Yeah, usually they’re just sourced from public-domain book collections such as Google Books (who scan older books which can end up visually messy), and I’m pretty sure some of those that are offered on Amazon were straight-up based on pirated PDFs.

because you’re paying

Well no, it’s the buyer who is paying. Which they might find off-putting, if the final price is too high, so you get fewer buyers and less profit.

As for the quality, there’s literally no reason that a book that is printed on demand has to be low quality or use low quality materials.

Except that in practice they simply are of lower quality. I’ve seen quite enough of such books. Maybe higher quality materials could be used, but that would raise the price for the end-user even more, and possibly slow down the production.

and the proof is the fact that Amazon is filled with AI generated garbage books

One has to wonder how much money they actually make, though. I saw some YT videos about the topic, IIRC it’s really difficult. Their mere presence doesn’t prove their profitability but only the belief by many people that they could be profitable.

It’s easy to start a business, sure. But you didn’t explain the rest of the process and don’t seem to actually know a lot about the particulars of book publishing (neither do I, but whatever I do know doesn’t agree with your imagined “solution”).

I guess, but print on demand is also more expensive than printing in bulk, when looking per unit, and of lower quality (paper and binding). I’m not too familiar with the details of book publishing but I wouldn’t expect that people are not using this route simply because they failed to notice its benefits.

I tried to read about “just-in-time economy” but I really don’t see how it would apply to book market?

Large AI companies themselves want people to be ignorant of how AI works, though. They want uncritical acceptance of the tech as they force it everywhere, creating a radical counterreaction from people. The reaction might be uncritical too, I’d prefer to say it’s merely unjustified in specific cases or overly emotional, but it doesn’t come from nowhere or from sheer stupidity. We have been hearing about people treating their chatbots as sentient beings since like 2022 (remember that guy from Google?), bombarded with doomer (or, from AI companies’ point of view, very desirable) projections about AI replacing most jobs and wreaking havoc on world economy - how are ordinary people supposed to remain calm and balanced when hearing such stuff all the time?

Oh man…

That is the point, to show how AI image generators easily fail to produce something that rarely occurs out there in reality (i.e. is absent from training data), even though intuitively (from the viewpoint of human intelligence) it seems like it should be trivial to portray.

Yeah, I don’t think that would fly.

“Your honour, I was just hoarding that terabyte of Hollywood films, I haven’t actually watched them.”

Bro are you a robot yourself? Does that look like a glass full of wine?

AI can “learn” from and “read” a book in the same way a person can and does,

If it’s in the same way, then why do you need the quotation marks? Even you understand that they’re not the same.

And either way, machine learning is different from human learning in so many ways it’s ridiculous to even discuss the topic.

AI doesn’t reproduce a work that it “learns” from

That depends on the model and the amount of data it has been trained on. I remember the first public model of ChatGPT producing a sentence that was just one word different from what I found by googling the text (from some scientific article summary, so not a trivial sentence that could line up accidentally). More recently, there was a widely reported-on study of AI-generated poetry where the model was requested to produce a poem in the style of Chaucer, and then produced a letter-for-letter reproduction of the well-known opening of the Canterbury Tales. It hasn’t been trained on enough Middle English poetry and thus can’t generate any of it, so it defaulted to copying a text that probably occurred dozens of times in its training data.

Facebook (Meta) torrented TBs from Libgen, and their internal chats leaked so we know about that, and IIRC they’ve been sued. Maybe you’re thinking of that case?

(you know who I’m talking about)

(I don’t)

And again in a year or so only a handful of tech nerds with few social connections will actually ditch it.

Tbh a lot of the torrenting terminology is quite metaphorical and doesn’t make sense without understanding all the mechanics. Seeding? Leeching? Ports? Clients? And even the central concept - “torrent”?

This may be a bit too far outside the nominal topic of the comm, so feel free to report it and let the mods decide if it can stay up. (I’d report it myself but apparently can’t do it.)

The GIF in the OP is from the game Lemmings (1991).

you know what I’m talking about

But I literally don’t. Well, I didn’t but now I mostly do, since you explained it.

I get what you’re saying with regards to the isolation, this issue has already been raised when many left-wing people started to leave Twitter. But it is opening a whole new can of worms - these profiles that post AI-generated content are largely not managed by ordinary people with their private agendas (sharing neat stuff, political agitation, etc.), but by bots, and are also massively followed and supported by other bot profiles. Much the same on Twitter with its hordes of right-wing troll profiles, and as I’m still somewhat active on reddit I also notice blatant manipluation there as well (my country had elections a few weeks ago and the flood of new profiles less than one week old spamming idiotic propaganda and insults was too obvious). It’s not organic online behaviour and it can’t really be fought by organic behaviour, especially when the big social media platforms give up the tools to fight it (relaxing their moderation standards, removing fact-checking, etc.). Lemmy and Mastodon etc. are based on the idea(l) that this corporate-controlled area is not the only space where meaningful activity can happen.

So that’s one side of the story, AI is not something happening in a vacuum and that you just have to submit to your own will. The other side of the story, the actual abilities of AI, have already been discussed, we’ve seen sufficiently that it’s not that good at helping people form more solidly developed and truth-based stances. Maybe it could be used to spread the sort of mass-produced manipulative bullshit that is already used by the right, but I can’t honestly support such stuff. In this regard, we can doubt whether there is any ground to win for the left (would the left’s possible audience actually eat it up), and if yes, whether it is worth it (basing your political appeal on bullshit can bite you in the ass down the line).

As for the comparison to discourse around immigrants, again I still don’t fully understand the point other than on the most surface level (the media is guiding people what to think, duh).

I don’t have even the slightest idea what that video is supposed to mean. (Happy cake day tho.)

In 2005 the article on William Shakespeare contained references to a total of 7 different sources, including a page describing how his name is pronounced, Plutarch, and “Catholic Encyclopedia on CD-ROM”. It contained more text discussing Shakespeare’s supposed Catholicism than his actual plays, which were described only in the most generic terms possible. I’m not noticing any grave mistakes while skimming the text, but it really couldn’t pass for a reliable source or a traditionally solid encyclopedia. And that’s the page on the best known English writer, slightly less popular topics were obviously much shoddier.

It had its significant upsides already back then, sure, no doubt about that. But the teachers’ skepticism wasn’t all that unwarranted.

I think the academic advice about Wikipedia was sadly mistaken.

It wasn’t mistaken 10 or especially 15 years ago, however. Check how some articles looked back then, you’ll see vastly fewer sources and overall a less professional-looking text. These days I think most professors will agree that it’s fine as a starting point (depending on the subject, at least; I still come across unsourced nonsensical crap here and there, slowly correcting it myself).

I think that’s not possible. Wikipedia collects as little user data as possible, and providing a different UX in different countries sounds like it would already be too intrusive in that regard.

As far as I’ve seen they only generated one example summary, which is linked in OP. It’s not good, as Wikipedians have pointed out: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Village_pump_(technical)#The_Dopamine_summary