HN Reader

I think for me I’m just going to accept that I won’t be reading any modern fiction, likely ever. It isn’t like there isn’t more than I could read in multiple lifetimes already out there that is pre, say, 2010. But the other side is that fiction has never been worse, because the commercial impetus to become a published fiction writer has never been lower (literally since before the 1600s, given functional literacy levels and the amount of fiction reading the average person does). The Steinbecks of the world aren’t writing novels in 2025.

I like the term “organic literature.” A significant amount of readers have no interest whatsoever in generated prose, so there is definitely a viable market in human provenance.

An independent certification body is quite an old-world solution for a problem like this, but I’m not sure this is something that can be done mathematically. A web of trust may be all we have.

We need this for technical books. I was a chapter into something the other day before deciding I’d been hoodwinked into reading someone’s ChatGPT output

The world of literature is increasingly making itself inaccessible to broad audiences by turning this into a zero-sum game.

I wish OpenAI, Anthropic and Gemini would all figure out how to pay royalties to copyright holders anytime their content is used. I see absolutely no reason why they can't do this. It would really take all the steam out of these hardline anti-AI positions.

This is inverted. AI books should come with warning labels similar to those found in cigarettes.

I always wondered if there was some way to make a "proof" that some piece of work was human created.

A recording of the entire process of it's creation is one possible answer (though how are deep fakes countered)

But maybe there is some cryptographic solution involving single direction provable timestamps..

Does anyone know of anyone working on such a thing?

This idealistic objective is highly commendable, but the fight could be futile. As you would need AI to do the work of detection. Then there will be another movement to do "organic detection" of "organic content". And the story goes on.

Think of interview candidates rejected by AI and employees fired by AI, or that case where a snack pack was identified by AI as a weapon in a student's pocket. This will lead to "organic decision making".

I love that they show an image of Kerouac's On the Eoad.. it's such a great example of a book that you know is based on real lived experience and that just comes to life as a wild and cacophonous daydream.

Knowing that some mad person wrote it is critical to its appeal

In 2020 at the beginning of the pandemic, I set a timer, wrote for 10 minutes, live-streamed it, did it three times per day, for 35 days, and put everything unedited into a book.

It seems as if it may be more relevant in our AI writing times.

I too am open for business, for a modest fee I will arrange to meet a book publisher in nyc for a firm handshake to cement a declaration from them that they are publishing books not made with AI. I will then send a formal email saying they may publish a little gold star on their book, and my preeminence as a member of the literary elite should carry it through. I'm doing this for the people because I _care_.

I wonder how this works since authors are more and more likely to use AI to spell check, fix wording, find alternate words, and all manner of other things. It might be useful to understand the “rules” for what “human” means.

What is the point of this? Any publishing house can just "self certify" that no AI was used. Why would it be necessary to have an outside organization, who can not validate AI use anyway and just has to rely on the publisher.

Writing a book is, in most cases, something which happens between the author and their writing medium, how could any publisher verify anything about AI use, except in the most obvious cases?

The one thing which matters here is honesty and trust and I do not see how an outside organization could help in creating that honesty and maintaining that trust.

I don't care if AI wrote the book, if the book is good. The problem is that AI writes badly and pointlessly. It's not even a good editor, it 1) has no idea what you are talking about, and 2) if it catches some theme, it thinks the best thing to do is to repeat it over and over again and make it very, very clear. The reason you want to avoid LLM books is the same reason why you should avoid Gladwell books.

If a person who I know has taste signs off on a 100% AI book, I'll happily give it a spin. That person, to me, becomes the author as soon as they say that it's work that they would put their name on. The book has become an upside-down urinal. I'm not sure AI books are any different than cut-ups, other than somebody signed a cut-up. I've really enjoyed some cut-ups and stupid experiments, and really projected a lot onto them.

My experience in running things I've written through GPT-5 is that my angry reaction to its rave reviews, or its clumsy attempts to expand or rewrite, are stimulating in and of themselves. They often convince me to rewrite in order to throw the LLM even farther off the trail.

Maybe a lot of modern writers are looking for a certification because a lot of what they turn out is indistinguishable cliché, drawn from their experiences watching television in middle-class suburbs and reading the work of newspaper movie critics.

Lastly, everything about this site looks like it was created by AI.

This is a big problem, though I would be slow to trust anyone purporting to address this problem. (Though, to their credit, this Books by People team is more credible than the bog-standard pair of 20yo Bay Area techbro grifters I expected.)

Reportedly, Kindle has already been flooded with "AI" generated books. And I've heard complaints from authors, of AI superficial rewritings of their own books being published by scammers. (So, not only "AI, write a YA novel, to the market, about a coming of age vampire young woman small town friends-to-lovers romance", but "AI, write a new novel in the style of Jane Smith, basically laundering previous things she's written" and "AI, copy the top-ranked fiction books in each category on Amazon, and substitute names of things, and how things are worded.")

For now, Kindle is already requiring publishers/authors to certify on which aspects of the books AI tools were used (e.g., text, illustrations, covers), something about how the tools were used (e.g., outright generation, assistive with heavy human work, etc.), and which tools were used. So that self-reporting is already being done somewhere, just not exposed to buyers yet.

That won't stop the dishonest, but at least it will help keep the honest writers honest. For example, if you, an honest writer, consider for a moment using generative AI to first-draft a scene, an awareness that you're required to disclose that generative AI use will give you pause, and maybe you decide that's not a direction you want to go with your work, nor how you want to be known.

Incidentally, I've noticed a lot of angry anti-generative-AI sentiment among creatives like writers and artists. Much more than among us techbros. Maybe the difference is that techbros are generally positioning ourselves to profit from AI, from copyright violations, selling AI products to others, and investment scams.

Just another rent-seeker. I mostly choose books based on word of mouth recommendations or liking other things by the same author. This is very resistant to slop from AI and to the large amounts of rubbish that has always been published.

Books written by AI is yet another case of an application of AI that does nothing to solve existing problems that consumers have (too few books in this case) but instead focuses on the producer side of things.

Worse yet, increasing the quantity of books while simultaneously decreasing the quality just makes the situation worse for readers: more slop to filter out.

An organization with zero technical capability charging publishers recurring fees to certify something they can't actually verify?

So this is the thing that Zitron and Doctorow are always talking about? Naked grifting in the AI industry?

Ugh, capitalism monifies yet another problem it created.