GenAI that imitates human art is the definition of an anti-invention. If an invention is a new innovation that improves something for the human experience, an anti-invention is a new innovation that makes life worse.
This is just one of several areas where GenAI has been harmful and should start getting regulated like digital drugs.
I think there are other digital technologies that are also a lot like drugs and deserve similar regulation. I.e. if your social media company decides it wants to be a platform and insert stuff to inflame you or generate more engagement....it's a drug, not a tool for social connection..
I think there are ways you could serve ads and make money as a business, just not as much money, and not be basically a drug. The social media giants choose not to do this of course and will have to be forced.
I am distinctly less libertarian/classically liberal/etc. than the average user of HN though. So I understand that this opinion is likely to get me downvoted. I prefer to think that I live in the real world and have seen the damage these things have caused and am not in a tech-only friend group bubble.
> Amazon spends a lot of time and effort trying to prevent these [fake] books from getting posted,” Mary Rasenberger, the CEO of the Authors Guild, told me, “but it’s always a game of catch-up.”
Do they really? They take a cut; they have incentives to let people get scammed.
Yes, it's a naive assumption that quality of the presented material doesn't impact consumer behavior, if they get flooded with loads of garbage books and people can't find good book they enjoy they'll stop shopping at Amazon and it doesn't matter if they make money off the slop. It's the same reason Youtube has quality filters for algorithmic feeds, if the stream gets too polluted with bad videos people will watch fewer videos.
It's exactly the same process that's causing people to avoid expensive purchases on Amazon due to the number of fake products that have infiltrated their supply. People move on if they're sold a lot of bunk goods from a place.
I don't know. For years Amazon has had a fraudulent item listing problem to the point where it's hard to trust them. They have made no effort that I have seen to solve it. I mean, why would they, their sales haven't declined.
So, I am skeptical books will be any different than all those knock-off drop-shipped items.
I often trust AliEx more than Amazon these days. At least one of the two isn't pretending not to be what it is.
Plus Amazon has a long history of screwing over sellers. TL;DR if your product is actually successful, they'll make their own "Amazon Basics" version of your product, then deprioritize you (or even ban you over an excuse). They do this a lot. There's a lot more than just this, it's just an example.
I'd say that's hard to judge from the top line sales numbers, their broad sales could remain fine even when they lose larger rare purchases if they're bringing in enough new customers that are fine with only buying the slop.
And yet look at all the non-book products being sold on Amazon that are all garbage. Its the same slop problem and has been for a while, but they don't seem to be addressing that either. I have to assume it doesn't impact their bottom line as much as we think it should, consumers don't (or can't) care as much as we would hope.
> Amazon lets individuals upload a maximum of six books a week, allowing for endless churn.
That's a book a day (give or take), per account. No human author is publishing a book per day.[0]
It's interesting to me how little the incumbent platforms for digital content seemingly have been able to do in combating the tidal, exponential shift in submissions.
I just spent a month developing a Shopify App, on the side, for fun. When I launched it a couple of weeks ago, I discovered an app doing the same thing as mine with an identical name had also been approved and released a week prior.
How do people think that distribution will change now that supply has increased (at least) tenfold? If the consensus on X.com is to be believed, it's all about personal brand. This used to be the case, but perhaps 80% of it. Is conventional discovery dead now?
[0] - If this includes organisations, like publishing houses, then fair enough. But realistically we should be able to distinguish actual authors.
As if human didn’t produce slop, or write factually wrong things before AI?
I understand the sentiment, but if a human name is on the author field, then I don’t care if they used AI or a type writer to produce it. They’re responsible for however I feel no matter what, not AI or any tools they might have used. AI will not and can not take away authorship, because humans are responsible for the work they put out. Plagiarism is another issue, which can also happen without AI.
Its the reverse turing test: can a human convince another human (or bot screener) that they are human?
We need legislation banning ai from imitating/impersonating humans and creating confusion about whats real. And people using ai to make their art need to label it or else theyre just plagarizing
I mean, even ghost writers arent making the world a better place
We could just say "AI has destroyed trust" and it's accurate.
First hand experiences myself:
I can't commission an artist without questioning if they are using AI, which isn't acceptable in the projects I am commissioning for.
I can't trust that my coworkers are actually testing the crap they're generating before wasting my time with runbooks that aren't even validated. It was bad enough that people miss important steps with assumed knowledge, but now we have that amplified by these types of documents that are no being AI generated.
