As a parent this stuff is driving me crazy. It was already bad enough avoiding the garbage on YouTube Kids (pregnant Elsa, Peppa Pig dental torture), and it's getting worse on the reg. And honestly, between this and the ability to easily sell fraudulent electronics on Amazon (and the labor issues! But no one in the government cares about that), I really wish regulators would go after them for real.
As a teen librarian, I’m so glad you’re talking about this. Children’s books are some of the hardest literature to write well. Good children’s authors understand stuff like early childhood development, even if that understanding is unconscious. A key part of linguistic development is understanding how to tell a story. You see it in how young kids will be a mess when telling a story, even stories like “what did I did today at school”. They’ll mix up the timeline, not be able to distinguish between unnecessary details and key moments, forget to introduce characters, etc. Try asking a 7 year old to summarize a movie they’ve seen recently and you’ll see what I’m talking about. Instead of saying “Stars Wars is about the Empire and the Rebels fighting for the galaxy” they’ll say stuff like “there’s this boy called Luke and he wants to go to the town but first he has to do his chores and this princess gave a secret to some robots and… and…” This isn’t just important for knowing how to create art, it’s vital for stuff like figuring out the main idea of a passage in a textbook. Kids learn how to process information by reading well-written stories.
A lot of these aren't new trends in art or publishing, just being accelerated by new technology. Big companies have been plagiarizing off etsy for easy money forever, and search engine optimization being a more marketable creative skill than creativity isn't new either. YouTube needs some sort of Reading Rainbow/study group system where kids can talk and make meaning out of shared experience (like reading a book written by a person was before robots) instead of being left in a vacuum by overworked parents to parse out cons from meaning on their own. Part of the problem you're describing here is people are easier to prey on when they're isolated, and there used to be Levar Burton and public broadcasting to keep kids from wandering alone through the world of literacy in the soul-less hollowed out pit where all those amazon reviews and get rich quick schemes are.
I'm an actual professional children's book illustrator (back from when that used to mean something), and a group expert for a children's book illustrators community on FB with thousands of members. I've been illustrating and writing comics, graphic novels and children's books for close to twenty years and witnessing the rise of AI has been a soul-destroying nightmare. My art has been stolen to train these bots (I'm not speaking figuratively, I mean I have actively searched and found over 2 dozen pieces taken without my consent and that was just for one algorithm, the others offer far less transparency but it seems safe to assume at this point that they are just as guilty).
These hacks and grifters have been flooding artistic online spaces, peddling their cheap, shoddily produced knockoffs. As soon as I flag/block one from our group, two more appear in their place. It's like creative vampirism--sucking the very essence out of our life's work and converting it into grist for their content mill. Everything about it is profoundly offensive to me as a mom with little kids, and as an artist who cares passionately about her work. (As an aside, I HATE that these AI bros keep dragging DaVinci's name into this; he would have hated what they've done as much as I do. Every time they try to explain how great AI image generators are and how we should embrace them as the future, I just hear a fundamental misunderstanding of why humans create art to begin with. It's like telling an ultra-marathon runner that you could get there faster by car--yeah, no shit. That's not why we do it!)
I have heard increasing complaints from people who publish through KDP that their work and accounts are being flagged for infringement and that their royalties are being forfeited and withheld by Amazon. Whether this is happening purely to these grifters, or also effecting genuine artists and writers, I have no idea, but as a person who has a couple books (notably NOT a hundred) published through KDP, it is an infuriating and terrifying time to be an author/illustrator.
I think one of the other problems with this kind of stuff is that if you're filling kids' literature up with this sort of empty garbage, what you end up with a is a big cohort of people who are *nominally* literate -- they can identify and read words and pass their English tests in middle school and high school by extracting the literal meaning of sentences -- but they're not really parsing that language with any kind of depth or nuance. And that like, I mean historically that's what the public schools wanted from kids, to make them into a generation of people who could read instructions and letters from the tax office but not anything more than that, but I feel like that's not overall what we want from children's literacy education anymore. There's a degree to which that kind of flat, incurious, concrete kind of literacy is almost worse than not being literate at all.
