Deep Thought - Down the Forty-Two Levels of AI Hell: The AI Novel
Created | Updated Jul 8, 2023
Deep Thought - Down the Forty-Two Levels of AI Hell: The AI Novel
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Down the Eighteen Levels of Hell but the phrasing triggered a filter in Microsoft Designer. Honour among Cyberthieves. |
Jiang Zhiyuan was originally unconscious and had no feeling. At some moment, she suddenly felt that her face was itchy, and it made her very uncomfortable.
Her last bit of rationality made her realize the severity of the situation.?Who is touching my face?!
The moment she opened her eyes, the bright light caused her vision to turn white. After a few seconds, she then saw the looks of the person before her.
“Ah!!!” Jiang Zhiyuan let out a miserable and horrified scream! Almost instinctively, she raised her hand to push the other party away!
But at this point, many bones in her body were broken, and her organs were squeezed together. She should be severely injured.
– Mollie Mertz DDS, Down the Eighteen Levels of Hell
This is a real book.
It is 'real' in the sense that the book exists, in virtual space, online, and can actually be read – if one were to call the act of running eyes over a screen containing nearly random collections of more-or-less English words 'reading' – by anyone with a Kindle Unlimited subscription. (I do not have a Kindle Unlimited subscription. I do not have that kind of free time.)
Not being a detective, I cannot prove this, but I'd be willing to bet real money that Mollie Mertz, the writing dentist, is not a real person. I suspect she is the fictional beard of that chatbot author who usually hides behind Vietnamese-sounding names like Ha Phuong Nga, Kim Linh, or Thi Miu. If I were a Vietnamese writer, about now I would be yelling at Amazon for making my life more difficult. It's hard enough to establish a writing reputation. To be confused with an AI would be the height of infuriating.
Anyway, kudos to the AI chatbot for coming up with Down the Eighteen Levels of Hell as an intriguing novel title. From the cover, it appeared to be Young Adult Fiction. From the writing sample, not so much. Maybe the title was just a description of the experience of reading it from the POV of an English teacher. Mind you, having taught English to people from most parts of the world, and having used fiction prompts for writing exercises, I have to say that passages like the following don't seem completely unfamiliar to me.
Tong Jing Hao coldly glared at him. Lam Tam Ngon didn't want to, he couldn't tell him. Otherwise he will laugh until his teeth fall out. Shen Peichuan slapped him in the mouth.
– Quynh Thi, Wait You Love Me
That one is, after all, only marginally worse than my favourite student short story, which was called 'The Act of Revenge from a Dealer'. The plot involved illegal drug trading and was written by a lady who had watched far too many episodes of Tatort. This was the same adorable lady who informed us in a fact-based essay that 'the Egyptian gets darker as you go up the Nile,' which she didn't mean at all the way it sounded but which conjured up an indelible image in my mind's eye.
Okay, I hear you saying, but where are these Kindle Unlimited novels coming from? A rogue conglomerate of ESL student novelists?
No, my friend. No, indeed. The proliferation of these novels is due to a not-very-complicated scam which is currently plaguing Amazon and causing howls of protest from self-published novelists. I will elucidate.
Writer Twitter has explained to me that authors of books on Kindle Unlimited get paid by the number of pages read. Since the reading is online, counting what's read is easy for the computer, which pays the author a whopping $00.004 per page read. (Edgar Allan Poe would have understood the agony of this.) That means that if you had written, say, a 400-page book, and some subscriber read the whole thing, Amazon would pay you $1.60.
Now, even when nobody's cheating, this is not exactly an easy way to make money. Compared to flogging the product of your personal blood, sweat, and tears online, working the breakfast shift at Mickey D's sounds like a cushy job. Worse, validation-starved novelists hover anxiously over their online statistics, rejoicing at every page read ('to whoever read my book yesterday, thank you', on Twitter this morning) and agonising over all the 1-page reads ('18 people read only one page, why oh why?'). Now they have to compete with the chatbot scammers, and it's unfair.
The chatbots, who, pace Dr Mollie Mertz, seem to prefer Vietnamese-sounding names, use AI to generate the semblance of a novel or non-fiction book. They grab a photo online and use a design AI to generate a title. Wait You Love Me has a seagull on the cover. Not one of FWR's, thank goodness. Once the package is put together, the 'book' goes onto Kindle Unlimited. So far, so good. Here's where the scam comes in.
Now the chatbot owner turns on the reading machine. No, not the kind we had in school in the Sixties, the projector that put all the fast readers to sleep by isolating the lines in a story. The kind that 'reads' novels, page by page, at a simulation of human speed – thus racking up royalties for the AI author at the rate of $00.004/page. Department of Vinh Du Stands in Front of His Parents' Tombstone has 169 pages. You do the maths.
Writers are incensed about this. I'm assuming that, sooner or later, Amazon will do something about it. I mean, they're the ones paying machines to read bogus books. Unless they figure it comes under 'spoilage'. In the meantime, the writers ask that no Kindle Unlimited user actually read these books, as the scammers get money from this. All quotes in this column came from the freebie 'Look Inside' feature.
