Robert Evans and Ben Bola investigate how "contrapreneurs" exploit Amazon KDP using ChatGPT and Midjourney to mass-produce soulless children's books, citing examples like Brett Schickler's repetitive narratives and Paul Marls' anatomically incorrect dinosaur guides. They argue these AI simulacra lack genuine character arcs or intent, creating a "Wild West" where low-income children face exposure to frightening nonsense while wealthier peers access quality content, ultimately threatening the future of childhood literacy with algorithmic disinformation. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
|
Time
Text
Welcome to the Money Show00:02:28
This is an iHeart podcast.
Guaranteed human.
When a group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist, they take matters into their own hands.
I vowed I will be his last target.
He is not going to get away with this.
He's going to get what he deserves.
We always say that.
Trust your girlfriends.
Listen to the girlfriends.
Trust me, babe.
On the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
On a recent episode of the podcast, Money and Wealth with John O'Brien, I sit down with Tiffany the Bajanista Alicia to talk about what it really takes to take control of your money.
What would that look like in our families if everyone was able to pass on wealth to the people when they're no longer here?
We break down budgeting, financial discipline, and how to build real wealth, starting with the mindset shifts too many of us were never ever taught.
If you've ever felt you didn't get the memo on money, this conversation is for you to hear more.
Listen to Money and Wealth with John O'Brien from the Black Effect Network on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast.
Ernest, what's up?
Look, money is something we all deal with, but financial literacy is what helps turn income into real wealth.
On each episode of the podcast, Earn Your Leisure, we break down the conversations you need to understand money, investing, and entrepreneurship.
From stocks and real estate to credit, business, and generational wealth, our goal is simple.
Make financial literacy accessible for everyone.
Because when you understand the system, you can start to build within it.
Open your free iHeartRadio app, search Earn Your Leisure, and listen now.
Ah, welcome back to Behind the Bastards, a podcast that is that it's a podcast.
You know, what do you want?
That's honesty and advertising.
Can't argue with that.
It is a podcast.
I'm Robert Evans, your host, and I didn't think of a funny introduction for this episode.
So pretend I shouted atonally or screamed out the name of a dead dictator.
And let's welcome our guest for the episode, Ben Bola.
Ben, if you remember a dictator's name, that would be most appreciated.
Yeah, one of the hard to pronounce ones.
The Dictator Name Game00:15:18
Yeah, go for it.
Oh, okay.
Wow, that's that's definitely, oh, there are so many good ones, though.
Okay, Mahmoud Ahmed.
Oh, Ahmed.
Ahmadinejad, I think.
Ahmadinejad, you're right.
There you go.
There you go.
See, this is why you're the host, Robert.
Yeah.
Yeah, I mean, that's an interesting one, right?
Because he wasn't.
I don't know how you characterize exactly what he was, but he's become a darling of Twitter since his time as the leader of Iran, which is always fun.
As the air quotes leader.
Yeah.
Wild stuff.
I do love like the every now and then you're like, this guy who had a very different vibe, you know, when he first came to my awareness via media is now like a completely different person in a lot of people's eyes because he like went after Donald Trump on Twitter.
Always funny.
Ben, how do you feel about AI?
Not the movie with Haley Joel Osmond.
Oh, well, oh, okay.
Well, all my notes are trash then because I thought we were talking about this.
Okay.
I did say prepare for an episode on AI and then send you 37 pictures of Gigolo Joel.
So yeah, I think that's a good idea.
And thank you.
Thank you.
I'm framing those, Robert.
I'm framing those.
Yeah.
Oh, I got to give a shout out to a lot of folks, ethicists working in the field, who are asking about the nature of consciousness and why the term AI is somewhat problematic.
Like what makes an intelligence artificial, you know?
But when I hear AI, if I'm most people, what I'm thinking is, ooh, I should have studied math.
Numbers are scary.
Yeah, I've been, so I've been kind of digging into this as a new beat for myself as a reporter, as we'll introduce today.
Like, there's some stuff I've kind of gotten sucked into here.
And as I've kind of talked to more people who are on the technical side of things here, I'm gaining both a deeper appreciation for how complex this stuff is.
You know, there's been a lot that sort of you've got this mix of like incredibly dense academic papers and kind of the commentary of people who are actually like working with the nuts and bolts of this stuff and not trying to pump up the price of, you know, the IPO valuation of their company.
Right.
And then you've got kind of the hype cycle, which is very different, right?
The people who are kind of talking about, you know, how models are actually constructed and, you know, what the ideal size for the models might be and like how the capabilities kind of will change as they sort of ramp up or ramp down the scale, talk about like the potential of problems like model collapse and whatever, versus the people who are like, an AI is going to take control of all the nukes.
No, no, this isn't just me stealing the plot of Terminator 2 in order to like hype up the power of the product my company is making.
I swear Z.
It's real.
Swearsies.
Swearsies.
That's how you know it's legit.
That is some actual nomenclature used in the halls of power.
Swearsies.
Yeah.
And I think you can always trust when a bunch of people with a vested financial interest in making their AI products seem extra powerful recite the plot of Terminator 2 to you as if it's serious business.
So as we've kind of led into the internet is awash right now and kind of cheap takes on what AI means for the future.
On one hand, you've got these kind of Terminatory fears.
Kind of the best example of this recently was Vice put out this very dumb article that was like, a military AI killed its creator because it was trying to stop it from launching a missile.
And everyone was like, oh my God, we have to stop this.
And then it turns out, well, actually, what happened is like a bunch of human beings were sitting around a table, like kind of plotting out things that might happen if they ever built one of these.
And someone was like, well, what if it did this?
And like, that's all that happened.
Like they were playing fancy D ⁇ D.
It's nothing to be scared of.
Yeah, man.
And it's like, it's like a war game, like a simulation, right?
It's a planning out a hypothetical.
That's headline chicattery.
And it's not even a simulation where like they didn't like even code, you know, a fake AI to like test it as a simulation.
They were literally just like bullshitting, you know, like nothing, nothing was built, which is not to say like, I'm not concerned about the possibility of like AI, you know, involvement in weapons targeting and stuff and that kind of thing.
Like there's a lot to be concerned about there, but not this article.
And then kind of on the other end, on the positive end of the hype stuff, you've got like this, this growing chorus of people who are like certain that AI is going to save education and rescue students.
Bill Gates is like a big kind of, he's one of the big guys like kind of pushing this idea.
I found a thing recently where he was like very excitedly talking about how OpenAI had taught a chatbot to pass an AP test and why this might mean something good for education.
I'm kind of hesitant to say that I buy that just because I haven't really seen any evidence that like an AI is actually good at teaching people stuff, which is not to say I haven't seen evidence that there are uses for it in education potentially.
But like, I think people are getting a little bullish about this and kind of somewhere in between those two hype peaks, you know, the robots are going to nuke us all or the robots are going to replace teachers.
Somewhere in between those two hype peaks is a story I ran across a couple of weeks ago about an author who wrote 97 books in nine months using ChatGPT.
Oh no.
I think I, oh gosh.
All right.
I'm going to guess a lot of people came across this story.
And it's one of those things it sort of dropped in a bunch of different like places like the, I think the Post was one of them.
Insider was one of these kind of like low quality publications or publications that have recently sunk in quality significantly who are who are chasing SEO shit.
Right.
And it's also kind of noteworthy to me that like this story hit right as the writer strike began.
Like the writers go on strike and then there's this story about like, well, this guy wrote almost 100 books in less than a year using ChatGPT.
You know, maybe we don't need all these writers.
Now, if you actually look at this, this author, quote unquote, with the most quotation marks around that word I can possibly add, like a whole script that's just quotes around the word author there, is a guy named Tim Boucher.
And the reality, if you actually look into what he did here, he didn't write 97 novels using ChatGPT.
He had an AI generate like 97 stories, each about 2,000 to 5,000 words.
And if you don't know how novels work, generally speaking, kind of like the minimum word count before something's considered a novel is about 50,000 words.
It's like, and that's a short novel, right?
You're talking about like, I don't know, old man in the sea style shit or something like that.
I don't actually know how many words old man in the sea is, but like my silly book with robot horny cyborgs and stuff was 120,000 words.
So also it's a really good book and people should read it.
Thank you.
That's very nice.
It's not a compliment.
I'm objectively saying it's a good book.
Well, thank you.
Thank you.
I appreciate that.
Because like he's not having it write novels.
What he did was he had it churn out short stories, each with dozens and dozens of illustrations in them.
