!How to tell if a book is AI before you buy it!

This blog will be exactly as the title states, how to tell if a book is AI written or produced before you buy it. This will be applicable to buying physical books and books from online. I am writing this because I have accidentally spent about $45 USD total on AI books accidentally, and instead of burning them (yet) I will be analyzing them and their differences from human made and written books so that I can potentially help someone from making the same mistake I did.

I have purchased (accidentally) 2 books written by AI. Their titles are:

Ethiopian Orthodox Bible: Unveiling the Detailed History of the Oldest Surviving Bible with 88 Books Including the Apocrypha
Learn Polish: A Comprehensive Guide to Learning Polish for Beginners, Including Grammar, Short Stories, and 1000 Popular Phrases

Oh my god. How did I not realize.

NOTE- If you currently do not know how to differentiate generic AI writing patterns from human, please click this link here to read an article detailing methods to tell if something was written by AI. However, as plagiarists and their AIs get smarter users can simply input for their AI to not write with those tells. As much as it sucks, you may have to familiarize yourself with its writing patterns by reading AI generated content. Much of being able to tell comes with experience. Please research if you are able.

Okay, so one tell could be that the titles are ANNOYINGLY long. But there are several other tells you'll HAVE to keep an eye out for. I'll list them here.

1. The book will NOT have an author. Always, and I mean ALWAYS, check the book you are purchasing for a valid author. I don't know how advanced AI fraud has gotten in other areas, so you may need to verify the author actually exists and is not just a pen name for AI plagiarism.

2. There is no preface, no foreword, no acknowledgements page, no afterward page, no credits page, and no sources cited. In both of the AI books I have, they just have an introduction page. The writing style is very clearly AI, and the paragraphs are painfully standard length.

3. The text MAY be larger and farther spaced than is usually found. In the Ethiopian Bible book specifically, the text is too big. I have never picked up a book with text this large that was not labeled "Large Print" on the cover and the shelf it was on (For those of us in libraries and bookstores, however an online listing should still have the book labeled large print if it is so.).

4. It has a CONCLUSION page specifically, and nothing else IN conclusion. Unless you're reading an essay or a book of essays, human written books do NOT usually have conclusion pages. They will have afterwords, acknowledgements, credits, thank you pages, etc etc. Some books even have glossaries and indexes in the back. Even my Learn Polish book does not have any index, credits, or glossary pages, which is surprising as most language learning books and textbooks have those. I have a book specifically for the Ghanaian Dialect of Akan, Twi, and in the back of this book is a word list/Glossary for translation, an appendix for the symbols used in Twi and their meanings, and a references/resources page for the sources used in the book as resources available to the reader. Language learning books should always have these or adjacent. Depending what kind of book it is, if it is possible to check, look for resources and pages that are commonly in that type of book to see if they are actually there.

5. It will likely have an AI generated cover- It may be difficult to tell. AI has mastered some styles of text and meaningless background patterns, but oftentimes the cover will be clear AI generated images in a format that appears normal at first glance. The cover of the Ethiopian Bible book is definitely AI, the images make no sense and are just random gobbeltygook that appear to have some correlation to Christian history, I heavily suspect that the cover of the Polish book is AI, as I can't see a reason they'd AI generate the book but not the cover, but I can not tell definitively as it is just the title text and random blobs of color in the same colors as the Polish flag.

6. The publisher will have up to 1000's of books with no authors, it will often be obvious the publisher is pumping out books faster than any human could write them. You may have to check if the publisher has a website, or look at the online store of wherever you are purchasing a book, if there are (genuinely) HUNDREDS of listings with weirdly long titles and no credible authors then it's highly likely they're just spamming chat gpt with book titles and prompts.

Thank you for reading this far, I hope this will be of use to some people. If anybody has anything they'd like to add, please comment it and I will add it to this page. This may be subject to edit as AI is always getting smarter and there may be new tells as old ones grow unreliable. I was infuriated to realize these books were AI, I was using the Polish one to study admittedly for about 2 months before I realized. I honestly didn't even think to check, and skimming through the lessons and specific lists of info wasn't enough until I noticed the painful writing pattern in the ending paragraph of a lesson. Please stay aware, and again, educating yourself is the best thing you can do to avoid falling for generative AI, in any and all it's forms. The best way for us to combat AI is to keep creating, people who truly love art and creation will always exist and it's our job as creators and artists to never crack under the pressure and corporation creation has become. Art matters, and for those of you scared AI may completely overtake the art scene, it wont. Historically, humans have NEVER shut up about the things that irk them, and one thing that irks creators is AI. Sometimes the negative narrative is blasted louder than the positive, but that's okay because at the end of the day any one of us can buy a megaphone on Ebay.

Published by jupidupi02

!How to tell if a book is AI before you buy it!

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