[HN Gopher] A journey into Kindle AI slop hell
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A journey into Kindle AI slop hell
Author : didgeoridoo
Score : 112 points
Date : 2024-06-24 19:19 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (maxread.substack.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (maxread.substack.com)
| refulgentis wrote:
| I can't help thinking there's a _huge_ opportunity for discussing
| this side of AI in a more principled way. When something (i.e.
| AI) is this viscerally annoying, it 's tempting to slip into this
| style of discussion, I get it. But it's......hard to read even
| when you agree and smile along the way.
|
| "The brief bio read: A little girl with blue eyes and blonde hair
| leads her friends on a healthy eating mission, culminating in the
| creation of a neighborhood farmer's market. Okay. Sort of Triumph
| of the Will: Bedtime Story for Kids and Adults." (for context,
| Triumph of the Will is the name of a famous Nazi Germany-produced
| propaganda documentary)
|
| To flesh it out a bit more with examples, to make it clear it's
| not cherry-picking:
|
| - "What generative models are being used? What kinds of prompts
| are generating these texts? I don't know. I'm not a virgin. As I
| said, I have a child." (virgin really is a complete non-sequitor
| here, unless the idea is only virgins use ChatGPT?)
|
| - "But I did want to read about my nice Nazi Youth friend and her
| farmer's market journey"
|
| - "More importantly, what is a bedtime story for kids and adults?
| I am an adult. A bedtime story for an adult is just a real book.
| I read real books. Or at least, I used to? Basically, did Kindle
| think I was stupid now?"
| lelandfe wrote:
| Have you read many articles from sleep deprived mothers about
| AI? I appreciated her delirious candor, personally.
| refulgentis wrote:
| Apologies, I didn't mean we should silence sleep-deprived
| mothers. At best, inartful, on my part that it came across
| that way. I don't think I've ever consciously used pregnancy
| status/post-partum status, or sleep deprivation, as a prism
| for analyzing - to my knowledge, I've never used it
| unconciously either, but I'm faced with the distinct
| possibility I have, given thats how it came across here.
|
| It just sort of ripped me out of smiling and enjoying the
| article the reading to hear blonde hair and blue eyes = Nazi
| propaganda: I have the same (though, little hair left :P ),
| and little kids in the family who are.
|
| After the virgin reference I scrolled around to check if
| there was a layer joke where the article was written/edited
| by AI, thus demonstrating another layer of inappropriate
| references beyond the "bedtime story for kids and adults"
|
| Then you start thinking "gee...AI art and 'bedtime story for
| kids and adults' SEO ads...Then my mind starts whirring on
| "maybe this is _good_ because GenAI makes the monopoly
| incumbents look horribly bad, mindlessly selling programmatic
| content to me with programmatic ads on hardware I paid for "
| - and then I realized that's _probably_ not what the author
| intended a reader to start thinking, so there 's probably
| another way to poke at this
| lelandfe wrote:
| You didn't come off as wanting this silenced - I just mean
| that I liked having a different voice on HN. We see a lot
| of arch, academic analysis here. Loopy, sometimes crass mom
| encounters AI books was a fun share from OP.
|
| I bet you can imagine what her reaction might be if she
| read this thread :)
| torginus wrote:
| Honestly these AI books seem to be full of the saccharine sweet
| uber-PC toxic positivity that AI companies think what a 'safe'
| and 'aligned' AI should sound like.
|
| This is the main reason why I gave up on using ChatGPT for
| creative brainstorming.
| TheOtherHobbes wrote:
| The problem isn't the AI. The problem is the content
| distribution systems that corporations have created. AI just
| happens to make it easier to game+automate some of their
| systems for instant wins.
|
| Ultimately it's the entitled "I need money fuck you" attitude
| that enshittifies everything neoliberalism touches, with a
| toxic blend of desperation (some people really do need the
| money) and boundless narcissistic opportunism.
|
| Tech has become enmeshed in that, and is a major enabler and
| amplifier of it. It doesn't _have_ to be, but it 's where we
| are now.
| b450 wrote:
| > This week's edition is a guest post about spooky Kindle A.I.
| slop from Leah Beckmann, an L.A.-based screenwriter and
| journalist and Chief Kindle Bullshit Correspondent for Read Max.
|
| I had to reread this a couple times before understanding that the
| guest post - not the A.I. slop - was from Leah Beckmann.
