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Amazon Has Everything it Needs To Make Massively Popular Algorithm-Driven Fiction (qz.com)
Thu-Huong Ha, writing for Quartz: Amazon's power in books extends way beyond its ability to sell them super cheap and super fast. This year, a little over 40% of the print books sold in the US moved through the site, according to estimates from Bookstat, which tracks US online book retail. (NPD, which tracks 85% of US trade print sales, declined to provide data broken out by retailer.) In the US, Amazon dominates ebook sales and hosts hundreds of thousands of self-published ebooks on its platforms, many exclusively. It looms over the audiobook scene, in retail as well as production, and is one of the biggest marketplaces for used books in the US. Amazon also makes its own books -- more than 1,500 last year.
All that power comes with great data, which Amazon's publishing arm is well positioned to exploit in the interest of making books tailored exactly to what people want -- down to which page characters should meet on or how many lines of dialogue they should exchange. Though Amazon declined to comment specifically on whether it uses data to shape or determine the content of its own books, the company acknowledged that authors are recruited for their past sales (as is common in traditional publishing). "Amazon Publishing titles are thoughtfully acquired by our team -- made up of publishing-industry veterans and long-time Amazonians -- with many factors taken into consideration," says Amazon Publishing publisher Mikyla Bruder, "including the acquiring editor's enthusiasm, the strength of the story, quality of the writing, editorial fit for our list, and author backlist/comparable titles' sales track."
Amazon's Kindle e-reader, first released in 2007, is a data-collection device that doubles as reading material. Kindle knows the minutiae of how people read: what they highlight, the fonts they prefer, where in a book they lose interest, what kind of books they finish quickly, and which books gets skimmed rather than read all the way through. A year after the Kindle came out, Amazon acquired Audible. Audiobooks have been a rare bright spot in the publishing industry, with double-digit growth in total sales for the past few years. Audible now touts itself as the "world's largest seller and producer of downloadable audiobooks and other spoken-word entertainment," and its site has around 450,000 audio programs.
All that power comes with great data, which Amazon's publishing arm is well positioned to exploit in the interest of making books tailored exactly to what people want -- down to which page characters should meet on or how many lines of dialogue they should exchange. Though Amazon declined to comment specifically on whether it uses data to shape or determine the content of its own books, the company acknowledged that authors are recruited for their past sales (as is common in traditional publishing). "Amazon Publishing titles are thoughtfully acquired by our team -- made up of publishing-industry veterans and long-time Amazonians -- with many factors taken into consideration," says Amazon Publishing publisher Mikyla Bruder, "including the acquiring editor's enthusiasm, the strength of the story, quality of the writing, editorial fit for our list, and author backlist/comparable titles' sales track."
Amazon's Kindle e-reader, first released in 2007, is a data-collection device that doubles as reading material. Kindle knows the minutiae of how people read: what they highlight, the fonts they prefer, where in a book they lose interest, what kind of books they finish quickly, and which books gets skimmed rather than read all the way through. A year after the Kindle came out, Amazon acquired Audible. Audiobooks have been a rare bright spot in the publishing industry, with double-digit growth in total sales for the past few years. Audible now touts itself as the "world's largest seller and producer of downloadable audiobooks and other spoken-word entertainment," and its site has around 450,000 audio programs.
Then hit "refresh" if you want a completely new read in the same universe, or "I'm feeling lucky" if you can live with some algorithmic imprecisions. It'll come soon enough.
Perhaps, when you start writing your own fanfic about a company then perhaps you have an unhealthy obsession.
Echo chamber books, no need to question anything since reality is dished up with a nice bottle of Cabernet.
Yay, now books can become as predictable as Hallmark movies.
They can tell things like when people stop reading in their Kindle, but they don't have really great data to determine why the person stopped reading. They may be able to tell how long popular dialogues are, but an interesting dialogue is determined by much more than length. In fact you might say that length is one of the least important factors.
So great, they have tons of metrics, but they don't have the ability to extract the metrics they need to make a book interesting. And that is entirely the problem.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
So, the mechanically written books for the masses imagined in Orwell's 1984 may become a reality ? If i recall well it was called "pornosex".
Well, you can already automate generation of postmodern essays so why not ?
On of the many: http://www.elsewhere.org/journ...
Even trolls speak the truth every now and then.
I bought a device that seems to only work in Fahrenheit. It's time that California mandates that all products sold in the state support Celsius out of the box and can easily switch from Fahrenheit to Celsius. Only California can make the US progress in that way...
(I'll talk about meters next)
Your "contributions" are not welcome here. Please leave.
