Well said. It’s also true for movies these days which are predictable and algorithm tailored minus a couple of directors.
There's a level of involvement that most people have when it comes to entertainment. The more difficult that finding something you'll enjoy gets, the less interested people will be. Discovery is not a fun part of consuming media for most, I'd imagine
I catch myself thinking that even about films / books / games that try real hard to be original. You can't surprise me with a nonlinear time loop. Oh, the protagonist is also a villain but doesn't know it? Pfft, been there, done that.
It’s very easy to filter out the weeds: read the classics and any book that breaks through the noise with consistently high reviews. We don’t need to waste time on low-quality literature or AI-generated slop.
for games, steam offers a trial of the game which can be refunded in full if you do it within two hours. It's a great feature for consumer protection imho.
I'd like to try a chapter or two of a book first, and if it doesn't grab, get a full refund. This is how you can prevent sinking time (and money, presumably) into a bad book.
Sometimes I make bad purchases, and that's just too bad.
It's gotten incredibly easy to put media out there, and it's great that people are able to tell the stories they want through the medium they want. At the risk of sounding like I'm just bootlicking, traditional outlets used to be able to filter out some of the more low-effort content and it was easier to expect that you were at least getting mediocre stuff. At this point, a lot of really low effort and low quality junk is in the ecosystem and it's harder to just buy something that looks cool.
Sometimes I read reviews for a restaurant, go, and come out thinking the other reviewers and I have a totally different take on things. It happens.
Same goes for movies, books, games, etc. I "do my research" and sometimes I'm wrong.
And sure, I absolutely sometimes feel "scammed" but to me that's just something that happens.
I'm not too bothered by the idea of demos (eg 2 free chapters), but I am a bit bothered by the idea of "I want a refund if I'm not satisfied enough".
I guess everyone would have a different threshold on what "satisfied enough" is.
Further, up until recently the first few rungs of surviving as an author looked a lot like abject poverty today.
In fact, far from the contention that "Steinbecks" of the world no longer exist - they are prolific, and commercially successful, in a wide variety of Genres. Indeed, given Saul Bellow only published his last novel in the last 25 years, it seems somewhat callous to bifurcate the great from the good so chronologically.
Percival Everett immediately comes to mind - with Pulitzer Prize-winning James, a nuanced and insightful retelling of Huckleberry Finn, or 'I Am Not Sydney Poitier' which works almost as an homage to Steinbeck.
'The Nickel Boys' by Colson Whitehead I'd argue surpasses most of Steinbeck's more popular canon (Of Mice and Men, Cannery Row etc...). A magnificent novel in the very best of the american tradition.
'A Visit from the Goon Squad' by Jennifer Egan is probably tied for the best 21st Century Pulitzer winner with Jayne Anne Phillips' 'Night Watch' -both Steinbeck-esque in their charting of social mores in the face of an ever-changing culture rendered as the symbol and signifier drenched shadows of capitalism against the cave wall of society.
Looking at the Booker Prize since Paul Beatty, I'd also highlight 'Shuggie Bain' - Douglas Stuart's opus about growing up with an alcoholic mother in the working class Glasgow of the 1980s, or 'Prophet Song' - the requiem for a mother of four trying to preserve her family as a far-right totalitarian regime takes control of Ireland and suspends the Irish constitution.
An independent certification body is quite an old-world solution for a problem like this, but I’m not sure this is something that can be done mathematically. A web of trust may be all we have.
For a laugh I used grok to generate a 35,000-word slop novel, it took twenty prompts and a few hours, it even threw in a nice cover. From there it would have took me another 30 minutes to release it as an ebook on Amazon under a different pen-name. This is what I and the world of indie authors are up against. It is already hard for non-established authors, this may be the final nail in the coffin for most. My first book is now free, but good luck anyone ever finding it.
A year from now though...?
We're really cooked, though. Whenever I see a cool pic I wonder if it's AI and I have to spin up a TinEye or Google Images search and hope it was once posted to some random Facebook wall in 2011 so I can be pretty sure it's real.