There's something like 50 or 60 in each story, which is also too many for a short story.
Robert, did he draw the pictures himself?
He sure did not.
And we'll talk.
So like, if you look at these, like I went to his webpage, and thankfully, one thing I will give Tim Boucher is it looks like he's put most of these on a personal webpage rather than dumping them all on Amazon, which is what we're going to talk about in a second.
But if you look at this shit, he's got like a bunch of different, like one of the stories is Occupy AI, which is described as like a story about protesters fighting cops because AI takes the jobs away or something like that.
There's not like characters given or any kind of like sense of a narrative arc, but the AI generated art of the cops like beating up people makes them look like the bad guys in Spaceballs.
And I do appreciate that.
So that's that's that's good.
Sophie can show you the Spaceballs illustration.
Oh, holy smokes.
Yeah, they ain't found shit.
So I don't, I don't have a lot of respect for Tim's story writing project, but I also don't think it's particularly harmful, right?
Like, other than that, you know, this guy got a bunch of news attention, his books are presumably geared towards adults or at least young adults.
And I don't really think a lot of people are going to get swept up in it.
But there's something, there is something sinister in the world of people using AI to generate stories.
And this is where we get into like the meat of what we're actually going to be talking about this week, because I have found myself doing some journalism again.
I don't do as much of that as I used to, but I kind of got, I fell down a rabbit hole over the last two weeks, and I have been investigating something that I found really fucked up and scary.
And the short of it is the robots are coming for your children.
If you've got kids out there, there is a shady network of influencers and conmen who are trying to warp your kids' brain so that they can make a quick buck off of Amazon KDP, which is called, which is Kindle Direct Publishing.
So that's what we're fucking talking about today, because it's actually a serious problem that people should be aware about.
And I haven't seen any real reporting on this.
I was keyed into this story when I ran across a Reuters article like two weeks ago about a boom in AI written e-books on Amazon.
And the piece zooms in on this wannabe author named Brett Schickler.
Brett is a salesman from Rochester who heard that ChatGPT could write stories.
And he decided like he'd always wanted to be a writer, but he just could never get anything down on the page.
And he was like, well, maybe this will make it possible for me.
He told Reuters the idea of writing a book finally seemed possible.
I thought, I can do this.
Unfortunately, the book he put out is why is that so funny?
I can do this by not being able to do it.
It's so sad when you learn what he wrote because it's he his book is The Wise Little Squirrel, a tale of saving and investing.
Oh, it's a guide to financial literacy through the eyes of Sammy the Squirrel.
And I'll say this.
Everything we're about to talk to on this episode is much worse than The Wise Little Squirrel because I will give him credit for one thing.
He Schickler's like Brett has a thing he wants to get across to people.
I don't think he's done it well.
I don't think this is the right way to teach kids financial literacy is to have like a robot generate a story about a squirrel so they learn how to invest.
But he actually seems to care about like transmitting information to kids, which is the person who does.
Yeah.
So I'll give him some credit for that.
I'll also give him some credit for the fact that the cover of his book, it doesn't look good.
Like this doesn't look like a real book, I wouldn't say.
But there's nothing like inherently off-putting or terrifying about the squirrel drawing on the cover.
I don't know, man.
I don't know, Robert.
Sophie does.
Do you find it unsettling?
Well, there's the other, there's the other animal there.
Which one?
There's two.
That bear.
Oh, there are two.
Wait, where's the other?
In the tree.
In the trees.
Oh, yeah, yeah.
Well, and you know, the perspective is pretty fucked on that chipmunk.
Yeah, I don't buy it.
I don't buy the perspective here.
And where did they get that acorn?
We don't know.
The acorn's massive.
The acorn is bigger than the bear?
Well, that's just because the bear is further away.
But the acorn is at least the same size as the squirrel's torso.
Yeah.
Which I think might be, you know, maybe the subtext here is that the acorn is inherited wealth and the squirrel.
Oh, you know, it's to represent, you know, whereas, whereas the squirrel in the tree behind him kind of represents the working class.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Who has no acorn, right?
Because the inherited wealth of our anyway, whatever.
I don't know.
Why am I doing this?
You nailed it.
You nailed it.
Brett's book, which is available paperback only, that's another thing I'll give him credit for because the stuff that's actually really grifty is all being done on Kindle, is currently at about 30,000, number 30,000 in literature and fiction for children.
One thing that does show is that, like, that sounds really low.
That's not terrible, right?
Like, given the number of books that are on Amazon, it's not like a runaway success.
I think that this is like probably because there was a bunch of news stories around this, right?
Because it's kind of the first AI children's book to go viral.
It's not, again, any good, but I don't, I don't see the harm, like what we're about to be talking about is like a bunch of people who've done this in a much more harmful direction.
So this story kind of got me looking into what other people were writing AI children's books.
And part of why I thought to do this was late last year, I watched a documentary on the Folding Ideas YouTube channel.
If you're not aware of that, Folding Ideas is a channel run by a researcher and a writer named Dan Olson, who I admire quite a lot.
He's the guy who did that line go up documentary on NFTs that helped cause the NFT crash.
He's very good at what he does.
And late last year, he published an investigation into a group of Amazon con artists who like charge several thousand dollars so that they can teach people how to mass produce low-quality books to have both read by voice actors for like audible books and to sell on Kindle through KDP, which is again Kindle direct publishing.
And it's one of those things where like they're promising, they have all these lurid stories about like you can make tens of thousands of dollars in a few weeks.
This is they really brag.
They're called the Mickelson twins, the particular folks he's investigating.
And they brag a lot about like how little effort it takes to do this.
You have to do very almost no work whatsoever.
And it's one of those, like they're basically just having people look through to see what's selling on Amazon, create topics, and then hire some ghostwriter, pay him a couple hundred bucks to write a full book in two weeks, three weeks, something like that, and then find a voice actor and put it up.
Conning People with AI Books00:08:12
And these books, like they're, they're nonsense in a lot of cases.
Like he was, I think the book that Dan put together is kind of like a thought exercise was about using self-hypnosis to deal with epilepsy or something.
So a lot of really irresponsible topics, all that sort of stuff.
But the topics, you know, what matters is not like what you're actually trying to get out.
It matters that like what you're having these ghostwriters write include keywords that correspond to popular searches on Amazon, right?
It's an SEO scam.
I read about this.
I read about this because, Robert, the immediate question is, why are these guys now selling this trick, right?
This grift that they have exhausted, right?
Like why did they move to the next grift?
It's very, it's, it's very interesting, you know?
I wonder if their next thing is going to be self-help books.
Yeah, I think that like there, there's a, there were already some sort of in that topic that they're putting out.
I think mostly what it is is that like you can make money doing this.
Your goal basically is to trick people looking for real books on similar subjects into buying your books because it's kind of hard to tell on Kindle.
And they may, you know, if you just are putting enough stuff out there, the sheer number of people searching means that you'll make, you know, sales.
And if, you know, you don't, if it doesn't take that much work, you know, if you get a couple hundred sales, it can be worth it.
This is not an easy path, like actually an easy path to making a lot of money, which is why the real business is in conning the people who think that they'll make money off of this and getting them to pay you several thousand dollars to teach them all this crap.
Dan in his video calls these people contrapreneurs, which is a clever bit of wordplay, but I do think the term actually kind of misses something important because the con, well, the con is Dan is talking about the con that he is he is unraveling is that like this is not actually a great business.
It's hard for people to really make money.
They are lying to folks about how profitable this is so that they can take their money.
And that is, that is true.
That is a con, but there's an actual outside harm aside from this con because like the people they're conning are not just passive rubes.
They're trying to like unethically make a quick buck.
So to some extent, I'm like, I'm not, I don't have a huge problem with who they're conning necessarily.
But what I do have a real issue with is that the byproduct of the cons they're running is that the largest bookstore on the planet gets filled with thousands and thousands and thousands of nonsense titles that aren't real books that can spread disinformation, that can just cause people to waste money, that can like, there's a lot of issues.
It makes it harder to like find stuff that you're looking for that's of quality, you know, on various topics.
I've had to deal with this a few times with bastards where I'm looking for books on niche subjects and I find something that seems to be about it, but it turns out it's like one of these like crap books.
It's like someone's at best paraphrased a Wikipedia entry or something.
Is it that prolific though?
Like what thousands and thousands of titles.
Really?
I have actually reached out to Amazon for comment on like how many AI titles they have in their library and how they, like the degree to which or whether or not they do anything to attempt to like figure out which titles are AI or not.
