Behind the Bastards - Part One: AI Is Coming for Your Children

Episode Date: June 20, 2023

Robert sits down with Ben Bowlin to talk about the flood of AI-generated children's books con-artists are putting on Kindle. Not only are they off-putting and bad, they might represent a serious threat to literacy itself. https://shatterzone.substack.com/ You can now listen to all Cool Zone Media shows, 100% ad-free through the Cooler Zone Media subscription, available exclusively on Apple Podcasts. So, open your Apple Podcasts app, search for “Cooler Zone Media” and subscribe today! http://apple.co/coolerzoneSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Welcome back to Behind the Bastards, a podcast that is, it's a podcast, you know, what do you want? That's honesty and advertising. Can't argue with that. It is a podcast. I'm Robert Evans, your host, and I didn't think of a funny introduction for this episode.

So pretend I shouted atonally or screamed out the name of a dead dictator and let's welcome our guest for the episode. So pretend I shouted atonally or screamed out the name of a dead dictator and let's welcome our guest for the episode. Ben Bola. Ben if you could scream and get your name, that would be most appreciated. Yeah, one of the hard to pronounce ones. Yeah, go for it. Oh, okay. Uh, wow, that's that's definitely, uh, oh, there's so many good ones. So, okay, Matt mood, I'm a jajad. Oh, I've mentioned a jajad, I think. I've been a jajad. You're right.

There you go. See, this is why you're the host, Robert. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, that's an interesting one, right? Because he wasn't, I don't know how you, yeah, characterize exactly what he was, but he's become a darling of Twitter since his time as the leader of Iran, which is always fun as the air quotes leader. Yeah, yeah, wild stuff.

I do love like the every now and then you're like this guy who had a very different vibe, you know, when he first came to my awareness via media is now like a completely different person and a lot of people's eyes because he like went after Donald Trump on Twitter. Always funny. Ben, how do you feel about AI? Not the movie with Haley Joel Osmond. Oh, well, okay, well, all my notes are trash then because I thought we were talking about this. Okay. I did say prepare for an episode on AI and then send you 37 pictures of jiggle. Oh, so yeah. And thank you.

Thank you. I'm framing those, Robert. I'm framing those. Yeah. Oh, I get to give a shout out to a lot of folks, ethicist working in the field, who are asking about the nature of consciousness and why the term AI is somewhat problematic, like what makes an intelligence artificial. But when I hear AI, if I'm most people, what I'm thinking is, ooh, I should have studied math.

Numbers are scary. Yeah, I've been, so I've been kind of digging into this as a new beat for myself as a reporter, as we'll introduce today, like there's some stuff I've kind of gotten sucked into here. And as I've kind of talked to more people who are on the technical side of things here, I'm gaining both a deeper appreciation for how complex this stuff is. There's been a lot that sort of, you've got this mix of like incredibly dense

academic papers and kind of the commentary of people who are actually working with the nuts and bolts of this stuff and not trying to pump up the price of the IPO valuation of their company. Then you've got the hype cycle, which is very different. The people who are talking about how models are constructed and what the ideal size for the models might be and how the capabilities will change as they sort of ramp up or ramp down the scale. Talk about the potential problems like model collapse and whatever versus the people who are like,

an AI is going to take control of all the nukes. No, no, this isn't just me stealing the plot of Terminator 2 in order to like hype up the power of the product my company is making. I swear Z's, it's real. Swear Z's. That's how you know it's legit. That is some actual nomenclature used in the halls of power. Swear Z's. Yeah, and I think you can always trust when a bunch of people with a vested financial interest in making their AI products seem extra powerful,

recite the plot of Terminator 2 to you, as if it's serious business. So as we've kind of led into, the internet is a wash right now and kind of cheap takes on what AI means for the future. On one hand, you've got these kind of terminator refears. The best example of this recently was vice put out this very dumb article that was like a military AI killed its creator because it was trying to stop it from launching

a missile. And everyone was like, oh my god, there's, you know, we have to stop this. And then it turns out, well, actually what happened is like a bunch of human beings were sitting around a table like kind of plotting out things that might happen if they ever built one of these. And someone was like, well, what have you did this? And like that's all that happened. Like they were playing fancy D&D.

It's nothing to be scared of. Yeah, man. And it's like a war game, like a simulation, right? It's a planning out, a hypothetical unit. That's headline chicattery. And it's not even a simulation where they didn't even code a fake AI to test it as a simulation. They were literally just like bullshiting.

Nothing was built, which is not to say, I'm not concerned about the possibility of like AI, you know, involvement in weapons targeting and stuff and that kind of thing. Like there's a lot to be concerned about there, but not this article. And then kind of on the other end, on the positive end of the hype stuff, you've got like this, this growing chorus of people who are like certain that AI is going to save education and rescue students.

Bill Gates is like a big kind of, he's one of the big guys like kind of pushing this idea. I found a thing recently where he was like very excitedly talking about how open AI had taught a chatbot to pass an AP test and why this might mean something good for education. I'm kind of hesitant to say that I buy that just because I haven't really seen any evidence that like an AI is actually good at teaching people stuff, which is not to say I haven't seen evidence that there are uses for it in education potentially. But like I think people are getting a little bullish about this and kind of somewhere in between those two height peaks. You know, the robots are going to nuke us all or the robots are

going to replace teachers. Somewhere in between those two height peaks is a story I ran across a couple weeks ago about an author who wrote 97 books in nine months using chat GPT. Oh, no. Oh, no. Oh, no. I think I, oh, gosh. All right. I'm going to guess a lot of people came across this story. And it's one of those things. It sort of dropped in a bunch of different places like the, I think the post was one of them inside or was one of these kind of like low quality publications or publications that have recently sunk in quality significantly who are chasing SEO shit, right? And it, it's also kind of noteworthy to me

that like this story hit right as the writer's strike began. Like the writers go on strike and then there's this story about like, well this guy wrote almost a hundred books in less than a year, using chat GPT. You know, maybe we don't need all these writers. Now, if you actually look at this author quote unquote, with the most quotation marks around that word I can

possibly add, like a whole script that's just quotes around the word author there. Is a guy named Tim Boucher. And the reality, if you actually look into what he did here, he didn't write 97 novel using Chatchy PT. He had an AI generate like 97 stories, each about two to 5,000 words. And if you don't know how novels work, generally speaking kind of like the minimum word count before something's considered a novel

is about 50,000 words. It's like, and that's a short novel, right? You're talking about like, I don't know, old man in the sea style shit or something like that. I don't actually know how many words old man in the sea is, but like my silly book with robot, horny cyborgs and stuff was 120,000 words. So- Also, it's a really good book and people should read it. Thank you. That's very nice.

It's not a compliment. I'm objectively saying it's a good book. Well, thank you. I've read that because like he's not having it right novels. What he did was he had a turnout short stories, each with dozens and dozens of illustrations and then there's some like 50 or 60 in each story, which is also too many for a short story. Wait, it's Robert. Did he draw the pictures himself? He sure did not.

And we'll talk. So like, if you look at these, like I went to his web page, and thankfully one thing I will give Tim Boosher is it looks like he's put most of these on a personal web page, rather than dumping them all on Amazon, which is what we're wanting to talk about in a second.