Where AI shines - and to the uninitiated, apparently subsumes - is in the fields of lexicon and grammar. However, we do not read Homer's Iliad and Odyssey as an exemplar of dactylic hexameter - we do so to engage with a structured expression of grief for the motivations of man.
Epic (Patrick Kavanagh - 1960)
I have lived in important places, times When great events were decided; who owned That half a rood of rock, a no-man’s land Surrounded by our pitchfork-armed claims.
I heard the Duffys shouting ‘Damn your soul!’ And old McCabe stripped to the waist, seen Step the plot defying blue cast-steel – ‘Here is the march along these iron stones’
That was the year of the Munich bother. Which Was more important? I inclined To lose my faith in Ballyrush and Gortin
Till Homer’s ghost came whispering to my mind. He said: I made the Iliad from such A local row. Gods make their own importance.
Get what you’re saying but hasn’t that always been the case without extensive marketing and promotion?
My understanding that writing and finishing the book is just the start. Then you need to sell the thing.
For example, I stumbled on https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0DT4TKY58 and had never heard of the author. Their page (https://www.amazon.com/stores/author/B004LUETE8) suggested they were incredibly prolific in a huge number of areas which already felt off. No information about "Robert Johnson" was available either. The publisher, HiTeX Press (https://www.amazon.com/s?k=HiTeX+Press) has a few other authors with similarly generic names and no information available about them, each the author of numerous books spanning a huge array of topics.
It feels even more bewildering and disheartening to see AI slop come into the physical world like this.
There are lots of other ebook stores and physical book stores that don't enable scams, mistreat workers, or do this weird AI junk.
Recommendations for alternatives would be very welcome.
(Now, when a book does have DRM, I buy it from Kobo! I'll leave it to the reader to speculate why :) )
It's disheartening because now I will look much more into reputable publishers, and so filter off independent writers who have nothing to do with this.
I wish OpenAI, Anthropic and Gemini would all figure out how to pay royalties to copyright holders anytime their content is used. I see absolutely no reason why they can't do this. It would really take all the steam out of these hardline anti-AI positions.
So ... every time a model is used? Because it has been trained on these works so they have some influence on all its weights?
> I see absolutely no reason why they can't do this
They didn't even pay to access the works in the first place, frankly the chances of them paying now seems pretty minimal, without being forced to by the courts.
The AI company is really more like a vector search company that brings you relevant content, kind of like Google, but that does not mean the user will use those results for commercial purposes. Google doesn’t pay royalties for displaying your website in search results.
I suspect from purely logistics, AI training is better when it's free to injest all the content it can, and for that freedom it pays in some small royalty amount when that source is cited.
They'd simply pass that cost onto the customer. For universities or enterprises or lawfirms, or whatever, they would either include pre-existing agreements, or pay for blanket access. Whatever terms OpenAI, Anthropic, and Gemini sign with these entities, they can workout the royalties there.
These are all solved problems for every other technology middle man company.
With AI, copyrighted material is often not obvious to the end user, so I don't think it's fair to go after them.
I think it's non-trivial to make the AI company pay per use though, they'd need a way to calculate what percent of the response is from which source. Let them pay at training time with consent from the copyright holder, or just omit it.
The end user is 100% to blame for any copyright violations.
How will those potential customers know which businesses are providing an AI-generated product and which are not?
It's only a viable business if there is a way for potential customers to determine the amount of AI in whatever the product is.
but i agree i think there will be a small market for “vegan” content.
Good luck with that.
Why? Things are scale have different rules (different laws as well) from things done individually or for personal reasons.
What is the argument for AI/LLM stuff getting an exemption in this regard?
I don't see why AI/LLMs should get exemptions or special treatment.
We already have copyright laws, they already prevent people from distributing AI outputs that infringe on intellectual property. If you don't like those laws in the age of AI, get them changed consistently, don't take a broken system and put it on life support.
I find it funny that many people are pro-library and pro-archive, and will pay money to causes that try to do that with endangered culture, but get angry at AI as having somehow stolen something, when they're fulfilling an archival function as well.