I can't trust that my code wont be sucked up by some money greedy company at speeds unheard of before and benefit someone with out any credit to me doing something novel or interesting.
Even worse, I can't trust the smart people to not be idiots either. How many engineers do you know that have completely outsourced all the thinking to the robot, while we know fully that it's closer to a slot machine than it is a thinking machine?
Maybe even worse than that is the companies thinking they can reduce 10% of their workforce and compensate with LLMs. It's absolutely laughable, because I witnessed it first hand. Company I worked at fired my recruiter and the guy that was going to be my boss before my start date. My onboarding was practically non-existent and nobody wants to train their newbies anymore. The fear of being axed from your job at the first thing that MIGHT make a profit is also high. To every company that retained me through their layoffs, joke is on them, people like me want to see stability and that's just fiscal irresponsibility they're signalling.
Just some thoughts to illustrate it's not just writing. Trust is destroyed in any creative and professional en devour at this point.
"Maybe even worse than that is the companies thinking they can reduce 10% of their workforce and compensate with LLMs"
It's significantly dumber than that. Companies are paying to pour all of their domain and institutional knowledge, processes, and data into the training pipeline of tools their competitors use. Even better, they ignore the fact that as these tools gain competency the owners of these systems are guaranteed to start spinning up integrated industry verticals in direct competition.
Tried to tell that to my executive suite and they told me I was being ridiculous. Showed them OpenAIs "digital program management" for USG projects and it was like they suddenly went blind. Half a beat later it was like I never uttered a word and they were back to talking about "becoming a leader in AI." We're a fucking consulting company that can't even put small, hand written projects written by domain experts in front of the client because of our joke of an IT department. We're never going to credibly be "leaders in AI."
Trust in media corporations died a long time ago, AI has just accelerated the trend. When human ‘journalists’ write to a script handed to them by the media’s editors and owners (eg ‘write articles that convince our readers to maintain their confidence in the <dot-com, subprime, AI> market’ or ‘write articles that convince our readers that <regime change, tariffs> is needed’), and the result is a debacle, then trust is eroded and questions arise about the journalist’s integrity and/or intelligence. Then the owners and editors find new fresh journalists to generate new stories to ‘restore trust’.
With AI, the editors and owners can just send their scripts to a machine and it’ll write the narrative as requested - but without a human face on that article. However, most readers would not accept such material as trustworthy.
There is another reason that AI reduces trust in media, which is that AI now makes it trivial to trace media ownership up the tree to the consequential owners, look at their other economic interests, and examine if the articles they print tend to favor those economic interests. Applying this analytical framework to the Atlantic itself is an interesting exercise.
Q1: Would it be entirely unfair to characterize the Atlantic as ‘yet another mouthpiece of the neoliberal project instantiated in the United States in the 1970s’?
I don't think there ever was generic trust between writers and readers.
Trusting the written word just because it's written by someone or published by some newspaper was a huge mistake before AI was in the picture.
The trust was exploited by many actors with agenda - politicians, journalists, academics and just plain grifters publishing another "self-help" book.
You could get a glimpse when a newspaper, even a very respected one published an article about your domain of expertise - I am sure I wasn't the only one who realized that if an incomplete, simplistic or just plain wrong text could be reviewed and published then probably a big part of other work is of similar quality - you are just not in position to judge it so you naturally trust it.
Sadly the same goes for academic world - millions of papers gets published - a lot of them not worth the paper they are written on. You are just rarely in position to say.
What AI has done to it is actually a favor: it exposed what was always there but covered well enough to deceive big part of the population.
Now we need to reevaluate. Come back to fundamental mechanisms. Can the claims be verified? Maybe in formal manner. If not who the author or someone authorizing the text is. What did they achieve in their life? What experiences they have lived through? What work have they done? What incentives do they have to publish it? If you can't answer those questions the text is irrelevant as a source of information. It turns out not everyone is worth listening to.
It was always the case. It's just easier to see now.
This is multi-faceted and I agree that AI is destroying some levels of trust, but many of the publications on the Internet were never deserving of trust anyway so I'd describe it as formalizing or recognizing distrust or lack of credibility and, in a manner of speaking now that the tide is going out we can see who has been swimming naked.
One of the other facets is the idea that trust is now being lost due to AI. It's unfortunate that it seems that publications like The Atlantic (and others) are now going to scapegoat the lost of trust that they've earned over the last decade or so to be about AI when it's actually about bad, biased writing with a default point of view, and lack of intellectual honesty and an inability to facilitate intellectual debate and discussion.