| Analemma_ wrote:
| I'm getting more and more convinced that tech people are living
| in a dangerous bubble re: the generative AI boom. I've been
| talking to people outside this bubble, and the _unanimous_
| response to all the "exciting" AI developments of the last ~3
| years has been that their experience of generative AI has been
| purely negative with no upsides whatsoever. All they see is the
| content slop, the shitty search results, degraded experiences in
| e.g. customer service, and so on.
|
| And it's starting to alarm me that nobody in tech appears to care
| about this and is just going "damn the torpedoes, full speed
| ahead". That kind of arrogant dismissal of popular mood and
| forcing unwanted change on people is how resentment and
| revolution happen.
| minimaxir wrote:
| Unfortunately, the anti-AI discourse is a vocal minority in the
| grand scheme of things. As long as engagement metrics are up
| and the marginal benefits outweigh the marginal costs, the AI
| slop will continue.
|
| Boomers using Meta AI to create nonsensical images on Facebook
| and WhatsApp aren't complaining about it on social media.
| ks2048 wrote:
| I'm not sure its Boomers who create these images. It's
| Boomers who reply "Amen" to a pictures of six-fingered Jesus
| wrapped in an American flag. (Actually I'm not quite sure -
| maybe it's just mostly bots replying to other bots...?)
| rchaud wrote:
| Boomers aren't making them. They are the captive audience in
| Facebook groups. I predict that around October, the content
| on those pages will switch to political stuff (at least for
| American audiences).
| AlexandrB wrote:
| There's already plenty of resentment aimed at "big tech". Gen
| AI will probably accelerate it.
| surfingdino wrote:
| Gen AI is the worst thing that happened to AI research. It is
| a bullshit generation machine that feeds resentment towards
| all technologies that make up the broad field of AI.
| probably_wrong wrote:
| Here's my two hot takes on that topic.
|
| First, you are on HN, a website full of entrepreneurs betting
| their savings on AI companies. "It is difficult to get a man to
| understand something when his salary depends upon his not
| understanding it" [1]. Remember that the CEO of OpenAI used to
| be the president of HN.
|
| Second, remember NFTs? Bitcoin? Perhaps even MongoDB [2]? Tech
| lives and dies on hype and AI is the newest one. This too shall
| pass.
|
| [1] https://quoteinvestigator.com/2017/11/30/salary/
|
| [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b2F-DItXtZs
| wkat4242 wrote:
| The President of YC's board, allegedly. Which he never was
| because that position didn't actually exist until after he
| left. There's been numerous articles about that recently.
|
| Not to undermine your point, the techbroism is strong here
| but facts are facts
| rchaud wrote:
| Bitcoin and crypto come with a get-rich-quick stench that
| turns off most people. AI hype is much more dangerous because
| it mixes real use cases, to push enthusiastic viewpoints for
| LLM slop.
| ToucanLoucan wrote:
| > I'm getting more and more convinced that tech people are
| living in a dangerous bubble
|
| You don't need the rest of this sentence. They are. Almost
| everyone I talk to in the Valley of Silicon speaks of broad
| trends in... I mean, anything really, in how people use
| technology, in what people need cars for, in what people eat,
| in what goods typically cost, genuinely any topic of sufficient
| breadth that escapes the technology itself, as though they have
| not been on planet earth since roughly 2009. It is astonishing
| how well insulated from common concerns tech workers are, which
| is probably how we got shit like Juicero, an incredibly
| overbuilt, over-spec, ludicrously designed wifi-connected
| machine to _squeeze a fucking bag._ And it explains a bunch of
| their other incredibly stupid ideas, like e-scooters.
|
| This is why, I am sorry, but I simply do not put a lot of stock
| (literally, and metaphorically) into the opinions of SV's
| elites. That's like, a bubble in a damn bubble. That's a
| bubbled subset of people who haven't had a normal experience of
| being human for who knows how long, inside a bubble of people
| who largely do not share the same reality as me.
|
| Bringing it back to what I was replying to: you are absolutely
| right about the common folk's experience with AI. It's an
| annoying thing being shoved into tons of products they use,
| that seemingly no one asked for, that doesn't work. And it's a
| massive, 400 foot tall neon sign, telling them that big tech
| doesn't give a fuck about them, what they want, or anything
| else besides sign up for the subscription dumbass.
| password54321 wrote:
| Perplexity is one of the only tools that I think takes great
| advantage of LLMs strengths (pattern matching, interpolation)
| while also making up for its weaknesses (hallucinations, lack
| of ability for novel contribution/thought) by using it for
| summarisation with search.