Yes! They're angry that there are two standards, an onerous one making life hell for archivists, librarians, artists, enthusiasts, and suddenly a free-for-all when it comes to these AI fad companies hoovering all the data in the world they can get their paws on.
I.e. protecting the interests of capital at the expense of artists and people in the former, and the interests of capital at the expense of artists and people in the latter.
But we (i.e. society) don't agree that it is; the rules, laws and norms we have is that some things are bad at scale!
As a society, we've already decided that things at scale are regulated differently than things for personal use. That ship has sailed and it's too late now to argue for laws to apply universally regardless of scale.
I am asking why AI/LLMs should get a blanket exemption in this regard.
I have not seen any good arguments for why we society should make a special exemption for AI/LLMs.
If we were talking algorithms, would you special case code because a lot of people hit it even if load wasn't a problem, or would you try to keep one unified function that works everywhere?
It's not a strawman - that's literally how things work.
You can hold a bake sale at school with fewer sanitation requirements that a cake store has to satisfy.
You can possess weed for personal use, but will get locked up if you possess a warehouse filled with 200 tons of the stuff.
You can reproduce snippets of copyrighted material, but you can't reproduce the entire thing.
(I can go on and on and on, but you get the idea)
Which laws, regulations or social norms did you have in mind when you thought that scale doesn't matter?
I'm unable to think of even one regulation that applies universally regardless of scale. Which one were you thinking of?
Corporations are individuals and can engage in fair use (at least, as the law is written now). Neither corporations nor individuals can redistribute material in non-fair use applications.
School bake sales are regulated under cottage food laws, which are relaxed under the condition that a "safe" subset of foods is produced. That's why there are no bake sales that sell cured sausage, for instance. Food laws are in some part regulatory capture by big food, but thankfully there hasn't been political will to outlaw independent food production entirely.
You're misinformed about all the examples you cited, you should do more research before stating strong opinions.
You've literally agreed with what I said[1]:
> School bake sales are regulated under cottage food laws, which are relaxed under the condition that a "safe" subset of foods is produced. That's why there are no bake sales that sell cured sausage, for instance. Food laws are in some part regulatory capture by big food, but thankfully there hasn't been political will to outlaw independent food production entirely.
Scale results in different regulation. You have, with this comment, agreed that it does yet are still pressing on the point that there should be an exemption for AI/LLM.
I don't understand your reasoning in pointing out that baking has different regulations depending on scale; I pointed out the same thing - the regulations are not universal.
-------------------
[1] Things I have said:
> Things are scale have different rules (different laws as well) from things done individually or for personal reasons.
> As a society, we've already decided that things at scale are regulated differently than things for personal use.
> You can hold a bake sale at school with fewer sanitation requirements that a cake store has to satisfy.
Update copyright to an initial 10 year limit, granted at publication without any need to register. This 10 year period also works just like copyright today, the characters, places, everything is projected. After 10 years, your entire work falls into the public domain.
Alternatively, you can register your copyright with the government within the first 3 years. This requires submitting your entire work in a machine readable specified format for integration into official training sets and models. These data sets and models will be licensed by the government for some fee to interested parties. As a creator with material submitted to this data set, you will receive some portion of those licensing feed, proportional to the quantity and amount of time your material has been in the set, with some caps set to prevent abuse. I imagine this would work something like the broadcast licensing for radios works. You will receive these licensing fees for up to 20 years from the first date of copyright.
During the first 10 years, copyright is still enforced on your work for all the same things that would normally be covered. For the 10 years after that, in additional consideration for adding your work to the data sets, you will be granted an additional weaker copyright term. The details would vary by the work, but for a novel for example, this might still protect the specific characters and creatures you created, but no longer offer protection on the "universe" you created. If we imagine Star Wars being created under this scheme, while Darth Vader, Luke Skywalker and Leia Organa might still be protected from 1987-1997, The Empire, Tatooine, and Star Destroyers might not be.