Like I have I've asked them a couple of questions on that about like their plagiarism filters and stuff.
I haven't heard back yet.
But and if I do, I'll update this.
I'll record an update for you.
Well, surely they can just create a large language model that will respond to your insightful questions in novel form.
Yeah, that would at least be a response.
So far, I haven't gotten anything from them because I think they're they're following the Elon Musk route of just ignoring any questions from media because there's a lot of money.
They make money anytime people upload this shit and anytime it sells.
So like they don't have a problem with con men putting fake books up on the site.
And it's one of those things, again, when I when I watched this video by Dan, I was like, well, this is an interesting con.
I think what's happening here is kind of unsettling.
And then, you know, the late, like the AI explosion happened, right?
And suddenly this con gets supercharged because the main barrier to entry and barrier to production and profitability and the old way of doing things is the ghost writing.
You know, these people, the original version of this con, you're hiring a human being to ghost write a fake book for you, basically, right?
And a human being can only write 50,000-ish words so fast, even if all they're doing is like paraphrasing a bunch of like Wikipedia and news articles, right?
Like there's a degree, there's a hard limitation on how many of these can get written.
And it's going to cost money because people, even people who will do this very cheaply, won't do it for nothing.
Whereas ChatGPT and other large language models will write thousands of words for you for effectively nothing.
So as soon as I kind of read this story about this, this children's book and thought back to Dan's video, I was like, oh shit, I bet this is causing, I bet this is causing like a massive surge in crap getting posted onto Amazon Kindle.
And it's unfortunately like more unsettling than I had initially thought because with this early scam with like the, you know, these, these, these ghostwriting scams, the books tend to be like aimed towards adults, right?
You're trying to get adults who might be looking for a topic or something to buy your book.
But It's hard to get ChatGPT to write a whole proper nonfiction book.
Like getting it to write a 50,000-ish word book is almost impossible unless you do a bunch of like really messy sort of like prompt tricks, which is why all of Tim Boucher's books were a couple of thousand words long.
But children's books are a very different story because children's books, if you like have gone through books for little kids, for toddlers or whatever, they're heavy on illustrations.
There's an illustration every page, and there's often just a couple of sentences or a paragraph of text per page, which is exactly the kind of length that ChatGPT and other LLMs are perfectly capable of reproducing, right?
So the places you'll go.
Exactly.
Exactly.
And the places you're going to go are like directly into the recursive loop of slop feeding through, you know, an LLM, which is what the investigation we're talking about is this week.
Because as soon as I start type, I started typing in like how to write AI children's books and shit, my YouTube search revealed video after video with titles like Easy AI Money, Make 100K writing children's books with Chat GPT and Midjourney and Easy Passive Income with Chat GPT and Midjourney creating children's books.
Now, I watched way too many of these fucking videos, all of which lay out the same basic strategy.
The first step is to pick a prompt.
An actual author might decide, for example, I want to teach children about the importance of conservation with a cautionary tale about the thoughtless capitalization of natural resources, right?
You know, that's the Lorax.
Or one of my favorite books is a kid.
You know, I want to write a book about a bat raised by birds that kind of shows kids that bats are beautiful and complex creatures and not just spooky set dressings for vampire stories.
That's Stella Luna, right?
Those are examples of things human beings might try to transmit to children through like actual human-created children's books.
But chatbots and grindset influencers are both incapable of feeling things or of wanting to transmit their feelings to others, right?
Like you've got people who are effectively soulless using a robot that is effectively soulless in order to try and transmit messages to children.
And that gets dark pretty quickly, Ben.
But you know what's not dark?
Oh, is it is it goods and services?
Yeah, the products and services that support this podcast.
I don't know if you're aware of this, Ben.
None of them are, you know, we take one promise from our advertisers.
Henry Kissinger and Chatbots00:03:21
Don't be evil.
Dot, dot, dot, unless it makes a lot of money.
Your ads, unless you have CoolerZone Media, are ad-free subscription channel available on Apple Podcasts.
Which is the most ethical way to consume this.
You know, I mean, it is true that every time you get a CoolerZone Media subscription, Raytheon fires a Maverick missile at a school bus in a foreign country.
But we are working to fix that.
Yeah.
That is not an intent.
Yeah.
That's a glitch.
I heard that every time someone subscribes to CoolZone Media, they get a little coupon.
And if we get enough coupons, we can finally subtract a day from Henry Kissinger's life.
I don't know which day.
Yeah.
I don't know if it's the last one or one of the days he ordered bombings in Cambodia.
You know, fucking time.
I'm clear.
It's going to take all of us.
Yeah, we got to subscribe.
Yeah.
So get enough subscriptions and together we can kill Henry Kissinger.
There's two golden rules that any man should live by.
Rule one, never mess with a country girl.
You play stupid games, you get stupid prizes.
And rule two, never mess with her friends either.
We always say, trust your girlfriends.
I'm Anna Sinfield, and in this new season of The Girlfriends.
Oh my God, this is the same man.
A group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist.
I felt like I got hit by a truck.
I thought, how could this happen to me?
The cops didn't seem to care.
So they take matters into their own hands.
I said, oh, hell no.
I vowed I will be his last target.
He's going to get what he deserves.
Listen to the girlfriends.
Trust me, babe.
On the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Hey, I'm Nora Jones, and I love playing music with people so much that my podcast called Playing Along is back.
I sit down with musicians from all musical styles to play songs together in an intimate setting.
Every episode's a little different, but it all involves music and conversation with some of my favorite musicians.
Over the past two seasons, I've had special guests like Dave Grohl, Leve, Mavis Staples, Remy Wolf, Jeff Tweedy, really too many to name.
And this season, I've sat down with Alessia Cara, Sarah McLaughlin, John Legend, and more.
Check out my new episode with Josh Grobin.
You related to the Phantom at that point.
Yeah, I was definitely the Phantom in that.
That's so funny.
Share each day with me each night, each morning.
Say you love me.
You know I.
So come hang out with us in the studio and listen to Playing Along on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
I'm Laurie Siegel, and on Mostly Human, I go beyond the headlines with the people building our future.
Achieving What You Put Your Mind On00:15:19
This week, an interview with one of the most influential figures in Silicon Valley, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman.
I think society is going to decide that creators of AI products bear a tremendous amount of responsibility to products we put out in the world.
From power to parenthood.
Kids, teenagers, I think they will need a lot of guardrails around AI.
This is such a powerful and such a new thing.
From addiction to acceleration.
The world we live in is a competitive world, and I don't think that's going to stop, even if you did a lot of redistribution.
You know, we have a deep desire to excel and be competitive and gain status and be useful to others.
And it's a multiplayer game.
What does the man who has extraordinary influence over our lives have to say about the weight of that responsibility?
Find out on Mostly Human.
My highest order bit is to not destroy the world with AI.
Listen to Mostly Human on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Ah, we're back.
So the process Ben of picking a topic for an AI kids book is mechanical and bleak.
It starts with a trip to the Amazon sales rankings.
People use extensions like Book Bolt, which show which topics are selling well.
And it's kind of a mix of the videos that I found pointed out that like you want stuff that's reasonably high up on the lists and has a good number of your views, but you also don't want it to have too many reviews.
The most successful AI kids books will only sell like dozens or maybe a hundred or so copies.
And so they kind of like a lot of the people making these videos will disguise that by showing you like sales calculation apps where they plug in books by actual human beings to like be like, you can make $32,000 a month, you know, just like this guy who wrote this, you know, storybook or whatever that's a bestseller did, which you're not gonna like actually do if you're really doing this for a business.
One of the creators that I watched kind of put together one of these guys is called the Zinni Studio.
They advocate copying the premises of real kids books that have several hundred reviews, but less than a thousand.
They've like worked this out to a science where, like, if there's more than a thousand reviews, you're going to get lost in the mix, right?
It's, it's the stories are too big.
So, like, whatever you put out isn't going to break through.
But if they've got a couple of hundred reviews, that's enough that like you know, there's a lot of interest, but also you have a good chance that while your book's new, if you can get a couple of early sales, you can juke it up the spots.
Um, there's also a strategy for price points.
They note that like Amazon pays 70% in royalties if your book's $2.99 to $9.99, but if it's cheaper than that, they only pay out like half as much.
We are in the wrong business.
Yeah, we are in the wrong business.
I cannot wait to read because this is like a dark side of cyborg philosophy, right?
Yeah.
Right.
So, like, Robert, Sophie, let's get on the SEO.
Let's find a topic and let's have our evil Pandora gin kind of thing write us a little old man in the sea and just mad lib whatever, whatever the narrative is, right?