Great episode Robert, thank you for posting the article, it's an excellent companion to the BtB episode.
Listening to you describe this AI generative product as a simulacrum of a creative work made me think back to my read through of Stephen King's On Writing. He answers the question "what is writing?" with "It's a form of telepathy".
He goes on with an example:
“Look- here's a table covered with red cloth. On it is a cage the size of a small fish aquarium. In the cage is a white rabbit with a pink nose and pink-rimmed eyes. [...] On its back, clearly marked in blue ink, is the numeral 8. [...] The most interesting thing here isn't even the carrot-munching rabbit in the cage, but the number on its back. Not a six, not a four, not nineteen-point-five. It's an eight. This is what we're looking at, and we all see it. I didn't tell you. You didn't ask me. I never opened my mouth and you never opened yours. We're not even in the same year together, let alone the same room... except we are together. We are close. We're having a meeting of the minds. [...] We've engaged in an act of telepathy. No mythy-mountain shit; real telepathy.”
It's a fun way to think of writing, especially of fiction. It's the vector that you can send the thoughts in your head to someone else. But if you extend the analogy to AI generative content, you come to the conclusion that it's a transmittion without a transmitter. You're receiving static, and have to quickly rely on apophenia to draw significance from the static in order to derive anything of value from the end product. If you wanted to be especially generous, you might consider the AI end product to be a kind of slurry of ideas and thoughts and transmissions of countless other people blitzed and pressed into a new form. The Mechanically Separated Chicken of literature. Or maybe the cosmic background radiation of human creativity if you want to be more kind, not that I particularly want to.
At any rate, the anthropomorphizing of AI to project human traits onto it is I think probably our most dangerous, and hardest to beat, engagement with the concept of AI. Even people who swear up and down that they don't humanize AI will, two sentences later, remark that it's basically the equivalent of an intern at their job and while they didn't invoke pronouns, they clearly referred to chatGPT in ways that you'd talk about a person (this was a real exchange I had recently). We don't even know we're doing it, and in the act of humanizing a predictive chat bot, we invest a *lot* more value in what it produces than we should. The funny thing is that we have been doing this since the start of chatbots (and arguably before) and we've dubbed it the Eliza effect after the ELIZA chatbot from the 60s. It's a fascinating bit of history to look up.
The idea that creating SEO spam trash to flood Amazon with because children are too young and don't have enough agency to reject your zero-effort garbage spew is terrifying and honestly strikes me as something on the spectrum from abuse to neglect because at the end of the day there *is* a human making the decisions to crank this crap out. It's arguably more of a statement on how shit capitalism, and especially our current invocation of capitalism, is, but that's a whole other topic.
Looking forward to the end of the week drop on this one.
I just finished listening to this first episode of the podcast, and you brought up Bill Waterson in contrast to the dinosaur color books, and I thought I would share some extremely relevant bits of information you might appreciate (if you don't know already)!
So I have a few of the collected works of his comics that I got in the early 90s, (Snow Goons, 10th Anniversary, and maybe one other one, I've since purchased the rest, so I don't know for certain which one this was in), but he did commentary along some of the comics. Sometimes it was about the comic specifically, sometimes it was more like a general interview, talking about the entire process of his career. Two distinct moments always stuck out to me, and seeing how they are the antithesis of all these grindset grifters is just so clear.
The first is that he talked about the collected works themselves, how each edition was a repackaging of the same material (I think this might have been a foreword in the 10th Aniversary book), and basically this was all a scam to get collector's to buy more books filled with comics they already had. So, you know, the exact opposite mentality of any of these creatively bankrupt people.
But more to the point, he talked about the evolution of his art, and how he drew dinosaurs with their long tails dragging on the ground. If I remember correctly, it was advances in paleontology that actually updated this information (although maybe that update happened before he started drawing them and he just didn't get the message from when he was a child), but he was so self-critical, "I can't believe I ever drew a dinosaur like THAT," etc. He wanted to depict them accurately and was devastated that he ever didn't. Imagine putting that guy in a room with any of these clowns and seeing people perish from secondhand embarrassment.