What I envision here is that these government data sets would be known good, clean, properly categorized and in the case of models, the training costs have already been paid once. Rather than everyone doing a mad dash to scrape all the world's content, or buy up their own collection of books to be scanned and processed, all of that work could already have been done and it's just a license fee away. Additionally because we're building up an archive of media, we could also license custom data sets. Maybe someone wants to make a model trained on only cartoons, or only mystery novels or what have you. The data is already there, a nominal fee can get you that data, or maybe even have something trained up, and all the people who have contributed to that data are getting something for their work, but we're also not hamstringing our data sets to being decades or more out of date because Disney talked the government into century long copyrights decades ago.
>hardline anti-AI position
Some people are beyond parody.
I disagree. AI use is diffuse. An author is specific. Having people label their work as AI free is accountable in a way trying to require AI-generated work be labeled is not.
> similar to those found in cigarettes
Hyperbole undermines your argument. We have decades of rigorous and international evidence for the harms from cigarettes. We don’t for AI.
We put warnings on cigarettes because not only are they harmful, but we have ample evidence about how and by what mechanism they are harmful.
The logic that leads to labelling every harm is the one that causes everything in California to be labeled as a cancer hazard. You want tight causation of sufficient magnitude and in a way that will cause actual behavior change, either through reduced demand or changed producer behavior. Until you have that-which we did for cigarettes—labelling is a bit silly.
There's an infinite number of positions they could hold, and the discussion works better if you ask rather than assume.
A recording of the entire process of it's creation is one possible answer (though how are deep fakes countered)
But maybe there is some cryptographic solution involving single direction provable timestamps..
Does anyone know of anyone working on such a thing?
Did the author come up with the main ideas, character arcs or plot devices himself? Did he ever seek assistance from AI to come up with new plot points, rewrite paragraphs, create dialog?
The only thing which really matters is trust.
I would almost give that a pass as long as we could prove that the person had sat down for 10s/100s of hours to type out the novel.
In that instance it would be almost the same as false authorship and stealing credit for other people's work. This has existed for centuries already.
As to being influenced by an LLM I think that is fine, even up to entire plot structure.. as with the above this could happen between people too.
(I don't have an answer, just wondering.)
It's a social problem at heart and piling on yet more technology won't fix it.
Are thoughts and ideas creations? Or you just mean the literal typewriting?
How do you prove an idea is original and you have been in a vacuum not influenced _by anything at all_?
If anything The Hunger Games is the perfect example that you can get away with anything you want, and that was almost 20 years ago.
Everything is a remix https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nJPERZDfyWc or if you hate your life https://tvtropes.org/
So yeah, simply filtering by year published could be a start
For non-fiction it is a bit trickier. I buy DRM-free from some niche publishers, but I have no idea which ones can be trusted to not begin to mix in AI slop in their books.
I also wrote an article on my blog that you are mainly writing for yourself and your family, friends and followers these days, the algorithm is very unlikely to get you outside of that word-of-mouth audience, unless you pay $$, go full-in promoting on social media (which may backfire), or are extremely lucky. With AI the algorithm has become the enemy and finding genuine indie authors is unfortunately getting harder.
Self certification backed by a war chest to sue those who lie.
People will know by reputation alone, which cannot be fabricated.
I'm so happy I'm not doing any school/academic work anymore, because AI writing detection tools (I learned English though reading technical docs; of course my writing style is a bit clinical) and checking the edit history in a Google Docs document would've both fucked me over.
Think of interview candidates rejected by AI and employees fired by AI, or that case where a snack pack was identified by AI as a weapon in a student's pocket. This will lead to "organic decision making".
Why?
It seems as if it may be more relevant in our AI writing times.
Writing a book is, in most cases, something which happens between the author and their writing medium, how could any publisher verify anything about AI use, except in the most obvious cases?
The one thing which matters here is honesty and trust and I do not see how an outside organization could help in creating that honesty and maintaining that trust.
