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.
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.
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.
"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.
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.
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. 🫠
As a former copy editor, I get so frustrated with Grammarly. I'm all about people using tools, but it doesn't understand nuance (or purposeful breaking of rules). I love that you have a human editor – I can tell! I think that is a big miss for many Substackers.
Grammarly creeps me out. There's something evil about it going on behind the scenes.... don't know what it is but at some point we'll look back and claim it was obvious.
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.
Hey Lyz! The Authors Guild will help you get your book down. They are sometimes faster even than your actual publisher! The A.G. is doing amazing work on behalf of authors. If you are a member ($150 a year for free legal advice and assistance!) I'll tell you exactly how to get help from their lawyer today.
Argh. I have had to add a layer of instruction about AI when I teach (college writing and literature). Mostly I've seen students using AI to respond to discussion prompts in my Lit/Film classes, but they suck. They also copy other students word for word, so I had to institute a mechanism that requires them to post their own before they read others.
I'll be teaching in person again this fall (got the VAP gig!) and I will go over this in class as part of an ethics lesson. I might use your experience as an example - and it would be instructive in terms of writing summary as well.
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.
A year ago, as a test, I asked BARD AI (now GEMINI, I guess) to, 'Write a blog introduction to a podcast about "It Came From Outer Space."' What it instantly produced surprised me. It was a bit flat, maybe inhuman, but still surprising.
However, in a short list of the movie's stars, BARD included an actor that is not in the movie. YIKES! After a little research, I learned that the AI didn't check databases for accuracy; it just used words that frequently appeared together.
I've noticed that every question I ask Google now has an AI generated answer appearing first in the results list. I have to scroll down to find sourced results. I assume many people don't get that those AI-generated results can't be trusted.
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!
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.
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.
I doubt that you have ever murmured anything!
Thank you Shayne! You are correct
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.
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'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.
I like "automaticity" which is pedagogical shorthand for "information you can spit out immediately" like memorized times tables
I'll say it since I think your editor's ban* is still in effect: this book is a Temu-brand knockoff of God Land by Lyz Lenz.
I'm also laughing at the Famous Footwear rewrite, imagining if it were about other stores and rewriting it worse:
"Look at the borders! You enjoy maps!"
"Check out the 711! You dig numbers!"
"See that best buy! You purchase well!"
"There's the dollar general. You save major money!"
* https://lyz.substack.com/p/the-real-womens-work-is-making-fun-of-your-ass?utm_source=publication-search#footnote-1-144726251
"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.
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.
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. 🫠
As a former copy editor, I get so frustrated with Grammarly. I'm all about people using tools, but it doesn't understand nuance (or purposeful breaking of rules). I love that you have a human editor – I can tell! I think that is a big miss for many Substackers.
Grammarly creeps me out. There's something evil about it going on behind the scenes.... don't know what it is but at some point we'll look back and claim it was obvious.
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.
Hey Lyz! The Authors Guild will help you get your book down. They are sometimes faster even than your actual publisher! The A.G. is doing amazing work on behalf of authors. If you are a member ($150 a year for free legal advice and assistance!) I'll tell you exactly how to get help from their lawyer today.
Argh. I have had to add a layer of instruction about AI when I teach (college writing and literature). Mostly I've seen students using AI to respond to discussion prompts in my Lit/Film classes, but they suck. They also copy other students word for word, so I had to institute a mechanism that requires them to post their own before they read others.
I'll be teaching in person again this fall (got the VAP gig!) and I will go over this in class as part of an ethics lesson. I might use your experience as an example - and it would be instructive in terms of writing summary as well.
The only consolation is its popsicle season.
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.
A year ago, as a test, I asked BARD AI (now GEMINI, I guess) to, 'Write a blog introduction to a podcast about "It Came From Outer Space."' What it instantly produced surprised me. It was a bit flat, maybe inhuman, but still surprising.
However, in a short list of the movie's stars, BARD included an actor that is not in the movie. YIKES! After a little research, I learned that the AI didn't check databases for accuracy; it just used words that frequently appeared together.
I've noticed that every question I ask Google now has an AI generated answer appearing first in the results list. I have to scroll down to find sourced results. I assume many people don't get that those AI-generated results can't be trusted.
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!
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.