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Comment by lelandfe | Hacker News Reader

> Is Amazon cutting out the author middle man and using A.I. and user data to generate books on its own?

Amazon has done just this elsewhere: https://techcrunch.com/2022/11/29/amazons-alexa-ai-animated-...

By the by, I’ve enjoyed my Kindle a whole lot more since turning on its airplane mode. I connect to WiFi to sync new books to it, but don’t give my Amazon overlords other opportunities to present AI slop from the vaults.

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>Create with Alexa,” a new AI tool for kids that generates animated stories

How soon until we find out it's child labour?.. on both ends.

Well most AIs are only a year or so old!

Fantastic quote from the article:

“Is Amazon cutting out the author middle man and using A.I. and user data to generate books on its own? What generative models are being used? What kinds of prompts are generating these texts?

I don’t know. I’m not a virgin. As I said, I have a child.”

I have never connected my Kindle to WiFi. Prevents ads and updates. USB is easy enough to transfer files.

Same. Calibre works pretty seamlessly as well with transferring and converting books to and from mobi/epub with targeted layouts depending on whether you're on a full sized Kindle vs Paperwhite etc.

I've moved away from Kindle to Kobo (far less locked down), but when I had Kindles I always paid the $20 to get rid of ads. Totally worth it.

I remember there being some buzz a few months back around something similar happening with Spotify. Lots of random tracks that looked/sounded suspiciously AI-generated strewn into Spotify-generated playlists.

That was identified as fraud, and Spotify took action against it.

https://www.billboard.com/pro/spotify-removed-thousands-song...

I’m pretty relaxed about this. There is absolutely no consumer product whatsoever that amazon has nailed.

Maybe Kindle, but that’s just a store window for them. Alexa is garbage, the fire phone a disaster, and so on.

dramatically improved battery life is also a side-effect of disabled wifi, too

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