> She has sold more than one million books, by her own estimate, in digital, print and audio formats, earning more than $1 million so far this year.
> The South African now heads an operation that has trained several hundred people in her method and is preparing to launch software for AI authors called Authorythm.
So basically she is yet another grifter making money selling her method for "success"
The number of books makes this hilarious. Whatever your take on AI generation in writing, it's pretty difficult to read 370 books in 20 months closely. Let alone consider, edit and improve.
There's just no way you can claim "oh no, I have a full creative process in place to produced something considered", whilst turning out an unreadable quantity of books.
I did the math when I was trying to write a comment in a similar vein (yours is much better worded). Assuming that months are a generous 31 days, she'd have to read 0.6 books every day to read them all. That's on top of everything else.
You need to be the kind of character who wants to see more cheap stuff in the world to pull this kind of shit. AI augmented troll hackers of civilians and small honest SMEs, invasive stalkers, self-proclaimed hard pushing media jerks bribing doctors and teachers and civilians, medical malpractice proponents, genAI augmented trolls...
Too many people, once they understand that pseudo-tricky or smart folks can freely abuse stupid or naive or temporarily "crippled" people, go on to do exactly that.
It just lowers all maxima, consequentially lowering quality of output and quality of evolution in those buckets, including the quality of rare events.
Few people care about those very special tears of disillusionment and guilt they will shed on their death bed.
Drug-induced forced laughter and pseudo-dominance over sabotaged and vulnerable reign superior in minds that fully outsourced "consciousness" to certain value systems.
Ask yourself: when do non-functioning people on the spectrum, or people suffering from later stage Dementia and Alzheimer's et al feel most "conscious" ... that's a consciousness you can't outsource.
a debate I had with a friend recently was about how there aren't actually that many people contributing to the spam everywhere of AI crap. There are tens of thousands perhaps, probably not even enough to fill a small city, spread around the entire global population.
A lot of people use AI, some even are unlucky enough to post online before learning its a faux pas. Some few are oblivious enough to go for some time before realizing.
A select few decide that this is their opportunity to industrialize production of slop for profit. It seems that when platforms take steps to curb excesses like people posting thousands of products/posts/books/games/videos/whatever a day, the volume drops dramatically, because its these villains posting thousands of times a day that are responsible for most of the nonsense
and as with this woman, whenever they see a modicum of success extracting money from the commons, they immediately pivot to selling courses, so other malignant souls can clog up the shared processes of humanity with their crap too.
This is the true killer app for LLMs. A lot of important people didn't like a media channel they couldn't control and many businesses did not like having fair reviews of their products and services.
First it was "bot" accounts from low income countries posting and rating to skew the numbers, now you can do the same with actual bots. Drown the signal in a pool of noise until nobody believes anything any more and we return to the status quo from before personal computers.
Except with a surveillance apparatus that would've made the soviets jealous.
I've already seen it impacting community curators on Steam; their inboxes are overflowing with vibe-coded slop. Curation is important, but it doesn't really scale; it just shifts the need to be a "human slop filter" from you to someone else.
> "Readers don't read rubbish books; they return them," she said.
Do people actually return books they don't like? I don't but maybe it's a thing. Or is it her trying to convince herself the books are actually good, or at least not rubbish? Which is putting the bar low anyway.
Imaging if people returned all the defective junk they got from Temu or Amazon. If the price is low enough people aren't returning anything, it's simply not worth the hassle and they'll accept that they got swindled.
For books I'm not sure, assuming that the author actually have a story to tell, but is just lacking the skills to write a book, I don't know that I think you can justify calling it a grift when they're trying to write that book using AI. 370 books however.... Is she really that imaginative?
There's a hell of a difference between having an AI help you write a fictional story that you've planned out and dreamed about for years, but just didn't have the skills to write and then pumping out 20 books a month. There's no way those were have been edited and read by one person.
If it's cheap enough people likely won't bother to return them, but if it's rubbish then there will inevitably be reviews that'll lead to people avoiding the author like the plague. That's the real signal of whether or not something is good.
She has not broken any laws nor done anything scummy; what she has done is studied the system and hacked it to her ends: a true hacker in the HN sense of the word.
