What is worse, IMO, is that these GenAI books have found their way into physical stores. You know, the few that are still left.

I've found AI slop at many big box stores (think Walmart, Target, etc. and all their equivalents around the world) - which I suspect are "industry plants", meaning that the publishing house will have someone internally generate books like these, and sell them as physical copies around the thousands of stores I mentioned.

It is the equivalent of record labels pushing their own in-house GenAI artists.

Maybe the LLMs need some kind of "coverage" metric so they prioritise new paths? The author would know a thing or two about that.

I think for that instance to carry weight you would have to provide evidence that the mosaic of books were the product of different people using AI. If it is just one person doing variations on the same thing then it wouldn't mean very much.

I love the illustration of the same-ness of AI.

One question / quibble:

> if a hundred “authors” give their favorite AI tool a similar prompt

Do we really believe there are 100 different people generating those? When I saw the books, I assumed they were generated on demand to match the (to me unlikely) search terms.

I don’t think I’m invested enough to research this. Amazon slop is harder and harder to wade through. (Searches are very imprecise. Deliberate, I’m sure.)

We likes this "same, complex set of mannerism" when using LLM for programming. If you ask LLM to write a certain function for you, it gives you statistically obvious implementation. But maybe for writing an original book, this feature is not so desirable

I don't want to hurt people's feelings, so in person I restrain myself from speaking out (it wouldn't change anything anyway)... but every person I have seen so far, who was bullish on building an AI business has followed the same path:

  1) They think the AI can replace them, but in a good way: "it will keep doing my job and people will pay ME"
  2) They assume people either don't notice or don't mind that it's AI. They build businesses, where AI impersonates a professional when that person is not available ("chat with your therapist any time even if they sleep!")
  3) All they do is based on written or spoken words. There is no substance

I expect that sooner than later a great skepticism for anything non-tangible will develop. Personally, I have been highly distrustful of people who don't build things (even the word "building" is now tainted). I think it will accelerate.

It’s actually pretty easy to distinguish AI from real text because all AI generated texts have 2.4 children. In aggregate it is indistinguishable statistically but for a given text it’s remarkably easy.

Have you seen Egyptian paintings or Hollywood movies?

Everything is slop if you make enough of it and squint hard enough.

The point with AI is if and how to steer it to produce something that is interesting and unique for you, not another bland cookie cutter blockbuster or lame summer song.

Ignore me

The whole point of the thesis is that because the cover image are very similar, therefore LLMs are bad at writing text?

I think it's that today's LLMs have access to poor/generic image generation models and people find it easier to ask ChatGPT or NanoBanana to make a cover instead of fine tuning a small SD model for the purpose.