Anyway, love your work as always, and I hope this was some fun info for you!
As fucked up as those dinosaurs are, you should know the article you cited about early reading leans on a theory that has been scrutinized lately… maybe even discredited. Check out Emily Hanford’s (APM) journalism. Cueing theory is disconnected from the neuroscience of reading, but the field of education has been very slow to correct.
If the Trogdor T-Rex fucks the kids up, it will be for other reasons. Illustrations don’t play a crucial roll in learning to read, except in as much as they make books appealing.
This is solid reporting! Definitely important stuff, my brother just had a kid and has been increasingly suspicious of some ridiculous content. Thanks for doing this, I think it matters a devastating amount lol
My father (Thomas B. Allen) was an author and illustrator of children's books. He worked so hard for months on a book, often redrawing a single illustration many times so that it conveyed just the right emotion, or had the right light. This pisses me off for so many reasons, not just because it is taking away sales from real artists, but also because we are already living in a society where people don't have the ability to think critically. All of these bullshit, nonsensical kid's books are just going to start them off confused and not understanding that things have to have structure or meaning. Not to mention what you said about the class divide in early education widening. I worry too about parents whose whole personality is being weird thinking that these books are cool, like they expose their kids to weird ideas, not understanding the damage that they can do. Anyway, great work spreading the word!
Just for fun I had ChatGPT write a short story about Robert's lifelong battle against Raytheon. Here it is:
In the sprawling metropolis of Belleville, nestled amidst the shadows of towering skyscrapers, journalist Robert Evans sat at his desk in the dimly lit office of Behind the Bastards podcast. Robert was known for his relentless pursuit of truth, his willingness to dig deep into the dark underbelly of the world and expose the villains who lurked within it. His latest target was the notorious defense contractor Raytheon.
For years, Raytheon had operated with impunity, profiting from war, conflict, and the suffering of countless innocent lives. Their vast influence stretched like a web, ensnaring politicians, military officials, and even the media. But Robert was determined to unravel their nefarious web and expose the truth to the world.
With each episode of his podcast, Robert peered into the abyss that was Raytheon's history. He uncovered stories of corruption, unethical practices, and the insidious ways in which they perpetuated global conflicts for their own gain. But he knew that merely shedding light on their misdeeds would not be enough to bring them down.
Robert began to reach out to like-minded individuals who shared his desire for justice. He connected with whistleblowers, former Raytheon employees, and activists who had felt the devastating impact of the company's actions firsthand. Together, they formed a clandestine group dedicated to dismantling Raytheon's empire.
Their rebellion started slowly, with small acts of defiance. They organized protests outside Raytheon's headquarters, demanding accountability and an end to their warmongering ways. But as their numbers grew and their resolve hardened, they realized that bolder actions were necessary.
Robert and his comrades began infiltrating Raytheon's operations, gathering evidence of their illicit activities. They exposed the company's cozy relationship with politicians, their manipulation of intelligence, and their exploitation of vulnerable communities. The revelations shook the public's trust in Raytheon, and the once-mighty corporation began to crumble.
But Raytheon was not one to go down without a fight. They launched a relentless campaign to discredit Robert and his rebellion, employing every tool at their disposal to protect their interests. They spread disinformation, launched legal attacks, and even resorted to intimidation tactics.
Undeterred, Robert and his allies fought back. They used their platform to expose Raytheon's desperate attempts to cling to power. The public, awakened by the revelations, rallied behind them, demanding justice and an end to the company's reign of terror.
In a climactic showdown, Robert confronted Raytheon's CEO in a public debate. Armed with evidence and the support of the people, he exposed the true nature of the corporation. The world watched as the once-mighty CEO squirmed under the weight of their crimes. The truth could no longer be ignored.
