[jjmarr]

> Are AI-written books getting published?

Yes, online bookstores are full of them:

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/05/travel/amazon-guidebooks-...

The issue is there's an asymmetry between buyer/seller for books, because a buyer doesn't know the contents until you buy the book. Reviews can help, but not if the reviews are fake/AI generated. In this case, these books are profitable if only a few people buy them as the marginal cost of creating such a book is close to zero.

[qup]

This really has fuck-all to do with copyright though, correct?

If you can't tell how the content is before you read it, it could be written by a monkey.

[brendoelfrendo]

This is starting to get pretty circular. The AI was trained on copyrighted data, so we can make a hypothesis that it would not exist - or would exist in a diminished state - without the copyright infringement. Now, the AI is being used to flood AI bookstores with cheaply produced books, many of which are bad, but are still competing against human authors.

[JohnHaugeland]

the problem with how circular the argument is is that the essence of there being an actual problem is being taken for granted

it's not clear that detriments actually exist, and the benefits are clear

[roguecoder]

The benefits are not clear: why should an "author" who doesn't want to bother writing a book of their own get to steal the words of people who aren't lazy slackers?

[satvikpendem]

It's as much stealing as piracy is stealing, ie none at all. If you disagree, you and I (along with probably many others in this thread) have a fundamental axiomatic incompatibility that no amount of discussion can resolve.

[roguecoder]

It is not theft in the property sense, but it is theft of labor.

If a company interviewed me, had me solve a problem, didn't hire me or pay me in any way and then used the code I wrote in their production software, that would be theft.

That is the equivalent of what authors claiming they wrote AI books are doing. That they've fooled themselves into thinking the computer "wrote" the book, erasing all the humans whose labor they've appropriated, in my opinion makes it worse, not better. They are lying to the reader and themselves, and both are bad.

[consteval]

Stealing is not the right word perhaps, but it is bad, and this should be obvious. Because if you take the limit of these arguments as they approach infinity, it all falls apart.

For piracy, take switch games. Okay, pirating Mario isn't stealing. Suppose everyone pirates Mario. Then there's no reason to buy Mario. Then Nintendo files bankruptcy. Then some people go hungry, maybe a few die. Then you don't have a switch anymore. Then there's no more Mario games left to pirate.

If something is OK if only very, very few people do it, then it's probably not good at all. Everyone recycling? Good! Everyone reducing their beef consumption? Good! ... everyone pirating...? Society collapses and we all die, and I'm only being a tad hyperbolic.

In a vacuum making an AI book is whatever. In the context of humanity and pushing this to it's limits, we can't even begin to comprehend the consequences. I'm talking crimes against humanity beyond your wildest dreams. If you don't know what I'm talking about, you haven't thought long enough and creatively enough.

[greenie_beans]

shop at a real bookstore, they don't have this problem.