Authors Are Accidentally Leaving AI Prompts In their Novels (404media.co)
- Reference: 0177708593
- News link: https://news.slashdot.org/story/25/05/23/1829251/authors-are-accidentally-leaving-ai-prompts-in-their-novels
- Source link: https://www.404media.co/authors-are-accidentally-leaving-ai-prompts-in-their-novels/
[1] https://www.404media.co/authors-are-accidentally-leaving-ai-prompts-in-their-novels/
A YouTuber I follow that does c64 programming (Score:4, Informative)
Did a short video about a bunch of books on c64 programming that were AI generated slop. Actual books you could order from Amazon physically.
Frankly I'm just a bit surprised that that kind of on-demand printing is cheap enough and accessible enough to make these kind of scams viable.
And they were absolutely scams. The information in the books was either completely nonsensical or stolen wholesale from other authors.
Some of the stuff that got stolen was fairly recent, books written in 2020 or 2022.
AI makes it possible to do a whole new world of plagiarism where you can steal somebody's work and it's jumbled around enough you can no longer obviously tell it was stolen.
Re: (Score:1)
If you're talking about 8-bit Show and Tell's video, they were all stolen from the same book, were pretty much the original book verbatim other than formatting errors and some AI slop at the beginning (the slop varied from book to book to defeat Amazon's dupe detection). And as a punchline the original book wasn't that great either, e.g. it had some stuff that was lifted literally from the Commodore C-64 manuals with an error intact.
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Yeah he picked out specific books because the way Amazon works it's going to keep recommending the same scammer and he just kept buying the books being recommended but I have no doubt there's tons and tons of scammers there
And great or not it's still stole from someone. It's automated high scale plagiarism.
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FWIW the original guides to programming in the early 1980s were slop too, it's just a human wrote most of them.
A typical "How to program your Commodore 64" book in 1982 was a direct copy of a book called "How to program your Sinclair ZX Spectrum." The original author would go through the book with a manual for the Commodore 64 and change anything they could easily see needed changing. Most of the sample programs were "Guess my number" or variants thereof, because those required virtually no system features
Is this being factored into productivity stats? (Score:1)
Is it possible productivity is being kept up by AI while workers take more siestas?
Copying and copyright? (Score:3)
Since AI's often don't create copyrightable works (depending on the depth of the prompts), what's to stop someone ripping off the prompter's work?
Re: (Score:2)
The only reason to do so is because it's essentially legal to (or would be much harder for them to prevail in court if they were to sue) and you wanted to in order to prove a point. If you were the first to do it you might be able to skim a few sales, but unless you live in some country where the piddling amount you'd get is actually worth the time investment, there's little reason to when anyone else can freely compete at the same ridiculously low opportunity cost. You'd still be competing against the exis
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> Since AI's often don't create copyrightable works (depending on the depth of the prompts), what's to stop someone ripping off the prompter's work?
What about recursive use? An AI reads an AI generated book as part of its training. The prompters work may be more difficult to spot.
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Copyright is obviously not a natural property of anything. It's a legal attribute defined by jurisdiction. 'Inheritence of copyright infringement by proxy' as a concept is a good illustration of the fact that we really haven't dug too deeply into all of the edge cases.
Here's an enhanced version of your post... (Score:2)
Here's an enhanced version of your post, making your slashdot post more relatable.
For anything generated or influenced by AI, we need a simple disclaimer to keep things transparent.
Robot: summarize this trashy romance novel! (Score:1)
If an AI reads the AI-generated book for me while I go cut the grass or get my garden ready for planting...did a tree really fall in the woods?
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On the other hand if AI can write a novel and deliver it as a radio play for you to listen to while you cut your grass and prepare you garden, is worth paying people to have any role in that production?
Assuming the AI's output is actually good/enjoyable?
Re: Robot: summarize this trashy romance novel! (Score:1)
Nah...I'd have the AI listen to it and give me the gist while I do something else...
Editor failure (Score:2)
This is mainly a failure of the editor. How could a minimally capable editor not catch this? Either the editor was incompetent or there was no editor.
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Almost exactly, have they hived the editing process off to an AI?
I'd be strongly tempted to stop reading works from that publishing house.
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I'm going with the 'editor was let go to improve shareholder value' option.
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Yeah, I was wondering if all these novels are perchance self-published dross on Amazon.
Prompt? (Score:2)
Not to nitpick, but if we're going to pinpoint a specific issue, it should probably describe the correct one. Both TFA and TFS only show an example of an AI response being left in the published text. The prompt itself was not included, although the problematic part of the response that was copied into the finished product happens to summarize the model's interpretation of the prompt. (Not that either is good, but it's at least more understandable how this one might have happened...)
Are authors leaving poison pills in book? (Score:2)
Maybe some authors are deliberately leaving prompts in their works to see if they are being scanned by a AI bot. Sort of like a poison pill that will somehow issue a response when prompted with a special prompt.
my personal rules have been updated (Score:1)
It's never okay to burn a book. "Here's an enhanced version of your passage, making Elena more relatable..." ...It's never okay to burn a book written by a human.
As it becomes increasingly effortless... (Score:5, Insightful)
...to create stuff using AI, its commercial value will drop to zero
We are still in a transition period where people believe that they can automate their work using AI and sell it as if it was original
This will change quickly
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This is true. The other thing a lot of people need to get thru the last 35 years of economic orthodoxy is that actually "stuff" is the future of economic success.
Things that AI can generate, be books, software, whatever, will approach zero value, while stuff AI can't generate, everything from farm products thur injection molded crap all the way to machines using the most advanced metallurgy or ICs using fanciest photolithography process will still have value.
The future of wealth is in building of actual th
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it'll have value, but it will be reduced to and approach the cost of the electricity
Re: As it becomes increasingly effortless... (Score:1)
Did you know that retail electricity rates are typically set by state regulatory commissions explicitly directed by decoupling laws not to use supply and demand in their price-setting?
Re: (Score:2)
Depends on where you are...
I here as example it is supply and demand.
As a consumer you can select from among several hundred plans from more than 20 suppliers.
Some of them are fixed price for a term. Some are fixed price with no expliry, but the supplier can change the price be telling you a given time before and at that point you can change supplier if you want and some are variable with the market rate+fixed margin. The market rate changes hour by hour and is sometimes negative.
The plans also have differe
Re: (Score:2)
agreed. it'll just be a cheaper commodity. Like youtube video learning. nobody is going to subscribe to Bob Villa's Home Improvement book club anymore now that youtube exists. His books still have value, but it's marginalized by fungible products
Not for human authored (Score:2)
The same way that right now people will pay extra for artisan works of art and craft even though technically they may be inferior to stuff from a factory, similarly in the future people will pay a premium - or maybe even simply just pay - for human created works.