The lack of real effort bothers me more than the content itself. We can't be bothered to even proofread children's books anymore?

the lack of effort has been the main thing for me since this all started. you give people a tool to do something easier and instead of doing more WITH the tool they do this instead. is anyone out there using AI to make more higher quality children's books than were possible before?

As the other commenter here says, I suspect whoever did skim through found it amusing. Besides, it's not like this genre was particularly accurate anyway --- I have some old purely-manual-human examples of "how things work" books which distort, exaggerate, or grossly simplify for illustrative purposes.

Alternate theory: It's a best seller because it's so goofy. Much like brainrot and Dr Seuss.

The lack of effort is the point. This is the equivalent of SEO spam, meant to extract money from the ecosystem by crowding out books that earned their position in the marketplace.

The difference is that multimodal generative AI lets you can crank you SEO spam-style content across all types of media, at almost any scale.

Because openai and other ai companies spend billions convincing people that they dont need to put in effort as long as they use AI. They literally think they are interacting with a hyperintelligence that is so smart it will destroy the planet eventually. Why would you spellcheck a digital god? Why not just push straight to publish and "automate" everything.

Over time, i hope the chickens come to roost.

The lack of effort is the point. The intent is to automate the entire pipeline and churn out huge numbers of these for whatever the top selling topic of the week is.

These are not made by people who care. It’s a scam basically. Spamming Amazon with slop is a current hustle culture thing. There’s guides, probably AI generated and not proofread, explaining how to do it. They obviously have tricks to game the rankings since these books get recommended like mad in every category.

It’s today’s hot successor to the big drop shipping craze, which is also still happening, and has destroyed Etsy. That was another hustle culture thing. I remember hearing something about it being one of the get rich scams Andrew Tate was teaching at his thing.

You could use AI to help make a good book like this, but you would proofread and fact check it and sit there and converse with the AI and tell it all the stuff to fix… just like vibe coding.

I assume these aren't being published by major publishing houses but rather microbrands and print-on-demand services. They're, like, bypassing gatekeepers and democratizing knowledge, man. Why do you hate freedom so much?