I don't know why people are so upset.<p>She has not broken any laws nor done anything scummy; what she has done is studied and system and hacked it to her ends: a true hacker in the HN sense of the word.<p>Now, I hate AI slop as much as anyone can hate it, but if society is so insensitive to actual quality that it will reward slop to the tune of a millions dollars, the the problem lies with that, not her.<p>And to her credit, it is not like she is one-shotting books with a single prompt: she has a structured process starting from a human outline and ideas, plus human review at the end.
"I Don’t Want to Read What You Didn’t Write"
a debate I had with a friend recently was about how there aren't actually that many people contributing to the spam everywhere of AI crap. There are tens of thousands perhaps, probably not even enough to fill a small city, spread around the entire global population.<p>A lot of people use AI, some even are unlucky enough to post online before learning its a faux pas. Some few are oblivious enough to go for some time before realizing.<p>A select few decide that this is their opportunity to industrialize production of slop for profit. It seems that when platforms take steps to curb excesses like people posting thousands of products/posts/books/games/videos/whatever a day, the volume drops dramatically, because its these villains posting thousands of times a day that are responsible for most of the nonsense<p>and as with this woman, whenever they see a modicum of success extracting money from the commons, they immediately pivot to selling courses, so other malignant souls can clog up the shared processes of humanity with their crap too.
you need to be the kind of character who wants to see more cheap stuff in the world to pull this kind of shit. AI augmented troll hackers of civilians and small honest SMEs, invasive stalkers, self-proclaimed hard pushing media jerks bribing doctors and teachers and civilians. medical malpractice proponents. genAI augmented trolls.
The number of books makes this hilarious. Whatever your take on AI generation in writing, it's pretty difficult to <i>read</i> 370 books in 20 months closely. Let alone consider, edit and improve.<p>There's just no way you can claim "oh no, I have a full creative process in place to produced something considered", whilst turning out an unreadable quantity of books.
> "Readers don't read rubbish books; they return them," she said.<p>Do people actually return books they don't like? I don't but maybe it's a thing. Or is it her trying to convince herself the books are actually good, or at least not rubbish? Which is putting the bar low anyway.
The push to become 1000x engineer at big tech is nothing compared to the push to become a 1000x author at big publishing media houses :D
<p><pre><code> > She has sold more than one million books, by her own estimate, in digital, print and audio formats, earning more than $1 million so far this year.
> The South African now heads an operation that has trained several hundred people in her method and is preparing to launch software for AI authors called Authorythm.
</code></pre>
So basically she is yet another grifter making money selling her method for "success"