What the Hell Is This?

By -
I was looking up my new book on Amazon tonight to send a friend the link, and ran across this:

Whatever it is, it costs $40. Down in little letters in the bottom left, you'll note it is "High quality content by Wikipedia articles."

So apparently, AI has gotten to the point where Wikipedia articles are now able to write books themselves.

But really, please tell me that someone is not printing out the four paragraphs on me at Wikipedia and then charging people $40 for the printout. Because that would be really slimy.

Comments

  1. Otto Kerner7:16 PM

    For sure, that's what they're doing. Wikipædia's license allows commercial use.

    I started that article a number of years ago, so I may be the person second-most qualified to be annoyed by this development.

    ReplyDelete
  2. gcallah4:10 PM

    Hey, thanks Otto!

    So these people are going to put one piece of paper between two covers and ship it to you for $40?

    Awful.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Libertarians, My Libertarians!

By -
Cruel to be kind means that I love you . Because, while I think you are mistaken, your hearts are in the right place -- yes, even you, Silas --  unlike some people . This Breitbart fellow (discussed in the link above), by all appearances, deliberately doctored a video of Shirley Sherrod to make her remarks appear virulently racist, when they had, in fact, the opposite import. I heard that at a recent Austrian conference, some folks were talking about "Callahan's conservative turn." While that description is not entirely inaccurate, I must say that a lot of these people who today call themselves conservative give me the heebie-jeebies.
Read more

"Pre-Galilean" Foolishness

By -
 I am currently reading The Master and His Emissary , which appears to be an excellent book. ("Appears" because I don't know the neuroscience literature well enough to say for sure, yet.) But then on page 186 I find: "Asking cognition, however, to give a perspective on the relationship between cognition and affect is like asking astronomer in the pre-Galilean geocentric world, whether, in his opinion, the sun moves round the earth of the earth around the sun. To ask a question alone would be enough to label one as mad." OK, this is garbage. First of all, it should be pre-Copernican, not pre-Galilean. But much worse is that people have seriously been considering heliocentrism for many centuries before Copernicus. Aristarchus had proposed a heliocentric model in the 4th-century BC. It had generally been considered wrong, but not "mad." (And wrong for scientific reasons: Why, for instance, did we not observe stellar parallax?) And when Copernicus propose
Read more