As some of these publications continue to spiral into irrelevancy I think what is a bit tragic is they'll never really understand why. They'll blame AI, which will likely destroy all but the top-tier sites, but in reality the quality of the writing and honesty went down the drain next to their ad-filled garbage pages and other spam.
> Ever since, I’d worried that the misrepresentation might somehow have a real-life impact
Doubt is good for the brain & mind.
But either the author is AI or she--Rachel Kadish, born in '69--needed something AI related to write about.
There is no trust between writers & readers. People either distrust and scrutinize or they like or dislike how the reading went. Some don't even judge but just shrug it off whatever impact the reading might have had.
The problem is that the AI conversation is reinforcing cultural polarity, especially among experts and people who are at least well enough off, so any methods to ignore the actual problems, which have been ignored in the past by most people almost by convention, are welcome and this article seems, at least to me, to be the result of one of these applied methods.
> There is no trust between writers & readers. People either distrust and scrutinize or they like or dislike how the reading went. Some don't even judge but just shrug it off whatever impact the reading might have had.
I interpret this more as an underlying social contract: Both writing a book and reading it used to be laborious. Now they're not.
Reaching out to an author about specific details used to mean you've deeply engaged with the work. Writing a book used to mean you spent lots of time understanding and writing about the topic.
Neither is now true, so it makes it harder to distinguish what's worth paying attention to.
I've definitely seen this happen with myself. When I shop for books, I do extra research into the author and publisher for anything published after 2022.
Agreed I also think, what unique perspective am I getting if it's just AI? If I want to know what AI thinks I could ask it myself, I want more diverse opinions.
> There is no trust between writers & readers. People either distrust and scrutinize or they like or dislike how the reading went. Some don't even judge but just shrug it off whatever impact the reading might have had.
That suggests that writer reputation and the reader’s past experience are of no importance. But before you even get to read something, you have to decide to do so. On what basis? And how might a bad experience colour future decisions?
GenAI that imitates human art is the definition of an anti-invention. If an invention is a new innovation that improves something for the human experience, an anti-invention is a new innovation that makes life worse.
This is just one of several areas where GenAI has been harmful and should start getting regulated like digital drugs.
I think there are other digital technologies that are also a lot like drugs and deserve similar regulation. I.e. if your social media company decides it wants to be a platform and insert stuff to inflame you or generate more engagement....it's a drug, not a tool for social connection..
I think there are ways you could serve ads and make money as a business, just not as much money, and not be basically a drug. The social media giants choose not to do this of course and will have to be forced.
I am distinctly less libertarian/classically liberal/etc. than the average user of HN though. So I understand that this opinion is likely to get me downvoted. I prefer to think that I live in the real world and have seen the damage these things have caused and am not in a tech-only friend group bubble.
> Amazon spends a lot of time and effort trying to prevent these [fake] books from getting posted,” Mary Rasenberger, the CEO of the Authors Guild, told me, “but it’s always a game of catch-up.”
Do they really? They take a cut; they have incentives to let people get scammed.
Probably the same amount of effort spent on trying to prevent fake SSDs and usb drives.
Yes, it's a naive assumption that quality of the presented material doesn't impact consumer behavior, if they get flooded with loads of garbage books and people can't find good book they enjoy they'll stop shopping at Amazon and it doesn't matter if they make money off the slop. It's the same reason Youtube has quality filters for algorithmic feeds, if the stream gets too polluted with bad videos people will watch fewer videos.
It's exactly the same process that's causing people to avoid expensive purchases on Amazon due to the number of fake products that have infiltrated their supply. People move on if they're sold a lot of bunk goods from a place.
I don't know. For years Amazon has had a fraudulent item listing problem to the point where it's hard to trust them. They have made no effort that I have seen to solve it. I mean, why would they, their sales haven't declined.
So, I am skeptical books will be any different than all those knock-off drop-shipped items.
I often trust AliEx more than Amazon these days. At least one of the two isn't pretending not to be what it is.
Plus Amazon has a long history of screwing over sellers. TL;DR if your product is actually successful, they'll make their own "Amazon Basics" version of your product, then deprioritize you (or even ban you over an excuse). They do this a lot. There's a lot more than just this, it's just an example.
I'd say that's hard to judge from the top line sales numbers, their broad sales could remain fine even when they lose larger rare purchases if they're bringing in enough new customers that are fine with only buying the slop.
And yet look at all the non-book products being sold on Amazon that are all garbage. Its the same slop problem and has been for a while, but they don't seem to be addressing that either. I have to assume it doesn't impact their bottom line as much as we think it should, consumers don't (or can't) care as much as we would hope.
> Amazon lets individuals upload a maximum of six books a week, allowing for endless churn.
That's a book a day (give or take), per account. No human author is publishing a book per day.[0]
It's interesting to me how little the incumbent platforms for digital content seemingly have been able to do in combating the tidal, exponential shift in submissions.
I just spent a month developing a Shopify App, on the side, for fun. When I launched it a couple of weeks ago, I discovered an app doing the same thing as mine with an identical name had also been approved and released a week prior.
How do people think that distribution will change now that supply has increased (at least) tenfold? If the consensus on X.com is to be believed, it's all about personal brand. This used to be the case, but perhaps 80% of it. Is conventional discovery dead now?
[0] - If this includes organisations, like publishing houses, then fair enough. But realistically we should be able to distinguish actual authors.
As if human didn’t produce slop, or write factually wrong things before AI?
I understand the sentiment, but if a human name is on the author field, then I don’t care if they used AI or a type writer to produce it. They’re responsible for however I feel no matter what, not AI or any tools they might have used. AI will not and can not take away authorship, because humans are responsible for the work they put out. Plagiarism is another issue, which can also happen without AI.
http://archive.today/8sikZ
Its the reverse turing test: can a human convince another human (or bot screener) that they are human?
We need legislation banning ai from imitating/impersonating humans and creating confusion about whats real. And people using ai to make their art need to label it or else theyre just plagarizing
I mean, even ghost writers arent making the world a better place
it seems like a slam dunk that we should own our likeness legally, but the scam lobby is very powerful at the moment
We could just say "AI has destroyed trust" and it's accurate.
First hand experiences myself:
I can't commission an artist without questioning if they are using AI, which isn't acceptable in the projects I am commissioning for.
I can't trust that my coworkers are actually testing the crap they're generating before wasting my time with runbooks that aren't even validated. It was bad enough that people miss important steps with assumed knowledge, but now we have that amplified by these types of documents that are no being AI generated.
I can't trust that my code wont be sucked up by some money greedy company at speeds unheard of before and benefit someone with out any credit to me doing something novel or interesting.
Even worse, I can't trust the smart people to not be idiots either. How many engineers do you know that have completely outsourced all the thinking to the robot, while we know fully that it's closer to a slot machine than it is a thinking machine?
Maybe even worse than that is the companies thinking they can reduce 10% of their workforce and compensate with LLMs. It's absolutely laughable, because I witnessed it first hand. Company I worked at fired my recruiter and the guy that was going to be my boss before my start date. My onboarding was practically non-existent and nobody wants to train their newbies anymore. The fear of being axed from your job at the first thing that MIGHT make a profit is also high. To every company that retained me through their layoffs, joke is on them, people like me want to see stability and that's just fiscal irresponsibility they're signalling.
Just some thoughts to illustrate it's not just writing. Trust is destroyed in any creative and professional en devour at this point.
"Maybe even worse than that is the companies thinking they can reduce 10% of their workforce and compensate with LLMs"
It's significantly dumber than that. Companies are paying to pour all of their domain and institutional knowledge, processes, and data into the training pipeline of tools their competitors use. Even better, they ignore the fact that as these tools gain competency the owners of these systems are guaranteed to start spinning up integrated industry verticals in direct competition.
Tried to tell that to my executive suite and they told me I was being ridiculous. Showed them OpenAIs "digital program management" for USG projects and it was like they suddenly went blind. Half a beat later it was like I never uttered a word and they were back to talking about "becoming a leader in AI." We're a fucking consulting company that can't even put small, hand written projects written by domain experts in front of the client because of our joke of an IT department. We're never going to credibly be "leaders in AI."
Trust in media corporations died a long time ago, AI has just accelerated the trend. When human ‘journalists’ write to a script handed to them by the media’s editors and owners (eg ‘write articles that convince our readers to maintain their confidence in the <dot-com, subprime, AI> market’ or ‘write articles that convince our readers that <regime change, tariffs> is needed’), and the result is a debacle, then trust is eroded and questions arise about the journalist’s integrity and/or intelligence. Then the owners and editors find new fresh journalists to generate new stories to ‘restore trust’.
With AI, the editors and owners can just send their scripts to a machine and it’ll write the narrative as requested - but without a human face on that article. However, most readers would not accept such material as trustworthy.
