The New York Times had an article recently about a women who claims to use imitative AI to make a six figure income on Kindle Unlimited. I am late to the conversation, so I would encourage you to read Lincoln Michael’s post about the subject. I would just add a couple of thoughts.
The story did not ring true to me, even before I saw Michael’s note that his sources confirmed that the one pen name given in the article only sold thirty-seven books. It always seemed odd that the article combined her money from her page reads on Kindle Unlimited (for those unfamiliar, Kindle Unlimited is a serve where people who pay a fee — currently ten dollars a month, I believe — have access to a large percentage of the ebooks on their Kindles or Kindle apps. Authors are paid based on how many of their pages get read by the subscribers. Payments are determined by an algorithm Amazon unilaterally controls. Self-published authors make up, I believe, the bulk of the books subscribers have access to) and her business “teaching” people how to “write” with AI. The smell of scam covered the article.
I find it hard to believe that someone who is putting out a dozen books in a year is making six figures on those books. It is hard to believe that such a lack of polishing would produce books that people would want to read. And no, for those about to ask, it is not credible that imitative AI could produce books good enough to generate that level of engagement. For all the talk of how imitative AI is going to replace artists, I never see anyone pointing to a book that embodies the alleged coming masterworks. I doubt, very much, that this one person has cracked that secret and is willing to sell it to others.
That willingness should have been a thread that the article picked upon, but it dod not. In general, it seemed very credulous. As far as I could tell, the writer did not use the pen names of the writer to verify her sales claims. They seemed to merely take the person’s word for her performance. Nor did they examine the idea that a person who made so much money from producing imitative AI content would then turn around and sell those techniques, creating competition in what is very close to a zero-sum game for page reads. The article, when examined thoughtfully, seems less like reporting and more like stenography.
There is a desire among many people, in and out of tech, to overstate the usefulness of imitative AI. Some of the hype is self-serving, some of it seems to be a fear of not catching the next wave, some of it seems to be resentment at the people who are allegedly going to be the most impacted, and some of it seems to be a simple desire to live in interesting times. Imitative AI can have some utility, but reporters should be helping readers separate the hype from the bullshit. Instead, the Times lack of curiosity appears to have both spread hype rather than information and legitimized what appears to be a simple grifter. Time to close the journalism schools indeed.
Weekly Word Count
Pretty much nothing. Finished plotting out/writing out scene list for the corrupt judge/algorithm book. I also got feedback on the last version of Sarah Smith (the tech abortion book) and so I spent time planning those revisions. Honestly, just been busy and a chunk of my free time has been swallowed by the Olympics.
I know they are corrupt, but I love them so. Especially the winter Olympics, where most of the events seem like they are based on drunken bar bets. Let’s play human bumper cars in a hockey rink with knives on our feet (short track skating)! Let’s jump off a perfectly good mountain and then ask people how pretty we looked doing it (ski jumping)! Let’s ski somewhere with our guns and then shoot random shit for no discernible reason (biathlon)! Let’s take the wheels off the skateboards of our chunkier friends and then make them race down a mountain (snowboard cross)! Let’s throw ourselves down a tube made of ice in increasingly flimsy vehicles (bobsled, luge, and skeleton. I bet skeleton racers spend their downtime trying to pet polar bears)! They are all so, so stupid and so, so fun.
Have a great weekend, and don’t do anything a winter Olympian would do.