Humazon: A Bookstore for Humans, by Humans
Author Hugh Howey reflects on the history of content farms in publishing, from the Stratemeyer Syndicate to James Patterson, and how AI is now accelerating this trend. He argues that readers and writers are the only parties that truly matter, and while he has no objection to AI-generated books, he personally craves authenticity. He challenges the industry to create a 'Humazon'—a bookstore with a 100% human badge—confident that demand will make it profitable.
If there was a Waldenbooks full of Pattersons and Stratemeyers, and a Humazon store full of 100% human books, I’d never go into the Waldenbooks again.
- SwellJoe
I've been researching AI detection (and also made a game to see if humans can quickly detect AI writing just based on style in a short passage: https://prose-or-con.com/ as a way to gather data and to sate my own curiosity about whether I can actually detect AI writing reliably...I can, but not as reliably as I thought).
Storyscope (https://github.com/jenna-russell/storyscope) is a really interesting concept, and one I'm in the process of reproducing and expanding on, even though it is less accurate on direct detection than something like BERT or Binoculars. It is interesting because the usual obfuscation tactics, even having a human transcribe and rephrase the story don't work; it looks at the story itself, rather than word use and grammatical quirks, etc. Plot, agents, temporal structure.
So far, AI writing is detectable to a pretty high degree, though I think it'll be a war of attrition that AI eventually wins. And, all the detectors are the same tools one could use to create undetectable AI writing; AI loves to iterate in a loop, seems like iterating to rewrite to be undetectable is a soluble problem (though models currently probably would end up writing worse and worse to avoid detection, and the current best models have begun integrating watermarking, pushing back the defeat of human writers for some time).
- jgord
I think AI detection will increasingly be an arms race .. so we might need other solutions, eg :
- blockchain attestation [ crypto-graphically signed by human author / artist ]
- proof of work in the traditional sense, eg video of artist at work, stages of the painting from sketch to under-painting, brushstrokes, layers, glazing
yes, Im aware the second can be increasingly faked .. eg train a DNN or LLM to mimic brushstrokes and oil paint handling
In my case, I think videos of the painting process are a reasonable, if temporary, solution.
- scubbo
> I see nothing wrong with readers gobbling up AI-written books for the rest of their lives.
> Because to me, authenticity makes for a better reading experience.
This pair of sentences gave me pause, until I realised that they're not in contradiction - the author is deliberately non-judgemental of _others_ making a personal choice that _he himself_ would prefer not to make. Remarkably rare, nowadays.