Against AI: An Open Letter From Writers to Penguin Random House, HarperCollins, Simon & Schuster, Hachette Book Group, Macmillan, and all other publishers of America
(lithub.com)
from Pro@programming.dev to technology@lemmy.world on 28 Jun 23:55
https://programming.dev/post/33072431
from Pro@programming.dev to technology@lemmy.world on 28 Jun 23:55
https://programming.dev/post/33072431
“We want our publishers to stand with us. To make a pledge that they will never release books that were created by machines.”
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🤣 🤣
If there’s money to be made by releasing books created by Counterfeit Cognizance, those publishers will take advantage of it to its fullest… Count on it.
Nice try, but…
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Unless readers want street cred reading only books from publishers who observe the request. There will be a market for “authentic” publishers along with the more liberal slop-friendly ones.
Your points don’t get better just because you coined/found a new term
Aaannd…
Yours don’t improve by you being a jackass. But, doing so will earn you a quick block. Bye.
Bro found the block button
It’s too early for the Butlerian Jihad to start.
If they don't then someone else will.
That’s Game Theory right there.
That’s not how capitalism works my friend
How does it exactly relate here?
Cute, but we all know the only way these writers are going to get what they want is if they part ways from their current publishers and start a coöperative.
It’s actually wild how with the just-in-time economy, it has never required less capital investment to start a business like a book publisher. And yet it seems like the only people that take advantage of it are average schmo “grindset grifters” selling junk while all of the people with the real economic power literally beg the institutions that have abused them since the very beginning of their industry to please do the right thing.
I tried to read about “just-in-time economy” but I really don’t see how it would apply to book market?
It means that today pretty much anybody can start a book publishing company, because just-in-time print shops will handle literally all of the expensive overhead that is associated with running a publishing company and just print whatever you hire them to print on demand for you once customers actually place orders, sometimes even on a commission basis so you don’t even have to pay them money unless people are actually buying the books you are publishing.
I guess, but print on demand is also more expensive than printing in bulk, when looking per unit, and of lower quality (paper and binding). I’m not too familiar with the details of book publishing but I wouldn’t expect that people are not using this route simply because they failed to notice its benefits.
As someone who loves books, I avoid print-on-demand. Most of the time they end up with terrible, jpeg artifact ridden covers, disorganized page breaks, and terrible quality text.
Yeah, usually they’re just sourced from public-domain book collections such as Google Books (who scan older books which can end up visually messy), and I’m pretty sure some of those that are offered on Amazon were straight-up based on pirated PDFs.
Print on demand is more expensive because you’re paying a premium for never having to actually spend your own money. This is why these get rich quick types use it, because again literally anybody can do this with basically no money and all of the “expenses” only happen when people actually buy the stuff. Once that happens, the printer takes its cut directly from the sale and then passes on the rest to you without you having to do literally anything or spending any money out of your own pocket.
As for the quality, there’s literally no reason that a book that is printed on demand has to be low quality or use low quality materials. It quite literally only seems like that because the only people who are doing this right now are rich quick types who don’t actually care about what they’re selling and are just trying to minimize the cut the printer takes because that means more money for them.
And all of this is honestly moot anyway because you wouldn’t do this with the intention of using on-demand printing long-term. You would do it just to get started and then as the business grows, it will eventually be able to take advantage of more economical, but high capital investment opportunities like bulk publishing. I only brought it up because it’s literally never been easier to boot strap a business and the proof is the fact that Amazon is filled with AI generated garbage books. So like I’m just not willing to entertain the idea that an individual who literally has fans and clout should have a more difficult time selling books this way than a literal nobody scam artist pushing garbage.
Well no, it’s the buyer who is paying. Which they might find off-putting, if the final price is too high, so you get fewer buyers and less profit.
Except that in practice they simply are of lower quality. I’ve seen quite enough of such books. Maybe higher quality materials could be used, but that would raise the price for the end-user even more, and possibly slow down the production.
One has to wonder how much money they actually make, though. I saw some YT videos about the topic, IIRC it’s really difficult. Their mere presence doesn’t prove their profitability but only the belief by many people that they could be profitable.
It’s easy to start a business, sure. But you didn’t explain the rest of the process and don’t seem to actually know a lot about the particulars of book publishing (neither do I, but whatever I do know doesn’t agree with your imagined “solution”).
I’d take it part of the problem is that publisher is quite a “unglorious” job to say somehow. Like, it’s difficult to make it look fancy or interesting enough that you’d take effort, time and resources from other things you could be doing - such as, ya know, writing the story you want to write - to have to do that.
And I don’t care if something is written by AI. As people we care about the quality of the output.
We know AI by default just creates slop but with a human in the loop, it’s possible to get inspiration for scenes, brainstorming, discuss ideas etc.
I think a good writer would use it this way.
AI is much like smoking (hey, it is killing the atmosphere! ). Even if a good writer uses it, the usage itseld can still cause harm for others.
Is that like a cooperative but in germany?
Oh it’s for the correct sound distinction. Compare naïve vs naive (eg.: glaive).
And demand an additional disclaimer that “use of the contents of this book for AI training purposes is explicitely forbidden”.
That will 100% stop Meta from using it for training their AI for sure.
/s
It will at least stop AI training from claiming fair use.
I think the thing about fair use is that you don’t need permission
The key here is that this is a reasonable legal hurdle. It would be like the terms of service you never read when installing a piece of software.
Everyone wants to protect their money under a capitalistic system. Where were you when all of the typewriter repairmen lost their jobs? Society and technology change and evolve over time.
That’s not an equivalency. From written paper to typewriters and then to computers, writing has remained a product of the author. A typewriter repair shop would transition from mechanical to electronic typewriters and potentially then to computer repair. This is because it supports an evolving technology.
An author cannot transition to becoming a machine, because they cannot author what they don’t write, but a publisher can continue to publish anything that would make them money. So when human experience is boiled down to nothing more than the probabalistic order of the words written by authors who gave no consent to have their work absorbed and mutilated by an LLM, the only winner is a publishing house seeking cheaper labour than the human.
AI written books have no value.
If it was not worth writing, it is not worth reading.
I see this as the 2025 equivalent of the entertainment industry’s collective backlash against Napster back in the day. The issue will probably be decided by courts and legislatures, as before, and that legal decision will be transmuted into fierce morality, as before. The major difference is that in 1999 the legal combatants were a whole industry vs a handful of software developers and basically Lawrence Lessig, whereas with AI they’re all corporations with tons of money at stake. So the outcome could easily be very different this time, and our crowdsourced moral standards could follow suit.