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Comments (116)

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  RomanPushkin
  It's one of the reasons I don't want to update my free book about Ruby: https://leanpub.com/rubyisforfun - written by a human, and will stay the same forever I think. The moment you touch it to update - immediately changes the date from 2022-05-26 to 2026 and all the value is gone
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  zerobees
  I've been consciously doing that for reference books for the past three years because Amazon is absolutely littered with AI-generated non-fiction. I have my own ideological reasons too, but the main problem is that most of that AI-generated reference stuff is just of incredibly poor quality. It's meant to saturate the platform as cheaply as possible, so no one actually does any fact-checking, editing, layout, and so on. They're not even using frontier models for that.For example, there are multiple evidently AI-generated titles that come up on the front page if you search for "Rust programming", "cybersecurity book", etc. I guess I can't rule out that "Winston Knowles" is a real person, but I'm not gonna bet money on that: https://www.amazon.com/Cybersecurity-Career-Manual-Interview...
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  adamddev1
  And there might be no way to prove you really wrote something Post-2022. I wrote a long article, all by hand. I never used any LLMs, even for searching. I checked it with a couple of AI detection tools and they confidently said that 60% of the article was written by AI.
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  MichaelNolan
  I was browsing Amazon and I found one “author” with over 100 published in the last 12 months. And they weren’t cheap either. Most were $50 or more for the paperback version.It really put a sour taste in my mouth. At that volume (2 books per week) you’d think Amazon could identify and label that it’s AI generated.
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  dspillett
  Not just books. When searching for information online, for anything where things haven't changed significantly in the last few years, I definitely favour a post on SO/SE/HN/reddit/etc dated before 2023 over those that are later. And where there are no good looking references before that, the earlier the better.Of course there are no doubt people out there realising that a fair few of us do this, and are starting to edit posts to pre-date them as a sort of SEO trick…
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  YesBox
  You are not alone. I like to read Harry Potter fan fiction [1] and I have started checking the publication date when Im searching for something new to read. I started doing this passively and realized it after the fact.Have you ever met someone who could say all and do the right things but never made you feel anything, or your gut was sensing an ulterior motive? It's a magic trick we are all bewitched by at some point in our lives. I suppose I filter by published year because I dont want think about if I am being tricked or not.[1] There are some very talented writers[A] out there who (I assume) cannot do the world building part.[A] Recent Favorite: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1134255/chapters/2292768
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  Avicebron
  Props to the author for not mentioning low-background steel.
• TeaVMFan
  Even though I started Means and Motive ( https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0GYCZJVGX ) 5 years ago, and it was written without any AI use, I was worried people might have this concern, given the 2026 publication date.For a sanity check, I did run the first page through an online AI checker and it confirmed what I already knew: 100% human.
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  culi
  Perhaps we need a 2022 version of this sitehttps://wtfhappenedin1971.com/https://wtfhappened2012.com/
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  cryo32
  It’s not just 2022 and earlier books. There’s a supply chain problem as well. I’ve seen two older books so far from Amazon which were AI generated copy text with a genuine looking cover on it. Amazon just took the return and probably restocked it for the next victim.I tend to buy books from second hand book shops and eBay now and usually older or well used copies. A good sign of their authenticity.
• andy99
  I’m pretty conservative with books and usually only read things based on recommendations anyway. I would rarely read a book published in the last few years just because news of it hasn’t travelled to me yet. I think worrying about AI generated books would really only matter if you’re at the bleeding edge of reading and looking for brand new stuff.
• low_tech_love
  ” Perhaps we’ll get used to this new tool, and move on.”Perhaps we’ll be flooded with slop to the point where nobody can distinguish reality from fiction anymore, because it takes too long to check and reason about it with our outdated tools and thinking processes. Then perhaps people will lose faith in the “truth” and simply accept that one-sided ideology and biased belief is all that exists and matters, and corrupt leaders (at all levels) will make use of that to sway masses of useful idiots.Wait…
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  julianeon
  This will work for a little while but this can't go on indefinitely: no one is going to want to stick to 30+ year old books.We should probably work on developing standards for what we want in a book instead of clinging to a losing position.
• theodpHN
  Tech documentation has been kind of a three-decade race to the bottom, with some ups and downs along the way. From vendor documentation in the 70's to Windows Help in the 90s to the rise of tech books incl. O'Reilly to fill the gap, to PDF and Internet document, and now to often lacking-in-detail Javadocs, Python docs, API interface, API docs, event/parameter lists, and GitHub README files that are passed off as documentation today, often with no detail, use examples, illustrations, or though-through overall structure and organization.In addition to the obvious negative effect on learning curves, I'd argue this dearth of "long-form documentation" has a negative impact on programming language and app development, as well as software usability in general (isn't CONTROL+COMMAND+SHIFT+3 for a MAC screen capture intuitive?)..AI has become the new "teacher of record" to fill this documentation void, but it's very individualized and narrowly focused. There's no longer a shared mental model, where everyone has read the same books and are working somewhat off the same page. Ironically, it's probably never been easier to write a good tech book, but there's likely zero money in it and the search and AI giants are likely to hover it up and start serving snippets of it up for free before you see a dime, making people very unlikely to buy your book, even if you've written a technical masterpiece!