As the dust settled, Raytheon faced a wave of legal repercussions and public scrutiny. The company was dismantled, its assets seized, and its top executives held accountable for their actions. The world breathed a collective sigh of relief, knowing that justice had been served.
Robert Evans had achieved what seemed impossible—a rebellion that had toppled an evil empire. He had shown that even the mightiest corporations could be brought to their knees when the power of truth and collective action converged.
But Robert's fight was far from over. With Raytheon gone, he turned his attention to other bastards lurking in the shadows, ready to expose their misdeeds and inspire others to rise against them. His rebellion had ignited a spark that would continue to burn, illuminating the darkest corners of the world and challenging those who believed themselves untouchable.
And so, the journey of journalist Robert Evans continued, his voice echoing through the airwaves, rallying the people against those who would do harm. The world was forever changed, one rebellion at a time.
I went more meta and was using ChatGPT to write a book called “how to use ChatGPT to write a best selling self help book…in under a week!” It was so formulaic and deeply disturbing to me, an actual writer, that I gave up in disgust. I then used it to generate bios for fake people, together with quotes, in how incredible the <insert trending self help topic> was. Then of course, fake 5 star reviews on the fake book
Sure but this problem can be easily solved by purchasing based on reviews rather than blindly buying whatever matches your search.
When you say there are going to be rich kids with good books and poor kids with bad books that seems a bit alarmist. Distribution of good and bad quality content costs the same, lots of good quality stuff is in the public domain and the demand would still exist for quality books as not everyone is going to be incapable of gauging it.
I think this article is great in raising the awareness that parents and schools should be checking some recommended book lists rather than buying any old crap as I agree this AI generated stuff can't be good for learning, but really they should have been doing that anyway, books written by humans can have toxic content too
Fake reviews have been a plague for years. And fakes only need to be superficial to be effective. Most people don't look too deep, mostly because nobody has the time
As a parent this stuff is driving me crazy. It was already bad enough avoiding the garbage on YouTube Kids (pregnant Elsa, Peppa Pig dental torture), and it's getting worse on the reg. And honestly, between this and the ability to easily sell fraudulent electronics on Amazon (and the labor issues! But no one in the government cares about that), I really wish regulators would go after them for real.
As a teen librarian, I’m so glad you’re talking about this. Children’s books are some of the hardest literature to write well. Good children’s authors understand stuff like early childhood development, even if that understanding is unconscious. A key part of linguistic development is understanding how to tell a story. You see it in how young kids will be a mess when telling a story, even stories like “what did I did today at school”. They’ll mix up the timeline, not be able to distinguish between unnecessary details and key moments, forget to introduce characters, etc. Try asking a 7 year old to summarize a movie they’ve seen recently and you’ll see what I’m talking about. Instead of saying “Stars Wars is about the Empire and the Rebels fighting for the galaxy” they’ll say stuff like “there’s this boy called Luke and he wants to go to the town but first he has to do his chores and this princess gave a secret to some robots and… and…” This isn’t just important for knowing how to create art, it’s vital for stuff like figuring out the main idea of a passage in a textbook. Kids learn how to process information by reading well-written stories.
A lot of these aren't new trends in art or publishing, just being accelerated by new technology. Big companies have been plagiarizing off etsy for easy money forever, and search engine optimization being a more marketable creative skill than creativity isn't new either. YouTube needs some sort of Reading Rainbow/study group system where kids can talk and make meaning out of shared experience (like reading a book written by a person was before robots) instead of being left in a vacuum by overworked parents to parse out cons from meaning on their own. Part of the problem you're describing here is people are easier to prey on when they're isolated, and there used to be Levar Burton and public broadcasting to keep kids from wandering alone through the world of literacy in the soul-less hollowed out pit where all those amazon reviews and get rich quick schemes are.
I'm an actual professional children's book illustrator (back from when that used to mean something), and a group expert for a children's book illustrators community on FB with thousands of members. I've been illustrating and writing comics, graphic novels and children's books for close to twenty years and witnessing the rise of AI has been a soul-destroying nightmare. My art has been stolen to train these bots (I'm not speaking figuratively, I mean I have actively searched and found over 2 dozen pieces taken without my consent and that was just for one algorithm, the others offer far less transparency but it seems safe to assume at this point that they are just as guilty).
