Comment by Jblx2
6 hours ago
I started reading and at about the half-way point, I decided to search for "AI", "LLM", "generative", which all came up blank. At that point I closed the tab and headed back here. #1 reason I would be very skeptical of purchasing a book published in 2026 is AI. Unfortunately, you need to overcome a pretty big hump in convincing me that there was no AI involved in authoring.
I don't necessarily mind reading AI generated content. But the bar you need to clear is: why would I read (or watch or play) what you generate with AI compared to me just directly asking the AI?
To be clear: this isn't meant as a rhetorical question. There are AI generated works I'm happy to consume. It's meant as a real bar that you can clear. But it's also non-trivial, and the goalposts are moving as AI becomes better and easier to use.
This is the bar with other works as well. If you would hire it buy anything that’s just a mindless AI dump, why not use your $5/mo GPT sub?
Especially with the current rate of progress, you asking ChatGPT today probably means you'll get a way better answer than whatever the author got using a model from last year.
1 reply →
I agree with you in principle, but I think this ignores the reality. Many nonfiction categories are overrun by self-published AI slop generated at an industrial scale by hustlers in low-CoL countries, never as much as proofread by a human. So yes, in theory, good AI-assisted books may exist. But in practice, they're more or less guaranteed to be drowned out because they take much longer to produce (and are written only if the author has something to say).
I'm not sure the low cost of living of the guy who kicks off the AI generation still makes much of a difference?
This might have been more important when the human still had to invest quite a few hours.
In any case, why do we care about the cost of living of the author? Notionally, my adopted home of Singapore is one of the highest cost of living countries on earth, but I'm not sure that makes me nor my AI slop any better? Especially I don't think my output is any better than before I moved to Singapore.
There is a lot of curation and editing that go into AI generated content. Like if you just use an AI to write from a prompt, you’ll just get slop (vibe writing), but if you plan it, review the bullet points, delete and add points that make the narrative stronger, have it sketch some writing out after you are happy with what it is covering, then rewrite that because LLMs have absolutely no sense for word rhythm.
This is logical, but it’s also a lemon market. You don’t know the author, editor and publisher did anything of the sort, unless you’re the sort of person who doesn’t need the book. But if you do see an LLMism, it’s a strong sign of cost-cutting.
I think if you read a little bit further in the article you would find that this attitude is exactly why the author believes there is a collapse in non-fiction book.
> The collapse of nonfiction is [...] a massive breakdown in the social fabric of trusting education, expertise, or any authority
People don't want to read non-fiction because they don't trust the people writing it.
Honestly most non fiction books title sound like linkedin posts and have been for decades even before linkedin was a thing.
I didn't wait for AI to lose trust in people writing them, they are just all mostly repulsive.
Shouldn't that hit nonfiction and fiction equally?
Yeah, frankly, this doesn't make sense to me. Has the author checked any nonfiction categories on Amazon recently? In many categories, 80-90% of all new releases are obvious AI slop. And even for non-self-published releases, about 20-30% previews get flagged as AI by Pangram, compared to roughly 0% pre-2023.
I don't buy (new) nonfiction because it now feels like playing Minesweeper.
Likewise. I'm only interested in books that were either published before 2024, or are by authors I respect (e.g. Patterson & Hennessy), or by respectable academic publishers (e.g. Cambridge University Press). I used not to be so picky.
It also presents a bit of chicken & egg for new authors: nobody knows them, and now few will risk it, so they stay unknown. They must pursue other avenues to gain traction; far more than was needed a few years ago.
The deluge of AI books on Amazon has really been quite amazing. Between them and the higher risk of poorly-printed books, I don't buy from Amazon anymore. Now it's always direct from publishers.