Now, I hate AI slop as much as anyone can hate it, but if society is so insensitive to actual quality that it will reward slop to the tune of a million dollars, the problem lies with that, not her.
And to her credit, it is not like she is one-shotting books with a single prompt: she has a structured process starting from a human outline and ideas, plus human review at the end.
> Now, I hate AI slop as much as anyone can hate it, but if society is so insensitive to actual quality that it will reward slop to the tune of a millions dollars, the the problem lies with that, not her.
Very true, but perhaps beyond my rapidly expanding misanthropy I can also dislike the process that feeds it. I don’t see it any differently than people disliking companies that push unhealthy and addictive foods, or drug pushers, or any other potential societal malignancy.
Just because we can make the thing and people will buy it doesn’t mean we should make the thing. And the more people that adopt the “lowest common denominator” production process the more we rob ourselves of the joy of creation itself.
First, the societal view on HN-approved hackers is not always positive.
Second, society is bad at recognising systemic problems, that doesn't mean they aren't problems. Something with short term gain for long term harm is a particular problem for our society to handle.
> It is not like she is one-shotting books with a single prompt
It's not clear where she gets the original concept - maybe it's an original idea - fine. But maybe that's another few prompts. Which would make her little more than a meat proxy.
> she has a structured process starting from a human outline and ideas
It's not massively complicated though is it.
> plus human review at the end.
Yeah, it's the proofreaders having to work through hundreds of pages of slop I'm bothered about. Even if you assume the latest models are awesome it's not like this is Astra/frontier output is it?
Complicated enough that very few people have award winning stories. Not even books - you can write 5 great pages and get relatively well known. But apparently it's not that easy.
Same reason why I'm upset when Temu ships a garbage plastic gadget. Someone must have wanted it, they ordered it, but I doubt that they wanted the quality that showed up. We've all seen the videos of what people think they order vs. what actually shows up. I don't get why you'd go through the trouble of wasting the resources on a scam product, rather than just outright robbing people.
What if the Temu plastic gadget that you ordered actually turns out to be actually quite good and does what you’d expect it too? I think that’s the real comparison here instead of automatically assuming her books are crap that no one enjoys. Obviously enough people enjoy her books (some of it anyway) to make her money.
Are there reviews though? Many readers are always ready to publish reviews of stuff they read, so it's mostly just a matter of finding reviews of works by this author.
Yeah, people suddenly got selective amnesia and act like "slop" never existed before 3 years ago.
Hell, look at the video games from the 1980s. Download the scans of any early gaming magazine or a MAME ROM archive. At least 50% of the games were derivative slop. Crappy movies and books were around for a 100 years too.
True, but at some point it doesn't. Ignoring the 99.99% of titles on Steam I don't recognize from reviews, known developers, or word of mouth isn't meaningfully harder than ignoring 99%.
This is worse for new entrants than either established developers or consumers, who will have to work harder to get their work recognized amidst the rising tide of slop.
Perhaps some conventions will develop similar to what I've seen on a smaller scale for fan artists releasing work online, where developers will provide some evidence of their development work in process to convince (human or AI) slop filters to let them pass.
I did not only read 5G book about how bad it is, i also read the 5G spec book.
I read books about pendulum (different types of them too, like one with stones you can drop), tunnels and pendulum, energizing water, homeopathy (how you make it, the theory behind it).
What's the end game? Once we have a billion books published online each day, how can a legit writer with something real to say break through? Same with indie games. I'm in a game jam community and we're struggling with this. The sudden influx of entries (50% increase this year), mostly of low effort copied games, puts an unfair burden on everyone who needs to judge games - a fundamental part of how game jams work.
This. Ironically, an increase in slop production could end up making it harder for new non-AI authors to get recognized, due to default assumptions that unknown quantities are slop.
All AI games are heavily bloated. Try cloning Factorio or Prison Architect. AI can make something that looks similar to such games, but the back end falls apart.
I have friends who keep showing me their new "games". I just see some version of Doom, but one that needs multiple GB of memory to accomplish what was commonplace in the 90s with a millionth as much headroom.