| wkat4242 wrote:
| It's not even that special imo. Openwebui does the same
| locally when you enable search engine integration. It's not
| really rocket science
| BeFlatXIII wrote:
| > And it's starting to alarm me that nobody in tech appears to
| care about this and is just going "damn the torpedoes, full
| speed ahead". That kind of arrogant dismissal of popular mood
| and forcing unwanted change on people is how resentment and
| revolution happen.
|
| Tell that to the schoolchildren who excitedly use AI to do all
| the busywork for them.
| AlexandrB wrote:
| Isn't this going to be crippling once they're in a situation
| where the actually _need_ some of the skills they skipped
| learning?
| wkat4242 wrote:
| I think AI has a place in this world. As does virtual reality,
| the previous hype. The problem with these hypes is, the
| overstressed business types that think it is the key to the
| future for everything. Almost nothing is the next internet. And
| in a year or so when they don't see their 2000% payoff, they
| will consider it a flop, which will also harm the genuine
| efforts that were made and usecases where the tech does add
| value. It's the overexpectations that hurt it.
|
| The problem starts happening when you shoehorn it into a bunch
| of shit for the sake of it, where it adds no value and often
| even degrades it. Like what everyone is now doing with AI.
| Especially Microsoft.
|
| It's great for some stuff, like making summaries. It's not
| GenAI and if we try to use it as such (as Nadella is doing) the
| bubble will burst sooner rather than later and that's bad for
| the tech community as a whole. I find the journey super
| interesting however from a personal tech interest point of view
| and I love playing with it locally. But I'm not blind to its
| glaring limitations and I don't care whether it makes money or
| not, I'm just into it for the tech. It's the money boys that
| keep blowing good stuff up.
| rchaud wrote:
| VR doesn't have anywhere near the same level of fossil fuel
| emissions as AI though.
| AlexandrB wrote:
| Crypto certainly does.
| rchaud wrote:
| The AI power brokers are all getting rich by hyping up the tech
| to the high heavens, while pooh-pooing AI ethics and safety
| concerns. Governments are following in lock step so as not to
| appear "anti-innovation".
|
| I don't see revolution on the cards. Maybe a giant market
| correction once the hype wears off and pension funds figure out
| that throwing more H100 GPUs into the mix isn't going to make
| AGI happen any faster, and that there there's no real road to
| profitability for startups making shitty genAI chatbots, images
| and music.
| medhir wrote:
| Think it's worth calling out that many people in tech have
| significant reservations about the reckless push of generative
| AI into just about every product -- the issue is the executive
| class that insists on chasing hype and potential short-term
| stock growth over everything else.
| timetraveller26 wrote:
| AI was a mistake
| hosh wrote:
| I don't know if it is a mistake, but it's certainly the genie
| we let out of the bottle. If anything, we're seeing the
| acceleration of what happens when we have a world view that is
| founded upon exploitation, be that the land or the people.
| lelandfe wrote:
| > _Is Amazon cutting out the author middle man and using A.I. and
| user data to generate books on its own?_
|
| Amazon has done just this elsewhere:
| https://techcrunch.com/2022/11/29/amazons-alexa-ai-animated-...
|
| By the by, I've enjoyed my Kindle a whole lot more since turning
| on its airplane mode. I connect to WiFi to sync new books to it,
| but don't give my Amazon overlords other opportunities to present
| AI slop from the vaults.
| lawlessone wrote:
| >Create with Alexa," a new AI tool for kids that generates
| animated stories
|
| How soon until we find out it's child labour?.. on both ends.
| wkat4242 wrote:
| Well most AIs are only a year or so old!
| ulysses1244 wrote:
| Fantastic quote from the article:
|
| "Is Amazon cutting out the author middle man and using A.I. and
| user data to generate books on its own? What generative models
| are being used? What kinds of prompts are generating these
| texts?
|
| I don't know. I'm not a virgin. As I said, I have a child."
| baxtr wrote:
| I'm pretty relaxed about this. There is absolutely no consumer
| product whatsoever that amazon has nailed.
|
| Maybe Kindle, but that's just a store window for them. Alexa is
| garbage, the fire phone a disaster, and so on.
| kalupa wrote:
| dramatically improved battery life is also a side-effect of
| disabled wifi, too
| abdullahkhalids wrote:
| I have never connected my Kindle to WiFi. Prevents ads and
| updates. USB is easy enough to transfer files.
