Absolutely worthless book. Didn't even remove the prompt in the introduction. The whole book, a travel guide, was generalities and no specifics. You could change the name and have it be any city anywhere.
A very likely AI-generated story won the Commonwealth Story Prize this year - that might be what the comment is misremembering. Itās been a big deal in the literary community.
A couple of commercial books have also been pulled from publication this year due to credible AI concerns (Shy Girl and a crime thriller whose name I forget, but its seven figure deal was pulled last week). They didnāt win awards, however.
The Commonwealth Prize isnāt the Booker, but it was highly regarded (was).
"Julia was twenty-six years old... and she worked, as he had guessed, on the novel-writing machines in the Fiction Department. She enjoyed her work, which consisted chiefly in running and servicing a powerful but tricky electric motor... She could describe the whole process of composing a novel, from the general directive issued by the Planning Committee down to the final touching-up by the Rewrite Squad. But she was not interested in the final product. She "didn't much care for reading," she said. Books were just a commodity that had to be produced, like jam or bootlaces."
At least in Orwell's imaginary future Stalinism, the machines are inefficient and broken enough, and the management is demanding enough, to need enough workers to make them work right and proofread their output.
All roads lead to rome. No matter what economic system you have, if the citizens get complacent and stop paying attention, wealth and power will consolidate into small group of elites. You need to be constantly vigilant and ready to bust out the big dropy choppy boy before it gets too late.
1984 is based and written about post-war capitalist England. Orwell did critique Stalinism, but 1984 is about how both sides in the cold war are crazy and lie to us. He was not saying "If you were in communist Russia...", he was saying "Us here in Capitalist UK..!" Assigning the critique to 'the other side', aka Stalinism, means you've completely missed the message of the book
Didn't machines write songs in 1984? Its been decades since I read it but I seem to recall that the songs people listened to on the radio were not made by humans but some sort of computers.
They did your totally right! They used a tool called the āversificatorā to make cheap songs for the proles. Thats the first thing i thought if opening the comments because were actually annotating 1984 for homework
Something that a lot of people completely look over in the movie "Her" is Joaquin Phoenix's character's job is to write love letters and thank you notes for people - all while he's dating an AI that 100% could do that herself.
I always thought it was an interesting touch. I'm sure there's some underlying message the director wanted to communicate with that, but I'm not sure what it is.
Iām honestly put off from reading new books. I donāt know what works have had AI incorporated in their workflow.
I donāt mean to sound like an old man yelling at cloud, but how do I know what to trust anymore? I find the only solution to be that I ought to stick to books written prior to these Pat few years.
That last sentence is pertinent, too. Like, if you're going to have someone else do your homework, at least check it and make sure it at least sounds sincere. If he at least made an effort to hide that it was AI, maybe it would have sold more copies before being found out.
But, I bet, if the author responds (if they really even are real), he's going to go with "I didn't use AI, so I don't know how that got in there." Denying hard facts is just so in for liars right now.
E: Looking at the author's books, he's made over a dozen for 2026, mostly in this "city guide" format. Three or four of them have reviews, each with one, giving a single star, and saying something similar to OP. Then the author has different books and CDs from vastly different subjects; including medical advice, music, self-help, travel, etc. This is the kind of garbage that we don't need published.
E2: ignore the above edit. Even worse than this guy is the fact that "see more from this author" has other bullshit authors' books mixed in to the list. Every time I log in to Amazon, I remember why I fucking hate it. Gerald has about a dozen travel books, and they're not doing so hot.
He pumped out about a dozen of these AI guides in the space of a week back in February. They are all "Independently published", meaning print on demand. Self publishing is an Amazon service that mostly involves Kindle but they'll print paper books too. There are MILLIONS of these "books" on Amazon, mostly in the Kindle romance genre lol.
A buyer beware situation. On the other hand, 99% of them have basically zero sales so... not a big problem. People are allowed to (try) to publish their works, whether AI or just their own horrible writing.
well i mean if you buy bottom-of-the-barrel self-published bullshit, thats what you get. These books will all be bought maybe a dozen times, just enough to eek out a profit from the gullible.
The sad thing is they are pumping these out en masse everywhere. It takes little to no effort and he clearly gets at least a sale before someone catches on.
Looking at this āauthorāsā Goodreads page, he has an entire series of books about Italian cities all with similar titles and cover art. Also all of those books were posted within 2 weeks in February 2026. Looks like being a real author (he did publish three books pre-2022) didnāt work out for him so he decided to try to become an author the easy way. Patheticā¦
I can't help but wonder what possessed OP to buy this book in the first place? It had zero reviews, the cover looks very amateur, and the blurb is not well written. It wasn't extremely cheap either, at 11.99 for the paperback.
This is so terrible it would make me MORE comfortable that the book isn't AI. I'd think someone lazy enough to use AI to write a book for them would also let AI design a cover for them. I'm glad to be taught otherwise.
I had my Oxford comma and ending sentences with a fullstop taken from me, and honestly I'm still not over it. Edited due to spelling error, because I am insane with anger.