I think the real answer, Ben, because you and I both have hundreds of hours of our podcast.
You know, there's ridiculous history and behind the bastards and everything else we've been on recorded.
We feed all that into an AI and then just like look at what's trending on Twitter.
And then we have an AI generate like six hours of you and me talking about how masks don't work or something like that.
Just like crap that stuff onto the internet.
Whatever Joe Rogan talks about that week, we'll just generate an AI conversation between us about it.
You know, toss in like 15% Elon Musk and then we retire.
Yeah, yeah.
What I also love about this, first off, is the sincerity.
And second off is the idea that nothing could go wrong at all.
No.
It won't like, I don't know.
I feel like as long as we need one human being in there to keep a handle on things.
So it can just be like an AI version of you and an AI version of me.
And then human Sophie sitting there and like trying to control the robot conversation as we start giving out like the ingredients for Jellyknitz.
So yeah, you know, Sophie, it sounds like you're cool with that, right?
Yeah.
No, I could never replace Robert with a robot.
Oh, yeah, you could.
I mean, it would be a romantic robot.
You know, they got that like that AI Seinfeld where it's just like a never-ending mediocre Seinfeld episode.
We could slip Sophie in that too.
Make you make you moderate AI brainless Seinfeld.
So this would be well, because we're keeping things interesting, right?
The problem is that Behind the Bastards is an important and profound at times show.
No, I'm kidding.
Sometimes once or twice.
Yeah, okay.
Okay.
All right.
The problem is that Behind the Bastards is an important show.
So it might be too high on our SEO.
We need to get some kind of spin-off thing that appears to be irrelevant, but works on a search term that is kicking it for Jeff Bezos, right?
And then, and then we just crap out hours of that.
Obviously, this is behind the scenes, right?
This is not going out live, right?
Yeah, I think we call it the passive income diet hack cast with Robert Evans and Ben Bolin.
That's our path to $67 million.
I love how it's so brief and so snappy.
There's a lot of immediacy.
Take that, Hemingway.
Yeah, stick pat.
Yeah, exactly.
For sale, oh, Zimbic.
Never drop shipped.
I don't know.
That's most of what you need in there, right?
We got them freestyled.
No, I like it.
Yeah, yeah, it's good.
So, yeah, this is kind of the process of like making these books start.
You use like these different extensions to kind of see what's selling, figure out a premise for yourself.
And some creators will take this research and they'll like try to make an original premise for a children's book to feed into the AI.
But most of them suggest just collecting, like they're not even doing that for the most part.
And most of these people suggest collecting keywords by like whatever's popular and then plugging those keywords into Chat GPT and asking it to generate a story premise, which they then feed back to it to have it generate a story, thus avoiding the risk that human creativity might happen at any point in this process.
The messy prompts you were talking about.
It's sort of arcane, right?
Writing prompt is a bit like casting a spell.
Yeah.
Yeah, casting a spell or a math equation.
We'll talk about that in a little bit, but I want to play you a clip from this guide by the Zenny Studio, which had about 268k views when I watched it, kind of cautioning, attempting to make it seem a little bit less soulless than the process actually is.
Sophie, you can play that now.
You're not doing research to find books to copy.
You do research to understand what is working.
It's important to make your own original pieces, original storybooks, so you could stand out from your competition.
Okay?
So you could see that she says that, right?
You're not doing this to like copy people.
You're trying to find ideas for original work.
Here's the actual prompt that she uses to generate her children's book.
Write me a children's story about a girl going on an adventure to find a missing treasure.
Lesson, you achieve what you put your mind on.
Make it six pages and title each page.
Make is mind-blowing and intriguing.
I'm trying not to go too hard on the misspellings, but it does show you how lazy you can be with these.
Like, that's not a story idea.
Like, going on an adventure.
What kind of adventure?
Finding a mission?
What kind of treasure?
How does she like the lesson?
You achieve what you put your mind on.
Like, that's, that's like.
That's a producer.
That's a producer walking in and saying, you know, do a thing with this sort of vibe.
And I love that.
I love that shy malan at the end, Robert.
Make it mind-blowing.
Yeah, mind-blowing.
Yeah.
And it's very funny because like it is.
All of these AI people are the same as like the worst folks in Hollywood, right?
You know, there's good producers and bad producers, and nothing gets made without the producers who do know what they're doing.
But there's a lot of folks who are like a lot of corporate folks.
You know, I'm thinking about like David Zaslav and shit here who are like, yeah, I'm the idea.
Why do we need writers?
I already had the idea.
You know, write me a story about a guy who's angry.
You guys heard about Mad Max.
Yeah.
You guys heard about sharks?
What it like, so I saw a thing on Instagram about tornadoes.
So what if we what if we just do that?
Yeah.
Yeah.
Give me a tornado thing with Bill Paxton.
You know, that's the, that's the hard work.
I already did it.
You know, some, some, somebody can crap out the script anytime.
The intro just goes, call me Ishmael.
That's an original idea.
Yeah.
There you go.
So I want to actually like read you the Story that, or at least a chunk of the story that gets generated by this, this, this prompt.
I would love it.
Again, people are flipping out so much about the quality of writing that these things are capable of.
And, like, I think what you're all going to learn is that, like, this isn't writing what it puts out.
So, page one: the missing treasure.
Once upon a time, there was a brave and curious girl named Sarah.
She lived in a small village at the foot of a big mountain.
One day, she heard about a missing treasure that was hidden in the mountain a long time ago.
Sarah was very intrigued and decided to go on an adventure to find the missing treasure.
So, you see, you see, like, first, I'm taking a break here.
Like, she, the prompt said, like, make it intriguing.
And what the robot did was, like, well, I'll just say that Sarah's intrigued.
That means that it's an intriguing story now because I've used that word.
We also see, um, we also see repetition of phrases, right?
Oh, yeah.
Yeah, it's it's very clear that it's like a mechanical Turk, you know.
Uh, page two, the journey begins.
Sarah packed her backpack with food, water, and a map and set out on her journey.
She hiked up the mountain, and along the way, she met many animals who offered to help her, but Sarah declined their help, saying, I want to do this on my own.
Why are there animals offering her to help?
Like, what kind of thing is that?
What is it that she wants to do on her own?
Like, why is this important to her?
I was trying to intrigue it.
Yeah, I'm intrigued by how incomplete this story is.
Page three: The Cave of Trials.
After several days of hiking, Sarah finally reached the top of the mountain.
There, she found a cave that led deep into the mountain.
She entered the cave and was met with many trials, including steep cliffs, deep chasms, and dark tunnels.
But Sarah didn't give up.
She kept moving forward, always remembering the lesson she learned from her parents.
You can achieve what you put your mind to.
Oh, now her parents are characters in this?
Yeah, her parents.
Well, not even really characters.
Like, she's not a care.
It's, you know, you can see what it's doing here, right?
It's a simulacrum of a plot, right?
Where you've got, like, well, I know that plots have to have a conflict, you know, and characters in a story are supposed to have trials.
So I will just say she went through trials.
She didn't give up because her parents said, you can achieve what you put your mind to.
Like, and that's what the story views as like transmitting a lesson to kids, right?
It's just like saying the lesson in there, which like, that's not, if you think about children's books, like good children's books, the books that like you can still remember as a kid, um, that's not how they get messages across, right?
Like it's deeper than that.
Kids are actually not just capable of understanding like much more complicated messages than like, you can achieve what you put your mind to.
They, they crave that, which is why, I mean, part of why shit like Dr. Seuss's books, you know, still sell a century or whatever after he fucked, close to a century after he fucking wrote them.
And he's kind of a piece of shit.
Good books.
Good books.
Like what?
The guy himself.
What author isn't.
That's why like the Hobbits, you know, successful and shit.
Like you don't just have Bilbo being like, I learned that you can always trust in the power of friendship.
No, you, you show, you know, the character like evolving and changing and entering conflicts and failing and then learning lessons and then succeeding.
Like this is not super complex stuff.
You're not like writing fucking Ulysses just because you put this in here.
But the chat bot like is incapable of kind of understanding this because it's it's it's a calculation.
It's an algorithm, right?
It's an app it is not, it can't want to tell a story.
And like a critical part of telling a story is the intent, you know?
And, you know, kind of spoiler, that's what's most unsettling about all of this to me and what we're kind of building to.
But you can see, you know, kind of how these, how this story, you know, technically meets the requirements that the Zinni studio or whoever like set out for it.