These hacks and grifters have been flooding artistic online spaces, peddling their cheap, shoddily produced knockoffs. As soon as I flag/block one from our group, two more appear in their place. It's like creative vampirism--sucking the very essence out of our life's work and converting it into grist for their content mill. Everything about it is profoundly offensive to me as a mom with little kids, and as an artist who cares passionately about her work. (As an aside, I HATE that these AI bros keep dragging DaVinci's name into this; he would have hated what they've done as much as I do. Every time they try to explain how great AI image generators are and how we should embrace them as the future, I just hear a fundamental misunderstanding of why humans create art to begin with. It's like telling an ultra-marathon runner that you could get there faster by car--yeah, no shit. That's not why we do it!)
I have heard increasing complaints from people who publish through KDP that their work and accounts are being flagged for infringement and that their royalties are being forfeited and withheld by Amazon. Whether this is happening purely to these grifters, or also effecting genuine artists and writers, I have no idea, but as a person who has a couple books (notably NOT a hundred) published through KDP, it is an infuriating and terrifying time to be an author/illustrator.
I think one of the other problems with this kind of stuff is that if you're filling kids' literature up with this sort of empty garbage, what you end up with a is a big cohort of people who are *nominally* literate -- they can identify and read words and pass their English tests in middle school and high school by extracting the literal meaning of sentences -- but they're not really parsing that language with any kind of depth or nuance. And that like, I mean historically that's what the public schools wanted from kids, to make them into a generation of people who could read instructions and letters from the tax office but not anything more than that, but I feel like that's not overall what we want from children's literacy education anymore. There's a degree to which that kind of flat, incurious, concrete kind of literacy is almost worse than not being literate at all.
Great episode Robert, thank you for posting the article, it's an excellent companion to the BtB episode.
Listening to you describe this AI generative product as a simulacrum of a creative work made me think back to my read through of Stephen King's On Writing. He answers the question "what is writing?" with "It's a form of telepathy".
He goes on with an example:
“Look- here's a table covered with red cloth. On it is a cage the size of a small fish aquarium. In the cage is a white rabbit with a pink nose and pink-rimmed eyes. [...] On its back, clearly marked in blue ink, is the numeral 8. [...] The most interesting thing here isn't even the carrot-munching rabbit in the cage, but the number on its back. Not a six, not a four, not nineteen-point-five. It's an eight. This is what we're looking at, and we all see it. I didn't tell you. You didn't ask me. I never opened my mouth and you never opened yours. We're not even in the same year together, let alone the same room... except we are together. We are close. We're having a meeting of the minds. [...] We've engaged in an act of telepathy. No mythy-mountain shit; real telepathy.”
It's a fun way to think of writing, especially of fiction. It's the vector that you can send the thoughts in your head to someone else. But if you extend the analogy to AI generative content, you come to the conclusion that it's a transmittion without a transmitter. You're receiving static, and have to quickly rely on apophenia to draw significance from the static in order to derive anything of value from the end product. If you wanted to be especially generous, you might consider the AI end product to be a kind of slurry of ideas and thoughts and transmissions of countless other people blitzed and pressed into a new form. The Mechanically Separated Chicken of literature. Or maybe the cosmic background radiation of human creativity if you want to be more kind, not that I particularly want to.
At any rate, the anthropomorphizing of AI to project human traits onto it is I think probably our most dangerous, and hardest to beat, engagement with the concept of AI. Even people who swear up and down that they don't humanize AI will, two sentences later, remark that it's basically the equivalent of an intern at their job and while they didn't invoke pronouns, they clearly referred to chatGPT in ways that you'd talk about a person (this was a real exchange I had recently). We don't even know we're doing it, and in the act of humanizing a predictive chat bot, we invest a *lot* more value in what it produces than we should. The funny thing is that we have been doing this since the start of chatbots (and arguably before) and we've dubbed it the Eliza effect after the ELIZA chatbot from the 60s. It's a fascinating bit of history to look up.