I look forward to reading titles like: "The Ethical Billion Dollar Company," "The One Thing Everybody Agrees On," "The Functional Government," and "The Man Who Got Everything For Free At No Cost to Anybody."
So it will be indistinguishable from the writings of Orson Scott Card.
Readers aren't the same as Vidiots. They have enough brain cells to tell that they are reading AI-generated garbage. I'm more inclined to believe GAN will produce movies before it'll write a decent book. However, I'm probably just heavily biased since I'm a voracious reader myself (and completely fucking unashamed of it).
We'll have an algorithmic tech blog that generates nonsensical stories. The formula is simple company x + category y + fad z.
Why don't you stop licking the assholes of random homeless drunks/addicts? That's just nasty! Fucking disgusting pig!
— the gerald butler impersonator
Cool story, newfag.
I finally understand this APK nonsense.
It's Amazon's beta testing it's story writing AI!
Seems they have quite a bit of work that needs be done, though....
Check your premises.
Amazon and Netflix driven data mining is what gives us such ridiculous combinations as Sharknado and Clown Tornados
EG: http://www.killerclown.org/killer-clown-clownado
makes me wonder just how advanced these algorithms really are..
On the other hand I've seen some really bad moves based on really bad themes that were made prior to any of all this whoo haa .
Or some similar utter crap? I have been wondering where all that trash comes from...
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Look at this poor, little incel. Always raging at women becase he thinks he deserves poon, but no one wants to get within 500 feet of his shit breath and micropeen.
"I'm a much better programmer than APK" - by Anonymous Coward ZIP on Monday October 08, 2018 @11:27PM (#57449082)
BIG TALK - ZIP has nothing to show in programs.
I can https://news.slashdot.org/comm...
(From registered /.ers liking/using/praising my work (& 100k users worldwide too) - He can't!)
"ZIP" (Zach Patterson) tried to take credit for what I solved before him https://tech.slashdot.org/comm...
(He says he can code? I don't see it & DOUBT IT - he even needs to LEARN TO READ)
I even show 2 ways to do it YOURSELF https://tech.slashdot.org/comm... (he couldn't).
Delphi/FreePascal/ObjectPascal HAS no issue w/ null-term'd string bufferoverflows https://developers.slashdot.or... - C does, C++ can UNLESS you do what I said 1st loser.
He likes CODE SIGNING (that's been STOLEN & ABUSED) https://www.helpnetsecurity.co...
MY METHOD CAN'T BE (upmodded +2 INTERESTING in CODING FOR DEFCON no less) https://it.slashdot.org/commen...
LIAR ZIP says he has no account "I don't have an account, so I don't have mod points" https://news.slashdot.org/comm...
Yet LIAR ZIP says he downmods my posts (IMPOSSIBLE MINUS AN ACCOUNT on /.): "I down-modded a few of your post on other threads" - by Anonymous Coward "ZIP" on Thursday October 11, 2018 @11:31AM (#57461058) FROM https://yro.slashdot.org/comme...
APK
P.S.=> KEEP IMPERSONATING ME https://science.slashdot.org/c... - this comes out every time EXPOSING your BLOWHARD incompetence... apk
Basically without any scarcity (since the content can be produced almost instantly, and without any limitations at all due to quantity) -- there's nothing stopping the market being glutted with this crap, and the price asymptotically dropping to zero...
So would the end result be that human authors get priced out of existence, since they can't compete at all -- or perhaps in the long run worth it in the long run for amazon to make content like this?
SCIgen referring to https://pdos.csail.mit.edu/arc... if anyone is interested
I have little doubt that Amazon had the necessary corpus to generate books including ones containing all the elements that people look for in a good book. That said, well designed and programmed robots can make reasonable food out of correct quantities of each ingredients in the correct order, but after a while it will all just begin to taste the same and be bland. In the case of the software generated stories, some of it might be accidentally good enough to make it into a literary publications if all of the vogue themes show up; however, until such time that we have "electric readers" that will read for us so that we won't have to do so, I doubt the bulk of it will make the upper ranks for the bulk of readers, at least for the first few generations of such.
I believe it when I see it. Sure, companies do collect a whole truckload of data all the time and AI has made some huge progress in the last 10 years, but in terms of end user features I have seen pretty much zero of that ever being used to create something useful.
If they wanted to they could run face detection and AI on every movie out there and tell you exactly how long each character is on screen, with which characters they share a scene, what they are doing in the scene and so on. But they don't. We are still stuck with recommendation algorithms that are complete junk and provide no explorability.
In their store they can't even manage to group related items together. Want to buy a book or movie from a series? Better know what you are looking for already, since they down show you which are part of the series or in what order they go. A trip to Wikipedia is often needed to figure things out.