If you want to judge more entries without increasing the work for the judges, you need to scale the number of judges with the number of entrants, i.e. use peer review. Of course if most entries are low-effort, you'll get a lot of low-effort reviews. But if you have an inner circle of trusted judges, you can have them look at the winners according to peer review and, if they don't meet the bar, throw out reviewers who rated them highly. Repeat until you've found a subset of reviewers who are taking the task seriously.
After that, you make the initial review very cheap for you: YOu need to create a promovideo from ingame.
If this is still too much, you make a pre sampling phase. Everyone already developed a game gets more karma points and is easier found, everyone new has to earn their standing.
Yes, I think people are a bit quick to forget how much pre-LLM slop there was. In all sorts of media. Asset flips on steam, Chuck Tingle-level "romance", algorithmic spam on streaming services (think baby sleep rain relaxing lo-fi beats) etc.
The problem is scale. Human-produced garbage content come in at rate X, but LLM produced garbage can come in orders of magnitude faster because you can spawn off agents to produce garbage content multiplying the output. The only thing limiting this is the economics and since the cost to produce this garbage can be so low, the amount that can be produced while still be economically feasible is massive.
It's the difference between a regular ocean wave and a tsunami. It's the difference between a person bumping into you and a being hitting by a speeding semi-truck. Scale is the problem with LLM garbage content.
There is a demand for these books AFAIK, they existed before AI. Short, easy to read and I assume write romance books designed for people that read them in a day.
But now with AI they're just easy to mass produce I guess. What's funny is there were authors doing this with like gpt-4o and seemingly selling a bunch. I can't imagine they were very good but the people yearn for them.
But 370 in just over a year and a half is crazy work lol. Also a lot of RSA is anti-ai so seeing a woman earning like 60 times the annual average selling slop must be upsetting.
Why? If one gives it a charitable thought I feel like it's obvious she means Claude doesn't do well with convincing sex scenes (I'm guessing as much of that content as possible was removed from the training data and otherwise suppressed). Grok is where the really steamy stuff is at; no filters.
No way to enforce it. We already have laws about scams and counterfeit products which Amazon does not enforce, even in cases where it absolutely could.
There are valid objections to GP’s point, but this one is silly.
Having anti-counterfeit laws is vastly preferable to not having them. Counterfeiters do get busted, though you’re right that Amazon and the authorities could indeed do more.
I’d rather live in a world where at least some criminals are deterred from selling me a fake fire extinguisher that doesn’t work when my house is on fire.
There is an established market for sudoku books. So if a publisher using AI to generate more sudoku books with lower costs and at a faster rate and people still buy those books because they enjoy solving sudoku puzzles, what difference does it make if a human painstakingly made those puzzles versus an AI generating them?
Because sudoku is a math puzzle and a book of words is a story.
Like, the line between big artistic/creative efforts and other stuff is subjective and hard to trace, yes. I know the counter arguments here (“what if the book is an instruction manual?”, “what if someone’s labor of artisanal love is making sudoku puzzles?”), but sudoku vs story is like disagreements over “what counts as the Midwest”: you know very well that Antarctica isn’t in it, and that a sudoku book merits very different appreciation and artistic protectionism-from-AI than a story.
It’s fine to categorize things without having a rigorous definition of the category.
She is not generating Sudoku puzzles, so you can drop the hypothetical. As for the implication that good sales figures mean people enjoy the books she generates, might it be possible that the reason her books sell are because she stuffs storefronts with so much slop (see the figure in the title) that she outcompetes everything else by volume alone? Regardless of quality, whether people like her books, and with no regard for authors who use higher brain functions at the cost of spending more than a day and a half writing a book?
I'm unsure where the line is drawn for LLM ect in the arts is supposed to be, but the article does say that she "heads an operation that has trained several hundred people in her method". So, let's take the LLM out of the question, is it fair to say that she is the author?
I'm not saying that authors should mine clay, hand-carve the letters on a clay tablet, and fire it up in a kiln that they built themselves; but authorship requires intent.
From the figure in the title, she spends under 2 days per book. That's from the start of her "career", so I assume the rate has been ramping up. This isn't enough time to read and review a book, let alone write one, so it would indeed be delusional to call her an author.
She figured out a way to make a quick buck off gullible and uncaring people, and a market that has not been thoroughly saturated with slop yet. There's not much more to it.