The idea that creating SEO spam trash to flood Amazon with because children are too young and don't have enough agency to reject your zero-effort garbage spew is terrifying and honestly strikes me as something on the spectrum from abuse to neglect because at the end of the day there *is* a human making the decisions to crank this crap out. It's arguably more of a statement on how shit capitalism, and especially our current invocation of capitalism, is, but that's a whole other topic.
Looking forward to the end of the week drop on this one.
Another chance for librarians to save the day!
I appreciate a Liefeld joke...
I just finished listening to this first episode of the podcast, and you brought up Bill Waterson in contrast to the dinosaur color books, and I thought I would share some extremely relevant bits of information you might appreciate (if you don't know already)!
So I have a few of the collected works of his comics that I got in the early 90s, (Snow Goons, 10th Anniversary, and maybe one other one, I've since purchased the rest, so I don't know for certain which one this was in), but he did commentary along some of the comics. Sometimes it was about the comic specifically, sometimes it was more like a general interview, talking about the entire process of his career. Two distinct moments always stuck out to me, and seeing how they are the antithesis of all these grindset grifters is just so clear.
The first is that he talked about the collected works themselves, how each edition was a repackaging of the same material (I think this might have been a foreword in the 10th Aniversary book), and basically this was all a scam to get collector's to buy more books filled with comics they already had. So, you know, the exact opposite mentality of any of these creatively bankrupt people.
But more to the point, he talked about the evolution of his art, and how he drew dinosaurs with their long tails dragging on the ground. If I remember correctly, it was advances in paleontology that actually updated this information (although maybe that update happened before he started drawing them and he just didn't get the message from when he was a child), but he was so self-critical, "I can't believe I ever drew a dinosaur like THAT," etc. He wanted to depict them accurately and was devastated that he ever didn't. Imagine putting that guy in a room with any of these clowns and seeing people perish from secondhand embarrassment.
Anyway, love your work as always, and I hope this was some fun info for you!
As fucked up as those dinosaurs are, you should know the article you cited about early reading leans on a theory that has been scrutinized lately… maybe even discredited. Check out Emily Hanford’s (APM) journalism. Cueing theory is disconnected from the neuroscience of reading, but the field of education has been very slow to correct.
If the Trogdor T-Rex fucks the kids up, it will be for other reasons. Illustrations don’t play a crucial roll in learning to read, except in as much as they make books appealing.
This is solid reporting! Definitely important stuff, my brother just had a kid and has been increasingly suspicious of some ridiculous content. Thanks for doing this, I think it matters a devastating amount lol
arXiv is a preprint server, not a journal
Scientists can post to arXiv and sites like it before their article is peer reviewed and published in a journal
yeah sorry that's been fixed, was supposed to be fixed before publication but slipped by.
Also it's pronounced like "archive"! That really tripped me up in the (excellent!) podcast version
My father (Thomas B. Allen) was an author and illustrator of children's books. He worked so hard for months on a book, often redrawing a single illustration many times so that it conveyed just the right emotion, or had the right light. This pisses me off for so many reasons, not just because it is taking away sales from real artists, but also because we are already living in a society where people don't have the ability to think critically. All of these bullshit, nonsensical kid's books are just going to start them off confused and not understanding that things have to have structure or meaning. Not to mention what you said about the class divide in early education widening. I worry too about parents whose whole personality is being weird thinking that these books are cool, like they expose their kids to weird ideas, not understanding the damage that they can do. Anyway, great work spreading the word!
Just for fun I had ChatGPT write a short story about Robert's lifelong battle against Raytheon. Here it is:
In the sprawling metropolis of Belleville, nestled amidst the shadows of towering skyscrapers, journalist Robert Evans sat at his desk in the dimly lit office of Behind the Bastards podcast. Robert was known for his relentless pursuit of truth, his willingness to dig deep into the dark underbelly of the world and expose the villains who lurked within it. His latest target was the notorious defense contractor Raytheon.
