And work with AI not against it. I mean if AI can quickly make a filler chapter that can be tweaked, more time can be used to make it all get together etc etc. Or so I figure.

              •  jmp242   ( @jmp242@sopuli.xyz ) 
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                51 year ago

                This seems way to stem biased imho. Interacting with chatgpt isn’t really a technical skill. And editing prose certainly isn’t. I think writers, especially creative writers would be way ahead on prompts (basically an outline) and massaging the output into one more cohesive whole. Good writers can probably also discriminate between powerful prose and overblown pompous language that GPT can output sometimes.

                The other thing is I would hope that good writers would never have a filler chapter. I don’t like needlessly padded content of any type, and if I notice that my ranking of the content goes down.

                • Having played with ChatGPT as a writer, I agree. It takes some learning to shape prompts. It might eventually be good for churning out first-draft-level writing more rapidly by fleshing out those sections where you usually head off to a search engine or just want to add some ‘scaffolding’ such as a location description you know won’t make it to the final book, but which lets you more clearly imagine the space.

                  It’s incredibly limited though, once you start to really get familiar with it!

      •  livus   ( @livus@kbin.social ) 
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        1 year ago

        I guess the silver lining is that academic creative writing is a bit of a pyramid scheme, so if she goes the route of writing “literary” stuff that gets published by her university press, she will probably be able to get work teaching creative writing…

        • As someone who’s been there done that, this is the worst time to try and get into academics in the humanities. English departments are downsizing everywhere. There’s an incoming “demographic collapse” coming to higher ed by 2026 - i.e. birth rates went down between 2008-2011 by a large degree and that cohort is 25-30% smaller than previous years. A lot of small, tuition dependent colleges are going to fold. In preparation, non-essential departments are cutting people like crazy. STEM and business are money makers, English and History aren’t.

          Best thing you can do with a creative writing degree is go into corporate communications/marketing. Find a gig at an agency and do creative writing on the side.

          • I quit a PhD program in a social science and this is absolutely true of basically any field about which you cannot say “You need a degree in X to get that job”.

            Additionally, colleges and universities are increasingly not hiring tenure-track professors and instead relying on adjuncts to teach their classes. Adjuncts make almost no money, get no benefits, have no job security from one term to another, and often have to adjunct at multiple institutions simultaneously to make ends meet. It’s basically the gig-ification of post-secondary education and it’s awful.

            I quit my PhD because I loved the field but it was very clear I wouldn’t be able to live comfortably working in that field. Now I’m a programmer and I made more money at my first non-academic job than my PhD supervisor did with tenure and a decade of seniority.

        • I think that’s her plan. She was a bit disillusioned with knock backs, until I sent her a list of 50 odd famous(?) writers that got rejected, some many times. Ernest Hemingway, Agatha Christie, J. K. Rowling, Isaac Asimov etc. That perked her up a bit ;-)

          •  livus   ( @livus@kbin.social ) 
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            Everyone gets rejections. Something that’s hard to fully appreciate when you’re starting out is how much quite good stuff gets rejected for bad fit or “we already have one of those” or just timing.

        • As someone who’s been there done that, this is the worst time to try and get into academics in the humanities. English departments are downsizing everywhere. There’s an incoming “demographic collapse” coming to higher ed by 2026 - i.e. birth rates went down between 2008-2011 by a large degree and that cohort is 25-30% smaller than previous years. A lot of small, tuition dependent colleges are going to fold. In preparation, non-essential departments are cutting people like crazy. STEM and business are money makers, English and History aren’t.

          Best thing you can do with a creative writing degree is go into corporate communications/marketing. Find a gig at an agency and do creative writing on the side.

    • Honest questions: What worthwhile alternatives exist already? If there are none, what can be done? What can be built to improve discoverability of authors while moderating what is visible?

      • Libraries and some bookstores are great about picking favorites and putting blurbs about them right on the shelf.

        Powell’s always has great recommendations, I’ve found lots of fantastic new reads there. I wish everyone had access to one in person, I love that store so much.