But if you look at this shit, he's got like a bunch of different, like one of the stories is Occupy AI, which is described as like a story about protesters fighting cops because AI takes the jobs away or something like that. There's not like characters given or any kind of like sense of a narrative arc,

but the AI generated art for the cut of the cops like beating up people makes them look like the bad guys in space balls, and I do appreciate that. So that's good. So if you can show you the space balls illustration. Oh, holy smokes. Yeah, they ain't found shit.

So I don't have a lot of respect for Tim's story writing project, but I also don't think it's particularly harmful, right? Like other than that, you know, this guy got a bunch of news attention. His books are presumably geared towards adults or at least young adults, and I don't really think a lot of people are going to get swept up in it. But there's something, there is something sinister in the world of people using AI to generate stories. This is where we get into the meat of what we're actually going to be talking about this week because I have found myself doing some journalism again.

I don't do as much of that as I used to, but I kind of got, I fell down a rabbit hole over the last two weeks and I have been investigating something that I found really fucked up and scary. And the short of it is the robots are coming for your children. If you've got kids out there, there is a shady network of influencers and con men who are trying to warp your kids brain so that they can make a quick buck off of Amazon KDP, which is kind of direct publishing. So that's what we're fucking talking about today, because it's actually a serious problem that people should be aware about, and I haven't seen any real reporting on this.

I was keyed into this story when I ran across a Reuters article like two weeks ago about a boom in AI written e-books on Amazon, and the piece zooms in on this one-of-be author named Brett Schickler. Brett is a salesman from Rochester who heard that chat GPT could write stories. And he decided like he'd always wanted to be a writer, but he just like could never get anything down on the page. And he was like, well, maybe this will make it possible for me. He told Reuters the idea of writing a book finally seemed possible. I thought I can do this. Unfortunately, the book he put out is that so funny. I can do this by not asking.

It's so sad when you learn what he wrote because his book is the why is little squirrel, a tale of saving and investing. It's a guide to financial literacy Oh, it's a guy to fight the actual literacy through the eyes of Sammy the squirrel. And I'll say this, everything we're about to talk to on this episode is much worse than the wise little squirrel, because I will give him credit for one thing. He shicklers, like Brett has a thing he wants to get across to people. I'm not, I don't think he's done it well. I don't think this is the right way to teach kids, kids financial literacy is to have like a robot generate a story about a squirrel

so they learn how to invest. But he actually seems to care about like transmitting information to kids, which is well-only person who does. Yeah, so I'll give him some credit for that. I'll also give him some credit for the fact that the cover of his book It doesn't look good like this doesn't look like a real book. I wouldn't say

But there's nothing like inherently off-putting or terrifying about the squirrel drawing on the I don't I don't know man. I don't know Robert. So if you find it unsettling Well, there's the other there's the other animalling? Well, there's the other animal there in the background. Which one? There's two? That bear. Oh, there are two. Wait, where's the other? In the trees.

In the trees. Oh, yeah, yeah. And, you know, the perspective is pretty fucked on that chipmunk. Yeah, I don't buy it. I don't buy the perspective here. And where did they get that acorn? We don't know.

The acorn's massive. The acorn is bigger than the bear? Well, that's just because the bear is further away. But the acorn is at least the same size as the squirrel's torso. Which I think might be maybe the subtext here is that the acorn is inherited wealth and the squirrel. whereas the squirrel in the tree behind him kind of represents the working class. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Who has no a corn, right? Because the inherited wealth of our, anyway, whatever, I don't know. Why am I, why am I doing this?

So you nailed it. You nailed it, man. Brett's book, which is available paperback only, that's another thing I'll give him credit for, because the stuff that's actually really grifty is all being done on Kindle, is currently about 30,000, number 30,000 in literature and fiction for children. One thing that does show is that like, that sounds really low. That's not terrible, right? Like given the number of books that are on Amazon. It's not like a runaway success I think that this is like probably because there was a bunch of news stories around this right because it was it's kind of the first

AI children's book to go viral It's not again any good, but I don't I don't see the harm that, like, what we're about to be talking about is like a bunch of people who have done this in a much more harmful direction. So this story kind of got me looking into what other people were writing AI children's books. And part of why I thought to do this was late last year, I watched a documentary on the Folding Ideas YouTube channel. You're not aware of that folding ideas as a channel run by a researcher and a writer named

Dan Olson who I admire quite a lot. He's the guy who did that line go up documentary on NFTs that helped cause the NFT crash. He's very good at what he does and late last year he published an investigation into a group of Amazon con artists who like charge several thousand dollars so that they can teach people how to mass produce low quality books to have both read by voice actors for like audible books and to sell on Kindle through KDP, which is again Kindle direct publishing. And it's one of those things where like they're promising they have all these lured stories about like you can make tens of thousands of dollars

in a few weeks. This is they really, they're called the Michelson twins, the particular folks he's investigating. And they brag a lot about like, how little effort it takes to do this, you have to do very almost no work whatsoever. And it's one of those, like they're basically just having people look through to see what's selling on Amazon, create topics, and then hire some ghost writer, pay him a couple hundred bucks to write a full book in two weeks, three weeks, something like that, and then find

a voice actor and put it up. And these books, like they're nonsense in a lot of cases. Like he was, I think the book that Dan put together is kind of like a thought exercise was about using self hypnosis to deal with epilepsy or something. So a lot of really irresponsible topics, all that sort of stuff. But the topics, what matters is not like what you're actually trying to get out. It matters that like what you're having these ghost writers write include keywords that correspond to popular searches on Amazon, right?

It's an SEO scam. I read about this. I read about this because Robert the immediate question is, why are these guys now selling this trick, right, this grift that they have exhausted, right? Like, why did they move to the next grift? It's very interesting. You know, I wonder if they're next thing's going to be self-help books.

Yeah, I think that like, there were already some sort of in that topic that they're putting out. I think mostly what it is is that like, you can make money doing this. Your goal basically is to trick people looking for real books on similar subjects into buying your books because it's kind of hard to tell on Kindle and they may, if you just are putting enough stuff out there, the sheer number of people searching means that you'll make sales. If it doesn't take that much work, if you get a couple hundred sales, it can be worth

it. This is not an easy path, like actually an easy path to making a lot of money, which is why the real business is in conning the people who think that they'll make money off of this and getting them to pay you several thousand dollars to teach them all this crap. Dan in his video calls these people contrapreneurs, which is a clever bit of wordplay.

But I do think the term actually kind of misses something important. Because the con, well the con is Dan is talking about. The con that he is unraveling is that like, this is not actually a great business. It's hard for people to really make money. They are lying to folks about how profitable this is so that they can take their money.

And that is true, That is a con. But there's an actual outside harm aside from this con because the people they're conning are not just passive robes. They're trying to unethically make a quick buck. So to some extent, I'm like, I don't have a huge problem with who they're conning necessarily. But what I do have a real issue with is that the byproduct of the cons they're running is that the largest bookstore on the planet gets filled with thousands and thousands and thousands of nonsense titles that aren't real stuff that you're looking for that's of quality on various topics. I've had to deal with this a few times with bastards where I'm looking for books on niche subjects

and I find something that seems to be about it but it turns out it's like one of these crap books. It's like someone's at best paraphrased a Wikipedia entry or something. Is it that prolific though? Like what? What? Thousands and thousands of times.