And none of these grindset people actually care about anything beyond the fact that like it might be able to pass muster on Kindle.
So like it's good enough, right?
We'll go for it.
We'll take this script and turn it into a book for little kids.
Right, right, right.
But what first question, like, what do you think Joseph Campbell would think of this?
Because it's clearly like, again, it's a structural aggregate approach.
It's a very lazy mad lib that, you know, there's the uncanny valley to it.
I agree with you there.
It does feel that it's missing a soul, right?
We don't even know the animals.
We don't even know the parents.
Like, wait, wait.
I think he'd probably be kind of interested in the fact that sort of the, again, it's kind of the simulacrum of a story.
It's not an actual story.
It understands some aspects of the shape of a story and it attempts to reproduce that, but without any kind of understanding of what the original is.
So I suspect there's a degree to which he would find it intellectually fascinating.
I think he would probably be buying a gun right now.
I think towards the open AI offices.
He would be buying a gun and he would like DM Chekhov and say it's happening, but.
Yeah, let's get the fuck down there.
So I found an even lazier example of synthetic storytelling in a video by a guy named Christian Hydorn, which has about 120,000 views.
Maya Dialogue and Story Tension00:04:45
His YouTube channel is called Tokenized AI.
And he had Mid Journey create what he calls a comic book.
And boy, I am using those words as fucking, it's not a comic book, right?
He's he's lying about what this is.
It's a book with illustrations and barely any text, but it's not like, anyway, it's not actually a comic book.
And he plugs in the plot for this.
He gets ChatGPT to create a plot for him by kind of plugging in an equation for story ideas that reads like the brain of a Netflix executive.
And I'm going to read you this equation because I find it really interesting.
And Sophie will show you it because it is, it's physically laid out like a math equation almost.
Story.
Please come up with a short story based on in brackets theme that uses elements that are typical for in brackets genre stories.
Provide me with a three to four sentence summary and store it in plot.
And again, like you kind of plug in a theme.
I want the theme to be an adventure, you know, or I want the theme to be like, you know, yeah, an adventure story in, you know, the horror genre or whatever, something like that.
And provide me with a, yeah.
So that's, that's kind of the way the equation looks.
And Christian decides he wants a comic book that has kind of like Indiana Jones Uncharted style art vibes about like a man and a woman who meet up by coincidence and go on an adventure in like a dungeon to get a treasure, right?
And it's one of those things.
I say the artwork has the vibes of like Indiana Jones or Uncharted because the vibes are purely a product of the actual art itself.
There's no actual plot in the story that ChatGPT generates for him.
And he has it.
He has he has the robot break down a story page to page, but it's it's not a story.
Scene one in a bustling Southeast Asian market.
Maya and Leo accidentally bump into each other while following the same ancient map.
Dialogue.
Maya, hey, watch where you're going.
Leo, that's my line.
That doesn't, that's not like, that's nonsense.
Like, it's one of those, like, why is that his line?
He's never, we've never met these characters before.
We haven't heard him say that to anyone else.
Like, why would why would that be the response that he would make to her?
Like, you know, again, and this is because he, he's like, like, that's the setup.
That's the background for these characters you get.
Scene two, and again, this is like the second page of the story.
Maya and Leo reluctantly agree to work together, deciphering the maps, cryptic riddles, dialogue, Maya, fine, but we split the treasure, Leo, deal.
Scene three, journeying through the dense jungle.
The duo encounters a treacherous river crossing, testing their teamwork skills.
Dialogue, Maya, we'll need to build a raft.
Leo, on it.
Scene four.
Good.
Yeah.
Classic Leo.
Yeah, classic Leo.
That's the Leo I know.
Always raft building.
Scene four, the pair solves a puzzle in a hidden temple, revealing the entrance to the treasure chamber.
Dialogue.
Maya, we did it, Leo.
Leo, together.
We're unstoppable.
Scene five, inside the chamber.
Maya and Leo find the treasure, but also face a choice, greed or friendship.
Dialogue.
Maya, we could just take it all.
Leo, but at what cost?
And this is in the video.
The video is like, I want him to have to like choose between greed and friendship, which like they like that they don't.
Like it's just an artificial choice.
There's no like, you know, again, if you're doing like even a slightly more effortful version of this, do an Indiana Jones thing, you know?
They pull the treasure, but the room starts to collapse.
And like Maya's, you know, able to get across a chasm with the bag of treasure, but she, you know, she can't help, like, Leo falls and he's like hanging by a thread and she has to either take the treasure and run or drop the treasure and save him, you know, like something like that's, that's a, I'm not, that's not like, again, it's not like high art, but that's a conflict, right?
There's potential tension there.
The last crusade was great.
Yeah, if you're going to steal from Indiana Jones, do it well, right?
Like, again, there's a whole, like fucking Uncharted and shit started as doing that.
Like that worked out fine for everybody.
Like, but, but it has to be a story, you know?
We will forgive a lot of derivative shit.
Think about Star Wars, right?
Star Wars, if you actually look at the stuff that Lucas was pulling from, is actually pretty derivative of a lot of different things that inspired him as a kid, of a lot of different like movies and shows and comic books that he had read as a young man.
And it's fine because it's a fucking rollicking good story, you know?
But like, this is not a story.
This is like the AI is checking every box, but it doesn't understand what the boxes are.
Setting Scenes for AI Images00:04:22
So there's nothing.
That's it.
That's the quote.
Yeah.
There's no, none of the characters want anything, really.
There's no reason for them to be doing this.
We know nothing about their lives.
They're not like people, which again, this is like a little kid's storybook.
So I think the idea that these people have is that like, well, kids don't notice that because they're dumb.
And it's like, yes, they do.
Like that is, that's, that's, that's why like fucking Pixar movies are the, were the biggest thing for kids for a while.
Those are not like nonsense stories.
Those, those all feel like the fucking Incredibles or whatever.
Or they're not, this is not Pixar, but like one of the most beloved children's movies of all time.
I saw when I was like a little bitty kid, the fucking Iron Giant and shit or the brave little toaster.
You know, those are stories with like sorrow and character and motivation and like things are set up and paid off.
None of which the AI appears to be capable of doing.
Yeah.
You know what this reminds me of, Robert?
Are you familiar with the book Ploto?
No.
Okay, so back in the days of the humans.
Can I say that that way?
Yeah, back before the robots destroyed us all.
Sure.
Yeah, in the days of the humans, there was a guy named William Wallace Cook who wrote a book called Ploto with two T's.
And he was, he was like a old school hack, pulp novelist, paid by the word, et cetera, or paid by the letter.
I don't know how the math works out.
He tried to structurally calculate to quantify the amount of possible stories.
And he said there are exactly 1,462 possible plots.
And right, right.
You like the specificity, right?
Yeah.
So I love it.
Yeah.
1928, he publishes his great epiphany in a book called Plato, the Master Book of All Plots.
And I am frankly baffled that the new, you know, the new algorithmic overlords are forgetting their history.
Yeah, because of.
Let's do it.
Let's, you know what?
Let's light the tires.
Light the fires.
Kick the tires.
Yeah, I just want to generate 1,462 novels and then we're done with books.
You know, people said that when James Joyce put out Ulysses, this is the end of literature.
But we can actually make it so.
You know, AI can, and we can have Maya and Leo star in all of them.
You know, they can do it.
I want to play you a clip from this fucking video making this dog shit not a comic book.
So Sophie's going to do that now.
Need a third image, though, because we need to convey the fact that they've bumped into each other.
In this prompt, you'll notice that I start with the style, but then I immediately set the scene first.
Only then I add the characters and finally end with the activities.
As I said, you will need to experiment with what works best for you.
I've also changed the aspect ratio because I'm creating a wider image panel.
Okay, so this completes our first scene.
Whether you use just one or multiple images.
You see what he's, he's going into all this, like, we're trying to set the scene where these two characters bump into each other and you have to be very, you want to structure it this way so that the AI knows and it generates you an actual proper, you know, image of this action happening.
And like the picture we get is this very vague, generic looking, bizarre type background.
And then our two characters both staring directly at the viewer on frame.
They have not bumped into each other.
They don't, they aren't interacting.
They don't seem aware of each other.
It is not an illustration of what he asked it to write, but it's good enough.
Like, fuck it.
You know, like it's uncharted.
It's uncharted-y.
You know, it's for kids.
Yeah, it's, it's, it's pretty good.
So I want to, we're going to get more into this, but you know, you know what also reminds me a lot of the uncharted video games is the uncharted deals that our sponsors are throwing down.
