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Bot Book Wars [1]

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Date: 2023-06-30

ExtremeTech has a very interesting and thought-provoking piece, to the effect that the AI Wars have already begun.

There’s an arms race going on between Amazon’s book-checking AI and the grifters’ book-generating AI. It appears that right now, the grifters are winning. It’s not just Kindle Unlimited – I’ll discuss that in a moment – but the best-selling 100 are also infected. Even mainstream imprints are being displaced in the league tables by the trash imposters.

I’ve discussed in a previous diary the concept of creating a complete book and its cover using Chat-GPT, but I’m on hold with this at the moment while I wait for access to GPT-4. I am examining the code, though, and it’s easily enough tweaked by simple editing to produce (EG) Fantasy, Horror, SF, at will.

It’s a two-stage process in which first, the AI “pretends” to be an (EG) fantasy novelist and writes a complete novel of, say, 20 chapters. Then, in the second stage, the AI “pretends” to be a skilled editor, and improves the novel. I’ve read some of the material and to put it mildly, I hope no one ever asks me to edit something like this. We’re still in the early stages, though, and I view this as a portent of things to come. Stock-Trader-GPT can’t be far off. Lawyer-GPT will be a cinch, since judges will be replaced by judge-GPT anyway.

Since I’m an author and not a coder, I’m mainly interested in modifying the code, and hope to produce “Book-GPT” with features such as the ability to write in 1st or 3rd person limited instead of omni, and so on. For now, this will have to wait.

The trash books infesting Amazon have obviously not been generated using the kind of AI I just discussed. They are pure garbage, with garbage covers. No one in their right mind would even bother reading any of it. And yet, they have risen through the soup of prose until they now bubble on the surface. What’s going on?

Quite simply, this is in engineering terms a closed loop. Bots write the trash books, and other bots “read” and write “reviews” for them. KU (Kindle Unlimited) pays on a PPR (per page read) basis, so I assume Amazon must be bleeding from the nose due to the abuse.

I would love to be a fly on the wall at Amazon HQ right now.

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[1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2023/6/30/2178700/-Bot-Book-Wars

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