If a person who I know has taste signs off on a 100% AI book, I'll happily give it a spin. That person, to me, becomes the author as soon as they say that it's work that they would put their name on. The book has become an upside-down urinal. I'm not sure AI books are any different than cut-ups, other than somebody signed a cut-up. I've really enjoyed some cut-ups and stupid experiments, and really projected a lot onto them.
My experience in running things I've written through GPT-5 is that my angry reaction to its rave reviews, or its clumsy attempts to expand or rewrite, are stimulating in and of themselves. They often convince me to rewrite in order to throw the LLM even farther off the trail.
Maybe a lot of modern writers are looking for a certification because a lot of what they turn out is indistinguishable cliché, drawn from their experiences watching television in middle-class suburbs and reading the work of newspaper movie critics.
Lastly, everything about this site looks like it was created by AI.
Not so sure. Books are not all just entertainment but they also develop one's ouook on life, relationships, morality etc. I mean, of course books can also be written by "bad" people to propagate their view of things, but at least you're still peeking into the views and distilled experience of a fellow human who lived a personal life.
Who knows what values a book implicitly espouses that has no author and was optimized for being liked by readers. Do that on a large enough scale and it's really hard to tell what kind of effect it has.
There is some of this even without AI. Plenty of modern pulpy thriller and romance books for example are highly market-optimised by now.
There are thousands of data points out there for what works and doesn't and it would be a very principled author who ignores all the evidence of what demonstrably sells in favour of pure self-expression.
Then again, AI allows to turbocharge the analysis and pluck out the variables that statistically trigger higher sales. I'd be surprised if someone isn't right now explicitly training a Content-o-matic model on the text of books along with detailed sales data and reviews. Perhaps a large pro-AI company with access to all the e-book versions, 20 years of detailed sales data, as well as all telemetry such as highlighted passages and page turns on their reader devices? Even if you didn't or couldn't use it to literally write the whole thing, you can have it optimise the output against expected sales.
Reportedly, Kindle has already been flooded with "AI" generated books. And I've heard complaints from authors, of AI superficial rewritings of their own books being published by scammers. (So, not only "AI, write a YA novel, to the market, about a coming of age vampire young woman small town friends-to-lovers romance", but "AI, write a new novel in the style of Jane Smith, basically laundering previous things she's written" and "AI, copy the top-ranked fiction books in each category on Amazon, and substitute names of things, and how things are worded.")
For now, Kindle is already requiring publishers/authors to certify on which aspects of the books AI tools were used (e.g., text, illustrations, covers), something about how the tools were used (e.g., outright generation, assistive with heavy human work, etc.), and which tools were used. So that self-reporting is already being done somewhere, just not exposed to buyers yet.
That won't stop the dishonest, but at least it will help keep the honest writers honest. For example, if you, an honest writer, consider for a moment using generative AI to first-draft a scene, an awareness that you're required to disclose that generative AI use will give you pause, and maybe you decide that's not a direction you want to go with your work, nor how you want to be known.
Incidentally, I've noticed a lot of angry anti-generative-AI sentiment among creatives like writers and artists. Much more than among us techbros. Maybe the difference is that techbros are generally positioning ourselves to profit from AI, from copyright violations, selling AI products to others, and investment scams.
Worse yet, increasing the quantity of books while simultaneously decreasing the quality just makes the situation worse for readers: more slop to filter out.
So this is the thing that Zitron and Doctorow are always talking about? Naked grifting in the AI industry?
Why? Can't it be done same way it's done with copyrighted material: by checking the authors process?
(Because at least in EU law permits writing basically same thing, if both authors reached it organically - have a trail of drafts, other writing process documents. As long as you proved you came upon it without influence from the other author.)
Proving that you done it without AI can be similar. For example - just videotaping whole writing process.
Now, as for if anyone cares about such proofs is another topic.
Which proves very little. It also would be something which authors would absolutely loath to do.
Capitalism does however incentive unhealthy and self-destructive exploitation. Including of generative AI.
You’re really arguing greed (EDIT: and bad risk evaluation) didn’t exist before capitalism?
Is my cat capitalist?
For fucks sake we can play word games all day but let's not.