Really? I have actually reached out to Amazon for comment on like how many AI titles they have in their library and how they, like the degree to which or whether or not they do anything to attempt to like figure out which titles or AI or not. Like I have, I've asked them a couple of questions on that about their plagiarism filters and stuff. I haven't heard back yet. And if I do all update this, I'll record an update for you. Surely they can just create a large language model that will respond to your insightful questions in novel form. Yeah, that would at least be a response.

So far, I haven't gotten anything from them because I think they're following the Elon Musk root of just ignoring any questions from media because there's a lot of money. They make money anytime people upload the shit and anytime it sells. So like, they're never problem with con men putting fake books up on the site. And it's one of those things. Again, when I watched this video by Dan, I was like, well, this is an interesting con. I think what's happening here is kind of unsettling. And then, you know, the late, like the AI explosion happened, right?

And suddenly this con gets supercharged because the main barrier to entry and barrier to production and profitability and the old way of doing things is the ghost writing. These people, the original version of this con, you're hiring a human being to ghost write a fake book for you, basically, right? And a human being can only write 50,000ish words so fast, even if all they're doing is like paraphrasing a bunch of Wikipedia and news articles, right? There's a hard limitation on how many of these can get written, and it's going to cost

money because even people who will do this very cheaply won't do it for nothing. Whereas chat GPT and other large language models will write thousands of words for you for effectively nothing. As soon as I read this story about this this children's book and thought back to Dan's video, I was like, oh shit, I bet this is causing I bet this is causing like a massive surge in crap getting posted onto Amazon Kindle. And it's unfortunately like more unsettling than I had initially thought because with this early scam, with like these ghost

writing scams, the books tend to be like aimed towards adults, right? You're trying to get adults who might be looking for a topic or something to buy your book. But it's hard to get chat GPT to write a whole proper nonfiction book. Like getting it to write a 50,000-ish word book is almost impossible unless you do a bunch of really messy sort of like prompt tricks, which is why all of Tim Boucher's books were a couple of thousand words long. But children's books are a very different story because children's books, if you have gone through books for little kids, for toddlers or whatever, they're heavy on illustrations, there's an illustration every page, and there's often

just a couple of sentences or a paragraph of text per page, which is exactly the kind of length that chat GPT and other LLMs are perfectly capable of reproducing, right? So the places you'll go. Exactly, exactly. And the places you're going to go are like directly into the recursive loop of, of slop feeding through, you know, an LLM, um, which is what the investigation we're talking about is this week. Because as soon as I start type, I started typing in like a how to write AI children's

books and shit, my YouTube search revealed video after video with titles like Easy AI Money. Make 100K writing children's books with chat GPT and mid-journey. And easy, passive income with chat GPT and mid-journey, creating children's books. Now I watched way too many of these fucking videos, all of which lay out the same basic strategy.

The first step is to pick a prompt. An actual author might be to decide, for example, I want to teach children about the importance of conservation, with a cautionary tale about the thoughtless capitalization of natural resources. Right? That's the lore axe. Or one of my favorite books is a kid. I want to write a book about a bat raised by birds that kind of shows kids that bats are beautiful and complex creatures, and not just spooky set dressings for vampire stories, that's Stella Luna, right?

Those are examples of things human beings might try to transmit to children through like actual human created children's books. But chatbots and grindset influencers are both incapable of feeling things or of wanting to transmit their feelings to others, right? Like, you've got people who are effectively soulless using a robot that is effectively soulless in order to try and transmit messages to children. And that gets dark pretty quickly, Ben. But you know what's not dark? Oh, is it goods and services? Yeah, the products and services that support this podcast. I don't

know if you're aware of this, Ben. None of them are, you know, we have one, we take one promise from our advertisers, don't be evil. Dot, dot, dot, unless it makes a lot of money. Here are ads unless you have cooler zone media are ad free subscription channel available on Apple podcasts. Which is the most ethical way to consume this. I mean, it is true that every time you get a cooler zone media subscription, Raytheon fires a mafric missile at a school bus in a foreign country, but we are working to fix that. Yeah. That's a good one. Not an intent. Yeah. That's a glitch.

Yeah. I heard that every time someone subscribes to two cool zoe media, they get a little coupon. And if we get enough coupons, we can finally subtract a day from Henry Kissinger's life. I don't know which day. Yeah. I don't know if it's the last one or the last. Hopefully one of the days he ordered bombings and Cambodia. You know, I'm clear it's going to take all of us.

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or wherever you get your podcasts. Oh, we're back. So the process been of picking a topic for an AI kids book is mechanical and bleak. It starts with a trip to the Amazon sales rankings. People use extensions like Book Bolt, which show which topics are selling well. And it's kind of a mix of the videos that I found pointed out that like you want stuff that's reasonably high up on the lists and has a good number of reviews, but you also don't want it to have too many reviews. The most successful AI kid's books will only sell sell dozens or maybe a hundred or so copies.

And so they kind of, like, a lot of the people making these videos will disguise that by showing you, like, sales calculation apps where they plug in books by actual human beings to, like, be like, you can make $32,000 a month, you know, just like this guy who wrote this, you know, storybook or whatever, that's a bestseller did. Which you're not going to like actually do if you're really doing this for a business. But one of the creators that I watched kind of put together, one of these guys is called the Zine Studio. They advocate copying the premises of real kids books that have several hundred

reviews, but less than a thousand. They've like worked this out to a science where like, if there's more than a thousand reviews, you're going to get lost in the mix, right? It's the stories are too big. So like, whatever you put out isn't going to break through. But if they've got a couple of hundred reviews, that's enough that like, you know, there's a lot of interest, but also you have a good chance that while your books new, if you can get a couple of early sales, you can you can juke it up the spots. There's also a strategy for price points. They note that like Amazon pays 70% in royalties.

If your books 299 to 999, but if it's cheaper than that, they only pay out like half as much. So you're in the wrong business. Yeah. Yeah. We are in the wrong business. Yeah. We're in the wrong business. I cannot wait to read because this is like a dark side of cyborg philosophy, right? Yeah. Right? So like Robert, Sophie, let's get on the SEO.

Let's find a topic and let's have our evil Pandora, Jin kind of thing. Write us a little old man in the sea and just madlib, whatever the narrative is, right? I mean, I think the real answer been, because you and I both have hundreds of hours of our podcast. You know, there's ridiculous history and behind the bastards and everything else we've been on recorded. We feed all that and do an AI and then just like, look at what's trending on Twitter. And then we have an AI generate like six hours of you and me talking about how masks

don't work or something like that. Just like crap that stuff onto the internet. Whatever Joe Rogan talks about that week, we'll just generate an AI conversation between us about it. Tossin' like 15% Elon Musk, and then we retire. Yeah, yeah. What I also love about this first off

is the sincerity. And second off is the idea that nothing could go wrong at all. No, it won't like, I don't know, I feel like as long as, you know, we need one human being in there to keep a handle on things. So it can just be like an AI version of you and an AI version of me.

And then human Sophie is sitting there and like trying to, trying to control the robot conversation. As we start giving out like the ingredients for yelling night. Sound like a easier job. So, yeah, Sophie, it sounds like you're cool with that, right? Yeah, no, I could never replace Robert with a robot. Yeah, you could. I mean never replace Robert with a robot. Yeah, you could.