| vunderba wrote:
| Same. Calibre works pretty seamlessly as well with
| transferring and converting books to and from mobi/epub with
| targeted layouts depending on whether you're on a full sized
| Kindle vs Paperwhite etc.
| themadturk wrote:
| I've moved away from Kindle to Kobo (far less locked down),
| but when I had Kindles I always paid the $20 to get rid of
| ads. Totally worth it.
| wiml wrote:
| I've been getting these too -- they've largely supplanted the
| plausibly-human-written glurge I used to get (mil-SF and
| disturbingly specific romance subgenres). I don't think I've
| given Amazon any reason to believe I'd want them, though. My
| guess is that these are just the highest-expected-profit books
| that Kindle has, and it's what you get if Kindle doesn't have a
| more specific signal for you.
| jabroni_salad wrote:
| I guess my dozens of followed authors and infinitely expanding
| TBR list on goodreads that I regularly buy books and 15+ years
| of purchase history and ratings just can't be used as a signal,
| because my reccs are full of this nonsense too.
|
| Lately I've noticed that in self pub pulp land authors are
| trading shoutouts with each other without curation or
| discretion, but even those are self selecting to a higher
| degree of 'gives a shit' than what the algo reccs have been
| offering. I think it has been over a year since I found
| something off of the 'if you liked X' carousel and that used to
| be extremely reliable for me.
|
| And like I said, I'm reading pulp. I'm the kind of person who
| will see 'this is my first ever written work please be nice' as
| a synopsis and will read the first ten chapters just to see.
| There's plenty of decent trash around if I look for it but the
| robots only want me to have the soup at the bottom.
| torginus wrote:
| Honestly, I have no problem with airport novel quality books,
| and the thing is, these tend to be competently written -
| clearly there's such a huge oversupply of writing talent that
| even throwaway books are kind of decent. I suspect even people
| who only manage to sell hundreds of copies have quite a bit of
| talent and years of practice.
|
| The market doesn't need the flood of this AI garbage as it will
| make these books utterly impossible to discover and drown the
| low end in excrement, driving away 'guilty pleasure' readers
| such as me and you.
| hosh wrote:
| Royal Road is one of the platforms for indie authors to publish
| serialized web novels. Many people use that to jump into a full
| time writing career -- successful new serials get on a ladder,
| paetrons get set up, and when enough chapters are written, they
| get edited and published to Kindle. The publication to Kindle
| Unlimited ends up with the books getting stubbed. In return
| though, you have a kind of presale so you know people like
| reading the work, and a sufficient fan base to appeal for support
| for a successful launch on KU.
|
| One of the things I've been seeing the authors reporting to their
| subscribers are people stealing that work by scraping the
| chapters, running it through LLM, and then publishing it on KU.
| Authors have been adding watermarks into the text, though I don't
| know how successful that is.
|
| (On the other hand, many authors use generative image AI to
| create covers, which has angered artists whose work has been
| sucked up by the generative AI machine).
| torginus wrote:
| I really want to like Royalroad, as it's full of well-written
| stuff, made by clearly passionate and talented authors, but I
| can't help but notice that everything seems to some sort of
| Isekai/LitRPG/Progression novel where the protagonist fights
| anime-style battles and gets progressively more powerful, with
| sometimes numerical stats increasing, as presented by stat
| blocks in the story.
|
| This genre was completely unknown to me before I discovered RR,
| and I'm suprised how ubiquitous it is.
|
| Is this what young people want nowadays? The genre seems to
| have crossed over from Asian culture, with many novels being
| translations of Chinese/Korean ones.
| TheOtherHobbes wrote:
| That's genre fiction - a formula, with some reader-insert
| gratification. A site like RR is specifically aimed at
| readers who want those kinds of stories.
|
| Other fiction markets are the same. Mysteries, fantasy,
| thrillers, romance, all have their tropes and sub-tropes.
| Most don't have an RR equivalent because they're marketed
| through other communities, like TikTok for romance.
|
| _Original_ fiction that doesn 't follow strict genre rules
| and expectations is a very hard sell today - but I'm not sure
| that's ever been untrue.
| torginus wrote:
| I'm sure you are right but it didn't use to be this bad - I
| remember a couple of years ago I tried to familiarize
| myself with the old fantasy classics, most of which
| certainly weren't considered respectable literature back
| then.
