[HN Gopher] Paying AIs to read my books
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Paying AIs to read my books
Author : zdw
Score : 51 points
Date : 2025-10-07 23:44 UTC (4 days ago)
(HTM) web link (kk.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (kk.org)
| bgwalter wrote:
| https://kk.org/thetechnium/ - "Making the Inevitable Obvious"
|
| And the entire linked piece is written in this propaganda style.
| That no longer works except as a morale booster for "AI" cultists
| who feel that their funding will disappear soon.
| measurablefunc wrote:
| Kevin Kelly is a well-known technology booster so this isn't
| surprising to anyone who is familiar w/ his writing.
| dns_snek wrote:
| > If you are writing a book today, you want to keep in mind that
| you are primarily writing it for AIs. They are the ones who are
| going to read it the most carefully. They are going to read every
| page word by word, and all the footnotes, and all the endnotes,
| and the bibliography, and the afterward. They will also read all
| your books and listen to all your podcasts. You are unlikely to
| have any human reader read it as thoroughly as the AIs will.
| After absorbing it, the AIs will do that magical thing of
| incorporating your text into all the other text they have read,
| of situating it, of placing it among all the other knowledge of
| the world - in a way no human reader can do.
|
| [...]
|
| > The value of an author's work will not just be in how well it
| sells among humans, but how deep it has been included within the
| foundational knowledge of these intelligent memory-based systems.
| That potency will be what is boasted about. That will be an
| author's legacy.
|
| The fact that nominally "sane" humans with sizeable followings
| can publish megalomaniac articles like these and present them as
| anything other than descriptions of a dystopian hellscape makes
| me quite pessimistic about our future.
| lm28469 wrote:
| I was going to comment something in the same vein.
|
| What even is the point anymore? They want flesh and blood
| robots to feed the algorithm overlords. They don't even seem to
| realise they're basically killing their profession/passion in
| doing so, although I doubt any writer with an ounce of self
| respect, passion and skill would perceive llms as anything
| other than repulsive monstrosities
| simonw wrote:
| "I doubt any writer with an ounce of self respect, passion
| and skill would perceive llms as anything other than
| repulsive monstrosities"
|
| That's quite an uninformed position to take. I suggest
| talking to more writers.
| jrflowers wrote:
| I'm partial to David Simon's stance on AI and writing
|
| SIMON: I don't think AI can remotely challenge what writers
| do at a fundamentally creative level.
|
| SHAPIRO: But if you're trying to transition from scene five
| to scene six, and you're stuck with that transition, you
| could imagine plugging that portion of the script into an
| AI and say, give me 10 ideas for how to transition this.
|
| SIMON: I'd rather put a gun in my mouth.
|
| https://www.npr.org/2023/05/19/1177194215/tv-writer-david-
| si...
| MattPalmer1086 wrote:
| Every single author I follow is outraged their copyrighted books
| were sucked up by these AI companies.
|
| But yeah, feel free to be honoured that some company can profit
| from your work without recompensing you in any way.
| spwa4 wrote:
| And after what happened in the 2000s with the internet and
| authors ...
| scellus wrote:
| Not everybody, like Kevin Kelly and Tyler Cowen for example are
| not.
| dingnuts wrote:
| I'd imagine that these men use their publications to
| advertise their personas, and their livelihood is made via
| celebrity and appearances. That's why you know their names.
|
| Authors who make money primarily by creating art and selling
| it, and who do not wish to monetize their work through
| selling their persona, might have more of reason to be upset
| by the blatant violation of their legal rights by Sam Altman
| and his friends.
| measurablefunc wrote:
| That's correct. Writing is not the main source of income
| for either Tyler or Kevin. Their books are mostly
| advertising pamphlets for their respective ideological
| agendas, economic & technological growth & advancement.
| Both are now on the record about their support of writing
| books for AIs instead of people b/c they think that the
| primary way people will get their information in the coming
| years will be from AIs instead of books so they want their
| ideas to be part of the AI biases that can then influence
| whoever is querying the AIs.
| lithocarpus wrote:
| I think now is a little golden age for LLMs usefulness
| before they are further enshittified by people's agendas
| and profit motives. Not that they aren't already to a
| degree but I expect it will get a lot worse fast.
