#trashofai: instant books
Tags: watercooler, ai
Published: 2023-11-03 19:52:12

Remember anybody here [We put a chip in it](https://weputachipinit.tumblr.com/) with the tag line:

> It was a dumb thing. We put a chip in it. Now it's a Smart Thing!

It featured smart cat fountains, internet enabled coffee machines, smart forks that track how much you ate and so on.

I think we should start collecting the...

## Trash of AI
Things that provide no value for real, actual humans, things that are delusional, cynical or borderline harmful.

> **Disclaimer:** In my blog, my philosophical stance is that the _goal of engineering_ is not increasing profits regardless of its effects and consequences, but to provide value for people to have their lives easier. Products and code both should provide real value to its users, not a fake demand. 

## Save Time on Creating Content for Children!
By totally automating it with AI. You know, why bother collecting meaningful life experiences, why bother going through a tough artistic ladder, when you can just generate some garbage to children with a pipeline? 

Who cares if they are going to be scared, confused or if the stories will have questionable morals? What matters is not spending too much time while your ad revenues flow in. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i6Dcb9qbtw8

Brain kibble...

## Automatic Books!
Now let's go for adults! The advertisement for WordGenie that triggered me to write this article, showed a way to generate a decent looking e-book for _"Sailing over 50+"_.

Gone are the barbaric times of actually going to learn how to sail, fail, fail and fail again and then succeed, gone are the times of learning something new in your later years and tell about your experiences.

Just ask ChatGPT to create it for you and let those old farts gobble up the text!

People die because of advices of a limbless Large Language Model that never sailed? Who cares!

See another example with your own eyes:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O81G8pDBSMU

## Summary
In my opinion, these ideas are inherently bound by how things were. A book, for example, are best guesses at content that people might find useful. With AI we can tailor information to the actual person. But instead of that, we just create the old format, because of that _"passive income scheme"_ we're following.

The same is true with books turned into audiobooks by AI voices. It's the dropshipping equivalent for the world of AI: instead of having a usability feature, which produces decent albeit artistically inherently inferior voices for people who can't read for some reason.

All these ideas above are _immoral_, in the sense they want to save _their_ own time at the expense of _my_ own time. Imagine how infuriating it would be to find out that the book you paid 20$ turns out to be generated on the spot with a prompt you could have up yourself. ChatGPT and LLMs are great, but we should focus on cutting the chores, on enabling things that were too expensive to do beforehand, cutting demotivation so we can finish things and produce more quality. We have way too much art already that no one reads, listens to or watches. 

Why pour more water to the ocean when the same technology can provide the exact amount of water just anywhere, anytime, on demand?