If people are remorseful enough then there'd be enough feedback in reviews that others know to beware. And that would lead to author names associated with those works being outed and likely boycotted or something. This particular author has ~11 pen names, so assuming a roughly equal spread across her 370+ books, there should be a crop of bad reviews for books associated with a name that has maybe 25 - 40 other books associated with it. There should be a pattern for people to find and then say "Someone has been putting out slop under these names; avoid like the plague", which should then trigger a considerable gap in sales for that author.
I can assure you that no writing of mine is LLM-generated.
But I wish I had some way to prove that. (Live writing? Git logs—but a lot of my chapters see a big first commit? Some kind of PGP web of trust thing?)
For one thing, the goal of writing for me is not to produce a book. The goal is to learn and help others learn. The goal is to make the most concise, best quality material that has ever been written on that topic for that audience. It's a lofty goal that I can't claim to achieve, but that's the target. LLMs appear to be light years away from being able to do so and are easily bested.
And, perhaps most importantly, writing is fun, relaxing, challenging, frustrating, rewarding, and human. Having an LLM write something for me is none of those things.
wiether | 4 hours ago
prmph | 4 hours ago
basscomm | 3 hours ago
skeledrew | 2 hours ago
trizoza | 4 hours ago
benrutter | 4 hours ago
There's just no way you can claim "oh no, I have a full creative process in place to produced something considered", whilst turning out an unreadable quantity of books.
4thguy | 3 hours ago
staleBot_tom1pr | 4 hours ago
Too many people, once they understand that pseudo-tricky or smart folks can freely abuse stupid or naive or temporarily "crippled" people, go on to do exactly that.
It just lowers all maxima, consequentially lowering quality of output and quality of evolution in those buckets, including the quality of rare events.
Few people care about those very special tears of disillusionment and guilt they will shed on their death bed.
Drug-induced forced laughter and pseudo-dominance over sabotaged and vulnerable reign superior in minds that fully outsourced "consciousness" to certain value systems.
Ask yourself: when do non-functioning people on the spectrum, or people suffering from later stage Dementia and Alzheimer's et al feel most "conscious" ... that's a consciousness you can't outsource.
ign0rant | 3 hours ago
That was beautiful. Thanks
skeledrew | 2 hours ago
What exactly is the matter with cheap stuff? Isn't it every buyer's dream to get the stuff they want good, fast and cheap?
RugnirViking | 4 hours ago
A lot of people use AI, some even are unlucky enough to post online before learning its a faux pas. Some few are oblivious enough to go for some time before realizing.
A select few decide that this is their opportunity to industrialize production of slop for profit. It seems that when platforms take steps to curb excesses like people posting thousands of products/posts/books/games/videos/whatever a day, the volume drops dramatically, because its these villains posting thousands of times a day that are responsible for most of the nonsense
and as with this woman, whenever they see a modicum of success extracting money from the commons, they immediately pivot to selling courses, so other malignant souls can clog up the shared processes of humanity with their crap too.
za_creature | 4 hours ago
First it was "bot" accounts from low income countries posting and rating to skew the numbers, now you can do the same with actual bots. Drown the signal in a pool of noise until nobody believes anything any more and we return to the status quo from before personal computers.
Except with a surveillance apparatus that would've made the soviets jealous.
brador | 4 hours ago
za_creature | 3 hours ago
soon_to_be_sb | 3 hours ago
brendoelfrendo | 3 hours ago
za_creature | an hour ago
TV is a perfect example of this: you only have so much screen time to allocate to the news, so which subjects do you "curate"?
I bet LLMs would love to curate the internet for us from all of that slop.
mrweasel | 2 hours ago
RugnirViking | 2 hours ago
> "The South African now heads an operation that has trained several hundred people in her method"
flr03 | 4 hours ago
Do people actually return books they don't like? I don't but maybe it's a thing. Or is it her trying to convince herself the books are actually good, or at least not rubbish? Which is putting the bar low anyway.
mrweasel | 3 hours ago
For books I'm not sure, assuming that the author actually have a story to tell, but is just lacking the skills to write a book, I don't know that I think you can justify calling it a grift when they're trying to write that book using AI. 370 books however.... Is she really that imaginative?
