There to seems to be a key difference between a pulpy/slop reading list that says nothing useful and is a waste of time, versus a pulpy/slop reading list that actively invents books that don't exist. Both are untrustworthy, but the latter one is actively just lying to readers and wasting significantly more time for readers. Like, I legitimately had no idea at first glance that some of these books were fake (I don't follow publishing that closely). Imagine thousands of other readers going through that thought process too.
Absolutely! Which is why I say the scale of this is new, but the phenomenon itself is isn’t novel. I totally understand your argument, I’m just scoring my concern a little lower.
For sure, but what I'm arguing is that the incentive to check for the veracity of a given piece of supplemental material is gone because the system rewards efficiency over everything. Like this rec list was put together by presumably overworked and poorly paid content syndication shop, we've had those little chaos advertising boxes at the bottom of websites with obviously fake content in them for a decade now.
Yeah but this makes the degradation even worse and virtually instantaneous... and since the system rewards efficiency over everything, AI is going to be the perfect tool for speeding up that process because it's quite literally the embodiment of efficiency over everything!
There to seems to be a key difference between a pulpy/slop reading list that says nothing useful and is a waste of time, versus a pulpy/slop reading list that actively invents books that don't exist. Both are untrustworthy, but the latter one is actively just lying to readers and wasting significantly more time for readers. Like, I legitimately had no idea at first glance that some of these books were fake (I don't follow publishing that closely). Imagine thousands of other readers going through that thought process too.
Absolutely! Which is why I say the scale of this is new, but the phenomenon itself is isn’t novel. I totally understand your argument, I’m just scoring my concern a little lower.
For sure, but what I'm arguing is that the incentive to check for the veracity of a given piece of supplemental material is gone because the system rewards efficiency over everything. Like this rec list was put together by presumably overworked and poorly paid content syndication shop, we've had those little chaos advertising boxes at the bottom of websites with obviously fake content in them for a decade now.
Yeah but this makes the degradation even worse and virtually instantaneous... and since the system rewards efficiency over everything, AI is going to be the perfect tool for speeding up that process because it's quite literally the embodiment of efficiency over everything!