Thank you so much for this deep dive! I’d never heard of this site either. Maybe it’s something that BookTok is sending people to, or it’s just all bots mining for clicks.
Hard to say! I didn't look into the site since that wasn't my focus here, but maybe I'll dig into it a little more later.
Mostly, because I know there are a lot of people who don't have a foundation for spotting LLM-generated text, I just wanted to share what struck me about these bot comments. But . . . I have my suspicions about the questions as well. Do readers actually care who my publisher was for a book that came out thirteen years ago? Or is this just content being generated?
As if the potential repercussions of and/or massive and rapid escalation of AI didn't already keep me up at night 😄 Srsly though - thank you for sharing mainstream with this rather than paid content. This is important for people to realize. It's bad enough they believe everything posted on FB and TT already 🙄
I'm glad it was useful for you! A lot of my paid content is just "here's a weird thing that happened!" or "I had a bunch of thoughts about this and now I must tell you!" and originally, this would have fit right in with that. But while I was writing, it struck me that it might be actually useful, not just kind of funny. So I'm glad my friends confirmed that instinct was right.
And I agree -- these comments are all pretty low-stakes, so someone believing the errors isn't going to hurt them. Probably. But something more serious . . . big yikes.
When I was a kid, my parents told me I couldn't trust everything on the internet. And they were right. We need to bring back that energy.
We live in such strange times. As always my first thought upon coming across AI schlock in the wild is why? Who stands to benefit from any of this garbage? My second thought is that the internet is becoming more and more unusable.
I suspect in order to build viewership, sites like GoodNovel sprinkle in "known" authors without contacting them. If you complain, they'll remove you. They know, however, most will not complain. Any publicity is good publicity.
Muck Rack did this to me a few years ago. I asked them to take me off. I needed to control my brand, and it disturbed me to appear on their site without permission. They promptly complied, but encouraged me to join in the future, and I might. There's nothing wrong with them. It's one more source of publicity.
Each author will have to make their own determination. As for the bot part, this is our world now. Long as it helps me, I'm not all that concerned. Again, any publicity is good publicity.
I admit, I'm suspicious of these kinds of tools. I've seen a lot about them flagging human-made work as AI, which is . . . not great. And I want to be cautious about potentially putting a person's work into something like this.
As if the comments section always has perfect grammar with no typos! Although we do actually try hard here 😆 but no emojis? No sentence fragments for style? It's just SO frustrating that companies are shoving LLMs at us as hard as they can no matter how much we scream no please stop!
Right? That is a huge sign! I was waiting for someone to point out the grammar and punctuation in these comments. If these comments had been articles about the book, that might not have been a red flag. But in the context of *comments,* it's a huge one.
I think I’ve mentioned to you that I teach high school film analysis, and I was halfway through the first comment when I thought, “This isn’t human. It reads like a teenager trying to sound smart and formal.” I would be REALLY interested to learn who is training these bots. It could very well be the website trying to generate clicks. Were there ads that they’d make money from?
Yes, it does sound like that! Like someone trying to hit wordcount -- hence all the extra, unasked for information.
It doesn't quite sound like chatgpt to me, and I'm not as familiar with the other LLMs, but one it did remind me of . . . you know the one that summarizes text into podcast-style audio? That one. I can't recall what it's called, but the output has that same "trying to sound scholarly" sound.
I just went to check; I didn't see any obvious ads, but there must be *something* going on.
Thanks for the considerable effort that you plainly invested in this post, Jodi. As with some of the other comments I too wonder wherein lies the purpose, what’s the gain other than to keep us engaged. As a newly published writer and a genuine ‘old coot’ who’s supposed to be engaging on social media it sure makes me less inclined to do so.
Don't let social media take up too much of your precious writing time. I know publishers want us to be out there telling people about our books, and it's good to do that every now and then, but it doesn't move the needle as much as we like to imagine. Our time is best spent writing our next book. :)
Thank you so much for this deep dive! I’d never heard of this site either. Maybe it’s something that BookTok is sending people to, or it’s just all bots mining for clicks.
Hard to say! I didn't look into the site since that wasn't my focus here, but maybe I'll dig into it a little more later.