      •  jmp242   ( @jmp242@sopuli.xyz ) 
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        11 year ago

        I like to use goodreads, though that is still Amazon owned, it has more human curated lists and the like. I used to also use some of the subreddits to see what was recommended, I don’t know if lemmy yet has like a mystery book or sci fi book or whatever community.

      • As I have done with several others, I am going to point you to a website called Royal Road. Stories are free (generally, STUBs are stories that have moved at least a portion of their work to Amazon), Authors are hoping for Patreon support (which usually included Early Chapters at a minimum). I am one of said authors, link in my profile, same user name here and there.

        • I heard about Royal Road. I write and planned to put a complete novel on it. That being said, I saw reports of the community there being quite averse to LGBT content (it was in an old thread on r/hobbydrama).

          As an author there, does that match your experience? Did things improve if it used to be the case? Thanks!

          • I started writing my story back in September, and I do not seem to have more than the normal amount of trollish low ratings.

            My MCs are an M/F/F thruple, I have an explicitly stated F/F couple, a not yet explicitly stated M/M couple, and one of the female MCs has an earthy attitude and took full advantage of having magic birth control and disease prevention/curing available, before getting into this relationship. Only on her terms though, and she’s a warrior-monk who broke several bones of the last guy who tried to grab her when she walked away. :D

            There’s also a forum thread that is all about collating LGBTQ+ stories, since there is not a specific tag for them.

            I am sure there are some assholes there, but it appears welcoming enough to me. I could be missing something, but at the least they are not overt.

    • 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.

      • 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.

      • They are competing for attention of potential buyers. In terms of sales new authors are similar to these spammy nonsense books. Therefore when Amazon chooses a “new author to promote” chances are it’s going to be a spammy one instead of more genuine work. I agree that amazon should react to this as it should hurt their brand from both an authors and readers point of view

      • 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.

        • This is what I’m having trouble with: how are word salad books at the top of their “bestsellers” list - is anyone buying them? If someone is buying them, then are others buying them just because they appear on the bestseller list?
          It doesn’t pass the sniff test.

      • Already have for multiple subgenres. My subgenre (litrpg and progression fantasy) seems to almost exclusively rely on posting your book as a webnovel on Royalroad->creating a patreon->Batching up your chapters into a ebook on Amazon.

  • It’s the Dead Internet Theory in action. While it stays a conspiracy for the Internet as a whole, it is definitely true at particular websites. There are many communities which are just controlled by bots and have no real people there.

  •  megopie   ( @megopie@beehaw.org ) 
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    391 year ago

    This is going to be the real result of the large language model hype train, massive floods of basically worthless “content” made simply to pump metrics and fool investors.

    I’m not saying that there is no useful applications for the tech just that none of those are particularly marketable nor do they generate a lot of monetizable utility.

    And more importantly it’s not AI anymore than auto complete, spell check are. People insisting otherwise almost seem like they’re trying to start cults.

    • “Meanwhile the government” by Rentlar

      The company was founded in the late afternoon by its founder in a rush to create a more prominently displayed flag. I don’t want your kids to know when you get to work.

      …View this and much more riveting writing coming soon to the Amazon Bestsellers list!

    • So like the rest of Amazon then? Never used kindle, but Amazon for physical goods has been a dumpster fire for a while - completely overrun with dropshipped garbage, to the extent that it’s actually difficult now to find quality stuff in the sea of “brands” with random string of capital letter names, all using the same poorly photoshopped image…

      • Some large percentage of Amazon is just significantly marked up stuff you can get more direct via Temu or eBay. I never thought Amazon would reinvigorate Best Buy but if you want actual brand nane stuff, you have to go there. I also never thought it would be hard to discover actual brands online, but it is now.

      • The kindle eink reader is amazing and absolutely great. However I don’t use KU and rarely buy books on it. I mainly use my library and read the borrowed books on it. As a piece of hardware it’s one of the few Amazon builds well. I’m surprised too.

        • This. I own a basic Kindle because it only cost me $60, and while I could upgrade to a better e-reader from a less monopolistic company, it’d just be a bit of e-waste I don’t need to produce, and in the meantime Calibre + NoDRM / DeDRM means I can read books from anywhere on it.

    • I had kindle unlimited a decade ago and it was decent. Lots of good sci-fi and fantasy.