Uncharted Style Character Interactions00:03:05
There's two golden rules that any man should live by.
Rule one, never mess with a country girl.
You play stupid games, you get stupid prizes.
And rule two, never mess with her friends either.
We always say, trust your girlfriends.
I'm Anna Sinfield.
And in this new season of the girlfriends...
Oh my God, this is the same man.
A group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist.
I felt like I got hit by a truck.
I thought, how could this happen to me?
The cops didn't seem to care.
So they take matters into their own hands.
I said, oh, hell no.
I vowed I will be his last target.
He's going to get what he deserves.
Listen to the girlfriends.
Trust me, babe.
On the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
I'm Laurie Siegel, and on Mostly Human, I go beyond the headlines with the people building our future.
This week, an interview with one of the most influential figures in Silicon Valley, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman.
I think society is going to decide that creators of AI products bear a tremendous amount of responsibility to products we put out in the world.
From power to parenthood.
Kids, teenagers, I think they will need a lot of guardrails around AI.
This is such a powerful and such a new thing.
From addiction to acceleration.
The world we live in is a competitive world, and I don't think that's going to stop, even if you did a lot of redistribution.
You know, we have a deep desire to excel and be competitive and gain status and be useful to others.
And it's a multiplayer game.
What does the man who has extraordinary influence over our lives have to say about the weight of that responsibility?
Find out a Mostly Human.
My highest order bit is to not destroy the world with AI.
Listen to Mostly Human on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Hey, I'm Nora Jones, and I love playing music with people so much that my podcast called Playing Along is back.
I sit down with musicians from all musical styles to play songs together in an intimate setting.
Every episode's a little different, but it all involves music and conversation with some of my favorite musicians.
Over the past two seasons, I've had special guests like Dave Grohl, Leve, Mavis Staples, Remy Wolf, Jeff Tweedy, really too many to name.
And this season, I've sat down with Alessia Cara, Sarah McLaughlin, John Legend, and more.
Check out my new episode with Josh Grobin.
You related to the Phantom at that point.
Yeah, I was definitely the Phantom in that.
That's so funny.
Share each day with me each night, each morning.
Say you love me.
You know I.
So come hang out with us in the studio and listen to Playing Along on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
We're back.
The Wild West of AI Stories00:15:13
So looking at a bunch of these stories in a row kind of pulls the curtain aside on AI storytelling.
A lot of the dialogue it generates is pretty nonsensical.
And yeah, I keep going back to that like bit in scene one where she's like, hey, you bumped into me.
And he's like, that's my line.
Yeah.
It makes no sense.
And the only thing I think is that at some point, an actual human wrote a story, or probably a few people, a number of people did, where a character used that line as a retort, right?
And ChatGPT's calculating algorithm or whatever was like, this is an appropriate response.
Plug it in, even though it makes no sense.
Because that's kind of the way these things work.
Also, also, they both have one ancient map.
And they're not.
Why?
Where do they get it?
Yeah.
Right.
Is it the same map?
You know, like, like, do they have copies of this?
Who made it?
What is the ruins they're in?
Again, you know, Indiana Jones and The Last Crusade sets this up very eloquently by having River Phoenix go on a Boy Scout adventure and then come home having nearly been murdered and find out that his dad doesn't give a shit because he's too busy like working out, you know, his notebook that has all the clues for the movie that we're about to watch.
Perfect, elegant, actual storytelling.
Good shit.
Man, that movie rules.
So, wait, so the question that a lot of us listening today are going to have is it feels like we're talking a little bit about something profound, which is, you mentioned Ulysses earlier.
Ulysses triggered such an awesome conversation in U.S. courts, right?
Over the nature of obscenity, right?
I don't know what it is, but I know it when I see it, right?
So what, like, this does feel like there's something we don't know what it is, but we know when it's missing to a human story.
I think what's missing, I keep bringing up the term simulacrum.
And like the simulacrum is a great example of like the kind of classic example is if you like open up your a word app type thing up at somewhere probably in the top left-hand corner, that's where it is on mine, you will see the image that means you click to save your document, right?
And you and I and Sophie are all old enough that we know that that image is a floppy disk, right?
Like that's the image.
But like those don't exist anymore.
People don't use floppies anymore.
Huge numbers of the people who click on that every day to save their documents never lived in a world where like they touched a floppy disk.
So the original thing like is no longer around, right?
Like it's a simulacrum, you know?
And like the kind of whatever kind of original meaning that it had has been replaced by something else.
And like what we have here is like the simulacrum of a story.
You've got these ingredients of story structure, these ingredients of pieces of pop culture, but there's no, there's nothing that's actually trying to be transmitted.
Nobody has like, because there's not a person behind this for one thing.
And there's not an understanding of what it takes to make a story.
So it can kind of look like a story.
It can certainly trick the, like these AI grindset people think it's close enough.
But what's happening here that's really fucked up is that they are taking this thing that is not a story.
And they are, their goal is to trick overworked parents into buying this for children who will read it and be too young to elucidate why something seems to be wrong with their new book.
And that's actually very frightening, right?
Like there's, there's something, we're going to talk about learning in a little bit and how kids learn and how they don't learn.
But like fundamentally, kids are little information vacuums and this stuff is wrong on a fundamental level.
And they'll get that.
They may not get it why, but not only is it kind of like off-putting to them, but it has the potential to do harm to them.
And this is, you know, we've had versions of this.
There's this thing called Elza Gate, right?
Where like a year or two ago, there were suddenly all of these hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of like what appeared to be AI generated videos that were like involving Disney characters, Elza being a big one from, I think, Frozen.
And they were, they were like singing songs doing all that.
What are you calling this character?
Elsa, right?
Elsa.
Elsa.
Yeah, Elsa.
No, you said Elsa.
Yeah, I said Elsa.
Right.
Didn't I?
Whatever.
Okay.
Whatever.
So you, you've, and, and, like, a lot of them would suddenly get like really weirdly sexual or like fucking get tweaked into this kind of like uncanny, unsettling, almost like Lovecraftian weirdness.
And there were, I remember this.
Yeah.
And these were, they were all crafted and used kind of the keywords that like when parents, you know, you're, you're busy, you got to cook dinner, you got to like do, you know, clean the house or some shit.
Your kid won't calm down.
You, you put him in front of YouTube and you put on a children's video and the algorithm eventually starts spinning.
And so parents start realizing like, well, I set them on, you know, this video that was like a frozen song.
And now there's like this weird pornographic thing that they're watching.
Like, where the fuck did this come from?
A weaponized autoplay.
Yeah, exactly.
And I don't think there's still a solid understanding of where all these came from.
There's a couple of different theories, but it's really unsettling because part of the problem is like, what does it do to kids to have that kind of shit in front of their eyes?
Like, because we're not even talking about like the danger of like, what if a kid reads an adult book or, you know, stumbles in when there's porn on the TV?
You know, this is a question of like, well, this is like frightening nonsense that like is being fed into them automatically, like at a, at a scale that was like hundreds of these videos.
One of the channels for this was like one of the 20 biggest channels on this is fucked up, really problematic shit.
And this is people like what these grindset people are doing by pumping as many of these AI books into Kindle as they can is they are creating the, they're creating the hard copy, the physical book version of this, where parents are going to get tricked into buying this shit and kids are going to be sat down in front of this.
And technology always outpaces legislation.
Yeah.
What you're describing, man, it sounds like this is a very, very bad Wild West situation.
It's a Cormac McCarthy level Wild West situation.
So there is no, is there blowback?
I mean, children are some of the most frighteningly intelligent things.
Kids know bullshit.
That's super uncomfortable.
There's, you know, this reminds me of one of my favorite lines from the television show community.
This, Robert, I pause it to you.
Sophie, I pause it to you, fellow behind the bastards folks.
This shit is both silly and evil like a candy cigarette.
Yeah, yeah, exactly.
It is.
It's like the candy cigarette of literature, right?
Yeah.
And it's one of those, like, one of the things I found interesting.
So when you, I watch, again, watching a bunch of these videos, you become aware of like what the problems for these AI hustlers are, like what the things they have to overcome is.
And one of the problems they face is that like every single book generated by the AIs they're using sets off plagiarism detectors, right?
And like Amazon uses, I think Amazon uses, I believe they use a plagiarism detector.
I've asked them for specifics on this.
Again, I haven't heard back.
But so one of the first things they'll do is they'll use something like Grammarly to like run the text that they've got through a plagiarism detector and it will inevitably tell them significant plagiarism found.
But there's a solution.