I mean, it would be a raw robot. You know, they got that like that AI sign-feld where it's just like a never-ending mediocre sign-feld episode. We could slip Sophie and that too, make you moderate AI brainless sign-feld. So this will be well, because you know, we're keeping things interesting, right? The problem is that behind the bastards is an important and profound at times show. Now I'm kidding. Some of us want to know. Yeah. Okay. All right. The problem is that behind the bastards is an important show.

So it might be too high on our SEO. We need to get some kind of spin-off thing that appears to be irrelevant, but works on a search term that is kicking it for Jeff Bezos, right? And then we just crap out hours of that. Obviously, this is behind the scenes, right? This is not going out live, right? Yeah, I think we call it the passive income diet hack cast with Robert Evans and Ben Bowling. That's that's our path to $67 million. I love how it's so brief and so snappy. There's a lot of immediacy.

Take that, Himmiemway. Yeah, stick pat, yeah, exactly for sale, ozimbick, never a drop shipped. I don't know. That's most of what you need in there. We got a free sally, do I like it? Yeah, yeah, it's good. So, yeah, this is kind of the process of like making these books start.

You use like these different extensions to kind of see what's selling, figure out a premise for yourself. And some creators will take this research and they'll like try to make an original premise for a children's book to feed into the AI. But most of them suggest just collecting, like they they're not even doing that for the most part. Most of these people suggest collecting keywords by like whatever's popular and then plugging those keywords into chat GPT and asking it to generate a story premise, which they then feed back to it to have a generator story, thus avoiding the risk that human creativity

might happen at any point in this process. The messy prompts we were talking about, it's sort of arcane, right? Writing prompt is a bit like casting a spell. Yeah, casting a spell or a math equation, we'll talk about that in a little bit. But I want to play you a clip from this guide by the Zenny studio, which had about 268K views when I watched it. Kind of cautioning, attempting to make it seem a little bit less soulless than the process actually is. Sophie, you can play that now.

You should not do research to find books to copy, you have to research to understand what is working. It's important to make your own original pieces, original story books so you could stand out from your competition. Okay? So you could see that this. She says that, right? You're not doing this to like copy people. You're trying to find ideas for original work. Here's the actual prompt that she uses to generate her children's book. Write me a children's story about a girl going on an adventure to find a missing treasure.

Lesson, you achieve what you put your mind on. Make it six pages and title each page. Make his mind blowing and intriguing. I'm trying not to go too hard on the miss spellings, but it just show you how lazy you can be with these. Like, that's not a story idea. Like going on an adventure. What kind of adventure?

Finding a mission. What kind of treasure? How does she, like, on an adventure. What kind of adventure, finding a mission? What kind of treasure? How does she, like, the lesson you achieve what you put your mind on? Like, that's like, that's a producer. That's a producer walking in and saying, you know, do a thing with this sort of vibe. And I love that, I love that shaman at the end, Robert.

Make it mind blowing. Yeah, love that. I love that shaman at the end, Robert, make it mind blowing. Yeah. Mind blowing. Yeah. And it's, it's very funny because like it is all of these AI people are the same as like the worst folks in Hollywood. Right. You know, there's good producers and bad producers and nothing gets made without the people, the producers who do know what they're doing. But there's a lot of folks who rely a lot of corporate folks, you know, I'm thinking about like David Zoslov and shit here who are like, yeah, I'm the idea. Why do we need writers? I already had the idea, you know, write me a, write me a story about a guy who's angry.

You guys heard about road Max. You guys heard about sharks. What it, like, so I saw a thing on Instagram about tornadoes. So what if we just do that? Yeah, yeah, give me a tornado thing with Bill Paxton. You know, that's the hard work. I already did it. Somebody can crap out the script anytime.

Dan Frodo's just gonna call me Ishmael. That's a original idea. Yeah, there you go. So I want to actually like read you the story, or at least a chunk of the story that gets generated by this prompt. I would love it.

Yes. People are flipping out so much about like the quality of writing that these things are capable of. And like, I think what you're all going to learn is that like, this isn't writing what it puts out. So page one, the missing treasure. Once upon a time, there was a brave and curious girl

named Sarah. She lived in a small village at the foot of a big mountain. One day, she heard about a missing treasure that was hidden in the mountain a long time ago. Sarah was very intrigued and decided to go on an adventure to find the missing treasure. So you see, you see, like, first, I'm taking a break here, like, the prompt said, like, make it intriguing. And what the robot did was like, well, I'll just say that Sarah's intrigued. That means that it's an intriguing story now, because I've used that word.

We also see, we also see repetition of phrases, right? Oh, yeah. Yeah, it's very clear that it's like a mechanical Turk. You know, page two, the journey begins. Sarah packed her backpack with food, water, and a map, and set out on her journey. She hiked up the mountain and along the way, she met many animals who offered to help her, but Sarah declined their help,

saying, I want to do this on my own. Why are there animals offering her to help? Like, what is it that she wants to do on her own? Like, why is this important to her? I would say that I'm intrigued. Yeah, I'm intrigued by how incomplete this story is. Page three, the Cave of Trials. After several days of hiking, Sarah finally reached the top of the mountain.

There she found a cave that led deep into the mountain. She entered the cave and was met with many trials, including Steve Cliffs, Deep Casms and Dark Tunnels. But Sarah didn't give up. She kept moving forward, always remembering the lesson she learned from her parents. You can achieve what you put your mind to. Oh, now her parents are characters in there?

Yeah, her parent, well, not even really characters. Like she's not a care, you can see what it's doing here, right? It's a simulacrum of a plot, right? Where you've got like, well, I know that plots have to have a conflict, you know, and characters in a story are supposed to have trial. So I will just say she went through trials. She didn't give up because her parents said you can achieve what you put your mind to. Like, and that's what the story views is like transmitting a lesson to kids, right?

Is just like saying the lesson in there, which like, that's not, if you think about children's books, like good children's books, the books that like you can still remember as a kid, that's not how they get messages across, right? Like it's deeper than that. Kids are actually, not just capable of understanding like much more complicated messages than like you can achieve what you put your mind to. They crave that, which is why, I mean, part of why shit like Dr. Sous's books, you know, still sell a century or whatever

after he fucks close to his century after he fucking wrote him. And he's kind of a piece of shit. Good books. Good books like what? The guy himself. What author isn't? It's like the hobbits, you know, successful in shit like you don't just have Bilbo being like I learned that you can always trust

in the power of friendship. No, you you show, you know, the character like evolving and changing and entering conflicts and and failing and then learning lessons and then succeeding. Like, this is not super complex stuff. You're not like writing fucking Ulysses just because you put this in here. But the chatbot is incapable of kind of understanding this because it's a calculation, it's an algorithm, right? It's an out, it is not, it can't want to tell a story

and like a critical part of telling a story is the intent. And kind of spoiler, that's what's most unsettling about all of this to me and what we're kind of building to. But you can see kind of how this story technically meets the requirements that the Zine studio or whoever like set out for it. And none of these grind set people actually care about anything beyond the fact that like, it might be able to pass muster on Kindle. So like it's good enough, right? We'll go for it.

We'll take the script and turn it into a book for little kids. Right, right, right. But what first question, like, what do you think Joseph Campbell would think of this? Because it's clearly like, again, it's a structural aggregate approach. It's a very lazy mad lib that, you know, there's the uncanny valley to it.