      Then overnight the entire catalog became “shape shifting billionaire stepbrother bear” and other trash. It’s like browsing your spam folder.

    •  blindsight   ( @blindsight@beehaw.org ) 
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      I haven’t found that, but I’m not using the Kindle storefront to find new books, so maybe that’s why?

      Or maybe it’s because KU and online web serials are the only popular spots for my favourite niche subgenre. Trad publishers don’t publish my favourite genres.

  • It really sucks that we’re facing the digital equivalent of climate change with regards to the internet and the content economy on top of the decline of the actual economy and actual climate change. It’s all so much.

  •  Snapz   ( @Snapz@beehaw.org ) 
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    241 year ago

    “Folding Ideas” does amazing work on YouTube around exposing grifters in well structured, long form explanations of their grifts.

    One of their videos looked into a group of growth hustler type folks, a pair of twins. Part of their scam was automating the process of creating fake books like this from start to finish to sell them online for passive income.

    Highly recommend anything this channel creates. Worth your time to have a focused sit to watch the journey unfold (especially if interested in the main subject of this post).

    https://youtu.be/biYciU1uiUw

    • I mean, most of my reading comes from authors who are literally only on amazon. And they’re only on amazon because it’s impossible to make a living trying to sell your book anywhere else. Brandon Sanderson has brought attention to this issue.

      I’m supporting indie authors in a sub-genre that you literally can’t even find in a physical bookstore. I get that bookstores are hurting, but I had to make a choice between small time authors and small time book stores.

      • Assuming you mean the sub-genres popular on Royal Road, sufficient Patreon support helps keep authors off of Amazon.

        But that gets expensive fast if you support multiple authors, so that’s hard to do too.

    •  Xerø   ( @Xero@infosec.pub ) 
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      21 year ago

      I like reading ebooks on my phone or tablet. Google and Amazon make acquisition easy in that regard.

      So yes I am part of ‘the problem’ whatever that means.

      • Good for you. Just remember that monopolies rarely have your or the little authors’ interests at the centre of their business plans. It’s seems to be mainly about owning big yachts and rocket companies.

  • If this indeed breaks Amazon then at least that is one silver lining of AI. It’s a shame indie authors are losing their platform, but they’ll find another.

          •  sab   ( @sab@kbin.social ) 
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            I guess the most intuitive way to federate is that you can follow @user@bookwyrm.social, after which all reviews published by the user will appear in your subscriptions. You can participate in the conversation as normal, and boost it to increase visibility across the Fediverse.

            If you want to do more sophisticated things like manage your library or post reviews, I think you’ll have to sign up for an instance of BookWyrm. :)

        • Unfortunately it is extremely sparse vs goodreads. Maybe someday it will catch up, but I really didn’t find it useful right now. Then again I am def a lurker on goodreads so where I read lists and reviews from doesn’t matter that much.

        • Not everything has an answer yet, for example Discord, there’s alternatives but none on Fedi. Also somebody earlier was mentioning fanfiction sites, there’s problems with all the existing ones and again, no Fedi alternative. However, not everything needs to be federated, look at Wikipedia for example.

          • The Discord alternative probably should be end-to-end encrypted, so I guess Matrix or something would be a better alternative than the Fediverse. Or just IRC if it’s public ;) In either case it’s probably a good example of where the Fediverse is not the solution (but decentralizzato might still be).

            Fanfiction I guess could be federated - I don’t know how these services work. Personally I’m waiting for a good federated TripAdvisor/Yelp alternative that can be integrated with OpemStreetMaps.

            Wikipedia is wonderful, and probably shouldn’t be decentralized. Then again, it’s one of the few good things about the contemporary internet (along with archive.org).

          • Honestly, AO3 is pretty based for what it is, especially when you consider how the two main competitors (FFN and Wattpad) are ad driven with all the problems that entails. Tho come to think of it, now I’m getting worried about FFN getting enshittified…

  • Well, that’s all the more reason to not try to monetize through Amazon. But Patreons seem to only be about 0.5% of the people who Follow a story on Royal Road. Well, I’ll have to keep working on more incentives I guess.