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  subygan
  Anything that feels like it came out of matrix multiplication immediately loses the value for me.Something about the industrialization of thinking makes it uninteresting. similar to frozen pasta from the shelves, heated and served.
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  DavidPiper
  > But I can’t help but feel that the effort meant something.Each person that put in the effort is one additional review point.Thinking, Writing, Editing, Proofing, Publishing, Distributing, Selling...At every step, a human had the opportunity to say "no, this is bad". And the fact that they didn't is a vote of quality and reputation.These days presumably every step can be automated without a human in the loop at all, and it's up to the buyer to discover "no, this is bad", but at that point their money is already spent.
• hollowturtle
  The problem exist, the conclusion is wrong. LLMs DON'T produce great content, they PRETEND to produce great content, even in coding. They're as good as the statistical incidence. Writing a book with an LLMs, like with code, could lead to good results sure, but they're in the mean, sometimes slightly less sometimes slightly more. When it's good it looks good, because that's how it works, and it's broken way more subtly than ever
• gritspants
  Some on my bookshelf:> Crafting Interpreters, by Robert Nystrom> Re[Coding] America, by Jennifer Pahlka> Systems Performance, by Brendan Gregg
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  tyre
  Hot take: I think it’ll be pretty much the same as it was. If anything it will get better.You will still have gatekeepers and taste makers. Publishing houses will screen fiction for well-written and interesting fiction. Word-of-mouth, personal recommendations, and endorsements from people you respect will continue to outweigh algorithms, if you care.For cheap reads, how much of a difference is there between James Patterson’s 734th beach read thriller and what an LLM with a 50m token context window can produce? Does it matter that it’s not written by six ghostwriters? Probably not to the median Hudson News buyer.For non-fiction, it’s easier to gather research and related materials. If you were cherry-picking facts to make a narrative, yeah, that’s easier, but it’s not like we haven’t gotten really good at that anyway. Again, there will be cooling off periods for scholarship to be debated and coälesce.What will get better is people asking questions and getting well-researched pieces on a specific niche or confluence of topics. AI is just-good-enough-to-be-dangerous now. It will get better. We’ll learn to harness it (literally) to iteratively fact check and cite sources. We will build repositories with heavily sourced facts for it to build upon. It will be pulling together “truths” that can be traced, then incrementally adding inference across those, which can then be verified and are a new fact.I read a lot. I love, love, love new and original authorship. I deeply value writing as a craft. There will be a lot of garbage. More than there is now, at an incredible rate.And we’ll figure it out.
• drchaim
  This will happen with social accounts, news articles..I set the date pre 2023, but we all have some date in mind. I don’t like it, but it’s what it is
• andrewljohnson
  Pro-tip - the older it is, the more likely it is to be good.
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  boznz
  There are still plenty of us writing the book start to finish with all our own words and plots, it is very tempting to use AI to get the cover art correct, but going to a cover artist will these days likely get you the same "AI assisted" creation.I do have one freely downloadble Sci-Fi book from 2022 which took 10 years in total to write so it might safely pass all your standards, but if a fixed cut off date is your criteria for a good book then there really is no hope for writers like me continuing.
• adt
  First AI books (using GPT-3) were published in Aug/2020:https://lifearchitect.ai/books-by-ai/
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  wenbin
  If contents are generated instantly via llm and packaged as books, videos, podcasts, pull requests etc, then they don’t deserve human attention.
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  raincole
  I feel that too. But the reasonable part of me knows that it's just one generation can't "get" the entertainment of the next generation. It has always been like that.There are mobile game ads on TV here. My father asked me what actually the players get from paying the game companies money. He still doesn't get it after I tried to explain how it works twice.
• unknownian
  I’m vehemently anti-genAI in creative fields but even I think this metric is stupid and unfair to younger generations and generations to come, even if genAI writing gets better.If you can’t trust a contemporary writer to not use genAI, then find another interest with true zero trust creative verification (like improv) because copying and cheating on writing has existed for decades.However, my unpopular opinion is extremist in another way: societies should probably not tolerate AI in creative fields like creative writing at all, if Sora can be shut down, so can other useless and toxic parts of LLMs.
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  bashmelek
  I’m in my mid-30s, and have never written a book, but I still sometimes think of it. I know it isn’t too late. I still want to create my own applications, but I once used the Google ai result in a utility function. Is it all tainted? I still want people around me to try in earnest
• locusofself
  I take comfort in the fact that my wife and I have a few decent bookshelves of good novels many of which we have not read yet. I've been hoarding e-books as well.