There's a hell of a difference between having an AI help you write a fictional story that you've planned out and dreamed about for years, but just didn't have the skills to write and then pumping out 20 books a month. There's no way those were have been edited and read by one person.
skeledrew | 2 hours ago
sevenseacat | 3 hours ago
skeledrew | 2 hours ago
prmph | 4 hours ago
She has not broken any laws nor done anything scummy; what she has done is studied the system and hacked it to her ends: a true hacker in the HN sense of the word.
Now, I hate AI slop as much as anyone can hate it, but if society is so insensitive to actual quality that it will reward slop to the tune of a million dollars, the problem lies with that, not her.
And to her credit, it is not like she is one-shotting books with a single prompt: she has a structured process starting from a human outline and ideas, plus human review at the end.
ChrisMarshallNY | 4 hours ago
A lot of coders are using almost exactly the same approach, and it seems to be bearing fruit.
HolyLampshade | 4 hours ago
Very true, but perhaps beyond my rapidly expanding misanthropy I can also dislike the process that feeds it. I don’t see it any differently than people disliking companies that push unhealthy and addictive foods, or drug pushers, or any other potential societal malignancy.
Just because we can make the thing and people will buy it doesn’t mean we should make the thing. And the more people that adopt the “lowest common denominator” production process the more we rob ourselves of the joy of creation itself.
brador | 3 hours ago
philipwhiuk | 3 hours ago
First, the societal view on HN-approved hackers is not always positive.
Second, society is bad at recognising systemic problems, that doesn't mean they aren't problems. Something with short term gain for long term harm is a particular problem for our society to handle.
> It is not like she is one-shotting books with a single prompt
It's not clear where she gets the original concept - maybe it's an original idea - fine. But maybe that's another few prompts. Which would make her little more than a meat proxy.
> she has a structured process starting from a human outline and ideas
It's not massively complicated though is it.
> plus human review at the end.
Yeah, it's the proofreaders having to work through hundreds of pages of slop I'm bothered about. Even if you assume the latest models are awesome it's not like this is Astra/frontier output is it?
viraptor | 3 hours ago
Complicated enough that very few people have award winning stories. Not even books - you can write 5 great pages and get relatively well known. But apparently it's not that easy.
soon_to_be_sb | 3 hours ago
If the society is so dumb that it does not deserve to survive, then so be it.
Are you up for that line of thought?
mrweasel | 3 hours ago
tsaixingwei | 3 hours ago
mrweasel | 3 hours ago
People aren't returning the bad Temu products, it's not worth the trouble, could be the same with these books, assuming they are cheap enough.
skeledrew | 2 hours ago
mcc1ane | 4 hours ago
foxtrottbravo | 4 hours ago
skeledrew | 2 hours ago
impostervt | 4 hours ago
thewhitetulip | 4 hours ago
2 books per week is still absolutely insane
__natty__ | 4 hours ago
ChrisMarshallNY | 3 hours ago
lp92 | 42 minutes ago
origini | 4 hours ago
A book was never a quality criteria.
The community, bestseller list (easy to manipulate) etc, were.
Its the same with the critisism about Steam and Indiegames.
Razengan | 4 hours ago
Hell, look at the video games from the 1980s. Download the scans of any early gaming magazine or a MAME ROM archive. At least 50% of the games were derivative slop. Crappy movies and books were around for a 100 years too.
cwillu | 3 hours ago
soon_to_be_sb | 3 hours ago
Volume matters lol..
jasomill | 2 hours ago
This is worse for new entrants than either established developers or consumers, who will have to work harder to get their work recognized amidst the rising tide of slop.
Perhaps some conventions will develop similar to what I've seen on a smaller scale for fan artists releasing work online, where developers will provide some evidence of their development work in process to convince (human or AI) slop filters to let them pass.
Razengan | an hour ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_game_crash_of_1983
soon_to_be_sb | 3 hours ago
Have you actually read some of these garbage? If not, how do you decide it was garbage?
origini | 3 hours ago
I did not only read 5G book about how bad it is, i also read the 5G spec book.
I read books about pendulum (different types of them too, like one with stones you can drop), tunnels and pendulum, energizing water, homeopathy (how you make it, the theory behind it).
