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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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
$5 / month hosted VPS on linux = awesome!
I'm really looking forward to "Fifty shades of Magic", and "Ready, Player".
In the end I think pretty much all of the AI generated books will come off like really poor fanfic with cringe-inducing sex sprinkled throughout.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I love the one where the guy in the hat killed the other guy in the hat.
When they came for the communists, I said "He's next door. Take him away. Goddam commies."
... Trump does that with actual intelligence.
[sorry, low-hanging fruit]
It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.
Procedural generation of game content is already eating everything else that used to be hand coded in games, and it won't be long before the writing of the quests will itself be done by some sort of neural net trained on the feedback of millions of gaming hours. First it will be the side quests, and they will suck, but I'm keeping an open mind about the potential that this might actually get good one day. It's not like the games I play have a staff of JRR Tolkiens and GRR Martins doing the writing.
This is California They would mandate the temperatures that water boils and freezes at.
Vintage computer adverts: http://www.vintageadbrowser.com/computers-and-software-ads
Sure, they have words, sentences, story outlines, distribution infrastructure. That's everything they need, right?
There are intangible qualities that AI can't master, and won't for a long time. Amazon can't even figure out what I want to buy yet, much less what I want to read!
Its come a long way baby. :) To bad G can now recognize spun content. :( Ohh the glory days...
[($)]