Paying AIs to read my books
kk.org49 points by zdw 5 days ago
49 points by zdw 5 days ago
I can see how someone who writes non-fiction idea books would think this way. The impact of an idea book is how much it permeates into culture. For example, ideas like deep work, black swan, or skin in the game. The hope is to see the ideas discussed and have them attributed to their originators.
This argument makes far less sense for memoir and fiction. The goal of these forms of writing is to induce specific emotional states in the reader. Having them regurgitated or summarized via a LLM does nothing to achieve their goal.
Every single author I follow is outraged their copyrighted books were sucked up by these AI companies.
But yeah, feel free to be honoured that some company can profit from your work without recompensing you in any way.
Not everybody, like Kevin Kelly and Tyler Cowen for example are not.
I'd imagine that these men use their publications to advertise their personas, and their livelihood is made via celebrity and appearances. That's why you know their names.
Authors who make money primarily by creating art and selling it, and who do not wish to monetize their work through selling their persona, might have more of reason to be upset by the blatant violation of their legal rights by Sam Altman and his friends.
That's correct. Writing is not the main source of income for either Tyler or Kevin. Their books are mostly advertising pamphlets for their respective ideological agendas, economic & technological growth & advancement. Both are now on the record about their support of writing books for AIs instead of people b/c they think that the primary way people will get their information in the coming years will be from AIs instead of books so they want their ideas to be part of the AI biases that can then influence whoever is querying the AIs.
I think now is a little golden age for LLMs usefulness before they are further enshittified by people's agendas and profit motives. Not that they aren't already to a degree but I expect it will get a lot worse fast.
Slight exaggeration:
"Against the power of Mordor there can be no victory. We must join with him, Gandalf. We must join with Sauron. It would be wise, my friend."
If you aren't familiar with Kevin Kelly it's worth learning about his background as part of reading this. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kevin_Kelly_(editor)
Nice try, Anthropic!
I'm curious what it means for authors to "optimize their work for AI ingestion", especially in regards to literature and not just API documentation. Would this be specific paragraph formatting, or would there also be optimization of the prose itself?
I'd say metadata not content so good title and abstract, consistent with book content. Nothing new compared to usual book marketing, AI is a new channel but not that disruptive.
This stood out to me as well. My feeling is what makes writing good for humans will also make it more paresable for AI: clarity, structure, economy of language, etc.
Just upload it to a shadow library or make it publicly available at some URL. The search engines & crawlers will then pick it up & include it in the training corpus.
> If you are writing a book today, you want to keep in mind that you are primarily writing it for AIs. They are the ones who are going to read it the most carefully. They are going to read every page word by word, and all the footnotes, and all the endnotes, and the bibliography, and the afterward. They will also read all your books and listen to all your podcasts. You are unlikely to have any human reader read it as thoroughly as the AIs will. After absorbing it, the AIs will do that magical thing of incorporating your text into all the other text they have read, of situating it, of placing it among all the other knowledge of the world – in a way no human reader can do.
[...]
> The value of an author’s work will not just be in how well it sells among humans, but how deep it has been included within the foundational knowledge of these intelligent memory-based systems. That potency will be what is boasted about. That will be an author’s legacy.
The fact that nominally "sane" humans with sizeable followings can publish megalomaniac articles like these and present them as anything other than descriptions of a dystopian hellscape makes me quite pessimistic about our future.
I was going to comment something in the same vein.
What even is the point anymore? They want flesh and blood robots to feed the algorithm overlords. They don't even seem to realise they're basically killing their profession/passion in doing so, although I doubt any writer with an ounce of self respect, passion and skill would perceive llms as anything other than repulsive monstrosities
"I doubt any writer with an ounce of self respect, passion and skill would perceive llms as anything other than repulsive monstrosities"
That's quite an uninformed position to take. I suggest talking to more writers.
That's a whole lotta words to say AI companies want to extort artists.
https://kk.org/thetechnium/ - "Making the Inevitable Obvious"
And the entire linked piece is written in this propaganda style. That no longer works except as a morale booster for "AI" cultists who feel that their funding will disappear soon.
Kevin Kelly is a well-known technology booster so this isn't surprising to anyone who is familiar w/ his writing.
lol...this got to be a troll post.
> Another way to think of this is that in this emerging landscape, the audience for books – especially non-fiction books – has shifted away from people towards AI. If you are writing a book today, you want to keep in mind that you are primarily writing it for AIs. They are the ones who are going to read it the most carefully. They are going to read every page word by word, and all the footnotes, and all the endnotes, and the bibliography, and the afterward. They will also read all your books and listen to all your podcasts. You are unlikely to have any human reader read it as thoroughly as the AIs will. After absorbing it, the AIs will do that magical thing of incorporating your text into all the other text they have read, of situating it, of placing it among all the other knowledge of the world – in a way no human reader can do.
::slow clap:: Congratulations everybody. This is the future of pedagogy, learning, creativity, and appreciating things that we’ve bestowed upon humanity. I’ll bet our mamas are proud. Hopefully, now that writing, visual art and music are solved problems, we can clap the dust off of our hands and tackle life’s true inefficiencies that we’re clearly worse at than computers — eating a crisp apple off of the tree in autumn, falling in love, seeing a breathtaking summer sunrise over some Atlantic sand dunes… all that garbage that we couldn’t possibly pay the same amount of attention to or munge it up and share it with others nearly as efficiently as a computer could. That’s right. Let’s get to work on making the lean, productive life something that everybody has to want to aspire to, lest those troglodytes get left behind! I want the hyper-efficient Soylent version of making love to someone I just fell in love with so I can get back to work and make computer magic happen.