Are AI-written books getting published?
If they start out-competing humans, is that bad? According to most naysayers, they can't do anything original.
Are people asking the AI for books? And then hoping it will spit it out a human-written book word for word?
Yes, online bookstores are full of them:
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/05/travel/amazon-guidebooks-...
The issue is there's an asymmetry between buyer/seller for books, because a buyer doesn't know the contents until you buy the book. Reviews can help, but not if the reviews are fake/AI generated. In this case, these books are profitable if only a few people buy them as the marginal cost of creating such a book is close to zero.
If you can't tell how the content is before you read it, it could be written by a monkey.
actually i think they are. lots of e-book slop
> If they start out-competing humans, is that bad?
Not inherently, but it depends on what you mean by out-competing. Social media outcompeted books and now everyone's addicted and mental illness is more rampant than ever. IMO, a net negative for society. AI books may very well win out through sheer spam but is that good for us?
It feels more like we just want to punish people, particularly rich people, particularly if they get away with stuff we're afraid to try.
Is it?
(I don't agree)
Copyright was invented by publishers (the printing guild) to ensure that the capitalists who own the printing presses could profit from artificial monopolies. It decreases the works produced, on purpose, in order to subsidize publishing.
If society decides we no longer want to subsidize publishers with artificial monopolies, we should start with legalizing human creativity. Instead we're letting computers break the law with mediocre output while continuing to keep humans from doing the same thing.
LLMs are serving as intellectual property laundering machines, funneling all the value of human creativity to a couple of capitalists. This infringement of intellectual property is just the more pure manifestation of copyright, keeping any of us from benefitting from our labor.
Few company can amass such quantities of knowledge and leverage it all for their own, very-private profits. This is unprecedented centralization of power, for a very select few. Do we actually want that? If not, why not block this until we're sure this a net positive for most people?
Personally, I strongly believe that the aesthetic skills of humanity are one of our most advanced faculties — we are nowhere close to replacing them with fully-automated output, AGI or no.
i think when chatGPT was around version 2 or 3, i had extracted almost 2 pages (without any alteration from the original) with questions that considered the author from this book here, https://www.amazon.com/Loneliness-Human-Nature-Social-Connec...
now it's up to you to think this is okay... but i bet you are no author
You got less than 1% of a book... from an author who has passed away... who wrote on a research topic that was funded by an institution that takes in hundreds of millions of dollars in federal grants each year...
I'm not an author (although I do generate almost exclusively IP for a living) and I think this is about as weak a form of this argument as you possibly make.
So right back at ya... who was hurt in your example?