I agree with you there. It does feel that it's missing a soul, right? We don't even know the animals. We don't even know the parents. Like, wait, wait, wait. I think he'd probably be kind of interested in the fact that sort of the, again, it's kind of the semulacrum of a story.

It's not an actual story. It understands some aspects of the shape of a story and it attempts to reproduce that, but without any kind of understanding of what the original is. So I suspect there's a degree to which you would find it intellectually fascinating. I think he would probably be buying a gun right now. Uh, I think towards the opening eye offices, he would be buying a gun and he would like DM check off and say it's happening, but yeah, let's get

the fuck down there. So I found an even lazier example of synthetic storytelling in a video by a guy named Christian Hydorn, which has about 120,000 views. His YouTube channel is called tokenized AI and he had a mid, he had mid-journey create what he calls a comic book. And boy, I am using that, those words as fucking, it's not a comic book, right? He's lying about what this is. It's a book with illustrations and barely any text, but it's not like, anyway, it's not actually a comic book. And he plugs in the plot for this.

He gets chat GPT to create a plot for him by kind of plugging in an equation for story ideas that reads like the brain of a Netflix executive. And I want to read you this equation because I find it really interesting and so if you'll show you it because it is, it's physically laid out like a math equation almost. Story. Please come up with a short story based on in brackets theme that uses elements that are typical for in brackets theme that uses elements that are typical for in brackets

genre stories provide me with a three to four sentence summary and store it in plot. And again, like you kind of plug in a theme, I want the theme to be an adventure, you know, or I want the theme to be like, you know, yeah, an adventure story and in, you know, the horror genre or whatever, something like that and provide me with a yeah. So that's kind of the way the equation looks. And Christian decides he wants a comic book that has kind of like Indiana Jones on charted style art vibes about like a man and a woman who meet up by coincidence and go on an adventure in like a dungeon to get a treasure, right? And it's one of those things. I say the artwork has the vibes of like Indiana Jones

are unsharted because the vibes are purely a product of the actual art itself. There's no actual plot in the story that Chatt gpt generates for him. And he has the robot break down a story page to page, but it's not a story. Scene one in a bustling southeast Asian market, Maya and Leo accidentally bump into each other while following the same ancient map.

Dialogue, Maya, hey, watch where you're going. Leo, that's my line. That's nonsense. It's one of those, why is that his line? We've never met these characters before. We haven't heard him say that to anyone else. Like, why would, why would that be the response that he would make to her?

Like, you know, again, and this is because he's like, like, that's the setup, that's the background for these characters you get. Scene two, and again, this is like the second page of the story. Maya and Leo reluctantly agreed to work together deciphering the maps, cryptic riddles, dialogue, Maya, fine, but we split the treasure, Leo, deal. Scene three journey through the dense general, the duo encounters a treacherous river

crossing, testing, testing their teamwork skills, dialogue, Maya will need to build a raft, Leo on it. Oh, yeah, classic Leo. Yeah classic Leo. That's the Leo. I know always raft building Seen for the pair solves a puzzle in a hidden temple revealing the entrance to the treasure chamber Dialog Maya we did it Leo Leo together. We're unstoppable Seen five inside the chamber Maya and Leo find the treasure, but also face a choice, greed or friendship, dialogue,

Maya, we could just take it all, Leo, but at what cost? And this is, in the videos, I want them to have to choose between greed and friendship, which they don't, it's just an artificial choice. There's no, again you know, again, if you're doing like even a slightly more effortful version of this, doing Indiana Jones thing, you know,

they pull the treasure, but the room starts to collapse. And like Maya's, you know, able to get across a chasm with the bag of treasure, but she, you know, she can't help, like Leo falls and he's like hanging by a thread. And she has to either take the treasure and run or drop the treasure and save him, you know, like something like that's, that's, that's not like, again, it's not like high art, but that's a conflict, right? There's a laby potential retention there. What? The lab? The lab. The lab. The lab was great.

Yeah, if you're going to steal from Indiana Jones, do it well, right? Like again, there's a whole, like fucking uncharted and shit started as doing that. Like that worked out fine for everybody. Like, but it has to be a story, you know? We will forgive a lot of derivative shit. You know, think about Star Wars, right? Star Wars, if you actually look at the stuff that Lucas was pulling from, is actually pretty derivative of a lot of different things that inspired him as a kid of a lot of different like movies and shows and comic books

that he had read as a young man. And it's fine because it's a fucking rollicking good story, you know? But like this is not a story. This is like the AI is checking every box, but it doesn't understand what the boxes are. So there's not. That's it.

That's the quote you know. There's no, none of the characters want anything, really. There's no reason for them to be doing this. We know nothing about their lives. They're not like people, which again, this is like a little kid's storybook. So I think the idea that these people have is that like, well, kids don't notice that

because they're dumb. And it's like, yes, they do. Like that is, that's that like, well, kids don't notice that because they're dumb. And it's like, yes, they do. Like, that is, that's why, like, fucking Pixar movies are the, with the biggest thing for kids for a while. Those are not like nonsense stories. Those, those all feel like the fucking incredible's or whatever, or they're not, this is not Pixar, but like one of the most beloved children's movies

of all time. I saw when I was like a little bitty kid, the fucking iron giant and shit, or the brave little toaster. You know, those are stories with like, but children's movies of all time. I saw when I was like a little bitty kid, the fucking iron giant and shit, or the brave little toaster. You know those are stories with like sorrow and character and motivation and like things are set up and paid off, none of which the AI appears to be capable of doing.

Yeah. You know what this reminds me of, Robert? Are you familiar with the book Plato? No. Okay, so back in the days of the humans. Can I say that that way? Yeah, yeah, back before the robots destroyed us all. Sure.

Yeah, in the days of the humans, there was a guy named William Wallace Cook who wrote a book called Plato with two Ts. And he was like an old school hack, pulp novelist, pay by the word, et cetera, or pay by the letter. I don't know how the math worked out. He tried to structurally calculate to quantify

the amount of possible stories. And he said there are exactly 1,462 possible plots. And at night, yeah, right, right, you like the specificity, right? So I love it. Yeah. 1928, he publishes his great epiphany in a book called Plato, The Master Book of All Plots.

And I am frankly baffled that the new algorithmic overlords are forgetting their history. Yeah, he plotted with the chat GPT, let's do it. Let's, you know what, let's light the fires. Light the fires, kick the tires. Yeah, I just want to generate 1462 novels. And then, and then we're done with books.

You know, people said that when James Joyce put out Ulysses, this is the end of literature. But we can actually make it so. You know, AI can, and we can have Maya and Leo star in all of them. You know, they'll, they'll, they can do it. I wanna play you a clip from this fucking video making this dog shit, not a comic book. So Sophie's gonna do that now. Need a third image though,

because we need to convey the fact that they've bumped into each other. In this prompt, you'll notice that I start with a style, but then I immediately set the scene first. Only then I add the characters and finally end with the activities. As I said, you will need to experiment with what works best for you. I've also changed the aspect ratio because I'm creating a wider image panel. Okay, so this completes a first scene.

Whether you use just one or multiple images. You see what he's going into all this, we're trying to set the scene with these two characters bump into each other And you have to be very you want to structure it this way is that the a I knows and it it it generates you an actual proper You know image of this action happening and like the picture we get is this very vague generic looking bizarre type background and then our two characters both staring directly at the viewer on frame. They have not bumped into each other. They aren't interacting. They don't seem aware of each other.

