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I've been consciously doing that for reference books for the past three years because Amazon is absolutely littered with AI-generated non-fiction. I have my own ideological reasons too, but the main problem is that most of that AI-generated reference stuff is just of incredibly poor quality. It's meant to saturate the platform as cheaply as possible, so no one actually does any fact-checking, editing, layout, and so on. They're not even using frontier models for that.

For example, there are multiple evidently AI-generated titles that come up on the front page if you search for "Rust programming", "cybersecurity book", etc. I guess I can't rule out that "Winston Knowles" is a real person, but I'm not gonna bet money on that: https://www.amazon.com/Cybersecurity-Career-Manual-Interview...



It’s funny when people dismiss this as some kind of Luddite argument, when the reality is so simple: you have a producer-consumer system where the producer has been accelerated 1000x but the consumer remained the same. How can that work?


I'm keeping my pre-2023 history books and encyclopedias.


Similarly, when all of this started happening I went and bought some history books for anything that seemed like it would be useful later.




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