They've got a way to solve for this, which is an app called Quillbot.
And if you go online and look up Quillbot, it's built by its creators as an online paraphrasing tool.
So what Quillbot does is you feed it text and it goes through that text and it replaces adjectives and verbs in the text with synonyms.
So, you know, if the original text has the word courageous, it'll replace it with brave.
Or if it's got the word resided, it'll replace it with lived, stuff like that.
So you feed this Frankentext that you got from the AI into Quillbot and then Quillbot does kind of a find and replace with a handful of the words in there.
And then suddenly you've got something that won't trigger Amazon's plagiarism sensors and that you didn't have to actually edit yourself, right?
You still don't have to do any real work here.
You just let another robot mix it up a little bit more.
Yeah.
Now, once you've got kind of passable text, the next step for these grifters is to create image prompts for all of the illustrations in the book.
And again, there's not room for creativity here or for any kind of like human influence.
For each page, they just ask ChatGPT to generate descriptions of the images needed for that text.
And then they feed that text into Midjourney or Leonardo, which is another AI image generator, and use it to produce something like this.
And this is from another one of these.
This is kind of like one of the better case scenario looking illustrations.
And it's from like one of these fucking AI book guides that I found on YouTube.
And it's, you know, it's not remarkable, right?
Like it's, I'll read you the text.
This is from chapter one, setting off on an adventure.
This is the whole chapter.
Once upon a time, there was a young girl named Sarah who lived in a small village surrounded by rolling hills and lush forests.
Sarah was an adventurous spirit and loved to explore the great outdoors.
One day she heard a rumor that a long-lost treasure was hidden somewhere in the hills.
The treasure was said to be a great wealth of gold and precious gems, and whoever found it would be incredibly rich.
Sarah was determined to find the treasure and put all her focus on the task at hand.
Because the message here is that you need to focus in order to achieve your goals.
Oh, okay.
Yeah.
And it's the art that accompanies it isn't bad.
It looks kind of at first glance, you might assume a human drew it.
You can kind of tell, like, for one thing, the perspective on the backpack on her back is all fucked up.
It's not like actually quite right.
It might be that her hand is in a pocket, but she might actually just not have a hand.
But like, it doesn't look bad.
Especially, again, you're like an overworked parent looking for a book.
It would be way worse is what you're saying.
Yeah.
Yeah.
If you're an if you're just like a parent skimming through these, maybe you don't catch this, right?
As like something problematic.
You just see like, all right, well, that one works.
And by the standards of AI children's book arc, this one looks pretty good.
And I should say here, if you want to look at this stuff yourself, the text version of this article, of the whole article that we're using as the script for this, will be up as soon as the episodes drop on my sub stack, Shatterzone.
Just type Shatterzone substack into Google.
It'll be the first article that pops up if you click on that.
It's free to view.
You don't have to give me your email or any of that fucking bullshit.
And you can see all of the images and find links to everything if you want to like track back to the work that I did here.
So that's kind of the best case scenario for how these AI kids books work.
Look, the worst case scenario is shown in this video, which has about 412,000 views by Paul Marls.
Now, prior to the AI explosion, Paul was teaching, he had a bunch of videos teaching people how to like con other folks through Amazon KDP, kind of the old-fashioned way by like hiring ghostwriters and shit.
His videos had titles like $9,636 from 30 to 60 minutes work.
Exclamation point, exclamation point.
Make money online with KDP low content books.
This is like what he's advertising.
It's like, these are low content books.
You don't have to put anything into them.
It's the laziest thing ever, but you can make this weirdly specific number of money if you follow my guides.
And Paul Marls, if you look him up, he has dozens of videos for sale on Amazon.
I have reached out to Paul.
One of the ways you can tell this guy's sketchy is he has a website that like offers all of his different sort of like, you know, guidebooks and videos and stuff for people who want to follow him in this grift, but it has no contact info.
I did like send him a message on his Facebook, which I don't think he will check, but you know, I did reach out, Paul.
I don't like Paul.
I think he has a face in need of a fist here.
I'm not using that kind of language in the article that I've written because I want to seem like an objective journalist.
But as you'll see when we play a clip from this guy's video, he's pretty immediately off-putting.
Now, Paul ups the ante on laziness here by cutting out the text entirely and instead generating a children's coloring book that he hopes will SEO well because it's about dinosaurs and turn a profit.
It's even lazier, right?
That's what Paul is.
It's like, this is already a lazy grift.
Paul's going to make it lazier.
Fuck all that text.
We don't need a story.
Like we don't need to use chat GPT.
We'll just make a coloring book super easy.
And you may think a coloring book would be less problematic than some of this other shit we've seen.
I assure you, it's not.
So he enters this very half-assed prompt where he misspells the name of a dinosaur.
The prompt is just like coloring page for kids, Tyrannosaurus Rex in a jungle.
And he doesn't spell it right.
And I'm going to have Sophie play this guy describing how he generates the images for his coloring book.
And maybe then you'll hate him as much as I do.
Enter what we want our image to be of.
Now, I'm going to do a dinosaur coloring book.
That doesn't mean to say you need to go out and do a dinosaur coloring book.
Can use this method to create any number of different types of coloring book that you want.
So, I'm going to put in Tyrannosaurus Rex in a jungle.
The next instruction is going to be what sort of style.
And we're going to put in cartoon style.
Then, I'm just going to tell it how I want the lines.
And I want this with thick lines, low detail, and no shading.
Now, put in no shading, but you'll find that it probably will create some images with some element of shading.
The next is we need to put two minus signs and then AR for aspect ratio.
So, we're just going to put in 9, 11.
And then we enter.
And we can see here it's starting to create the images.
Okay, so stop it, Sophie.
Because now I want to talk about these images.
First, I want to say, you'll note he's like, we don't want there to be shading because, you know, if there's shading in a thing that you're supposed to color in, it like fucks up.
You can't like color in shading very well.
But he's like, there will be shading, but like, whatever, who gives a shit?
You know, we don't care anything about this stuff.
Now, Sophie is going to show you, these are the images that he generates with that prompt.
Take a good look at these dinosaurs.
Can you tell me anything that's wrong with these Tyrannosaurus Rexes?
Oh, sure.
They're not T-Rexes.
Coloring Books with Bad Dinosaurs00:12:08
No, they're not at all T-Rexes.
One of them is a quadruped.
It clearly has four legs, but like a T-Rex head on this like weird stump of a body.
Another one, the T-X Rex has like human muscle arms and thumbs.
And thumbs.
One of them, the one on the bottom left, like not only is the bottom jaw twisted away from the top jaw, but if you notice, its front arm is actually its back leg.
The back of its body is merged with a tree.
And then like there's maybe two other sort of half-formed limbs there.
And then the bottom right one, like these, I cannot exaggerate to you.
Like go to Shatterzone substack.
Look at these fucking T-Rexes.
These are so, such fucked up, janky Tyrannosauruses.
Like it is offensive to me how shitty these T-Rexes look.
Yeah.
The human hands are very funny.
Yeah.
The human hands on the bottom one is pretty great.
I do like how in the top one, like Midjourney's almost done like a Rob Leafield thing where like it can't figure out the feet so she tides them.
So hey, maybe AI has at least reached Leefieldian levels of like illustrative potential.
Yeah, they need they need never explained belts of ambiguous cartridges, right?
Right around the waist.
Also, you know what?
If there be that's going to be another two iterations.
Yeah.
A T-Rex with human hands that would have helped him out.
Maybe they would have been around, right?
You know, if the T-Rex had developed the fucking handgun, you know, they could have fought off those fucking asteroids.
Yeah.
It's a, you know, when you say that, I think about a much better Tyrannosaur drawing, Bill Watterson's classic Tyrannosaurs and F-14s.
Still one of like the highlights of my childhood.
That part of why I'm so offended by this coloring book is that like the best parts of my childhood all involved dinosaurs.
And he is just, he understands that, that kids are magnetically drawn to dinosaurs, always have been and always will be forevermore.
And so that he's grifting off that by providing like, he just, he doesn't even care enough to make sure that they look vaguely right.
Like any kid, kids know more about dinosaurs than paleontologists.
Any child is going to point out that these are fucked up looking T-Rexes.
So Paul's guide after this kind of goes through how you lay out your coloring book to publication, how you cobble together a cover, you know, what kind of things you need so that it'll, it'll get through Amazon sensors and they'll let you upload it to like not just to like, cause it's a coloring book, obviously, you need physical copies.
And you can, if you upload it right, Amazon will just like print and sell the books for you, the actual like physical books.
