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Comment by appreciatorBus | Hacker News Reader

I guess if I wanted to read a book written by Claude, I would ask Claude to write the book. I wouldn’t need you to do it, or to post them to hacker news, I would just ask Claude to do it.

Like with programming, I’m sure there are ways AI can help authors and subject matter experts be more productive, and hopefully help readers learn from the works created.

However at the current moment, I have few good tools to discern signal from noise.

Is the human co-author an experienced Lisp programmer who used an AI authoring tool to ease the process of writing a book?

Or is he/she an AI grifter, looking for quick cash by asking an AI to churn out thousands of words he/she has no understanding of and no care as to whether they are helpful or correct.

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I'm sharing a work product, just one that used a power tool. You didn't use that power tool to make my work product, I did. That's why people are curious - they want to see what was made. I'm an experienced Elisp programmer, among many other things. I'm curious what Claude Code Opus 4.1 has to say on the topic, aren't you? Why the hell anyone would try to get rich off a book on Perl or Lisp shared under CC0 in an open community is beyond me, but maybe -- just maybe -- somebody wants to read it? It's free. And open source. If that matters.

> I'm curious what Claude Code Opus 4.1 has to say on the topic, aren't you?

No. Claude isn’t a person and has nothing to say on any topic without a human providing the prompt.

Again, if I wanted Claude to write me a book about lisp or anything else, I’d ask it too. I ask AI tools to do stuff everyday, not clear value you are adding by inserting yourself between the tool and the readers who have the same access to the same tool.

If you think the stuff has value and you’re sharing it for free, that’s great, but I don’t know you from Adam, so your recent flood of HN posting doesn’t inspire confidence, it just looks like self promotion of AI slop being churned out at a rapid pace.

I'm a senior developer on medical leave who wanted to contribute to the community. I used Claude to help create the programming guides I wished existed - carefully prompting for content about languages I've worked with extensively. People were engaging positively with the Perl book before it was flagged. If there are specific technical issues with the content, I welcome that feedback via issues or PRs. But dismissing all AI-assisted content as 'slop' regardless of quality or utility seems shortsighted, especially as these tools become part of how we create and share knowledge.

> shared under CC0

I dispute that you have the right to put blatantly generated stuff under a license of your choice.

It was produced by ripping off countless copyrighted texts scraped from the Internet and used without permission.

If you actually wrote the book yourself and got Claude to correct some grammar errors and such, that would then be different. The result would still be influenced the aforementioned texts, but in such a way that it is overwhelmingly a derivative of your own text.

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