Gah! I'm sorry (but like you, not surprised) that this happened to you and your book. Whac-a-mole is right.
There's a whole service category emerging to monitor the internet for this kind of fakery--it's mostly set up to protect consumer brands from impostor sites and counterfeiters, but I wonder if we'll all need something similar in the near future to avoid having crappy simulacra of our work or identities being monetized by randos
There’s a new “healthcare service” that will call pharmacies in your area to find one with availability of your meds (ADHD and Ozempic mostly). Another one that you can pay to review healthcare bills to look for mistakes.
A whole new service sector to workaround the cruddy system, and the consumer pays. 🫠
Haven’t seen the “automatization” form of the word before and I love it because unlike “automation” it suggests “atomization,” which is often also happening with these v low-effort scams & dark patterns.
As almost always the root problem here is money and I don’t know how to get to a post-money society. I fear humanity will always have “a shitty rewrite of the past with a few minor words changed.”
My favorite imagining of a post-capitalist society comes from The Dispossessed, which is also a post-money society. So I guess I equate the two, to some extent. I do also like the post-capitalist-with-money system imagined in the Monk and Robot books by Becky Chambers. And heck, compared to the US system, the tempered capitalism of many European countries looks great. What’s your favorite post-capitalist (thought) experiment?
I confess I'm a bit of a Marxist purist here, believing that the (small-D) democratic struggle to get there will teach us more about what it should look like than any pre-designed plan. Agree about the "tempered capitalism" take, though. Anything but this!
That humility is very wise, and I suspect most don't have it. I'm convinced we can do better too, but it's a very difficult problem, because it's about the combined effects of the decisions of each of the billions of us on the planet.
I'm also getting echoes of Horn & Hardart in "automatization" (perhaps those echoes are PDQ Bach's Concerto for Horn & Hardart? Does this happen to music, too?). And a distant reverberation of laundromat.
When I was in between jobs in the early 2000s, I wrote a few book summaries for an online company. The money was meh, but the work was relatively interesting for a word nerd like me. Taught me a lot about summarizing content and proper editing, way beyond the skills I'd learned at the proofreading & copyediting jobs I had in the past. Hmm, maybe I should get an AI or bot job. I might be a great AI bot.
One of my kids recently got an air fryer, so I got online to see if I could find a decent cookbook with ideas for the air fryer. And I swear everything I saw was AI-generated. I ended up not getting anything.
Your AI-generated book reminds me of Aldi dill pickle spears. They're dill pickles, all right, and the price is great. But the taste is just a notch or two below what I expect when I bite into one. And they're kinda limp. So, I'm back to the name brands. If AI gets involved, maybe I'll be stuck with Aldi pickles and will never remember what a real pickle tastes like.
Add this to the list of questions always lurking about whether it's even worth it anymore to put in the blood, sweat, and tears to write a book-length work. Or if it's just a Don Quixote-sort of exercise, tilting at the windmills of the realities of modern publishing and AI bots because you're compulsive and can't get off your horse.
I had my first experience with AI this week: I filed an appellate brief on Monday, and late Sunday night the client annoyingly ran my draft through some form of AI. The summary was accurate, but wordy. The hints on what to add were pretty lame. At least it didn't make up cases.
You just set a light bulb off in my head! Had a proposed order in a difficult case that was approved by all 5 attorneys, and #6 decided to add some complicating language. We were befuddled (and enraged). The language added quibbling things that were already authorized by statute. Judge struck the language, but I finally figured out it had to be AI generated. Have to share this with the other attorneys, as we keep each other sane by texting horrible things about #6 to each other.
There is a fellow named Michael Burlingame, chair of Lincoln Stuudies at the university of Illinois, Springfield. He first came to prominence with solid accusations of plagiarism against Stephen Oates and others, one of whom called him "The Torquemada of Lincoln studies." Sure, I guess so, if you lift phrases wholesale from other works. It has been almost 25 years since I was actively following these things, but it seems to me he used a machine from one of the federal agencies to do the scanning. Too bad you can't get your hands on one of those. On the other hand, during the last administration, it was probably ceremonially burned.
Bast***ds! One of the many reasons I admire you is your clever insults. I shake my head in wonder and grin. Bet AI can’t come close to your inventive slams!
