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Comment by robertclaus | Hacker News Reader

The lack of real effort bothers me more than the content itself. We can't be bothered to even proofread children's books anymore?

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the lack of effort has been the main thing for me since this all started. you give people a tool to do something easier and instead of doing more WITH the tool they do this instead. is anyone out there using AI to make more higher quality children's books than were possible before?

I think its always been a thing. Give a society any new technology and the distribution curve of human effort doesn’t disappear: a slice of people will aim it at entertainment, shortcuts, and the lowest common denominator (this book), and a smaller slice with high discipline and curiousity will use the exact same tools to become 10x more capable. The tech changes; the distribution of how people use it mostly doesn’t

I don't think there has ever been an appetite amongst corporations to improve the quality of their products if they can easily get away with reducing costs.

People were not given a tool to do something easier. That is not how it was promoted or sold. And that is not why businesses pay for AI. AI was sold as a tool to replace people and do things on the cheap. A person is attached to it as an accountability sink, that is it.

The way AI got used and integrated makes it hard to produce quality and easy to produce a lot of slop. That was deliberate design and marketing choice.

> is anyone out there using AI to make more higher quality children's books than were possible before?

Of course not. Quality children's books were always easy to find. There was no "impossible to create quality children's book" problem before. There was "it costs money to produce sloppy childrens book" problem for companies that tried to live from producing slop kids books.

Because openai and other ai companies spend billions convincing people that they dont need to put in effort as long as they use AI. They literally think they are interacting with a hyperintelligence that is so smart it will destroy the planet eventually. Why would you spellcheck a digital god? Why not just push straight to publish and "automate" everything.

Over time, i hope the chickens come to roost.

These are not made by people who care. It’s a scam basically. Spamming Amazon with slop is a current hustle culture thing. There’s guides, probably AI generated and not proofread, explaining how to do it. They obviously have tricks to game the rankings since these books get recommended like mad in every category.

It’s today’s hot successor to the big drop shipping craze, which is also still happening, and has destroyed Etsy. That was another hustle culture thing. I remember hearing something about it being one of the get rich scams Andrew Tate was teaching at his thing.

You could use AI to help make a good book like this, but you would proofread and fact check it and sit there and converse with the AI and tell it all the stuff to fix… just like vibe coding.

I understand you can use AI to make a good book but you can also make a good book without AI. Why does AI have to be involved at all? Were we running out of children books that we need to optimize a factory assembly line for them with AI?

It's like there are some things that do not even need AI and thats okay. Children's books also don't need a hurculean effort to write/create (the part ai tries to automate and fs up). In fact, its almost entirely about the concept and direct execution.

You mention vibe coding but this is fundamentally different and it doesnt apply

The point I was making is that this isn't bad AI books made by people trying to make books. This is scam content made by spammers and hustlers.

As the other commenter here says, I suspect whoever did skim through found it amusing. Besides, it's not like this genre was particularly accurate anyway --- I have some old purely-manual-human examples of "how things work" books which distort, exaggerate, or grossly simplify for illustrative purposes.

The lack of effort is the point. The intent is to automate the entire pipeline and churn out huge numbers of these for whatever the top selling topic of the week is.

The lack of effort is the point. This is the equivalent of SEO spam, meant to extract money from the ecosystem by crowding out books that earned their position in the marketplace.

The difference is that multimodal generative AI lets you can crank you SEO spam-style content across all types of media, at almost any scale.

I assume these aren't being published by major publishing houses but rather microbrands and print-on-demand services. They're, like, bypassing gatekeepers and democratizing knowledge, man. Why do you hate freedom so much?

Yes we should celebrate these plucky entrepreneurs!

There was a window where new authors could break in with blogging and self publishing. Andy Weir (The Martian, Project Hail Mary, and the bad one that shall not be named) got started this way I think.

That window is now closed. If I wanted to be an author I’d probably try to get a real publisher, with all the downsides that entails.

the slop must flow

Alternate theory: It's a best seller because it's so goofy. Much like brainrot and Dr Seuss.

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