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Two Interesting Articles
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1. Coin Flips are not 50/50. They tend to come up with whatever side they started with.
2. Amazon has had many phony AI generated bestsellers
2. Amazon has had many phony AI generated bestsellers
Coin flips are not 50/50!
Many people believe that if you flip a coin the chances that it turns up heads is even, 50%. But it may depend on how it starts out. According to a study at the University of Amsterdam, the chances are 51% that the coin lands on the same side as it starts out. However, if after catching the coin you turn it over onto the back of the other hand, then you reduce the chances to 49%. They used coins from 46 different currencies. Thus, 1,000 flips would come out with 510 same side and 490 other side.
The Article:
https://boingboing.net/2023/10/10/coin-toss-not-so-random-after-all-says-groundbreaking-study.html
Amazon, AI, and Phony Bestsellers
One of the cleverest hoaxes I've seen recently is the Amazon Bestseller con. Here are the steps:
- Creative Miscreants use AI to generate a novel which is mostly gibberish. They use AI to generate a seductive looking cover. Then post it to Amazon and enable the Kindle Unlimited option. Kindle unlimited is Amazon's $11.99/month service that gives readers free access to four million e-books. Six million people subscribe. Amazon pays 39 cents to the author for every 100 pages read.
- You can also create AI books about current events and get them out much faster than real books someone has to write. The information in them doesn't need to be accurate or even comprehensible.
- Create Kindle Unlimited accounts for many bots. These bot programs open the phony books and turn pages slowly, as if they were reading. They "read" a lot.
- Collect thousands of dollars generated by your reader bots from your unlimited kindle books!
When this scam was first revealed, 81% of Amazon's 100 Teen & Young Adult Contemporary Romance bestsellers were phony AI generated slosh. One of the most prolific "writers" created about 10 books a day for a few months.
Not All ChatGPT Books Are Scams
There are also numerous books authored by ChatGPT or coauthored by ChatGPT which could be legitimate books which serve a purpose. They don't have to be scams. For example, short children's books around morality themes generated and illustrated by AI can be pretty fun and often as good as a human write. I recommend parents join their young children in generating children's bedtime stories using prompts and some AI system, then reading them together and maybe even using AI to illustrate them.
Further Reading
Sadly, these articles tend to focus on the generation of AI assisted books instead of the automated reader bots.
Date: December 2023
This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.