I haven't read any of these, but I'm glad this page exists. I have had a few conversations with Andrew. He seems like a good guy. Happy reading!
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I haven't read any of these, but I'm glad this page exists. I have had a few conversations with Andrew. He seems like a good guy. Happy reading!
I’m very much a real person, and Siggy can probably confirm that from our conversations. I’m also not going to pretend I don’t use AI. I do. I use it as a writing and editing tool: checking continuity, punctuation, researching things like city layouts, geography, timelines, and helping with covers and promotional material.
But the stories, characters, decisions, themes, revisions, and final judgment are 100% mine. I reread constantly, change plots halfway, rewrite chapters when they don’t work, and sometimes spend months developing a book. These aren’t prompts I type on Friday and upload to Amazon on Monday.
I completely understand anyone wanting to know that before deciding whether to spend time reading one. The easiest test is probably just to read one and decide whether it was worth your time.
One thing I probably should add is why I’m doing this at all.
We’re all Bitcoiners here, and I think it’s healthy for each of us to contribute in whatever way we can. There are already excellent nonfiction Bitcoin books out there. I’m not going to try to write a better book than Saifedean Ammous. What interested me was something different: fiction.
I don’t know many people trying to write novels specifically for Bitcoiners - stories about freedom, sound money, sovereignty, inheritance, censorship, second chances, and the strange culture that has grown up around Bitcoin. That’s the niche I wanted to explore.
That is my main motivation. I enjoy writing stories, I care about Bitcoin, and I thought combining the two might be one small way of contributing to the culture.
And frankly, I’m giving the EPUBs away. If somebody enjoys one, they can zap me some sats if they feel like it. There isn’t exactly a sophisticated get-rich-quick scheme hiding here. 😄 The reason the books exist in the first place is because I wanted to create Bitcoin fiction that I myself would enjoy reading. If people read one and think it’s terrible, fair enough. But at least judge the book rather than the cover.
The covers, while all the same covers and very AI-y, look amazing.
Also, perfect example of infinite generation and how (fiction) reading is largely pointless, (#1571294, #1550071), supply outstripping not demand narrowly but ALL AVAILABLE ATTENTION (=way worse)
Update: Can you vouch that these are real books, written/crafted/well-thought out and not just AI slob spun up over a weekend?
All of the books were published within a year of each other. That plus the website copy and art being AI - it's safe bet they're machine generated fiction.
Interesting. I have had very human sounding interactions with the author over the past six months or so. He sent me a single epub link a while ago. That proves nothing. I am going to attempt to get him to speak for himself in response to these questions.
I could be wrong. They could use AI to do everything but write the books, but IME once someone starts serving slop they have a hard time stopping.
We should know soon enough.
we appreciate the investigative effort, Siggy pal!
I'm now reviewing our messages. We had a long back and forth. I think he contacted @TotallyHumanWriter about publishing at 21 Futures. If he is discovered to be a bot, I will just have to face the fact that I can't trust my own opinions.
I have the same feeling. I haven't looked at any of these stories yet, but I'm finding that sometimes I want to believe in people's fiction so badly that I'm not seeing the signs that it's generated. And then later I just feel like crap that I wasted time reading it.
I think it is probably a matter of expectations: I suspect that we don't want to be elitist or demand too much from writers (especially bitcoin writers) lest we not read anything. We'd like to encourage people along because maybe they will eventually hone themselves into good writers and we'll get to enjoy all their stories. It's not like everyone can be a Steinbeck or a Heller. We extend a lot of patience and grace to new writers, but slop makes this sort of attitude too easy to game.
The problem is that this is leading us to accept stories that really aren't that good (largely because no human struggled over them). If a bot writes a story that really is good, I think I probably won't mind reading it.
and Phil will sniff it out!
"within a year" is still pretty reasonable... professional fiction authors pump out 3-5 books a year. Basically, because it's all just the same template/pattern of nonsense drivel repeated ad nauseum. They were the original infinite-generation AIs, spinning out endless amount of pointless text.
A more obvious AI-slop warning would be if they all came out within a week/month of each other
I just replied to @k00b, and I invited the guy to defend himself. Beyond that,
This is so true 😀
You read and liked Lyn's, but she has a track record and you know her. I wonder whether a real gem would go unnoticed in a sea of crap?
absolutely. But the only reason I would ever engage in the first place is because I know and trust her; was curious to see if her skills translated to another domain.
The same is not true with this guy, so no matter how good any of the books are (objectively speaking; let's pretend we can assess that), I won't read them.
(Though, if a gem falls in the forest and nobody is there to hear it...?)
I have to check this out