Pre-2022 Books

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• Hacker News
• 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
• Props to the author for not mentioning low-background steel.
  by Avicebron
• 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
• 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
• 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
• 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
• I've been consciously doing that for reference books for the past three years because Amazon is absolutely littered with AI-generated non-fiction. I have my own ideological reasons too, but the main problem is that most of that AI-generated reference stuff is just of incredibly poor quality. It's meant to saturate the platform as cheaply as possible, so no one actually does any fact-checking, editing, layout, and so on. They're not even using frontier models for that.

  For example, there are multiple evidently AI-generated titles that come up on the front page if you search for "Rust programming", "cybersecurity book", etc. I guess I can't rule out that "Winston Knowles" is a real person, but I'm not gonna bet money on that: https://www.amazon.com/Cybersecurity-Career-Manual-Interview...

  by zerobees
• It's one of the reasons I don't want to update my free book about Ruby: https://leanpub.com/rubyisforfun - written by a human, and will stay the same forever I think. The moment you touch it to update - immediately changes the date from 2022-05-26 to 2026 and all the value is gone
  by RomanPushkin