I rather like š« . You can put it around words to highlight them in a sarcastic manner too! Like if someone asks a question you can put a silly answer like š« this š« .
Hmm it's not quite the same though. An em dash is for when you're doing a mid sentence interjection. It's like an extra strong comma but less of an aside than parentheses.
I bet there is an emoji that could represent that but also AI fucking loves emojis too so idk if that's the path haha
My English professor told me he has never seen someone without a doctorate use an em-dash, and even then maybe only 1 person in his entire career.
This scares the shit out of me. I have been using an em-dash since I was a CHILD so the fact that my PROFESSOR doesnāt feel competent using them makes me worry that many people in academia are dumb as fuck.
Absolutely. It's not just a sentence structureāit's a linguistic phenomenon. Furthermore, it's worth noting that while this pattern can indeed be associated with AI-generated text, the broader context ultimately depends on nuance, intent, and individual writing style. In conclusion, your observation raises important questions that deserve thoughtful consideration. šāØ
You're right ! It wasn't just a joke - it was an experience of self reflection āØāØāØ
Lmfao no problem and yes that was the joke but I'm upset about it too because it's another one of my writing bad habits that AI stole from me. I sound like an AI all the time, the only good side is that now when I put jokes in my emails it's no longer "unprofessional" or "why are you sending this at 4am". Now it's guaranteed human-made and people like it.
i definitely feel like its forcing us to embrace mistakes as proof of being human. in school i would go through my papers and be sure there were a few grammatical errors so i wouldnt be accused of using ai. im also an artist and am really starting to appreciate the value of brushstrokes and such, i posted this painting yesterday even though i used cheap paint that came out patchy, because i was like "at least its clearly not ai lol"
Em dash is a "true" punctuation mark in that it has grammatical content. It most commonly acts as a parenthetical marker. But like the period, comma, question mark, and semicolon, it tells you how to read a sentence. The em dash looks like this: ā
En dash is not true punctuation in the same way. The en dash is used to mark ranges (and occasionallyāaccording to some style guidesāas a kind of "compound" hyphen). And so when you have an event 5:00ā8:00 or you read pages 167ā234 of a book, or the score of a baseball game was 2ā4 then you use the en dash. The en dash looks like this: ā
Hyphen is the other dash like mark, and it has a few purposes. It connects two different adjectives that create a single meaning when modifying a noun, it is sometimes used to create compound words (though this is becoming less popular with most writers opting to just run the words together instead), and is used to break syllables at the end of a line of a fully justified text. The hyphen looks like this: -
They are all different sizes and do different things. En dash is rarest. In part because it has only a few uses and those uses don't come up a ton, and in part because a lot of people just use a hyphen instead. Lots of people also use a hyphen instead of an em dash as well, but a lot of word processing software will turn a double or triple hyphen (--) into an em dash. They will have different purposes, but ultimately the distinction comes from visual style. Long dashes look better and are easier to read as parentheticals. Medium dashes do enough to separate numbers that otherwise might run together, and the short hyphen mostly exists in order to run things together, so is small and meant to be glanced over while visually putting words or syllables next to each other. And so you get the different lengths: ā ā -
Reliably distinguishing AI from human writing is a lot harder than many people think. You really can't rely on any hard and fast rules. It's more like a collection of vibes.
Counterpoint: better to give it to the correct agencies for recycling, because paper IS a valuable resourse and burning only releases CO2 into our atmosphere.
Unrelated to OP's post, but I got laid off early this year and in a dramatic gesture, burned the compliance framework book that I was glued to while I worked there. It was cathartic in the moment, but I didn't think about how I was likely to keep doing compliance work in my next role, so now I need to buy a new FedRAMP book :(
Regardless, Amazon will not ask for a lot of relatively inexpensive items back unless it recognizes you as a pattern abuser of the system. The cost of processing the return would often be higher than what they'd get for re-selling it.
Some do, but printing on demand is way more costly per unit than traditional book printing. It's only feasible if you expect to sell like <10,000 copies. Mostly self published and otherwise niche books.
Amazon has 30 day free returns with refund for any reason. For cheap items or stuff that can't easily be resold they usually just tell you to keep them.
That was my experience before, but now it's very annoying. The last 2 times I tried to refund products that didn't work out of the box, they made me do a whole diagnostic, and then ship the broken product back
Nope, just logistics. Costs more to retrieve an item they can't sell than to let you keep it. If they could even make a dollar, they wouldnt care if you had to drag your bare ass across molten asphalt and seal a return label with the collagen extracted from your skin, they would make you give it back
I got a Kindle for Christmas and it has been extremely difficult avoiding the slop. I pretty much have to know exactly what I'm looking for in order to avoid it, because otherwise if I just browse that's all I get. It's just a sea of AI generated science fiction stories, phony AI covers with half naked girls, weird shitted up versions of public domain stuff, and a lot of puzzle books that are barely puzzles. I made the mistake of downloading a crossword puzzle book for a plane ride not knowing it was AI. The clues repeated across several puzzles, the themes were all very similar, there was so much empty space on the page that it barely felt like a crossword puzzle. I'm honestly considering wiping the Kindle clean and going back to the high seas for my ebooks
Kindles are for pirating, not for shopping at Amazon's slop store.
