Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by catigula 125 days ago
So, the last book this person 'published' on Amazon was within a month of their current book. If you look at the amazon description, it seems entirely AI generated.
2 comments

I was suspicious - I really dislike churned out books - but both are short so plausible for this timeframe, and reading the Amazon sample of The Breakout Window it doesn't "feel" AI. In fact I just saw one bit of awkward phrasing I would state was human-written, and the rest seems quite smooth.

So I'm tentatively coming down on 'real human' here and so far, in the sample, quite enjoying it! Light scifi / thriller so far.

I strongly disagree. I kept seeing patterns like this (an actual quote from the sample):

>Vertex wasn't stimulating the global economy. It was compressing itself.

Another quote from the sample:

>It wasn't a malfunction. It was a handshake.

This is textbook AI writing.

That's true. But OpenAI (which is what generates that style text) has other tells I don't see. No em-dashes. No triples (not X, but a, b, c).

The short, pithy sentence pair can, plausibly, be human. It was in many thrillers before AI appeared, and if you write thrillers and have presumably read many, it may seem natural. Thing is, you are right, but it is plausibly human.

The bit I spotted was,

> ...down in the rack room. "We are seeing a weird harmonic in the cooling loop."

First-time writers write stilted dialog, especially avoiding contractions. I think an AI could be smoother than that.

Also, Steven, if you are reading, I apologise if this sounds critical. I'm sure as a writer you are, or will be, used to it - criticism is part of literature, or even just learning - but still. I had tried to avoid writing the bit I thought was human because it was negatively human :) As I noted above, I enjoyed what I read of the Amazon preview.

thankfully nobody has ever had multiple books they've been writing at the same time, or books that they have actually written in the past but not taken the time to format and publish, or anything else that would explain anything like a month gap between publishing two books.

The Boy in the Striped Pajamas was written in two days. Dr. Jeckyll and Mr. Hyde was evidently written in a week.

There are examples too numerous to mention of quite famous books that were written in 3 weeks.