Name: Nighty Night Cat Tales (Nighty Night Tales)
Rating: 2.9 (1 reviews)

Marc *Dark Reader with a Thousand Young! Iä!*

1,511 reviews314 followers

September 3, 2024

Parents, please don't let your children read books written by ChatGPT, like this one.

(If you want to skip the rant, scroll down to where I mock the book's nightmare-fuel hallucinatory A.I. "illustrations". That will be the fun part.)

I know you wouldn't do that knowingly. That's what makes this book, every other book in this "series" of "Nighty Night [insert animal] Tales", and every other book produced by this person, a scam, a trick, a lie. If they said up front, "Hey, this was written using ChatGPT (or equivalent), illustrated by Midjourney (or equivalent) and I think it's remotely readable (it's not), check it out," that would be one thing. But the book's origins are intentionally withheld.

I can tell you with 100% confidence that everything about this person's published material is generated by A.I. The text, the cover images, any interior illustrations, the "about the author" sections (not an author), all spit out by generative A.I. large language models and image generators, trained on the work of countless uncompensated and unrecognized actual creative people.

How can you tell? Once you've identified similar output as A.I.-generated, you'll never mistake it again. It starts with the cover art, with that shiny-smooth art style that yields all sorts of weird details on close examination. Human figures look creepy as shit, background details are all kinds of messed up. If you're not sure, look for an illustration credit; there won't be one, because no one drew anything.

Next, the text. When directed to create a story for children, these large language models produce soulless prose full of unwarranted superlatives, sickeningly saccharine emotion, repetition of words that no human writer would ever use at such frequency; an overwritten, cheesy tone; and a tendency to expand on every statement to over-describe its supposed significance.

The storytelling is equally vapid and shockingly bad. Every story in this collection is basically this:

Smoochy the animal loved a thing. Everyone became so excited. They played with the thing and had a magical adventure. Uh oh, another animal is grumpy about you having fun. "Stop having fun!" "Go away," Smoochy says. "Fine," the grump says. Smoochy and his friends had an amazing adventure full of excitement, saying, "This was the best day ever!"

Seriously, that is every story in this book. I downloaded it during a free promotion to give it the full thing a fair shake, and by Crom it's a nightmare. This is so much worse even than the most irritating, banal, cheaply-animated, adult-repelling preschool TV shows you've ever had the misery to encounter.

Unfortunately, not everyone can tell. "Books" like these do get some positive reviews, some of them honest reviews, even. Taste and perception varies, it is what it is. There are plenty of human-authored books that I would rail up and down as travesties of literature that others will enjoy without judgement. But if you told those people ahead of time that a book was written by ChatGPT, would they still choose to read it? Would they enjoy it as much if they knew? Someone will have to do a controlled experiment.

Look, I'm not saying this book is written by ChatGPT. The "author" is saying it.

I hope to write 1,440 books over the next 12 years, crafting 10 books a month for the next 12 years to secure a Guinness World Record.

That's three days for each book. Go ahead, write a book, any kind of readable 200 page book, in 3 days. Do you think even Stephen King is capable of this? This "author" has indeed released 110 "books" on Amazon between in the past 9 months. Every one of them A.I.-produced in full and then wrongly formatted, in the usual shitty self-published manner of un-indented paragraphs separated by line breaks.

The actual Guinness record holder for most prolific author is Ryoki Inoue, a Brazilian author who has published over 1000 books since 1983. That's something like 15 days per book, for reportedly slim pulp fiction. Who believes this guy out of nowhere decided to start writing and immediately quintupled the writing speed of someone with decades of experience?

Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe this person, by sheer coincidence, writes (like a mad fiend) in the exact same miserable, empty, soul-sucking style, indistinguishable from that used by every one else in the last year and at no prior time in history (ChatGPT became public in November 2022, and in late 2023 a glut of A.I-produced books started flooding online book markets) whose books also happen to sport covers that sure look like they were created by A.I. That's probably it: it's all just a massive coincidence. It's just become a common style to insanely overuse terms like "with excitement" (multiple times every single goddamn story in this series), "a tapestry of so and so", "ethereal", "resolve", and the like. (For an example, see my Kindle highlights from this book: https://www.goodreads.com/notes/21756... ) The specific word cloud depends on the genre and some garbage A.I.-prompt writers are removing the commonly cite tells to try and make the source less recognizable, but oh my god the schmaltzy repetition and flawed storytelling in this book is beyond belief.

But let's continue with my obviously correct assumption that this is all A.I. product. What is the point of all of it? Perhaps some people who put up "books" like this for sale are proud of their "creations." I don't see what there is to be proud of, but whatever. But mostly it must be to try to make money. And unless the person is upfront about using A.I., they are attempting to make money by tricking people, the people who don't recognize such "books" for what they are.

Similarly, what is the point of purchasing Goodreads Giveaways and free Amazon promotions and Facebook promotions for these "books"? That's a lot of money, time and effort to spend if it's really just to get the "books" out there, share them with the world, but if pride in having A.I. create a book-like thing is the goal, I'd say you're better off pooping in the potty and having mommy exclaim what a big boy you are. More likely I expect the goal is to generate reads and reviews and subsequent interest in the "books" with the hope this will lead to organic sales. Will this lead to profit? Crom, I hope not, but I fear it might. Many of this author's books have a not-terrible Amazon sales rank, so someone is buying them. And even more terrifying: so many of these "books" are aimed at children.

Shudder.

I love my children. I have read, and will continue to read to them a lot, and encourage them to read as much as I can. I want them to have books that will inspire and elate them, expand their inner worlds, spark curiosity and intelligence and emotion. I am blessed to have ready access to great works of literature, past and present, for children, teens, and adults, and I find joy in sharing these with my loved ones. I want them to discover books that expand their horizons and help them develop compassion and a love of humanity. I cried while reading to my boy at bedtime last night because of the moving book content and my hopes for his life experiences. That was a real, actual, worthy book. If I tried to read this A.I. book to him I would vomit instead.

When a child is given an A.I.-produced "book", they receive something soulless, something devoid of meaning, of artistry, of human connection. Something no one put actual love or dedication or artistry or hard work into creating. And it shows! These "books" are shit, and they convey shit to the reader. They are a waste of reading time and leave us all worse off, even when it's no immediately obvious. They teach mediocrity and falsehood. They contribute nothing of value. And people are being tricked into buying them.

And now the "illustration" gallery. Children should avert their eyes: