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A comment on The Influentists: AI hype without proof. Parent comment

Re:The Influentists: AI hype without proof by giancarlostoro on Wednesday January 14, 2026 @05:09PM (#46624421)
> "I wrote a novel while I made coffee this morning" --> used a ChatGPT agent to make a messy mediocre PDF

There was a story years ago about someone who made hundreds of novels on Amazon, in aggregate they pulled in a decent penny. I wonder if someone's doing the same but with ChatGPT instead.

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Re:The Influentists: AI hype without proof by strbean on Wednesday January 14, 2026 @05:41PM (#46624914)
Pretty sure there was a whole era where people were doing this with public domain works, as well as works generated by Markov chains spitting out barely-plausible-at-first-glance spaghetti. I think that well started to dry up before LLMs even hit the scene.
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Re:The Influentists: AI hype without proof by Terr_ on Wednesday January 14, 2026 @06:18PM (#46625420)
"AI helped me make money by evading anti-spam controls" doesn't have quite the same ring to it. :p
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Re:The Influentists: AI hype without proof by strbean on Wednesday January 14, 2026 @06:55PM (#46625824)
"Adding the abbreviation 'AI' to my marketing for online courses for making millions making marketing for online courses made me millions!"
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Re:The Influentists: AI hype without proof by bogwog on Wednesday January 14, 2026 @05:14PM (#46624490)
Afaik, I think the way people are making money in this space is selling courses that teach you how to sell mass produced AI slop on Amazon, rather than actually doing it
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Re:The Influentists: AI hype without proof by raincole on Thursday January 15, 2026 @02:01AM (#46629062)
It had happened in Japan. There was on author who were updating 30+ series simultaneously on Kakuyomi, the largest Japanese web novel site. A few of them got top ranked.
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