There is another reason that AI reduces trust in media, which is that AI now makes it trivial to trace media ownership up the tree to the consequential owners, look at their other economic interests, and examine if the articles they print tend to favor those economic interests. Applying this analytical framework to the Atlantic itself is an interesting exercise.
Q1: Would it be entirely unfair to characterize the Atlantic as ‘yet another mouthpiece of the neoliberal project instantiated in the United States in the 1970s’?
When reading takes more effort than writing, trust is inevitably a victim.
I don't think there ever was generic trust between writers and readers. Trusting the written word just because it's written by someone or published by some newspaper was a huge mistake before AI was in the picture. The trust was exploited by many actors with agenda - politicians, journalists, academics and just plain grifters publishing another "self-help" book.
You could get a glimpse when a newspaper, even a very respected one published an article about your domain of expertise - I am sure I wasn't the only one who realized that if an incomplete, simplistic or just plain wrong text could be reviewed and published then probably a big part of other work is of similar quality - you are just not in position to judge it so you naturally trust it. Sadly the same goes for academic world - millions of papers gets published - a lot of them not worth the paper they are written on. You are just rarely in position to say.
What AI has done to it is actually a favor: it exposed what was always there but covered well enough to deceive big part of the population. Now we need to reevaluate. Come back to fundamental mechanisms. Can the claims be verified? Maybe in formal manner. If not who the author or someone authorizing the text is. What did they achieve in their life? What experiences they have lived through? What work have they done? What incentives do they have to publish it? If you can't answer those questions the text is irrelevant as a source of information. It turns out not everyone is worth listening to.
It was always the case. It's just easier to see now.
Internet already lost faith with paywall site like this.
And how could I trust if their article is not written by AIs at this point?
This is multi-faceted and I agree that AI is destroying some levels of trust, but many of the publications on the Internet were never deserving of trust anyway so I'd describe it as formalizing or recognizing distrust or lack of credibility and, in a manner of speaking now that the tide is going out we can see who has been swimming naked.
One of the other facets is the idea that trust is now being lost due to AI. It's unfortunate that it seems that publications like The Atlantic (and others) are now going to scapegoat the lost of trust that they've earned over the last decade or so to be about AI when it's actually about bad, biased writing with a default point of view, and lack of intellectual honesty and an inability to facilitate intellectual debate and discussion.
As some of these publications continue to spiral into irrelevancy I think what is a bit tragic is they'll never really understand why. They'll blame AI, which will likely destroy all but the top-tier sites, but in reality the quality of the writing and honesty went down the drain next to their ad-filled garbage pages and other spam.
> Ever since, I’d worried that the misrepresentation might somehow have a real-life impact
Doubt is good for the brain & mind.
But either the author is AI or she--Rachel Kadish, born in '69--needed something AI related to write about.
There is no trust between writers & readers. People either distrust and scrutinize or they like or dislike how the reading went. Some don't even judge but just shrug it off whatever impact the reading might have had.
The problem is that the AI conversation is reinforcing cultural polarity, especially among experts and people who are at least well enough off, so any methods to ignore the actual problems, which have been ignored in the past by most people almost by convention, are welcome and this article seems, at least to me, to be the result of one of these applied methods.
> There is no trust between writers & readers. People either distrust and scrutinize or they like or dislike how the reading went. Some don't even judge but just shrug it off whatever impact the reading might have had.
I interpret this more as an underlying social contract: Both writing a book and reading it used to be laborious. Now they're not.
Reaching out to an author about specific details used to mean you've deeply engaged with the work. Writing a book used to mean you spent lots of time understanding and writing about the topic.
Neither is now true, so it makes it harder to distinguish what's worth paying attention to.
I've definitely seen this happen with myself. When I shop for books, I do extra research into the author and publisher for anything published after 2022.
Agreed I also think, what unique perspective am I getting if it's just AI? If I want to know what AI thinks I could ask it myself, I want more diverse opinions.
Bingo. I read plenty of AI writing. My AI writes it for me. The way I like it. Usually along with obvious action items already drafted.
There may be a market for sharing useful prompt ideas. There isn’t one—broadly—for sharing the outputs.
> There is no trust between writers & readers. People either distrust and scrutinize or they like or dislike how the reading went. Some don't even judge but just shrug it off whatever impact the reading might have had.
That suggests that writer reputation and the reader’s past experience are of no importance. But before you even get to read something, you have to decide to do so. On what basis? And how might a bad experience colour future decisions?