And again, this gets to what I worry about is that like parents who fall for these books are going to be, you know, overworked.
They're not going to be focusing on these books as much as their kids are, right?
They're just like, I want to get a dinosaur coloring book for my kid or whatever.
They need a coloring book.
Oh, this is what like popped up on Amazon.
The cover looks fine.
I am also worried, particularly what scares me.
It's both like parents who don't have a lot of time.
They're going for whatever is affordable.
And also, there's a lot of charities that provide poor kids with free books and they do bulk orders from places like Amazon that might get tricked by this kind of thing.
And so the thing that like the vision I can't get out of my head is this like frightening AI future in which like rich kids get to color in proper dinosaurs from like coloring books that human beings drew.
And poor kids grow up thinking stegosaurs had no tail and the earth used to have like a second moon that looked like a nipple, which is another, look at this image here.
Look at this fucking picture that it drew for that some kid, some kid's going to get this.
So some kid's going to get this fucking coloring book.
Look at this fucking thing.
That's not a Stegosaurus.
I don't even know.
It's got like spikes coming out of like actual like porcupine quills coming out of like the spines on its back and like it doesn't have a tail.
There's like five legs and the perspective's wrong.
And then like the world behind it, look like, yeah.
Yeah.
And yeah.
It's got spikes on the left, uh, the left hind leg.
Yeah.
Yeah.
It's like fucked up.
It's like super fucked up.
Like it's very bad.
Yeah.
I hate this shit.
And like the, again, that's what's unsettling.
Like there will always be high quality dinosaur coloring books and storybooks and stuff for kids.
And because they're made by humans, they'll command a premium price.
So like the poor kids grow up thinking that like T-Rexes.
Yeah, I don't know.
You know, I find it fucked up.
And maybe it'll be even bleaker than that.
And nobody will get good children's books.
But this is kind of like where I, what I'm suspecting is at least the first thing that's going to happen is that like the kids who start getting shafted with this low quality, unsettling, brain poisoning AI crap are like the kids who don't have as much money, you know, or whose parents don't have as much money, whose school districts don't have as much money.
Now, a cursory search on Amazon suggests that a lot of people have followed Paul's advice because there are a shitload of nearly identical coloring books.
So first off, Ben, this is the cover of Paul's book here.
You can see the dinosaur coloring book.
You know, pretty simple.
And that he did pick for the front cover the image that's like least fucked up looking.
Like that almost looks right.
But then I found as I started looking through Amazon, several near-identical copies all sold under different names.
And you can tell they're all AI copies because like, so this first one here, the arms are fucked up.
Like they're in the position, kind of like that one on the on the left is almost like set up like a leg, um, and they're both bent down so you don't actually see the claws.
You can tell the perspective's fucked up, though.
Um, that's by Jared Mason, uh, or it's not because like Paul and other people talk about how you just create fake names to write these books under.
These could all be Paul, they could all be people following Paul's advice.
We don't know.
Here's another book where, like, what the fuck dinosaur is that supposed to be?
That is, that is like, so again, folks, you really owe it to yourself to look at this shit.
I'm sorry.
Yeah.
What is what are the arm leg situations?
A tripod.
Like, it's got like the body of a dog, but like three legs, uh, a T-Rex head, and an arm that's not an arm.
Like, it's an arm that looks like this.
It looks like this animal was like a civil war veteran who was amputated.
This guy's been through some shit.
You know what I mean?
Like, and he's still.
Wow.
And it's, it, it, it's, it shows how lazy these people are.
That, like, anyone seeing that should be like, that's not a dinosaur.
That doesn't look quite at all.
What the fuck is happening here?
Yeah.
Oh, good.
There's more.
And then this is.
Oh, this is a higher age.
Look at that claw.
Look at how the claws are like the same size as it is.
Its fingers are like as long as its head.
It's like fucking salad fingers, the dinosaur.
It's so fucking off-putting and weird.
I like the incredible.
Yeah.
I like the nihilism.
I like the there's something like there's something very about the way the eyes are rolled up.
Yeah.
I love it.
So despite featuring easily the worst dinosaur drawing I've ever seen in my life, this coloring book appears to be selling reasonably well.
At the time this article was written, it was number 75 in the teen and young adult drawing category.
That's potentially decent money.
That's not low on Amazon.
Now that is like in the teen and young adult drawing category.
That's not like a massive category, but like that's there are human coloring books that are selling worse than this, I will guarantee you.
And that's potentially meaningful money for this person.
I use the term person lightly for whoever is like shitting this stuff.
Maybe it's all Paul.
Maybe it's all people copying him, but like this is already a problem is what I'm getting at.
Cause it's like, this isn't like the worst thing, you know, in a world where, yeah, I don't know, like the Catholic Church exists.
Fucked up coloring books aren't the worst thing for little kids.
But like this is seriously, I don't think it's, it's good.
Like kids pay attention to stuff like this.
Like show like the sheer, for one thing, I think the laziness in this reads off to them, but like it's just, it's wrong.
Like you shouldn't be shotgunning stuff that's wrong to kids because you're too lazy to like do even the minimum work of regenerating the images until they're right.
I find this unsettling.
And I, there's a lot more to find unsettling because like part of what I did while researching this was kind of a deep dive on literary education theory because I wanted to have an idea of how some of this stuff is going to affect children.
But that's going to be all for part one with us today, Ben, because, you know, time to take five.
Time to take five, do a little bit of a breather, and then we'll come back on Thursday and I will finish this deeply fucked up story.
Ben, you got anything to plug?
Yes.
Please check out and subscribe to CoolZone Media.
Do your part in supporting accurate depictions of dinosaurs for children.
You can also find me hanging with my rider dies, Matt Frederick and Noel Brown, on shows like Stuff They Don't Want You to Know and Ridiculous History.
You can find me talking trash about MREs and French military rations on Twitter, named it a burst of creativity at BenBolan, HSW, or at Instagram at BenBolan.
That's the whole thing.
Yeah, I think that's it.
Right?
No?
Good?
Oh, yeah.
Excellent.
Yeah, I also love a good MRE and a bad MRE.
I've been making my way through these MREs that Mountain House made, and it's like Chili Mac, which is devastating for your stomach.
Just anytime you try fucking.
Oh, it's a nightmare.
It's a nightmare.
There's some good ones, though.
I got a nice bison stew that I think is one of the companies I have made.
Yeah, there's some good ones out there.
I had some when I was out hunting for a couple of days in the Cascades last year, I had this freeze-dried biscuits and gravy that actually fucked unreasonably hard.
Did you ever get done with all that mac and cheese?
You said something.
No, I still have a ton of it.
I have a couple of years worth of dried food at any given time, just in case I have to hole up in my house, you know, firing wildly at trespassers in the road style situation.
Oh, okay.
Yeah.
R.I.P. Cormac.
We also would like to plug the newest CoolZone Media series, Sad Oligar, hosted by J.K. Inrahan, available on all the things.
Robert, do you want to give that link for where people can follow your sub stack one more time?
Hell yeah.
It's Shatterzone.
So just go to shatterzone.substack.com and you will find my thing.
You don't have to sign up or anything.
It's free.
You're good.
Bye.
Shabamzo.
Behind the Bastards is a production of CoolZone Media.
For more from CoolZone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
When a group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist, they take matters into their own hands.
Behind the Bastards Production00:01:39
I vowed I will be his last target.
He is not going to get away with this.
He's going to get what he deserves.
We always say that, trust your girlfriends.
Listen to the girlfriends.
Trust me, babe.
On the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
On a recent episode of the podcast, Money and Wealth with John O'Brien, I sit down with Tiffany the Bajanista Alicia to talk about what it really takes to take control of your money.
What would that look like in our families if everyone was able to pass on wealth to the people when they're no longer here?
We break down budgeting, financial discipline, and how to build real wealth, starting with the mindset shifts too many of us were never, ever taught.
If you've ever felt you didn't get the memo on money, this conversation is for you to hear more.
Listen to Money and Wealth with John O'Brien from the Black Effect Network on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast.
Ernest, what's up?
Look, money is something we all deal with, but financial literacy is what helps turn income into real wealth.
On each episode of the podcast, Earn Your Leisure, we break down the conversations you need to understand money, investing, and entrepreneurship.
From stocks to real estate to credit, business, and generational wealth, our goal is simple.
Make financial literacy accessible for everyone.
Because when you understand the system, you can start to build within it.
Open your free iHeartRadio app, search Earn Your Leisure, and listen now.