AI Aviation Books are here

Michel Van said:
witness the horror of social Post
HJDhZphXwAAQyil
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OMFG!!
 
Reminds me of reports nobody wanted, nobody needed, but were generated every time, printed every time, straight into the recycling bin.
Nobody on the controls was able to stop/modify/delete the process responsible, many trees were felled to feed it.
The organisation I worked for had personnel that could have intervened. They were never allowed to act. Client's privilege.
 
Arjen said:
Reminds me of reports nobody wanted, nobody needed, but were generated every time, printed every time, straight into the recycling bin.
Nobody on the controls was able to stop/modify/delete the process responsible, many trees were felled to feed it.
The organisation I worked for had personnel that could have intervened. They were never allowed to act. Client's privilege.
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'They must be seen to be written but are not written to be seen,' is an old adage.
 
@Brett Davidson I found that to be true of many other reports, but then they served as either a virtue signal, or a warning - this is what we are capable of. A function of sorts, in itself a sign of unhealthy/disfunctionial relations inside/between institutions.

This particular print-into-the-bin report was a symptom of institutional paralysis.
 
Justo Miranda said:
In cases where I have already drawn the theme of the cover, the procedure is very fast. I have a friend who designs the general look for me in ten minutes using Corel with the RGB function that Amazon demands. The procedure of sending the entire book for sale on Kindle can only take about ten minutes longer, when it has already been done several times.
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Interesting. Makes me wonder if the application process itself can be automated.
 
gatoraptor said:
The march of the AI books ("written" by AI authors?) continues. I found this monstrosity on Amazon today. I think the best thing about these books is the comic value of the outrageous cover aircraft! The engines look like turbofan nacelles with props added, and some props have 4 blades and some have 5! And of course, with 3 engines on one wing and 2 on the other, this thing will fly rather funny. If this is the best AI can do to answer the request to "show me a B-36" than I think mankind is in real trouble! And does anyone think that "Derick Bax" is a real human being?
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I think "Derick Bax" is the individual previously trading as "Avery A Hollis" (in turn a nom de plume apparently plagiarised from an existing legitimate author). AI slop aircraft "books" under the name Hollis now seem to have disappeared from Amazon, coincident with the arrival of this rubbish from "Bax". I suspect he/she has cut their losses after the relentless drubbing on the WW2 Forum and Amazon reviews, and decided to move their wagon to the next town.

I sincerely hope they aren't able to make money out of this.
 
Sabrejet said:
I think "Derick Bax" is the individual previously trading as "Avery A Hollis" (in turn a nom de plume apparently plagiarised from an existing legitimate author). AI slop aircraft "books" under the name Hollis now seem to have disappeared from Amazon, coincident with the arrival of this rubbish from "Bax". I suspect he/she has cut their losses after the relentless drubbing on the WW2 Forum and Amazon reviews, and decided to move their wagon to the next town.

I sincerely hope they aren't able to make money out of this.
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Sounds like a Bond archvillain
 
Michel Van said:
witness the horror of social Post
HJDhZphXwAAQyil
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The hard sf take of the escape pod R2-D2 and C-3PO used in the beginning of Star Wars.

The Blockade Runner was the Aldrin Cycler, and Polyus the Star Destroyer.

I'll allow it, as long as C-3PO is ASIMO...and as long as it is set all in LEO or on Earth.
 
I thought about asking this question in the general AI thread but decided this would the better place for it, is it possible for AI to become sufficiently capable to be able to write a decent book about a technical topic like aviation ? That could be a huge game changer but now it seems remote.
 
alberchico said:
I thought about asking this question in the general AI thread but decided this would the better place for it, is it possible for AI to become sufficiently capable to be able to write a decent book about a technical topic like aviation ? That could be a huge game changer but now it seems remote.
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Well in theory yes, but it would need access to digitised archives otherwise it's just going to be regurgitating what's already been written and fed to it*.

Digitising human knowledge is fiercely expensive and time-consuming yet probably only a fraction of what has been spent on data centre building this year alone. But without being able to attract those billions most historical knowledge remains out of reach on dusty shelves.

Imagine a future in which all the World's archives were online and it was possible for an LLM to make connections between them all.

* Though I appreciate that's probably the same as 90% of human-written aviation books on the market
 
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The idiots who think AI is the money jackpot for books are, indeed, idiots. There are still only 24 hours in a day. The average military book buyer still has a limited budget. And limited time to read. He can only buy X number of books a year. Amazon is concerned only with making money. If a flood of AI books threatens their cash flow, those fake books get pruned. After all, there is no actual human who might file a complaint.
 
Good point, the lack of digitized archives would be a huge stumbling block when it comes to writing about obscure topics. Maybe it's best if AI writing tools can't evolve beyond a certain point. But it would be interesting if AI assisted programs became advanced enough to allow amateur historians without a writing or research background to be able to pen a book about their favorite niche topic.
 
edwest4 said:
The idiots who think AI is the money jackpot for books are, indeed, idiots. There are still only 24 hours in a day. The average military book buyer still has a limited budget. And limited time to read. He can only buy X number of books a year.
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That's a problem even without 'AI books'. There are very few original, insightful new books on the market and those are outnumbered by tomes that rewrite what previous authors have already rewritten.

