Contrepreneurs: The Mikkelsen Twins

One thing to note is that if you're not on Amazon, your book will still be on Amazon. Cory Doctorow points out[0] that their copyright detection systems only detect reuploads of on-platform books, and people scamming Audible with duplicates of books are rampant. I suspect this is part of why there isn't a huge contingent of angry authors jumping ship, because they can't reliably deny Amazon their work anyway. You're supposed to be able to just tell platforms "no, take this down". That comes from DMCA 512, that thing that indie creators absolutely hate because its far more useful as a censorship tool than for copyright enforcement[1]. If someone else reuploads your book to Amazon you have to actually find that reupload, buy it to validate that it is your work, take it down (and dox yourself in the process), and then repeat, forever. Outright infringement isn't the only scam either - ghostwriting and reselling lightly-edited GPT-3 copy[2] is also rampant on the platform, and there's even people selling courses on how to resell fake books[3]. This may eventually destroy Amazon's brand reputation, but it takes a long time to fall down the Trust Thermocline[4] when you're a giant like Amazon. The $10 royalty punishment makes absolutely no sense to me and I do not understand what the hell Amazon's motive is there. Except perhaps to bluff-charge indie writers into devaluing their work ahead of time. It reminds me of how Apple pushed for $0.99 songs for so long that the RIAA was will

I guess this is more of a case of garbage in - garbage out. The original sentence itself is not well-structured. But people who write like that and don't edit it; won't care of how the AI reads it. I don't feel like this is a product for carefully producing audiobooks, but to create them by the pound, so to speak. I'd say it's a move for the "make your own business through audiobooks" people [1] -- very strange for Apple. [1]: I didn't know this audience existed until I saw this video on it (and the cons that happen) from Dan Olson: this video

So far AI art is doing the opposite: increasing the amount of crap that people produce. The kinds of people who were once limited to underpaying ghostwriters to make spam books for Audible[0] can now chuck together a few prompts to ChatGPT and Stable Diffusion and get the same result. Yes, you have to be good at art in order to make good art with AI, but that doesn't matter when your goal is to create spam. The idea that artists should "do stuff for the joy of creating" is just plain insulting, too. They already do that . While artists would love to see, say, AI art models that were trained with licensed or public-domain data; training data theft isn't even their biggest concern. Their biggest concern is having the fun sucked out of their job as the artful minutae of drawing or writing is replaced with finding the correct combination of words to make Stable Diffusion draw the character you want with exactly the same details every time. It would be like if you worked at a PC building shop and one day the boss said "Actually we're just going to be an Apple authorized reseller now." The thing that's destroying artists' jobs being trained on their own work is just insult to injury. To be clear, though, AI doesn't "steal and resell content" in the vast majority of cases, either. Regurgitation is a thing, but the cause is duplicate data in the training set making it advantageous to memorize a few images to improve loss metrics. Most diffusion model architectures are not big enough

This is actually a spin on an existing git-rich-quick scam ( this video ). Version 1.0 had people hiring low cost ghostwriters for hundreds of dollars to bang out a book on some SEO topic. Now you use the same playboy with "AI," with far less upfront cost.

> low quality self published garbage, algorithmic or otherwise. To elaborate on this - a common scam that people used to run was to pay a ghostwriter ~$750 to 'write' a 'book' that had ~50-80 pages of bullshit word salad. They'd then try to stick a real author's name on it, and try to sell it. (Amazon has started putting in a little bit of effort at detecting this scam, so now the scammers have pivoted[1] to selling suckers a training course on how to do this.) [1] this video

Dan Olson also made video on the topic, because of course he did: this video It was a bit before the AI boom, back when the bedrock of the scam economy was mostly gig platforms.

My impression is that there's a considerable overlap between people monetizing digital nomad content and what citizens of their residence country would call "shady characters". link this video

That reminds me of the time that Folding Ideas' Dan Olsen wrote a book on an arbitrary subject to see how the economics of a passive income audiobook grift worked: this video

Dan Olsen ("Folding Ideas") actually uploaded a video about KDP spamming, "Contrepreneurs: The Mikkelsen Twins" this video , in September 2022 just before ChatGPT 3 hit. Basically the whole turnkey infrastructure to automatically turn a prompt into a Kindle book was in full operation by then, just with human ghostwriters on Web portals in place of LLMs.