It is not an illustration of what he asked it to write, but it's good enough. Like, fuck it. You know, like it's uncharted. It's uncharted. You know, it's for kids. Yeah, it's pretty good. So I would have, we're're gonna get more into this, but you know what also reminds me a lot

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And yeah, I keep going back to that like bit in scene one where she's like, hey, you bumped into me and he's like, that's my line. Yeah. It makes no sense. And my kind, my, the only thing I think is that at some point an actual human wrote a story or probably a few people, a number of people did, where a character used that line as a retort, right? And Chatchy PT's calculating algorithm or whatever was like, this is an appropriate response, plug it in, even though it makes no sense. Because that's kind of the way these things work, yeah. Also, they both have one ancient map. And we're not totally right.

Why? Where do they get it? Yeah. Right. Is it the same map? You know, like, do they have copies of this? Who made it? What is the ruins therein?

Again, you know, Indiana Jones and the last crusade sets this up very eloquently by having River Phoenix go on a Boy Scout adventure and then come home having nearly been murdered and find out that his dad doesn't give a shit because he's too busy like working out, you know, his notebook that has all the clues for the movie that we're about to watch. Perfect, eloquent, actual storytelling. Good shit. Man, that movie rules. So, wait, so the question that a lot of us listening today are going to have is, it feels

like we're talking a little bit about something profound, which is, you mentioned Ulysses earlier. Ulysses triggered such an awesome conversation in US courts, right? Over the nature of obscenity, right? I don't know what it is, but I know it when I see it, right? So what like, this does feel like there's something we don't know what it is, but we know when it's missing to a human story. I think what's missing, I keep bringing up the term simulacrum and like a simulacrum is a great example of like the kind of classic

example is you like open up a word app type thing up at somewhere probably in the top left hand corner that's where it is on mine. You will see the image that means you click to save your document right and you and I and Sophie are all old enough that we know that that image is a floppy disk, right? Like that's the image. But like those don't exist anymore. People don't use floppies anymore.

Huge numbers of the people who click on that every day to save their documents never lived in a world where like they touched a floppy disk. So the original thing like is no longer around, right? Like it's a simulacrum, you know? And like the kind of whatever kind of original meaning that it had has been replaced by something else. And like what we have here is like the simulacrum of a story.

You've got these ingredients of story structure, these ingredients of pieces of pop culture, but there's nothing that's actually trying to be transmitted. Nobody has, like, because there's not a person behind this for one thing, and there's not an understanding of what it takes to make a story. So it can kind of look like a story. It can certainly trick the, like, these AI grind-set people think it's close enough. But what's happening here that's really fucked up is that they are taking this thing that is not a story.

And their goal is to trick overworked parents into buying this for children who will read it and be too young to elucidate why something seems to be wrong with their new book. And that's actually very frightening, right? Like, we're gonna talk about learning in a little bit and how kids learn and how they don't learn. But like fundamentally, kids are little information vacuums

and this stuff is wrong on a fundamental level and they'll get that, they may not get it why, but it's not only is it kind of like off-putting to them, but it has the potential to do harm to them. And this is, you know, we've had versions of this. There's this thing called Elze Gate, right? We're like a year or two ago. There were suddenly all of these hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of like, would appear to be AI-generated videos that were like involving Disney characters, Elze being a big one from,

I think, Frozen. And they were like singing songs. Why are you calling this character? Elsa, right? Elsa. Elsa. Elsa. No, Elsa. Yeah, I said Elsa, right? And I, whatever.

Okay. Whatever. So you've, and like a lot of them would suddenly get like really weirdly sexual or like fucking get tweaked into this kind of like uncanny, unsettling, almost like lovecraftian weirdness. And they were just like- I remember this. Yeah, and these were all crafted and used kind of the keywords

that like when parents, you know, you're busy, you gotta cook dinner, you gotta like do, you know, clean the house or some shit. Your kid won't calm down, you put them in front of YouTube and you put on a children's video, and the algorithm eventually starts spinning. And so parents start realizing, well I set them on this video that was like a frozen song

and now there's like this weird pornographic thing that they're watching, where the fuck did this come from? It weaponized auto play. Yeah, exactly. And I don't think there's still a solid understanding of where all these came from. There's a couple of different theories,

but it's really unsettling because part of the problem is like, what does it do to kids to have that kind of shit in front of their eyes? Because we're not even talking about the danger of like, what if a kid reads an adult book or stumbles in when there's porn on the TV? This is a question of like, well, this is like frightening nonsense

that like is being fed into them Automatically like at a scale that was like hundreds of these videos hit One of the channels for this was like one of the 20 biggest channels on you. This is fucked up really problematic shit And this is people like what these grind set people are doing by pumping as many of these AI books into Kindle as they can, as they are creating the, they're creating the hard copy, the physical book version of this, where parents are going to get tricked into buying this shit, and kids are going to be sat down in front of this. And technology always outpaces legislation. Yeah. What you're describing, man, it sounds like this is a very, very bad Wild West situation.

It's a core Mac McCarthy level Wild West situation. So there is no, is there, is there blowback? I mean, children are some of the most frighteningly intelligent things. Kids, no bullshit. That's super uncomfortable. There's, you know, this reminds me of one of my favorite lines from the television show community. This Robert, I posit to you, so if he I posit to you, fellow behind the bastards folks, this shit is both silly and evil,

like a candy cigarette. Yeah, yeah, exactly. It is like the candy cigarette of literature, right? Yeah. And it's one of those, like, one of the things I found interesting. so when you, I, again, watching a bunch of these videos, you become aware of, like, what the problems for these AI hustlers are, like, what the things they have to overcome is.

And one of the problems they face is that, like, every single book generated by the AI is they're using, uh, sets off plagiarism detectors, right? And like Amazon uses, I think Amazon uses, I believe they use a plagiarism detectors, right? And like Amazon uses, I think Amazon uses, I believe they use a plagiarism detector. I've asked them for specifics on this. Again, I haven't heard back. But so one of the first things they'll do is they'll use something like Grammarly

to like run the text that they've got through a plagiarism detector, and it will inevitably tell them significant plagiarism found. But there's a solution. They've got a way to solve for this, which is an app called Quillbot. Now, if you go online and look up Quillbot, it's Build By It's Creators as an online paraphrasing

tool. So, what Quillbot does is you feed it text, and it goes through that text, and it replaces adjectives and verbs in the text with synonyms. So, you know, if the original text has the word courageous, it'll replace it with brave. Or if it's got the word resided, it'll replace it with brave. Or if it's got the word resided, it'll replace it with lived, stuff like that. So you feed this franken text that you got from the AI into Quillbot, and then Quillbot does kind of a find

and replace with a handful of the words in there. And then suddenly you've got something that won't trigger Amazon's plagiarism sensors and that you didn't have to actually edit yourself, right? You still don't have to do any real work here. You just let another robot mix it up a little bit more. Yeah. Now, once you've got kind of passable text, the next step for these grifters is to create

image prompts for all of the illustrations in the book. And again, there's not room for creativity here, or for any kind of like human influence. For each page, they just ask chat GPT to generate descriptions of the images needed for that text. And then they feed that text in the mid-journey or Leonardo, which is another AI image generator, and used to produce something like this. And this is from another one of these,

this is kind of like one of the better case scenario looking illustrations. And it's from like one of the better case scenario, looking illustrations. And it's from like one of these fucking AI book guides that I found on YouTube. And it's not remarkable, right? Like it's, I'll read you the text. This is from the chapter one, setting off an adventure.