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  zeroonetwothree
  I don’t find this at all. Not that many fiction books use a lot of AI prose it seems. Maybe nonfiction is worse?
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  mrandish
  I hate slop as much as anyone else and was, until recently, absolute in my zero tolerance of any LLM use in personal posts and correspondence. Now I've adopted a slightly more nuanced view because I sometimes use an LLM when writing but only in a couple very limited, narrowly focused ways. The first is trying to remember a specific turn of phrase I can't recall at the moment (when you get past 50 this happens a bit more often). The other is breaking up overly long sentences, which is a bad writing habit I've struggled with since high school.I never let an LLM write or rewrite a post, or even a paragraph, for me. I want to write it myself and I want it to be in MY voice. I think I'm a pretty good writer and I like my writing. However, I suspect those who may be less confident in their writing use an LLM to "check" their rough draft but then succumb to the temptation of just pasting the LLM's output because it "sounds better", it's already finished and... writing is hard. This is always a mistake and no one should do it in a forum like HN. It's rude and we'd much rather hear your words and ideas as you express them.The sad part is this ends up in an all or nothing between "Never use an LLM when writing a post" and "Have LLMs write posts for you."
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  fallat
  There has always been shit books - let that sink in.There will be _more_ shit books now, but that's the only difference.There will be probably a constant rate of "good" books.
• TZubiri
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Low-background_steel
• Ferret7446
  It must be tiring, suffering from AI fear.I just read things and decide if they're good or not. I did that ten years ago and I do it now and nothing has changed. Most things are bad, a few are good. That also has not changed.
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  torben-friis
  I haven't seen any minimal sign that any of the fiction books I read lately was LLM helped. Writers seem like a particularly anti AI crowd too.Has anyone? Now I'm curious if it's just my particular bubble.
• bonoboTP
  In good hands, it can be a great tool, but you usually don't notice that. The issue is that AI allows for a superficial appearance of quality and it takes time to discover that the content is void of deeper insight.
• anon
  undefined
• ares623
  Same with open source projects (or other software projects in general).Pre-2022, when someone posts a Show HN, even if it's not something you would normally be interested in, there's a baseline understanding that _someone_ cared enough to spend time and effort to build it. So in a hypothetical future scenario if you do find yourself looking for that particular tool, there was value in you seeing that Show HN so you can revisit it.Now, I just ignore all Show HN posts.
• mvkel
  The glasses are a little rose-colored here. As if anything written <2022 were on stone tablets. LinkedIn slop was human generated before it was ai generated, but it was still slop.The issue with content >2022 isn't that it's ai-generated per se, it's that it's still slop.
• ChrisArchitect
  jgrahamc's post from about a year ago might be of interest:Low-background Steel: content without AI contamination (2025)https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44239481
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  casey2
  C-c C-v existed well before 2022. Most of history until the Renaissances consisted of the bulk of scholars copying out of "the book" whatever the book happened to be (Euclid, The Bible, Aristotle’s Logica Vetus, Cicero's Orations and De Officiis, 四書五經, 史記, 文選)The liberal concept that the everyman should have their own original thoughts that others should consider is a historically a very new concept. And we start getting things that look a lot like C-c C-v quickly after the Renaissance.See humans have the tendency to romanticize the past, and if this is allowed to compound they elevate really quite dismal people to the realm of literal godhood in some cases. If you asked someone a thousand years ago what they though life was like thousands of years in the past and what it will be like thousands of years in the future most would have said the past was better in all regards including health, strength, morals even technology; while the future would be viewed as the continual circling of the drain. Put yourself in their shoes, you go look at a Roman Colosseum, you can't build that, nobody you know can build that. If you asked Vitruvius during the construction of the Aqueducts he would tell you that he's maintain the knowledge of his ancestors, whom could have build such structures if they needed them or had the manpower, and the technical problems are just a trifle. If you pushed him, he might invoke Providentia and that if the gods stopped blessing you we'd fall even faster.This kind of discovered then lost fits better narrative within the human psyche better than the unintuative truth is a constructed social conversation, that can be semi-formal and rigorous (the scientific method) or lax (common sense) depending on the setting.
• cat-snatcher
  No just you
• viccis
  See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Low-background_steel
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  api
  I honestly find this a little deranged. I’ve read some AI generated prose before and it’s… boring. It tends to be the mathematical average of all stories, with plots that are heavy on cliche and tropes played straight. If I read a book like that it’s probably just going to be a bad book that I don’t finish. Humans write lots of boring bad books too.Eventually artists will figure out how to use AI to make real art that is actually good, just like photographers did with photography, and that will be its own new thing. I don’t see much of that yet but with photography it took a while.
• rudolftheone
  [dead]
• galfarragem
  [dead]
• codelong888
  [flagged]
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  psadri
  We are witnessing the birth of the term "pre-times" you often see in dystopian sci-fi.