For years, Raytheon had operated with impunity, profiting from war, conflict, and the suffering of countless innocent lives. Their vast influence stretched like a web, ensnaring politicians, military officials, and even the media. But Robert was determined to unravel their nefarious web and expose the truth to the world.
With each episode of his podcast, Robert peered into the abyss that was Raytheon's history. He uncovered stories of corruption, unethical practices, and the insidious ways in which they perpetuated global conflicts for their own gain. But he knew that merely shedding light on their misdeeds would not be enough to bring them down.
Robert began to reach out to like-minded individuals who shared his desire for justice. He connected with whistleblowers, former Raytheon employees, and activists who had felt the devastating impact of the company's actions firsthand. Together, they formed a clandestine group dedicated to dismantling Raytheon's empire.
Their rebellion started slowly, with small acts of defiance. They organized protests outside Raytheon's headquarters, demanding accountability and an end to their warmongering ways. But as their numbers grew and their resolve hardened, they realized that bolder actions were necessary.
Robert and his comrades began infiltrating Raytheon's operations, gathering evidence of their illicit activities. They exposed the company's cozy relationship with politicians, their manipulation of intelligence, and their exploitation of vulnerable communities. The revelations shook the public's trust in Raytheon, and the once-mighty corporation began to crumble.
But Raytheon was not one to go down without a fight. They launched a relentless campaign to discredit Robert and his rebellion, employing every tool at their disposal to protect their interests. They spread disinformation, launched legal attacks, and even resorted to intimidation tactics.
Undeterred, Robert and his allies fought back. They used their platform to expose Raytheon's desperate attempts to cling to power. The public, awakened by the revelations, rallied behind them, demanding justice and an end to the company's reign of terror.
In a climactic showdown, Robert confronted Raytheon's CEO in a public debate. Armed with evidence and the support of the people, he exposed the true nature of the corporation. The world watched as the once-mighty CEO squirmed under the weight of their crimes. The truth could no longer be ignored.
As the dust settled, Raytheon faced a wave of legal repercussions and public scrutiny. The company was dismantled, its assets seized, and its top executives held accountable for their actions. The world breathed a collective sigh of relief, knowing that justice had been served.
Robert Evans had achieved what seemed impossible—a rebellion that had toppled an evil empire. He had shown that even the mightiest corporations could be brought to their knees when the power of truth and collective action converged.
But Robert's fight was far from over. With Raytheon gone, he turned his attention to other bastards lurking in the shadows, ready to expose their misdeeds and inspire others to rise against them. His rebellion had ignited a spark that would continue to burn, illuminating the darkest corners of the world and challenging those who believed themselves untouchable.
And so, the journey of journalist Robert Evans continued, his voice echoing through the airwaves, rallying the people against those who would do harm. The world was forever changed, one rebellion at a time.
I went more meta and was using ChatGPT to write a book called “how to use ChatGPT to write a best selling self help book…in under a week!” It was so formulaic and deeply disturbing to me, an actual writer, that I gave up in disgust. I then used it to generate bios for fake people, together with quotes, in how incredible the <insert trending self help topic> was. Then of course, fake 5 star reviews on the fake book
Sure but this problem can be easily solved by purchasing based on reviews rather than blindly buying whatever matches your search.
When you say there are going to be rich kids with good books and poor kids with bad books that seems a bit alarmist. Distribution of good and bad quality content costs the same, lots of good quality stuff is in the public domain and the demand would still exist for quality books as not everyone is going to be incapable of gauging it.
I think this article is great in raising the awareness that parents and schools should be checking some recommended book lists rather than buying any old crap as I agree this AI generated stuff can't be good for learning, but really they should have been doing that anyway, books written by humans can have toxic content too
Fake reviews have been a plague for years. And fakes only need to be superficial to be effective. Most people don't look too deep, mostly because nobody has the time