Pre-2022 Books

api

I honestly find this a little deranged. I’ve read some AI generated prose before and it’s… boring. It tends to be the mathematical average of all stories, with plots that are heavy on cliche and tropes played straight. If I read a book like that it’s probably just going to be a bad book that I don’t finish. Humans write lots of boring bad books too. Eventually artists will figure out how to use AI to make real art that is actually good, just like photographers did with photography, and that will be its own new thing. I don’t see much of that yet but with photography it took a while.

RomanPushkin

It's one of the reasons I don't want to update my free book about Ruby: https://leanpub.com/rubyisforfun - written by a human, and will stay the same forever I think. The moment you touch it to update - immediately changes the date from 2022-05-26 to 2026 and all the value is gone

zeroonetwothree

I don’t find this at all. Not that many fiction books use a lot of AI prose it seems. Maybe nonfiction is worse?

Avicebron

Props to the author for not mentioning low-background steel.

zerobees

I've been consciously doing that for reference books for the past three years because Amazon is absolutely littered with AI-generated non-fiction. I have my own ideological reasons too, but the main problem is that most of that AI-generated reference stuff is just of incredibly poor quality. It's meant to saturate the platform as cheaply as possible, so no one actually does any fact-checking, editing, layout, and so on. They're not even using frontier models for that. For example, there are multiple evidently AI-generated titles that come up on the front page if you search for "Rust programming", "cybersecurity book", etc. I guess I can't rule out that "Winston Knowles" is a real person, but I'm not gonna bet money on that: https://www.amazon.com/Cybersecurity-Career-Manual-Interview...

torben-friis

I haven't seen any minimal sign that any of the fiction books I read lately was LLM helped. Writers seem like a particularly anti AI crowd too. Has anyone? Now I'm curious if it's just my particular bubble.

drchaim

This will happen with social accounts, news articles..I set the date pre 2023, but we all have some date in mind. I don’t like it, but it’s what it is

andy99

I’m pretty conservative with books and usually only read things based on recommendations anyway. I would rarely read a book published in the last few years just because news of it hasn’t travelled to me yet. I think worrying about AI generated books would really only matter if you’re at the bleeding edge of reading and looking for brand new stuff.

viccis

See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Low-background_steel

ares623

Same with open source projects (or other software projects in general). Pre-2022, when someone posts a Show HN, even if it's not something you would normally be interested in, there's a baseline understanding that _someone_ cared enough to spend time and effort to build it. So in a hypothetical future scenario if you do find yourself looking for that particular tool, there was value in you seeing that Show HN so you can revisit it. Now, I just ignore all Show HN posts.

adamddev1

And there might be no way to prove you really wrote something Post-2022. I wrote a long article, all by hand. I never used any LLMs, even for searching. I checked it with a couple of AI detection tools and they confidently said that 60% of the article was written by AI.

bonoboTP

In good hands, it can be a great tool, but you usually don't notice that. The issue is that AI allows for a superficial appearance of quality and it takes time to discover that the content is void of deeper insight.

casey2

C-c C-v existed well before 2022. Most of history until the Renaissances consisted of the bulk of scholars copying out of "the book" whatever the book happened to be (Euclid, The Bible, Aristotle’s Logica Vetus, Cicero's Orations and De Officiis, 四書五經, 史記, 文選) The liberal concept that the everyman should have their own original thoughts that others should consider is a historically a very new concept. And we start getting things that look a lot like C-c C-v quickly after the Renaissance. See humans have the tendency to romanticize the past, and if this is allowed to compound they elevate really quite dismal people to the realm of literal godhood in some cases. If you asked someone a thousand years ago what they though life was like thousands of years in the past and what it will be like thousands of years in the future most would have said the past was better in all regards including health, strength, morals even technology; while the future would be viewed as the continual circling of the drain. Put yourself in their shoes, you go look at a Roman Colosseum, you can't build that, nobody you know can build that. If you asked Vitruvius during the construction of the Aqueducts he would tell you that he's maintain the knowledge of his ancestors, whom could have build such structures if they needed them or had the manpower, and the technical problems are just a trifle. If you pushed him, he might invoke Providentia and that if the gods stopped blessing you we'd fall even faster. This kind of discovered then lost fits better narrative within the human psyche better than the unintuative truth is a constructed social conversation, that can be semi-formal and rigorous (the scientific method) or lax (common sense) depending on the setting.

cryo32

It’s not just 2022 and earlier books. There’s a supply chain problem as well. I’ve seen two older books so far from Amazon which were AI generated copy text with a genuine looking cover on it. Amazon just took the return and probably restocked it for the next victim. I tend to buy books from second hand book shops and eBay now and usually older or well used copies. A good sign of their authenticity.

tyre

Hot take: I think it’ll be pretty much the same as it was. If anything it will get better. You will still have gatekeepers and taste makers. Publishing houses will screen fiction for well-written and interesting fiction. Word-of-mouth, personal recommendations, and endorsements from people you respect will continue to outweigh algorithms, if you care. For cheap reads, how much of a difference is there between James Patterson’s 734th beach read thriller and what an LLM with a 50m token context window can produce? Does it matter that it’s not written by six ghostwriters? Probably not to the median Hudson News buyer. For non-fiction, it’s easier to gather research and related materials. If you were cherry-picking facts to make a narrative, yeah, that’s easier, but it’s not like we haven’t gotten really good at that anyway. Again, there will be cooling off periods for scholarship to be debated and coälesce. What will get better is people asking questions and getting well-researched pieces on a specific niche or confluence of topics. AI is just-good-enough-to-be-dangerous now. It will get better. We’ll learn to harness it (literally) to iteratively fact check and cite sources. We will build repositories with heavily sourced facts for it to build upon. It will be pulling together “truths” that can be traced, then incrementally adding inference across those, which can then be verified and are a new fact. I read a lot. I love, love, love new and original authorship. I deeply value writing as a craft. There will be a lot of garbage. More than there is now, at an incredible rate. And we’ll figure it out.

YesBox

You are not alone. I like to read Harry Potter fan fiction [1] and I have started checking the publication date when Im searching for something new to read. I started doing this passively and realized it after the fact. Have you ever met someone who could say all and do the right things but never made you feel anything, or your gut was sensing an ulterior motive? It's a magic trick we are all bewitched by at some point in our lives. I suppose I filter by published year because I dont want think about if I am being tricked or not. [1] There are some very talented writers[A] out there who (I assume) cannot do the world building part. [A] Recent Favorite: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1134255/chapters/2292768

dspillett

Not just books. When searching for information online, for anything where things haven't changed significantly in the last few years, I definitely favour a post on SO/SE/HN/reddit/etc dated before 2023 over those that are later. And where there are no good looking references before that, the earlier the better. Of course there are no doubt people out there realising that a fair few of us do this, and are starting to edit posts to pre-date them as a sort of SEO trick…

raincole

I feel that too. But the reasonable part of me knows that it's just one generation can't "get" the entertainment of the next generation. It has always been like that. There are mobile game ads on TV here. My father asked me what actually the players get from paying the game companies money. He still doesn't get it after I tried to explain how it works twice.

fallat

There has always been shit books - let that sink in. There will be _more_ shit books now, but that's the only difference. There will be probably a constant rate of "good" books.

wenbin

If contents are generated instantly via llm and packaged as books, videos, podcasts, pull requests etc, then they don’t deserve human attention.