This is so upsetting on so many levels. On top of everything else that is so upsetting. Nothing is really working anymore, my sentiment precisely. Couldn't word it any better than you did. AI sure as sh*t couldn't. Makes you want to eliminate everything you ever put online this instant. Oh, wait, you can't. They got it already.
My books are also the topic of AI versions and have been used to train AI. You might have some luck with your publisher. Mine is pretty good about going after piracy.
“We live in a world where nothing is working. Our democracy. Our courts. Our highest levels of government, yes. But even basic functional elements that we could count on before are falling apart.”
This is what collapse looks like.
I was taken by surprise, I must admit, by the Undead nature of AI as part of it, though.
"We poor humans are so exhausted by the inefficiencies of automatization that when we finally reach one another we can barely speak civilly."
This a million times over.
I like that there is a simple form of AI that can generate texts from speech. this is an accessibility feature that serves many. I want AI to be approached in that way—how can it serve humans to live well and in connection, not how can it take over and destroy all that is creative in the world for the sake of making billionaires even wealthier in their unstoppable competition to have The Most Monies while destroying the climate.
Agreed. It's a tool, and tools can be used for good, but they can also be used for not good. The problem throughout the history of humanity has always been how the not good people use the tools our species invents.
"But second, I might hire someone to scan the copy, do a side-by-side comparison, hire a lawyer, and issue a takedown notice."
Until the next AI shill does it again. And again. And again. Until the AI IS the shill and builds a swimming pool for itself.
You know, I am of an age to rage at the fact that cursive isn't taught in schools. Now I see that we critically need a range of literacies taught: digital literacy, media literacy and AI literacy. They're crossover in their possibilities and problems (SO many problems), while still there own thing. A healthy dose of teaching ethics, transparency and accountability.. and maybe some brain science... would help us all better understand what we're dealing with.
I'll have to buy your books now since my library doesn't carry them. I'll go through my independent bookstore, of course, because "Fuck you, Bezos".
Gah! I'm sorry (but like you, not surprised) that this happened to you and your book. Whac-a-mole is right.
There's a whole service category emerging to monitor the internet for this kind of fakery--it's mostly set up to protect consumer brands from impostor sites and counterfeiters, but I wonder if we'll all need something similar in the near future to avoid having crappy simulacra of our work or identities being monetized by randos
There’s a new “healthcare service” that will call pharmacies in your area to find one with availability of your meds (ADHD and Ozempic mostly). Another one that you can pay to review healthcare bills to look for mistakes.
A whole new service sector to workaround the cruddy system, and the consumer pays. 🫠
Haven’t seen the “automatization” form of the word before and I love it because unlike “automation” it suggests “atomization,” which is often also happening with these v low-effort scams & dark patterns.
As almost always the root problem here is money and I don’t know how to get to a post-money society. I fear humanity will always have “a shitty rewrite of the past with a few minor words changed.”
We don't need a post-money society; we need a post-capitalist society. (Money is just a convienent way to trade things.)
My favorite imagining of a post-capitalist society comes from The Dispossessed, which is also a post-money society. So I guess I equate the two, to some extent. I do also like the post-capitalist-with-money system imagined in the Monk and Robot books by Becky Chambers. And heck, compared to the US system, the tempered capitalism of many European countries looks great. What’s your favorite post-capitalist (thought) experiment?
I confess I'm a bit of a Marxist purist here, believing that the (small-D) democratic struggle to get there will teach us more about what it should look like than any pre-designed plan. Agree about the "tempered capitalism" take, though. Anything but this!
That humility is very wise, and I suspect most don't have it. I'm convinced we can do better too, but it's a very difficult problem, because it's about the combined effects of the decisions of each of the billions of us on the planet.
I like "automaticity" which is pedagogical shorthand for "information you can spit out immediately" like memorized times tables
I'm also getting echoes of Horn & Hardart in "automatization" (perhaps those echoes are PDQ Bach's Concerto for Horn & Hardart? Does this happen to music, too?). And a distant reverberation of laundromat.
When I was in between jobs in the early 2000s, I wrote a few book summaries for an online company. The money was meh, but the work was relatively interesting for a word nerd like me. Taught me a lot about summarizing content and proper editing, way beyond the skills I'd learned at the proofreading & copyediting jobs I had in the past. Hmm, maybe I should get an AI or bot job. I might be a great AI bot.
