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- Hacker News
- Anything that feels like it came out of matrix multiplication immediately loses the value for me.
Something about the industrialization of thinking makes it uninteresting. similar to frozen pasta from the shelves, heated and served.
by subygan - If the writer did not put effort to write, why would you put effort to read? Writing became 1000x faster but reading stayed the same speed.
- This will work for a little while but this can't go on indefinitely: no one is going to want to stick to 30+ year old books.
We should probably work on developing standards for what we want in a book instead of clinging to a losing position.
by julianeon - > no one is going to want to stick to 30+ year old books
This is... satire, right? right?
by geraneum - I use time as a filter. There is more good stuff to read than time to read it. I have no need for slop.by not_the_fda
- Guess you haven't met any old people. I know a few who don't read/watch/listen to anything after 1969.
- I'd guess some publishers just need to set a hard stance against clearly AI generated work, and have more in-depth reviews before publishing.
On the other hand, it means the age of self-publishing was short lived and is effectively dead now.
by fy20 - I’m pretty conservative with books and usually only read things based on recommendations anyway. I would rarely read a book published in the last few years just because news of it hasn’t travelled to me yet. I think worrying about AI generated books would really only matter if you’re at the bleeding edge of reading and looking for brand new stuff.by andy99
- Perhaps we need a 2022 version of this siteby culi
- I thought the Searches for "Second Job" infographic on the 2012 site was rather quaint, these days the term would be "Third Job" or even more
- Exists: https://wtfhappenedin2022.com/ and it's just a single chart of data centers shooting straight up
- It’s not just 2022 and earlier books. There’s a supply chain problem as well. I’ve seen two older books so far from Amazon which were AI generated copy text with a genuine looking cover on it. Amazon just took the return and probably restocked it for the next victim.
I tend to buy books from second hand book shops and eBay now and usually older or well used copies. A good sign of their authenticity.
by cryo32 - Thriftbooks is a decent source. Used hardcovers abound.by pluralmonad
- Yeah, Amazon has been garbage for a while with old books, especially classics. It seems like everything is just keyed off title/author so it takes a ton of effort to make sure you are getting the edition/translation you want. It's 100x worse with Kindle where it looks like some random cheap scan into-kindle format has 2k five star reviews. And of course user reviews where they seem to mix all the reviews together for various editions.by encomiast
- Props to the author for not mentioning low-background steel.by Avicebron
- Sounds like a pink elephant exercise. Low-background steel has now creeped back into our collective consciousness.by rzzzt
- I don't know, there's probably one person on Earth who hasn't heard of low background steel and it's a fun story, I wouldn't want them to miss out.
- You are not alone. I like to read Harry Potter fan fiction [1] and I have started checking the publication date when Im searching for something new to read. I started doing this passively and realized it after the fact.
Have you ever met someone who could say all and do the right things but never made you feel anything, or your gut was sensing an ulterior motive? It's a magic trick we are all bewitched by at some point in our lives. I suppose I filter by published year because I dont want think about if I am being tricked or not.
[1] There are some very talented writers[A] out there who (I assume) cannot do the world building part.
[A] Recent Favorite: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1134255/chapters/2292768
by YesBox - Thank you for the recommendation! I opened it out of curiosity and I'm already a chapter deep :)by 0x3444ac53
- I left a few creative writing forums I had been a member of for over a decade because of how much garbage was being posted. Perhaps even more upsetting than the number of people flooding the front page with reams of nonsensical AI prose was the number of people who saw nothing wrong with this and, instead, heaped praise on it and enthusiastically cried for more of it.
It was profoundly alienating to see hundreds of people liking and commenting on chapters of obviously AI-generated prose full of LLM-isms and broken metaphors and similes - and these 'authors' have the gall to link a patreon account and ask for money for this tripe!
by doctor_blood - There are people churning out 40k word novels daily on AO3, and they get the eyes and feedback that up and coming writers desperately want. Real content is being drowned out and ppl are hurting because of it.by tapland
- With Harry Potter (and Star Trek, I believe) fanfiction, I think decline in quality has been typical for the last decade; the fanfiction from the 90s/early 00s is often of much better quality on average just due to the age + other factors affecting who was able to type up and post fanfiction online back then.by idleplant
- Not just books. When searching for information online, for anything where things haven't changed significantly in the last few years, I definitely favour a post on SO/SE/HN/reddit/etc dated before 2023 over those that are later. And where there are no good looking references before that, the earlier the better.
Of course there are no doubt people out there realising that a fair few of us do this, and are starting to edit posts to pre-date them as a sort of SEO trick…
by dspillett - In this case, archiv.* might be your friend, since they have time stamped copies.by golem14
- I was browsing Amazon and I found one “author” with over 100 published in the last 12 months. And they weren’t cheap either. Most were $50 or more for the paperback version.
It really put a sour taste in my mouth. At that volume (2 books per week) you’d think Amazon could identify and label that it’s AI generated.
by MichaelNolan - Not sure why this got downvoted. The amount of book slop on Amazon these days is staggering. It has completely changed my experience of shopping for books on Amazon and it's for the worse.by chrsw
- And there might be no way to prove you really wrote something Post-2022. I wrote a long article, all by hand. I never used any LLMs, even for searching. I checked it with a couple of AI detection tools and they confidently said that 60% of the article was written by AI.by adamddev1
- How would you prove you wrote something prior to 2022?by quest88
- > I never used any LLMs, even for searching
I highly doubt there is any mainstream search engine that doesn't use any LLM like technology in the backend to provide search results.
> I checked it with a couple of AI detection tools and they confidently said that 60% of the article was written by AI.
These tools are as reliable as the polygraph. I have seen passages from books published before 1900 getting a 90% likelihood of being AI generated from these tools. At the end of the day there are only so many ways to write a grammatically correct sentence and if an AI can write it, chances are some human somewhere already did.
by pibaker - Every time I attempted to convince people to not use Pangram on HN I got downvoted.by raincole