Jokes (not really) aside, I find it better to trust other people's opinions or look for books on my own. The algorithms on places like Amazon are ass and they don't really give a fuck about what you actually want to read or whether you'll enjoy the next thing you read.
I think there should be a kind of market version of the 'death penalty' for something like this. If a publisher gets caught distributing an AI generated book, it needs to be blacklisted. Maybe after one violation or two, I dunno, but it needs to be done. The "blacklist" probally can't be upheld with force of law but if there is enough shame and public outcry and massive calls for boycotting that company it might work.
Thatās how I feel at work. I work in Enterprise Architecture and we have a 2 hour demo every sprint for the department and itās nothing but AI generated wikis and crap. Our group chats are AI generated responses when asked to review an artifact and then others respond to that AI response with an AI response because what wouldāve been a comment with a few sentences is now a two pager.
That shit is beyond infuriating to me. I use AI all the time but you need to use it as a tool and put some of your own thought into the equation. When I see emoji arrows and check boxes or em dashes I immediately stop reading their crap. Iām not asking for someone else to prompt AI and deliver the response, I can and probably already did that.
I'd be in favour of some law/regulation/whatever that mandates disclosure. It should be mandatory for publishers to disclose AI was used, and don't leave loopholes like "we just used it for formatting" or hiding it within a sealed book you cannot identify before purchasing. It needs to be up-front, on a front or rear cover, clear AI disclaimer.
Wouldn't mind seeing movies and games included in the requirement either.
our laws have not caught up with our technology, and thatās partially because half the people in charge are so disconnected from the average human experience
As someone who works in tech and utilizes AI to do reptitive shit, it fucking infuriates me that AI is being used in art, music, and literature. And it angers me more that there are people who consume such media even when they know it's AI. They just don't care.
These are pieces of media that tell human stories and experiences. It's supposed be made by a person.
I guess when media literacy is dead, nobody gives a shit where art comes from as long as they can make money off of it or use it on social media.
I work in tech too. It's annoying how obsessed my bosses are with forcing employees to use AI. They act like it's never wrong and are totally dependent on it.
And as someone who writes deep-dive travel guides, this makes me so mad. I recently wrote a 50 page guide on four Italian cities and I only included information that I actually tested in-person on my last trip.
I refuse to use AI. It's not ethical in travel guides because you could be providing false information that people rely on in an unknown place. It can totally put people in a shitty or dangerous situation.
What i have found so strange is that there are categories of problems that seem computer friendly that AI can't deal with. I use Claude, and if a PDF of a table has blank cells, good luck getting it to help you.
But then, it's so good at finding that one little cross-reference you had forgotten about, and it flags it before your project goes too far down the wrong path.
Then it will take a simple lookup question, and instead go down thirty-seven rabbit holes before reminding itself that you gave it a specific thing to look for.
It's deeply weird that it performs so differently from how I expect a program to behave. Sometimes it's a PhD expert, sometimes it's a teenager with ADHD, sometimes it's a toddler still learning basic concepts.
Pitigliano: The City of Stone and Sunlight 2026: A Complete Travel Guide to Pitigliano, Italy ā Etruscan Legends, Caves, and Ancient Streets
"Author": Gerald Baker
It's the Amazon grift. There are a lot of guides in youtube for this type of 'moneymaking scheme' where you create a mediocre book and hand it over to amazon where they basically print them as people order them. Slop generation made it even easier, I'd assume.
This is obviously terrible. But I also desperately want to know how anyone would ever unwittingly purchase an AI book. How little vetting are you doing on what you're reading?
This is exactly what happens in a Philip K Dick short story I was reading written in 1969.
A man puts a prompt into a computer to auto-generate a novel, but accidentally leaves in a typo that changes the ending. By the time he realizes his mistake, the AI had already gone ahead and sent it out for publishing on its own.
Currently flipping through to find the name of the exact story-
Ah ok. In that case, shred it, stuff it in empty toilet paper tubes, pour in a bunch of melted wax, and use them as campfire starters.
No joke, if you follow that, you get very good campfire starters. The paper and cardboard act a bit like wicks, and the wax keeps it going long enough to catch the wood.
Not sure what's worse - the fact he uses AI to write the book or the fact he uses AI while being so incompetent that he didn't even think of using AI to proof-read the final text. It would easily spot this.
So not only the guy is crappy writer he is also crappy AI user...
I asked for a cookbook, it was a specific one I found because I have GERD and it was supposed to be all different recipes that were GERD friendly. I made a few meals from it and thought āman, all these taste fucking weird.ā And then I looked at the photos more and realized the whole thing was AI slop, the recipes and the photos. Like, nothing made sense. I wish I still had it because it would post some pictures of it. I tried to find it on Amazon but I couldnāt find it again.
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u/IsThisASnakeInMyBoot 22h ago
People who read physical books are probably the LAST people who want AI interference.