That’s true. But people pointing out that the whole attempt is absurd and senseless also reinforces the point that current AI isn’t what companies tout it as.

then you likely live in a bubble of tech nerds

Well, we are on Lemmy…

Also it’s not like this is some important topic with societal implications. It’s just a technical question that I had (and still doesn’t) that doesn’t mandate researching.

So why “research” it with AI in the first place, if you don’t care about the results and don’t even think it’s worth researching? This is legitimately absurd to read.

are you comfortable with a single corporation having control over this sort of service?

Honestly? A tiny bit more than a single country. I have at least some miniscule control over the corporation through voting and local regulations that international corporations must follow, whereas I have absolutely no formal influence on US govt.

Which govt? I’m not comfortable with the idea of the current US govt having control over this sort of service.

“some” = the one that’s the basis of and technically closely tied to the one you’re using right now

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?

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

It can have effect when the opposition is relatively weak, e.g. individual small companies or govts that aren’t powerful and authoritarian enough to ignore massive protests.

Sounds like bullshit. Just in recent memory: look at Belarus 2021, look at the massive Serbian protests that have been going on for over half a year and the govt is still not relenting.

Every traditional forum used to have limitations of that sort. Lemmy would probably be no exception, once (if) it becomes attractive to spammers and bots.

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).