This is the whole chapter. Once upon a time, there was a young girl named Sarah who lived in a small village surrounded by rolling hills and lush forests. Sarah was an adventurous spirit and loved to explore the great outdoors. One day, she heard a rumor that a long-lost treasure was hidden somewhere in the hills. The treasure was said to be a great wealth of golden precious gyms, and whoever found it would be incredibly rich.

Sarah was determined to find the treasure and put all her focus on the task at hand. Because the message here is that you need to focus in order to achieve your goals. Oh, okay. Yeah. And it's the art that accompanies it isn't bad. It looks, it kind of at first glance, you might assume a human drew it. You can kind of tell like for one thing, the perspective on the backpack on her back is all fucked up.

It's not like actually quite right. It might be that her hand isn't a pocket, but she might actually just not have a hand. But like it doesn't look bad. Especially again, you're like an overworked parent looking for a pretty tender. It could be way worse, is what you're saying. Yeah. Yeah, if you're an, if you're, there's like a parent skimming through these, maybe you, you don't catch this, right?

It's like something problematic. You just see, all right, well, that one works. And by the standards of age, I, I, children's book arc, this, this one looks pretty good. And I should say here, if you want to look at the stuff yourself, the text version of this article of the whole article that we're using as the script for this will be up as soon as the episodes drop on my substack, Shatter Zone, just type Shatter Zone substack into Google. It'll be the first article that pops up. If you click on that. It's free to view.

You don't have to give me your email or any of that fucking bullshit. And you can see all of the images and find links to everything if you want to like track back to the work that I did here. So that's kind of the best case scenario for how these AI kids' books work.

The worst case scenario is shown in this video, which has about 412,000 views by Paul Marles. Now, prior to the AI explosion, Paul, he had a bunch of videos teaching people how to like con other folks through Amazon KDP kind of the old fashioned way by like hiring ghost writers and shit. His videos had titles like $9,636 from 30 to 60 minutes work, exclamation point, exclamation point. Make money online with KDP low content books. This is like what he's advertising.

He's like, these are low content books. You don't have to put anything into them. It's the laziest thing ever, but you can make this weirdly specific number of money if you follow my guides. And Paul Marles, if you look him up, he has dozens of videos for sale on Amazon. I have reached out to Paul, he's one of the ways you can tell this guy sketchy is he has a website that like offers all of his different sort of like, you know, guide books and videos and stuff for people who want to follow him in this grift.

But it has no contact info. I did like send him a message on his Facebook, which I don't think he will check, but you know, I did reach out, Paul. I don't like Paul. I think he has a face in need of a fist here. I'm not using that kind of language in the article that I've written because I want to seem like an objective journalist. But as you'll see when we play a clip from this guy's video, he's pretty immediately off-putting. Now, Paul ups the ante on laziness here by cutting out the text entirely

and instead generating a children's coloring book that he hopes will SEO well because it's about dinosaurs and turn a profit. It's even lazier, right? That's what Paul is. It's like this is already a lazy grift. Paul's gonna make it Lazier. Fuck all that text.

We don't need a story. Like, we don't need to use chat GPT. We'll just, we'll make a coloring book. Super easy. And you may think a coloring book would be less problematic than some of this other shit we've seen. I assure you, it's not. So he enters this very half-ass prompt

where he misspells the name of a dinosaur. The prompt is just like coloring page for kids. Tyranosaurus, Rex, and a jungle, and he doesn't spell it right. And I'm going to have Sophie play this guy describing how he generates the images for his coloring book. And maybe then you'll hate him as much as I do. Enter what we want our image to be of. Now, I'm going to do a dinosaur coloring book. And maybe then you'll hate him as much as I do. Enter what we want our image to be off. Now I'm going to do a dinosaur coloring book. That doesn't mean to say you need to go out and do a dinosaur coloring book. You can use this method to create any number of different types of coloring book that you want. So I'm going to put in Tyrannosaurus Rex

in a jungle. The next instruction is going to be what sort of style. And we're going to put in cartoon style. Then I'm just going to tell it how I want the lines, and I want this with thick lines, low detail, and no shading. Now put in no shading, but you'll find that it probably will create some images with some element of shading. The next is we need to put two minus signs and then AR for aspect ratio. So we're just going to put in 9, 11. And then we can see where we're starting to create the images. Okay, so stop it, Sophie.

Because now I want to talk about these images. First, I want to say, you'll note he's like, we don't want there to be shading, because if there's shading in a thing that you're supposed to color in, it like fucks up. You can't like color in shading very well. But he's like, there will be shading, but like whatever, who gives a shit,

we don't care anything about this stuff. Now, Sophie is going to show you, these are the images that he generates with that prompt. Take a good look at these dinosaurs. Can you tell me anything that's wrong with these Tyrannosaurus rexes? Oh, sure, they're not T-rexes. No, they're not at all T-rexes.

One of them is a quadruped. It clearly has four legs, but like a T-rex head on this like weird stump of a body. Another one, the T-X rex has like human muscle arms. And thumbs. And thumbs. One of them, the one on the bottom left, Rex has like human muscle arms and thumbs. One of them, the one on the bottom left,

like not only is the bottom jaw twisted away from the top jaw, but if you notice its front arm is actually its back leg. The back of its body is merged with a tree and then like there's maybe two other sort of half formed limbs there and then the bottom right one. Like these, I cannot exaggerate to you. Like go to Shatter's Own Substack, look at these

fucking T-rexes. These are so such bucked up janky tyrannosaurus. Like it is offensive to me how shitty these T-rexes look. Yeah. Um, yeah. The human hands are very funny. Yeah. The human hands are very funny. Yeah, the human hands on the bottom one is pretty great. I do like how in the top one, like mid-journey's almost done like a Rob Leefield thing where like it can't figure out the sheet. So it's just, I'd- So maybe AI has at least reached Lee fielding in levels of like illustrative potential.

Ty, they need, they need never explained belts of ambiguous cartridges, right, right around the two ways. But also, you know what, if there be, that's going to be another two iterations. Ty, T-Rex with human hands that would have helped him out. Maybe they would have been around, right? If the T-Rex had developed the fucking handgun, you know, they could have fought off those fucking asteroids. It's a, you know, when you say that, I think about a much better tyrannosaur drawing, Bill Watson's classic tyrannosaurs in F-14s. Still one of like the highlights of my childhood.

That part of why I'm so offended by this coloring book is that like the best parts of my childhood all involved dinosaurs. And he is just, he understands that that kids are magnetically drawn to dinosaurs, always have been and always will be forever more. And so that he's grifting off that by providing, like, he just, he doesn't even care enough to make sure that they look vaguely right. Like any kid, kids know more about dinosaurs

than paleontologists. Any child is going to point out that these are fucked up looking T-rexes. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. So Paul's guide after this kind of goes through how you lay out your coloring book to publication, how you cobble together a cover, you know, what kind of things you need so that it'll,

it'll get through Amazon sensors and they'll let you upload it to like not just, to like, because it's a coloring book, obviously, you need physical copies. Um, and you can, if you upload it right, Amazon will just like print and sell the books for you, the actual like physical books. And again, this gets to what I worry about. Is that like parents who fall for these books are going to be overworked. They're not going to be focusing on these books as much as their kids are, right? They're just like, I want to get a dinosaur coloring book for my kid or whatever.

