It’s partly AI, partly a get-rich-quick scheme, and entirely bad for confused consumers.

I also highly recommend Dan Olson’s documentary that gets a shout-out in the article, although - at the time the documentary was made - AI had not been a big factor in the grift yet.

  • lady_scarecrow (she/her)English
    6·
    7 months ago

    Online publishing is in a sad state indeed. On one hand, it’s never been easier to publish a book, but on the other hand, your carefully-written book has to compete with a sea of low-quality stuff before it even gets seen – and AI-generated text only made the problem worse. I’m glad I decided not to make a living off of my writing, but I’m not glad I’m saying that.

    • mctoasterson@reddthat.com
      1·
      7 months ago

      And that garbage gets served as ads to the ad-sponsored lockscreens of certain Kindle readers. You can tell they’re shit tier AI-generated books by the titles alone. They sound like Isekai anime.

      Its shit like “Circus Poems of the Universe: please enjoy our poetry - Bedtime stories for Children and Adults”.

  • AutoTL;DR@lemmings.worldBEnglish
    1·
    7 months ago

    This is the best summary I could come up with:

    They have managed, in what must be fairly acknowledged as a feat of branding wizardry, to hold on to the domain Publishing.com, and there they peddle their wares: a course they say can help students make a lifetime of easy cash off the revenue from books they don’t even have to bother to write themselves.

    That AI is part of but not central to the process is a helpful talking point for the Mikkelsens as Amazon strengthens its regulations against purely AI-generated text for sale.

    Vanicek added that they have “a robust set of methods” to detect content that violates their guidelines, and they regularly remove those books and sometimes suspend the publishing accounts of repeat offenders.

    “The thought of human creativity being overshadowed by robots isn’t exactly the prettiest picture,” Christian wrote in a (suspiciously ChatGPT-sounding) blog post in March.

    In April, however, the Mikkelsens announced that they were preparing to launch a new proprietary AI program, Publishing.ai, that they promise will write a manuscript for you, “Soooo much faster than a ghostwriter!”

    The twins’ sales pitch struck her as the perfect solution: She could provide her ideas, people who were good with words could rewrite her draft and polish the whole thing up into a sales-ready package, and everyone would get paid.

    The original article contains 3,563 words, the summary contains 214 words. Saved 94%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!