370 Books in 20 months: South African author defends her use of AI

Would improve both Amazon and YouTube significantly. I have basically stopped using them after seeing all LLM spam.

That said it all, and literally the only thing that matters, because sales means demand, which means people find the works valuable.

I'm not saying that authors should mine clay, hand-carve the letters on a clay tablet, and fire it up in a kiln that they built themselves; but authorship requires intent.

A book was never a quality criteria.

The community, bestseller list (easy to manipulate) etc, were.

Its the same with the critisism about Steam and Indiegames.

A lot of people use AI, some even are unlucky enough to post online before learning its a faux pas. Some few are oblivious enough to go for some time before realizing.

A select few decide that this is their opportunity to industrialize production of slop for profit. It seems that when platforms take steps to curb excesses like people posting thousands of products/posts/books/games/videos/whatever a day, the volume drops dramatically, because its these villains posting thousands of times a day that are responsible for most of the nonsense

and as with this woman, whenever they see a modicum of success extracting money from the commons, they immediately pivot to selling courses, so other malignant souls can clog up the shared processes of humanity with their crap too.

But I wish I had some way to prove that. (Live writing? Git logs—but a lot of my chapters see a big first commit? Some kind of PGP web of trust thing?)

For one thing, the goal of writing for me is not to produce a book. The goal is to learn and help others learn. The goal is to make the most concise, best quality material that has ever been written on that topic for that audience. It's a lofty goal that I can't claim to achieve, but that's the target. LLMs appear to be light years away from being able to do so and are easily bested.

And, perhaps most importantly, writing is fun, relaxing, challenging, frustrating, rewarding, and human. Having an LLM write something for me is none of those things.

I wish AI would do my fucking dishes, though.

There's just no way you can claim "oh no, I have a full creative process in place to produced something considered", whilst turning out an unreadable quantity of books.

This is the most disturbing snippet about AI I've read in the past few weeks.

Do people actually return books they don't like? I don't but maybe it's a thing. Or is it her trying to convince herself the books are actually good, or at least not rubbish? Which is putting the bar low anyway.

But now with AI they're just easy to mass produce I guess. What's funny is there were authors doing this with like gpt-4o and seemingly selling a bunch. I can't imagine they were very good but the people yearn for them.

But 370 in just over a year and a half is crazy work lol. Also a lot of RSA is anti-ai so seeing a woman earning like 60 times the annual average selling slop must be upsetting.

  > She has sold more than one million books, by her own estimate, in digital, print and audio formats, earning more than $1 million so far this year.

  > The South African now heads an operation that has trained several hundred people in her method and is preparing to launch software for AI authors called Authorythm.

She has not broken any laws nor done anything scummy; what she has done is studied the system and hacked it to her ends: a true hacker in the HN sense of the word.

Now, I hate AI slop as much as anyone can hate it, but if society is so insensitive to actual quality that it will reward slop to the tune of a million dollars, the problem lies with that, not her.

And to her credit, it is not like she is one-shotting books with a single prompt: she has a structured process starting from a human outline and ideas, plus human review at the end.

Too many people, once they understand that pseudo-tricky or smart folks can freely abuse stupid or naive or temporarily "crippled" people, go on to do exactly that.

It just lowers all maxima, consequentially lowering quality of output and quality of evolution in those buckets, including the quality of rare events.

Few people care about those very special tears of disillusionment and guilt they will shed on their death bed.

Drug-induced forced laughter and pseudo-dominance over sabotaged and vulnerable reign superior in minds that fully outsourced "consciousness" to certain value systems.

Ask yourself: when do non-functioning people on the spectrum, or people suffering from later stage Dementia and Alzheimer's et al feel most "conscious" ... that's a consciousness you can't outsource.