| 6510 wrote:
| Or (heaven forbid) to spread their ideas. Could one be that
| old?
| noduerme wrote:
| When did AI companies start turning a profit? /s
| DrewADesign wrote:
| _> Another way to think of this is that in this emerging
| landscape, the audience for books - especially non-fiction books
| - has shifted away from people towards AI. If you are writing a
| book today, you want to keep in mind that you are primarily
| writing it for AIs. They are the ones who are going to read it
| the most carefully. They are going to read every page word by
| word, and all the footnotes, and all the endnotes, and the
| bibliography, and the afterward. They will also read all your
| books and listen to all your podcasts. You are unlikely to have
| any human reader read it as thoroughly as the AIs will. After
| absorbing it, the AIs will do that magical thing of incorporating
| your text into all the other text they have read, of situating
| it, of placing it among all the other knowledge of the world - in
| a way no human reader can do._
|
| ::slow clap:: Congratulations everybody. This is the future of
| pedagogy, learning, creativity, and appreciating things that
| we've bestowed upon humanity. I'll bet our mamas are proud.
| Hopefully, now that writing, visual art and music are solved
| problems, we can clap the dust off of our hands and tackle life's
| true inefficiencies that we're clearly worse at than computers --
| eating a crisp apple off of the tree in autumn, falling in love,
| seeing a breathtaking summer sunrise over some Atlantic sand
| dunes... all that garbage that we couldn't possibly pay the same
| amount of attention to or munge it up and share it with others
| nearly as efficiently as a computer could. That's right. Let's
| get to work on making the lean, productive life something that
| everybody has to want to aspire to, lest those troglodytes get
| left behind! I want the hyper-efficient Soylent version of making
| love to someone I just fell in love with so I can _get back to
| work and make computer magic happen._
| artur_makly wrote:
| Here here!
| stuckkeys wrote:
| lol...this got to be a troll post.
| kwar13 wrote:
| Nice try, Anthropic!
| simonw wrote:
| If you aren't familiar with Kevin Kelly it's worth learning about
| his background as part of reading this.
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kevin_Kelly_(editor)
| alpenglow9 wrote:
| I'm curious what it means for authors to "optimize their work for
| AI ingestion", especially in regards to literature and not just
| API documentation. Would this be specific paragraph formatting,
| or would there also be optimization of the prose itself?
| measurablefunc wrote:
| Just upload it to a shadow library or make it publicly
| available at some URL. The search engines & crawlers will then
| pick it up & include it in the training corpus.
| babblingfish wrote:
| This stood out to me as well. My feeling is what makes writing
| good for humans will also make it more paresable for AI:
| clarity, structure, economy of language, etc.
| 6510 wrote:
| SEO
| Gigachad wrote:
| AI SEO is becoming a thing. Companies looking for a way to
| poison the dataset to get the LLM to recommend their products
| or company.
| eric-burel wrote:
| I'd say metadata not content so good title and abstract,
| consistent with book content. Nothing new compared to usual
| book marketing, AI is a new channel but not that disruptive.
| pharrington wrote:
| That's a whole lotta words to say AI companies want to extort
| artists.
| eCa wrote:
| Slight exaggeration:
|
| "Against the power of Mordor there can be no victory. We must
| join with him, Gandalf. We must join with Sauron. It would be
| wise, my friend."
| babblingfish wrote:
| I can see how someone who writes non-fiction idea books would
| think this way. The impact of an idea book is how much it
| permeates into culture. For example, ideas like deep work, black
| swan, or skin in the game. The hope is to see the ideas discussed
| and have them attributed to their originators.
|
| This argument makes far less sense for memoir and fiction. The
| goal of these forms of writing is to induce specific emotional
| states in the reader. Having them regurgitated or summarized via
| a LLM does nothing to achieve their goal.
| jrflowers wrote:
| It love seeing unironic "I, for one, welcome our robot overlords"
| posts in the wild because it's a reminder that some people read
| "what if in the future the computer got mad at you?" on the
| lesswrong forums in 2010 and got so freaked out that it changed
| their core values.
|
| Fifteen years after a copypasta about a basilisk and people are
| still making "I celebrate the impending blessed birth of my big
| beautiful binary boy!" posts
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