Why?
soon_to_be_sb | 8 minutes ago
lopis | 3 hours ago
profunctor | 3 hours ago
jasomill | 2 hours ago
sandworm101 | 3 hours ago
All AI games are heavily bloated. Try cloning Factorio or Prison Architect. AI can make something that looks similar to such games, but the back end falls apart.
I have friends who keep showing me their new "games". I just see some version of Doom, but one that needs multiple GB of memory to accomplish what was commonplace in the 90s with a millionth as much headroom.
yorwba | 3 hours ago
skeledrew | 2 hours ago
What does that mean? What defines a "legit writer" and who determines when they're saying "something real"?
origini | 45 minutes ago
Steam wants 100$ from you, tax documents etc.
After that, you make the initial review very cheap for you: YOu need to create a promovideo from ingame.
If this is still too much, you make a pre sampling phase. Everyone already developed a game gets more karma points and is easier found, everyone new has to earn their standing.
vintermann | 3 hours ago
morkalork | an hour ago
Eddy_Viscosity2 | 3 hours ago
It's the difference between a regular ocean wave and a tsunami. It's the difference between a person bumping into you and a being hitting by a speeding semi-truck. Scale is the problem with LLM garbage content.
thewhitetulip | 4 hours ago
NorthSouthNorth | 3 hours ago
But now with AI they're just easy to mass produce I guess. What's funny is there were authors doing this with like gpt-4o and seemingly selling a bunch. I can't imagine they were very good but the people yearn for them.
But 370 in just over a year and a half is crazy work lol. Also a lot of RSA is anti-ai so seeing a woman earning like 60 times the annual average selling slop must be upsetting.
netdevphoenix | 3 hours ago
yorwba | 3 hours ago
netdevphoenix | 2 hours ago
glimshe | 3 hours ago
This is the most disturbing snippet about AI I've read in the past few weeks.
skeledrew | 2 hours ago
throwa356262 | 3 hours ago
Would improve both Amazon and YouTube significantly. I have basically stopped using them after seeing all LLM spam.
Eddy_Viscosity2 | 3 hours ago
zbentley | 3 hours ago
Having anti-counterfeit laws is vastly preferable to not having them. Counterfeiters do get busted, though you’re right that Amazon and the authorities could indeed do more.
I’d rather live in a world where at least some criminals are deterred from selling me a fake fire extinguisher that doesn’t work when my house is on fire.
throwa356262 | 2 hours ago
tsaixingwei | 3 hours ago
zbentley | 3 hours ago
Like, the line between big artistic/creative efforts and other stuff is subjective and hard to trace, yes. I know the counter arguments here (“what if the book is an instruction manual?”, “what if someone’s labor of artisanal love is making sudoku puzzles?”), but sudoku vs story is like disagreements over “what counts as the Midwest”: you know very well that Antarctica isn’t in it, and that a sudoku book merits very different appreciation and artistic protectionism-from-AI than a story.
It’s fine to categorize things without having a rigorous definition of the category.
mzajc | 3 hours ago
swed420 | 3 hours ago
brendoelfrendo | 3 hours ago
4thguy | 3 hours ago
I'm not saying that authors should mine clay, hand-carve the letters on a clay tablet, and fire it up in a kiln that they built themselves; but authorship requires intent.
mzajc | 3 hours ago
She figured out a way to make a quick buck off gullible and uncaring people, and a market that has not been thoroughly saturated with slop yet. There's not much more to it.
skeledrew | 2 hours ago
That said it all, and literally the only thing that matters, because sales means demand, which means people find the works valuable.
beej71 | an hour ago
If someone's just in it for the money, why wouldn't they slop it up?
skeledrew | 49 minutes ago
beej71 | an hour ago
But I wish I had some way to prove that. (Live writing? Git logs—but a lot of my chapters see a big first commit? Some kind of PGP web of trust thing?)
For one thing, the goal of writing for me is not to produce a book. The goal is to learn and help others learn. The goal is to make the most concise, best quality material that has ever been written on that topic for that audience. It's a lofty goal that I can't claim to achieve, but that's the target. LLMs appear to be light years away from being able to do so and are easily bested.
And, perhaps most importantly, writing is fun, relaxing, challenging, frustrating, rewarding, and human. Having an LLM write something for me is none of those things.
I wish AI would do my fucking dishes, though.