For most of the items they sell they can't even bother to scan the backside.
There is a lot of cool stuff one could do with all that collected data, but I have yet to see somebody actually do something with it.
Seeing as how Amazon still has no idea what I might actually be interested in buying despite me doing quite a bit of shopping and browsing with them, (You bought a part for your car, so how about the same part, for a different car?) I have a hard time believing they would be able to make a full length book that would be anything more than a poor remix of something I had previously read.
My usual comment regarding CHILD MOLESTING IMPERSONATOR COWARDS applies here. Please shut the fuck up if you aren't willing to speak under your real name. Oh, that's right, your name is Chester the Molester!
— the gerald butler impersonator
Your presence on earth are not welcome. Please leave. Preferably by slitting your own throat and drowning in your own blood.
Be careful not to cut the dick off the guys penis that is down your throat though.
— the gerald butler impersonator
but they still gotta buy the books they would feed into the 'ai' author bot that would 'write' them...
and the first time their bot 'writes' a best seller that infringes on another work will be very expensive, very important, legal case.
It was the blurst of times.
Stupid monkey.
(') I am Bandit the penis, and I object to this thread.
When I become the anthropomorphic man sized Killer Penis in 2097, and I find a way back in time to 2018, I'll be slitting all of your throats and sacraficing your heads to Satan. Be warned.
I don't think you have really given Amazon and Netflix content a decent survey. Have you seen Big Mouth by Nick Kroll? What about the Marvelous Mrs. Maisel on Amazon?
$5 / month hosted VPS on linux = awesome!
I've never heard of a derived work made from so many other copyrighted works. Each query of this database must cost a royal fuckton when you think about how many tens of thousands of authors they must be paying.
According to a future spoof news article: "We at AruvB Labs have taken Machine Learning, Big Data and applied facial and scene recognition to tabloid photos with the results generating a new issue of People Magazine with pictures, captions, advertisements and information snippits - All Automatically with no human intervention."
hmmm....maybe worthy of submission to the Onion.
I'm really looking forward to "Fifty shades of Magic", and "Ready, Player".
In the end I think pretty much all of the AI generated books will come off like really poor fanfic with cringe-inducing sex sprinkled throughout.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
You don't need petabytes worth of data to understand what makes for a "good" book. There are countless analyses of plots and characters and pacing and on and on. James Patterson and Stuart Woods and many others have capitalized on formula fiction for decades. KDP has hundreds of thousands of books with bestselling quality covers, blurbs, characters, plots, pacing and so on that are NOT bestsellers or even mediocre sellers. What the data doesn't tell you is what kind of voodoo to add to make the book resonate with people and become a bestseller. That bit isn't as definable.
I love the one where the guy in the hat killed the other guy in the hat.
When they came for the communists, I said "He's next door. Take him away. Goddam commies."
... Trump does that with actual intelligence.
[sorry, low-hanging fruit]
It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.
Player Piano had it right. You don't have Algorithm-Driven Fiction. You have Algorithm-Driven Author selection paid to write books.
This is such a terrible thing. I don't want to read books written by an algorithm! Authors have always written because they have a story to tell, either about something they lived through, or about something they've created on their own. If this becomes more prevalent, I think we should demand that books include sworn statements from the authors that they wrote the book and that it wasn't written by an algorithm. And if an 'author' is found to be a fake person, then that author's books should be labelled as written by an algorithm.
How ironic that for all your hatred of ACs, your posts are of such low quality that the only people who will bother to engage with you are ACs.
Seems like all your simpering, fragile masculinity is the result of you winning the inferiority contest.
Incel: n. A term of abuse hurled by whoremongers and cuckolds to disparage romantics.
Since the algorithm is trained by reading real books written by real humans, how will Amazon compensate the authors?
Procedural generation of game content is already eating everything else that used to be hand coded in games, and it won't be long before the writing of the quests will itself be done by some sort of neural net trained on the feedback of millions of gaming hours. First it will be the side quests, and they will suck, but I'm keeping an open mind about the potential that this might actually get good one day. It's not like the games I play have a staff of JRR Tolkiens and GRR Martins doing the writing.
Sure, they have words, sentences, story outlines, distribution infrastructure. That's everything they need, right?
There are intangible qualities that AI can't master, and won't for a long time. Amazon can't even figure out what I want to buy yet, much less what I want to read!
Its come a long way baby. :) To bad G can now recognize spun content. :( Ohh the glory days...
[($)]
It's so weird that your'e such a faggoty, child-molesting, cowardly bitch who balls up in the fetal position and sucks his own dick while chanting, "make the bad man stop" instead of being a man and posting under your real name. Loser!
— gerald butler's impersonator