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Comment by prmph | Hacker News Reader

I don't know why people are so upset.

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.

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That type of workflow seems to be the "secret sauce" for successful LLM management.

A lot of coders are using almost exactly the same approach, and it seems to be bearing fruit.

> 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 millions dollars, the the problem lies with that, not her.

Very true, but perhaps beyond my rapidly expanding misanthropy I can also dislike the process that feeds it. I don’t see it any differently than people disliking companies that push unhealthy and addictive foods, or drug pushers, or any other potential societal malignancy.

Just because we can make the thing and people will buy it doesn’t mean we should make the thing. And the more people that adopt the “lowest common denominator” production process the more we rob ourselves of the joy of creation itself.

>society is so insensitive to actual quality that it will reward slop to the tune of a millions dollars, the the problem lies with that, not her.

If the society is so dumb that it does not deserve to survive, then so be it.

Are you up for that line of thought?

Same reason why I'm upset when Temu ships a garbage plastic gadget. Someone must have wanted it, they ordered it, but I doubt that they wanted the quality that showed up. We've all seen the videos of what people think they order vs. what actually shows up. I don't get why you'd go through the trouble of wasting the resources on a scam product, rather than just outright robbing people.

What if the Temu plastic gadget that you ordered actually turns out to be actually quite good and does what you’d expect it too? I think that’s the real comparison here instead of automatically assuming her books are crap that no one enjoys. Obviously enough people enjoy her books (some of it anyway) to make her money.

That's absolutely a possibility, we simply don't know that, but they may very well be enjoyed by readers.

People aren't returning the bad Temu products, it's not worth the trouble, could be the same with these books, assuming they are cheap enough.

Are there reviews though? Many readers are always ready to publish reviews of stuff they read, so it's mostly just a matter of finding reviews of works by this author.

> a true hacker in the HN sense of the word.

First, the societal view on HN-approved hackers is not always positive.

Second, society is bad at recognising systemic problems, that doesn't mean they aren't problems. Something with short term gain for long term harm is a particular problem for our society to handle.

> It is not like she is one-shotting books with a single prompt

It's not clear where she gets the original concept - maybe it's an original idea - fine. But maybe that's another few prompts. Which would make her little more than a meat proxy.

> she has a structured process starting from a human outline and ideas

It's not massively complicated though is it.

> plus human review at the end.

Yeah, it's the proofreaders having to work through hundreds of pages of slop I'm bothered about. Even if you assume the latest models are awesome it's not like this is Astra/frontier output is it?

> It's not massively complicated though is it.

Complicated enough that very few people have award winning stories. Not even books - you can write 5 great pages and get relatively well known. But apparently it's not that easy.

“Human review at the end” is bs. No one is doing that for 370 books. I gave up at 2.

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