Lyz, did you write that footnote, or did your editor add it in?? 😀
I WROTE IT! And I was so stressed out I would add in an error! Because whenever I go rogue I always add in an error
One of my kids recently got an air fryer, so I got online to see if I could find a decent cookbook with ideas for the air fryer. And I swear everything I saw was AI-generated. I ended up not getting anything.
Your AI-generated book reminds me of Aldi dill pickle spears. They're dill pickles, all right, and the price is great. But the taste is just a notch or two below what I expect when I bite into one. And they're kinda limp. So, I'm back to the name brands. If AI gets involved, maybe I'll be stuck with Aldi pickles and will never remember what a real pickle tastes like.
Add this to the list of questions always lurking about whether it's even worth it anymore to put in the blood, sweat, and tears to write a book-length work. Or if it's just a Don Quixote-sort of exercise, tilting at the windmills of the realities of modern publishing and AI bots because you're compulsive and can't get off your horse.
lyz might not be angry but, honestly, this makes me furious. aargh.
You'd have made a great lawyer!
I had my first experience with AI this week: I filed an appellate brief on Monday, and late Sunday night the client annoyingly ran my draft through some form of AI. The summary was accurate, but wordy. The hints on what to add were pretty lame. At least it didn't make up cases.
You just set a light bulb off in my head! Had a proposed order in a difficult case that was approved by all 5 attorneys, and #6 decided to add some complicating language. We were befuddled (and enraged). The language added quibbling things that were already authorized by statute. Judge struck the language, but I finally figured out it had to be AI generated. Have to share this with the other attorneys, as we keep each other sane by texting horrible things about #6 to each other.
There is a fellow named Michael Burlingame, chair of Lincoln Stuudies at the university of Illinois, Springfield. He first came to prominence with solid accusations of plagiarism against Stephen Oates and others, one of whom called him "The Torquemada of Lincoln studies." Sure, I guess so, if you lift phrases wholesale from other works. It has been almost 25 years since I was actively following these things, but it seems to me he used a machine from one of the federal agencies to do the scanning. Too bad you can't get your hands on one of those. On the other hand, during the last administration, it was probably ceremonially burned.
Bast***ds! One of the many reasons I admire you is your clever insults. I shake my head in wonder and grin. Bet AI can’t come close to your inventive slams!
This is so upsetting on so many levels. On top of everything else that is so upsetting. Nothing is really working anymore, my sentiment precisely. Couldn't word it any better than you did. AI sure as sh*t couldn't. Makes you want to eliminate everything you ever put online this instant. Oh, wait, you can't. They got it already.
My books are also the topic of AI versions and have been used to train AI. You might have some luck with your publisher. Mine is pretty good about going after piracy.
“We live in a world where nothing is working. Our democracy. Our courts. Our highest levels of government, yes. But even basic functional elements that we could count on before are falling apart.”
This is what collapse looks like.
I was taken by surprise, I must admit, by the Undead nature of AI as part of it, though.
"We poor humans are so exhausted by the inefficiencies of automatization that when we finally reach one another we can barely speak civilly."
This a million times over.
I like that there is a simple form of AI that can generate texts from speech. this is an accessibility feature that serves many. I want AI to be approached in that way—how can it serve humans to live well and in connection, not how can it take over and destroy all that is creative in the world for the sake of making billionaires even wealthier in their unstoppable competition to have The Most Monies while destroying the climate.
Agreed. It's a tool, and tools can be used for good, but they can also be used for not good. The problem throughout the history of humanity has always been how the not good people use the tools our species invents.
"But second, I might hire someone to scan the copy, do a side-by-side comparison, hire a lawyer, and issue a takedown notice."
Until the next AI shill does it again. And again. And again. Until the AI IS the shill and builds a swimming pool for itself.
You know, I am of an age to rage at the fact that cursive isn't taught in schools. Now I see that we critically need a range of literacies taught: digital literacy, media literacy and AI literacy. They're crossover in their possibilities and problems (SO many problems), while still there own thing. A healthy dose of teaching ethics, transparency and accountability.. and maybe some brain science... would help us all better understand what we're dealing with.
I'll have to buy your books now since my library doesn't carry them. I'll go through my independent bookstore, of course, because "Fuck you, Bezos".
my library will often buy books, if a patron specifically requests one. Maybe your library would too?
That is really, really shitty and I'm sorry this is being done to your work.
I doubt that you have ever murmured anything!
Thank you Shayne! You are correct