|
| By far the worst offender of the bunch was Lin Carter's
| Under the Green Star - in which the sickly protagonist has
| his mind transported into a body of a powerful hero of
| legend, in a faraway realm, and rescues a beautiful
| princess who falls madly in love with him - at which point
| the teenage boy pandering became so unbearable, that I had
| to put the book down. This is exactly the tier wher most RR
| books stand at.
|
| Other books, such as the Elric books by Moorcock, or
| Leiber's Fafhrd books would still qualify as genre fiction,
| but have far more depth and nuance to them and I thoroughly
| enjoyed reading them.
|
| I wonder, what other sites are there for online fiction?
|
| I only know of Wattpad, which seems to largerly focus on
| romance for teenage girls, and AO3, which seems to focus on
| smut/fanfiction.
|
| While all 3 sites have hidden gems, it's too much of a
| bother for me to wade through the typical faire to bother
| looking for them.
| vunderba wrote:
| Isekai (e.g. wish fulfillment + power fantasy) is absurdly
| popular in the anime/manga industry so I guess I'm rather
| unsurprised that its leaking over to more traditional novels
| as well.
| meowface wrote:
| As an anime fan, I wish there were more series that strayed
| from this formula. So many are either isekai, "protagonist
| has an ultimate power/entity inside them they can't fully
| control", or both.
| LordDragonfang wrote:
| As a (perhaps not-so-young) consumer of several RR stories in
| those exact genres, yes. It's a fun genre that really tickles
| the same part of my brain that building munchkins in D&D
| does. Progression fantasy is just very satisfying to read.
|
| (In case anyone is looking for recommendations, _Mother of
| Learning_ is the best all-around, _Delve_ is probably my
| favorite, and _Worth the Candle_ is incredible if you can
| stomach how much of a crapsack world the protagonist is
| dragged through)
| jtolmar wrote:
| LitRPG fans aren't all young people, it's also weirdly
| popular with middle-aged women with fond memories of playing
| World Of Warcraft.
|
| I don't think the phenomenon is young people these days, so
| much as every online fiction site slowly narrowing in on one
| subgenre over everything else, and Royal Road's being trashy
| power fantasies.
|
| I'm on a discord where authors discuss these things, and they
| talk a lot about the RR community and the hoops they need to
| jump through to match that specific group's specific tastes,
| because it's one of the niches where the money is right now.
| Aerroon wrote:
| > _Is this what young people want nowadays?_
|
| Yes, but it's not just young people.
|
| > _The genre seems to have crossed over from Asian culture,
| with many novels being translations of Chinese /Korean ones._
|
| You can basically trace a lot of the web novel versions back
| to anime/manga/light novels. (Maybe the reason is that in
| Asia these are also web novel, eg Shousetsuka ni Narou.)
|
| However, this kind of a genre is and was popular in the west
| independently of that. Edgar Rice Burroughs wrote A Princess
| of Mars in 1912. It hits onto most of the same ideas these
| more modern stories do.
| WereAllMadHere wrote:
| I don't think there's a comparison between the AI book scraping
| and the generated covers.
|
| One is using a tool to create a new artwork, one is using a
| tool for plagiarism.
| pizzalife wrote:
| >One is using a tool to create a new artwork, one is using a
| tool for plagiarism.
|
| Is it "new artwork", though? That's the big question. I would
| say both are tools for plagiarism.
| NBJack wrote:
| I've tried to use generative text LLMs myself for story ideas,
| filling out backstory in characters, etc. No matter how good the
| model is, no matter how much context you supply or repeat, it
| will inevitably spiral down into some degree repetition and
| forgotten story beats.
|
| But hey, at least it's all technically grammatically correct.
| Most of the time.
|
| What disturbs me more is the thought of lost context in things
| like code, medical notes, and actually critical workflows.
| surfingdino wrote:
| > But hey, at least it's all technically grammatically correct.
| Most of the time.
|
| Unless you use it to translate or feed it languages other than
| English. It's mostly crap.
| nop_slide wrote:
| Hit up support and ask them to remove the lock screen ads, even
| if you didn't buy the "ad free" kindle support usually does it.
|
| It worked for me.
| mhx1138 wrote:
| I wish that worked on echo show. That thing is infuriating.
| Don't get it unless you're cool with ads in your home.
| themadturk wrote:
| I turn mine on at Christmas to act as a speaker for my phone,
| so we can listen to my choice of seasonal music during
| present-opening.
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