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

wiether

> 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. So basically she is yet another grifter making money selling her method for "success"

trizoza

The push to become 1000x engineer at big tech is nothing compared to the push to become a 1000x author at big publishing media houses :D

benrutter

The number of books makes this hilarious. Whatever your take on AI generation in writing, it's pretty difficult to read 370 books in 20 months closely. Let alone consider, edit and improve. 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.

staleBot_tom1pr

You need to be the kind of character who wants to see more cheap stuff in the world to pull this kind of shit. AI augmented troll hackers of civilians and small honest SMEs, invasive stalkers, self-proclaimed hard pushing media jerks bribing doctors and teachers and civilians, medical malpractice proponents, genAI augmented trolls... 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.

RugnirViking

a debate I had with a friend recently was about how there aren't actually that many people contributing to the spam everywhere of AI crap. There are tens of thousands perhaps, probably not even enough to fill a small city, spread around the entire global population. 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.

flr03

> "Readers don't read rubbish books; they return them," she said. 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.

prmph

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.

mcc1ane

"I Don’t Want to Read What You Didn’t Write"

impostervt

Amazon KDP recently put a limit of 2 books published per week because of this kind of thing.

origini

We have books pre LLM writing about 5G, memories of Water and other garbage. 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.

thewhitetulip

I have a very simple ideology here: if you don't bother to write your book, I won't bother to read it

NorthSouthNorth

There is a demand for these books AFAIK, they existed before AI. Short, easy to read and I assume write romance books designed for people that read them in a day. 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.

netdevphoenix

Not sure how her nationality is relevant here. Only the usage of LLMs in this manner matters

glimshe

> ...Claude, "really good story structure, terrible at sex drives" This is the most disturbing snippet about AI I've read in the past few weeks.

throwa356262

I am proposing a new law: Any content where more then 2% has been created by AI should be clearly marked as such. Would improve both Amazon and YouTube significantly. I have basically stopped using them after seeing all LLM spam.

tsaixingwei

There is an established market for sudoku books. So if a publisher using AI to generate more sudoku books with lower costs and at a faster rate and people still buy those books because they enjoy solving sudoku puzzles, what difference does it make if a human painstakingly made those puzzles versus an AI generating them?

brendoelfrendo

I object to her being called an "author."

4thguy

I'm unsure where the line is drawn for LLM ect in the arts is supposed to be, but the article does say that she "heads an operation that has trained several hundred people in her method". So, let's take the LLM out of the question, is it fair to say that she is the author? 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.

skeledrew

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

beej71

I can assure you that no writing of mine is LLM-generated. 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.