Anyone who buys books from the uni-bosomed tax dodger, especially non-fiction: travel guides and music books, will be aware of how, suddenly, there are pages and pages of authors. Unusual names, that smack of b-movie directors, names like Homer X. Symcyck, Henry J. Catchpole. Always a middle initial, oddly.
Here is a good explanatory, and cautionary, article:
https://americana-uk.com/how-many-gene-parsons-bios-do-we-need-the-book-bots-are-taking-over-amazon
AutobAIgrophy
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http://www.americana-uk.com/how-many-gene-parsons-bios-do-we-need-the-book-bots-are-taking-over-amazon
I’d mentioned this when I saw a ‘new’ biography of Richard Thompson and the somewhat grisly cover.
Further evidence, if it were needed, to hang on to previous books (throw in CDs here as well) you know to be quality.
Absolutely. Our own physical and digital libraries may well be what is spottily left after big electromagnetic pulses, whether solar or caused by a nuclear weapon. Or simple malignancy: stuff seems to be made able to “disappear” these days. The idiots who think “it’s all in the cloud” are complicit with The Enemy.
Under those circumstances, I am not going to be too worried about reading biographies of Gene Parsons.
This kind of low-level enshittification is rife and getting, er, rife-er… AI books, AI videos all over YouTube, AI music on TV programmes (for instance), all making everything x% worse all the time…
… and the commercial aspects aren’t anything to be sniffed at, either. As I read somewhere, all Spotify has to do is cunningly replace one song in 20 in their playlists with an AI-created track, and they automatically save 5% on their royalty payments overnight, which I’d wager is quite a sum annually worldwide…
A recent, commercially published English “translation” of a Japanese novel turned out to be some chancer running the entire document through Deep L. Yep, enshittifcation.
I have a muso friend who has been on the fringes of the Cambridge music scene for 20 years. Now in her early 40s, she’s still playing in pubs. Not exactly a household name, not even locally.
She’s just been cloned. The AI track sounds nothing like her. She doesn’t have the sort of funds required to engage m’learned friends.
Musicians Union?
Richard Osman talked about this on his podcast. He said that within a day or so of a popular book being published there will be dozens of AI versions also available. If you let Amazon know they are supposed to take them down, of course instantly replaced by others
I expect AI has valuable uses in some fields, and I’m probably using it (and benefiting from it) in the background of some tech without even knowing about it. But every time somebody sings its praises I think of things like this, where the publishing industry is being swamped by AI slop.
Luddite that I am, I wish tech people could slow down and take a deep breath before we all plunge headlong into a world run by AI. A friend of mine has seen his translation business vanish practically overnight thanks to AI, and he is undoubtedly not alone.
Yes, it’s the future and ridiculously clever and (most importantly for many people) free, but too little attention is being paid to the downsides of AI and the damage it causes to people’s livelihoods and the world around us – how can you trust a film or picture, for example, when AI can instantly create lifelike deepfakes?
Years ago, I read (in Wired, IIRC) an expert saying, “If your job can be done by a computer/robot/AI, it WILL be, and very soon.” I wish all the tech bros now pouring billions into AI could spare a thought for those who would lose out to it, and what they could do once it took away their livelihood.
I’m sure thatchers, typesetters, wagonmakers, etc., all said something similar when technology caught up with their industry, but there seems to be something insidious about AI. Currently, publishing and the quality of what we read is being ruined by the AI- conjured rubbish, but in a year or two, will anybody be trying to stop it, or will they have given up?
It’s not the technology itself, or necessarily the people working on it.
It’s the usual greedy and lazy exploiters latching onto it, like they do with anything that they think can make them a buck for minimal cost and effort.
Hmm, not sure if it was AI, but a recent check for when the film ‘Performance’ was first shown on British TV revealed it to have been in 1999.
I was happy I used the latest technology to help me out with that question… it must be right.
I remember watching it on TV in about 1983
Thanks for this useful and somewhat bizarre cautionary tale, @retropath2
Cavear Emptor.
There’s a lot of AI generated history videos on YouTube these days. You can tell by the hilarious mistakes in pronunciation and factual errors all over the shop. No wonder the likes of James Holland are cleaning up.
I saw some really awful AI of The Beatles on Facebook. Then I realised it was just promotion for the new films on each member.
I wonder if this is one of these AI generated books?….supposed biography of John Prine.
An interesting diatribe against AI political manipulation at the end of the most recent “Silent Witness” 2-part story from the BBC, which looks to be the hook for the next (or a later) 2-parter.
A new 3rd series of “The Capture” is also coming soon on the Beeb.