Misuse of AI might impair the signal to noise ratio even more in the short term, but readers will eventually adapt and screen them out.
 
Kiltonge said:
That's a problem even without 'AI books'. There are very few original, insightful new books on the market and those are outnumbered by tomes that rewrite what previous authors have already rewritten.
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I'd beg to disagree; case in point - Tommy Tomasson & Al Casby's F7U recent book for Crecy. Then there are also numerous new books in the Solomons Air War series and then Wings Across the Pacific. I'd agree that there is a dearth of WW1 aviation books but every so often a new title does appear. Re-hashed and plagiarised books (books with plagiarised errors especially) existed 30 years or more ago, so nothing new there.
 
Not aviation book, but interesting :
The writer Julien Blanc-Gras recounts how he discovered a book bearing his signature… which he did not write

Are the concept of authorship and the rights that go with it compatible with artificial intelligence?

The book is called *The Complete Adventure Guide: The Modern Traveller’s Survival Manual*. It has been on sale on Amazon since 20 March, is 134 pages long and costs 17.05 euros. According to the blurb, it is ‘a formidable method for rediscovering the freedom to travel intelligently, off the beaten track’, written by ‘the globetrotting author and writer Julien Blanc-Gras’. Julien Blanc-Gras is me. And, indeed, I am a writer who travels. The problem is, I never wrote this book.

My first reaction was one of utter astonishment when I stumbled across this product by chance whilst browsing the Amazon page dedicated to my books. Then, the truth became glaringly obvious. It was a crude ‘fake’ generated by artificial intelligence (AI). The cover was hideous, the blurb was written in bullet points, and it was ‘self-published’. The phenomenon of fake books sold online is nothing new. For several years now, novels created entirely by AI have been sold under the names of fictional authors, much to the dismay of the publishing industry, which cries foul over this parasitic behaviour. Here, however, the situation is different, because I am not a fictional character.
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galgot said:
Not aviation book, but interesting :
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Amazon will prune so-called AI books. They are flooding their market with crap. It prevents them from making more money. It brings down their reputation. I hope to see a curated source of military history books that deletes all the AI junk.
 
Sabrejet said:
I'd beg to disagree; case in point - Tommy Tomasson & Al Casby's F7U recent book for Crecy. Then there are also numerous new books in the Solomons Air War series and then Wings Across the Pacific. I'd agree that there is a dearth of WW1 aviation books but every so often a new title does appear. Re-hashed and plagiarised books (books with plagiarised errors especially) existed 30 years or more ago, so nothing new there.
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Not to get off topic but there is a publisher called Aeronaut Books that's been publishing a lot of titles regarding WW1 aviation recently. Might be worth taking a look at what they have.

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galgot said:
Mate, ALL the covers are AI shit. Look that beautiful tri-engine X-15 (or "X-0" ?)

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The weird thing is that there really WAS a proposal for a three-engined X-15 with wingtip ramjets that was passed around in late 1960 before fading into obscurity.

How AI managed to hallucinate something so obscure when thousands of pictures of actual X-15s exist online will forever be a mystery to me.

(Picture from Jenkins and Landis's "Hypersonic" because I couldn't find any images of this particular proposal online.)
 

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alberchico said:
I thought about asking this question in the general AI thread but decided this would the better place for it, is it possible for AI to become sufficiently capable to be able to write a decent book about a technical topic like aviation ? That could be a huge game changer but now it seems remote.
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I think artificial intelligence is in general trained to find a way to yes/there is a positive answer, and that critical thought processes are undervalued or even suppressed or ignored. Anything to keep the consumer happy and returning, whether it is objective ground truth or not.
 
martinbayer said:
I think artificial intelligence is in general trained to find a way to yes/there is a positive answer, and that critical thought processes are undervalued or even suppressed or ignored. Anything to keep the consumer happy and returning, whether it is objective ground truth or not.
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What need is there for objective truth in an artificial universe where everything is made up...?
 
Seems be made all with a sofware ai like Automateed that promise to sell book generated by Ai also in Amazon. A case of worst utilize of AI.
 
airman said:
Seems be made all with a sofware ai like Automateed that promise to sell book generated by Ai also in Amazon. A case of worst utilize of AI.
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Is it possible that these AI publishing startups end up like Napster, where the publishing industry gets so fed up with the tidal wave of slop and endless copyright violations that they try to sue these companies out of existence ?
 
alberchico said:
Is it possible that these AI publishing startups end up like Napster, where the publishing industry gets so fed up with the tidal wave of slop and endless copyright violations that they try to sue these companies out of existence ?
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Nope , when it will explode speculative bubble also this AI publishing startup will ends. So the problem is not Ai, it's how people use it.
 
The above answers are completely wrong. I work in the publishing industry. AI books are crap. Full stop. People will stop buying them. However, IF Amazon is hit with a flood of AI books that clog their system, they will dump them. They don't want to lose money or get a bad reputation.

AI is just another fraud engine, similar to printing fake currency.
 

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