They need a colored book. Oh, this is what popped up on the Amazon. The cover looks fine. I am also worried, particularly what scares me. It's both parents who don't have a lot of time. They're going for whatever is affordable and also there's a lot of charities that provide poor kids with free books and they do both orders from places like Amazon that might get tricked by this kind of thing and so the thing that like the vision I can't get out of my head is this like

frightening AI future in which like rich kids get to color in proper dinosaurs from like coloring books that human beings drew. And poor kids grow up thinking Stegosaurus had no tail and the earth used to have like a second moon that looked like a nipple, which is another, look at this image here, look at this fucking picture that it drew for some kid, some kids gonna get this,

some kids gonna get this fucking coloring book. Look at this fucking thing, that's not a stegosaurus. I don't even know, it's got spikes coming out of like actual like porcupine quills coming out of like the spines on its back and like it doesn't have a tail. There's like five legs and the perspectives wrong and then like the world behind it. Look, like yeah.

Yeah. It's good. It's good. Yeah. It's got spikes on the left, the left hind leg. Yeah. Yeah. It's like fucked up. It's like super fucked up.

It's very bad. Yeah. I hate this shit. And like the again, that's what's unsettling. Like there will always be high quality dinosaur coloring books and story books and stuff for kids. And because they're made by humans, they'll command a premium price. So like the poor kids grow up thinking that like T Rex is, yeah, I don't know, you know,

I find it fucked up. And maybe it'll be even bleaker than that. And nobody will get good children's books. But this is kind of like where I, what I'm suspecting is at least the first thing that's gonna happen is that like the kids who start getting shafted with this low quality, unsettling brain poisoning, AI crap are like the kids

who don't have as much money. You know, or whose parents don't have as much money, whose school districts don't have as much money. Now, a cursory search on Amazon suggests that a lot of people have followed Paul's advice because there are a shitload of nearly identical coloring books. So, first off, this is the cover of Paul's book here. You can see the dinosaur coloring book, you know, pretty simple. And that, he did pick for the front cover, the image that's like least fucked up looking,

like that almost looks right. Rob. for the front cover, the image that's least fucked up looking. That almost looks right. But then I found as I started looking through Amazon several near identical copies all sold under different names. You can tell they're all AI copies because this first one here, the arms are fucked up. They're in the position kind of. That one on the left is almost set up like a leg. They're both bent down so you don't actually see the clause. You can tell the perspectives fucked up though.

That's by Jared Mason or it's not because like Paul and other people talk about how you just create fake names to write these books under. These could all be Paul. They could all be people following Paul's advice. We don't know. Here's another book where like, what the fuck dinosaur is that supposed to be? That is like, so again, folks, you really owe it to yourself. Look at this. Sorry, I'm sorry. Yeah.

What is it? What are the like, the arm leg situation? A tripod, like it's got like the body of a dog, but like three legs, a T-Rex head and an arm that's not an arm. Like, it's an arm that looks like this, it looks like this animal was like a civil war veteran who got a man today. Yeah, I was gonna say, if you date it, like.

This guy's been through some shit. You know what I mean? Like, and he's still. Wow. It shows how lazy these people are that like anyone seeing that should be like, that's not a dinosaur. That doesn't look like it at all. What the fuck is happening here?

Yeah. Oh good, there's more. And then this one, this is our, our age range. Look at that claw. Look at how the claws are like. The same size of the face. The same size of the face. It's fingers are like as long as it's head.

It's like a fucking salad fingers the dinosaur. It's so fucking off putting in weird. I like the yeah, I like the night. I like the there's something like there's something very his song about the way the eyes are rolled up. Yeah. I love it. So despite featuring easily the worst dinosaur drawing I've ever seen in my life, this coloring book appears to be selling reasonably well. At the time this article was written,

it was number 75 in the teen and young adult drawing category. That's potentially decent money. That's not low on Amazon. Now that is like in the teen and young adult drawing category. It's not like a massive category, but like that's there are human coloring books that are selling worse than this. I will guarantee you. And that's potentially meaningful money for this person. I use the term person lightly for whoever is like, shitting this stuff. Maybe it's all Paul. Maybe it's all people copying him, but like, this is already a problem is what I'm getting at. Cause it's like, this isn't like the worst thing,

you know, in a world where, you know, I don't know, like the Catholic Church exists, fucked up coloring books aren't the worst thing for little kids. But um, like, this is, uh, seriously, I don't think it's, it's good.. Kids pay attention to stuff like this. For one thing, I think the laziness in this reads off to them, but it's just wrong. You shouldn't be shotgunning stuff that's wrong to kids because you're too lazy to do even the minimum work of regenerating the images until they're right. I find this unsettling and I there's a lot more to find unsettling because like part of what I did while researching this was kind of a deep dive on literary education theory because

I wanted to have an idea of how some of the stuff is going to affect children. But that's going to be all for part one with us today. Ben, because you know, time to take five, time to take five, do a little bit of a breather, and then we'll come back on Thursday, and I will finish this deeply fucked up story. Ben, can anything to plug? Yes. Please check out and subscribe to CoolZone Media. Do your part in supporting accurate depictions of dinosaurs for children.

You can also find me hanging with my writer dies, Matt Frederick and Noel Brown on shows like Stuff They Don't Want You To Know. And Ridiculous History, you can find me talking trash about MREs and French military rations on Twitter, named at a burst of creativity at Ben Bullen, HSW, or at Instagram at Ben Bullen. That's the whole thing. Yeah, I think that's it, right?

No? Good? Yeah. Excellent. Yeah, I also love a good MRE and a bad MRE. I've been making my way through these MREs that Mountain House made and it's like ChilliNac, which is devastating for your stomach.

Just any time you try fucking, it's a nightmare, it's a nightmare. There's some good ones though. I got a nice bison stew that I think of. Oh yeah. One of the companies I have made. Yeah, there's some good ones out there. I had some, when I was out hunting for a couple of days in the cascades last year, I had

this freeze dried biscuits and gravy that actually fucked unreasonably hard. Did you ever get dumb with all that mac and cheese? You said something of... No, I still have a ton of it. I have a couple of years worth of drive food in any given time. Just in case I have to hole up in my house, you know, firing wildly at trespassers in a the road style situation. Oh, okay. Yeah. Right. P core Mac. I we also would like to plug the newest coolz media series sad oligar costified JK in

your hand available on all the things. Robert do you want to give that link for where people can follow your sub stack one more time? Hell yeah, it's ShatterZone. So just go to shatterzone.substac.com and you will find my thing. You don't have to sign up for anything. It's pretty. You're good. Bye. Shabamzo. Behind the bastards is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more from Cool Zone Media, visit our website CoolZoneMedia.com or check us out on the IHART

radio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. Alphabet Boys is a podcast that takes you inside undercover investigations. In the second season, we've got an alphabet soup with the DEA, the CIA, and the FBI all mixed up in the same case. So, you do personal security all over the world and you have somebody call you and say, can you get grenades and guns for this guy in Colombia? No, no, no. It's a mystery wrapped around an international arm

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