Mostly, because I know there are a lot of people who don't have a foundation for spotting LLM-generated text, I just wanted to share what struck me about these bot comments. But . . . I have my suspicions about the questions as well. Do readers actually care who my publisher was for a book that came out thirteen years ago? Or is this just content being generated?
Oh that is a good point (and sinister!). That the whole site is some kind of Ouroboros of generated questions and generated answers.
As if the potential repercussions of and/or massive and rapid escalation of AI didn't already keep me up at night 😄 Srsly though - thank you for sharing mainstream with this rather than paid content. This is important for people to realize. It's bad enough they believe everything posted on FB and TT already 🙄
I'm glad it was useful for you! A lot of my paid content is just "here's a weird thing that happened!" or "I had a bunch of thoughts about this and now I must tell you!" and originally, this would have fit right in with that. But while I was writing, it struck me that it might be actually useful, not just kind of funny. So I'm glad my friends confirmed that instinct was right.
And I agree -- these comments are all pretty low-stakes, so someone believing the errors isn't going to hurt them. Probably. But something more serious . . . big yikes.
When I was a kid, my parents told me I couldn't trust everything on the internet. And they were right. We need to bring back that energy.
We live in such strange times. As always my first thought upon coming across AI schlock in the wild is why? Who stands to benefit from any of this garbage? My second thought is that the internet is becoming more and more unusable.
It is becoming more and more unusable in the sense that, for a lot of the time, you're not actually talking/interacting with another human being.
If you go on Reddit, a lot of posts are clearly LLM-generated.
As to the question of why, I don't know.
It's so true, and sadly Reddit is actually better than most sites these days for finding actually useful information.
I suspect in order to build viewership, sites like GoodNovel sprinkle in "known" authors without contacting them. If you complain, they'll remove you. They know, however, most will not complain. Any publicity is good publicity.
Muck Rack did this to me a few years ago. I asked them to take me off. I needed to control my brand, and it disturbed me to appear on their site without permission. They promptly complied, but encouraged me to join in the future, and I might. There's nothing wrong with them. It's one more source of publicity.
Each author will have to make their own determination. As for the bot part, this is our world now. Long as it helps me, I'm not all that concerned. Again, any publicity is good publicity.
A few tools to check if something is AI
https://gptzero.me/
https://quillbot.com/ai-content-detector
I admit, I'm suspicious of these kinds of tools. I've seen a lot about them flagging human-made work as AI, which is . . . not great. And I want to be cautious about potentially putting a person's work into something like this.
As if the comments section always has perfect grammar with no typos! Although we do actually try hard here 😆 but no emojis? No sentence fragments for style? It's just SO frustrating that companies are shoving LLMs at us as hard as they can no matter how much we scream no please stop!
Right? That is a huge sign! I was waiting for someone to point out the grammar and punctuation in these comments. If these comments had been articles about the book, that might not have been a red flag. But in the context of *comments,* it's a huge one.
I think I’ve mentioned to you that I teach high school film analysis, and I was halfway through the first comment when I thought, “This isn’t human. It reads like a teenager trying to sound smart and formal.” I would be REALLY interested to learn who is training these bots. It could very well be the website trying to generate clicks. Were there ads that they’d make money from?
Yes, it does sound like that! Like someone trying to hit wordcount -- hence all the extra, unasked for information.
It doesn't quite sound like chatgpt to me, and I'm not as familiar with the other LLMs, but one it did remind me of . . . you know the one that summarizes text into podcast-style audio? That one. I can't recall what it's called, but the output has that same "trying to sound scholarly" sound.
I just went to check; I didn't see any obvious ads, but there must be *something* going on.
Thanks for the considerable effort that you plainly invested in this post, Jodi. As with some of the other comments I too wonder wherein lies the purpose, what’s the gain other than to keep us engaged. As a newly published writer and a genuine ‘old coot’ who’s supposed to be engaging on social media it sure makes me less inclined to do so.
Don't let social media take up too much of your precious writing time. I know publishers want us to be out there telling people about our books, and it's good to do that every now and then, but it doesn't move the needle as much as we like to imagine. Our time is best spent writing our next book. :)
Congratulations on your debut!