Didn't even know that was a thing.

It isn't.

yet

Take a peek at the books. They are really terrible. For example, the book on “suspenders” actually just prints out anything that uses any form of the word “suspend.” E.g., the suspension of civil rights or a machine that uses a suspended bar.

I didn't have to read the book to realize this. It might have been better to read the book before writing about this eh.

text to speech and voice recognition was absolute garbage not many years ago, but look at it now. If there's a dime to be made with this, and i would say there's more then that, this is going to work sooner then later even if it doesnt work now.

than, dolt

thanks, troll.
It's nice to have captain grammar out there hunting out 6 year old post to correct. thanks for your service lol

Do you have a link to those books? I would love to read one of those books! But I don't want to pay for it.

Well, two years ago when I made the above comment, I followed a link to a book or books in question on Amazon and used the "Look inside this book" feature of Amazon to read a few sample pages. There may be a link in the article, although that will only help if the books are still on Amazon. I certainly don’t have a copy, sorry.

his voice almost sounds like a robot's (is this a common stereotype of computer nerds).
I can picture a group of "cyberbullies" having a contest to see much emotional harm they can create in a short period of time with such technology... they'd auto scan social profiles for vulnerable people and autopost messages & content about them to try and drive them right to suicide. just an example of evil in mass quantities you could create with such power.
If the books are 'horrible' as someone said, well, he could be right I didn't confirm but it would still have to be a leap in the right direction for this kind of thing to be successful.

Harassing someone constantly is bad. I don't see how a tool like this would make that type of harassment any worse, or have the slightest thing to do with that scenario. What the frak are you talking about?

They're not suggesting that it will necessarily DIRECTLY make cyber-harassment worse exactly, but rather that it could allow the AUTOMATION of such harassment to the point where it would be pretty much trivial for a properly equipped "script kiddie" to destroy someone vulnerable psychologically. Rather unlikely scenario (at the moment), but still… COULD happen, I suppose…

what they?

try /what/? and, dolt.
There is no evil, only self-interest and randomness.

"This is a perfect complement to human creativity — not something for creatives, researchers, or consumers to fear." It seems you are reviewing the *idea* rather than the *implementation*, which stinks. Took a close look at the actual books. Some of your other commenters have.

I am just waiting for the lawsuit .............

lawsuit is the new trend ;-)

Phil Parker here. Interesting posts. Here are some links
that can clarify for some:

Here is a piece about reaching underserved
subjects/languages:

http://www.huffingtonpost.c...

Here is a current project dealing with agriculture:

http://gulfnews.com/news/gu...

Here is a poetry project (graph theoric stuff):

http://totopoetry.com/poetr...

My favorite page:

http://www.totopoetry.com/s...

I have used this approach to write definitions as well (www.websters-online-diction...)

The following contrasts definitions of zealously:

1. In a zealous manner. [Human]

2. In an enthusiastic, fervid, ardent or fervent manner. [graph theoretic]

3. In a fanatical manner. [graph theoretic]

A vid on fiction automation:

http://vimeo.com/17168987

A debate/reaction amongst literature people:

http://www.thepassivevoice....

Cheers

Phil

p.s. most of the “books” are used by businesses in narrow
markets, and are econometrically estimated, not compiled from internet sources. The bibliographies, timeline, health and langauge books were created from a request from a library consortium.

You sir have created a spam bot. and spammed amazon with 800 000 books.
And have the arrogance to put a price on them.

Do you not realize spam is illegal ?
Polluting a market with quantity is very bad. Creates all sorts of problems.

We should strive for creating books with quality.

Since we do not have access to this system we can't make an independent review but can assume it will be like all the other automated systems.

Generic, no intelligence, mind numbingly dry, etc.
But most of all it will miss huge important info.

Remember those automated robots that keep trying to walk through a wall because they do not understand any better ?
Your spam bot is just like that.

This will most likely create a similar problem as spam mail but in the market of books.

Another greedy person exploiting an outdated system and by doing so destroys it for everyone,

You don't seem to know what he actually did.

He's taken databases full of tables and combined with econometric analyses to provide market information on hundreds of topics. Which will save humanity thousands of hours compiling reports about these topics. Look, "The 2007-2012 World Outlook for Wood Toilet Seats" sounds boring to you and may qualify as spam, but to people in the business, it's essential to know what the trends are.

His only "fault" is in putting his content up on amazon, where it seems like people are expecting "Books" whereas he's providing business reports, which are more economically valuable and more expensive.

Wut?

800 000 = 0.
? isn't a word.

Your response to the criticism looks like it was generated by a bot.

what's the difference to wolframalpha?

WolframAlpha has value.

The poop that took a pee... Chapter 1.

lmfao

This is awesome. The idea behind is very useful in many fields.

Well , at least we should congratulate him for the attempt.
The idea is great.
Imagine, if sources of information are of acceptable quality and if the computers intelligence is improved substantially, then hey , all the information I want will be available .

Btw
Isnt Google doing this already?
But needs to improve so as to present the info in a book form.

So it a stupider version of a search engine that you have to pay for.

I don't think you know what 'scam' and 'fraud' mean. He's not hiding the nature of the content from anyone. The people who buy his 'books' know what they are getting.

This is totally insane - who would buy a paper compilation of google search results? And I thought books are the last spam-free information source....

You do realy great steps for i for infomationlal future of mankind

He could earn hundreds of millions of dollars if the words "Entitled spoiled teenager girl falls in love" with a gay-looking heterosexual immortal boy" become a priority in his book-making algorithm.

Please, everybody, quit the paranoid snarking about spambots; Parker has written an expert system that specializes in writing technical reports. Have any of you ever actually written a tech report? It's one of the most boring, stifling jobs ever (if you're not fascinated by the material). It's exactly the sort of task that we humans *should* give over to computers.

I don't hire people to write tech reports, but when I research a tech topic for my own uses I do what everyone else does; I use search engines, libraries, talk to people, and make notes, then collate the notes for readability according to my own mental indexing algorithm. If Parker's algorithm can do better than mine I might pay money to save me the effort, as long as his algorithm can access a similar breadth and depth of sources.

That said, the article feels a little bit as if it were written by such a system- just kidding, Grant, I meant you wrote as if you were trying to emulate Parker's algorithm!

Cool, yes, but I can copy and paste from a database well enough not to really need this.

we can't make an independent review but can assume it will be like all the other automated systems.
FR107

For some reason, all I could think of when reading this article was Issac Asimov's short story "Someday."

That looks interesting. I think I'll give it a read.

Now, if it could write new Asimov books, that would be cool!

Wow. Now instead of books, it wrote websites, it could rule the world. And to hell with the editors, right?

That's a remarkably uncritical about someone who's basically running a scam.

How is it a scam if the people know exactly what they're getting?

I bet each and every one of them is still better than Twilight.

these have a limit. and would probably be super boring. you can expect too much from a computer. it can only create based on what its given.

But they give it everything ever written.... that's on "us".

This sentence is true << Humans just don’t have the ability to translate content to that many languages in a time and cost effective manner. >> However, since a quick glance at any computer-translated text shows us immediately that machines just don't have the ability to translate content to any languages at all, this enterprising fellow shows himself up as an overoptimistic self-publicist.

Speech-to-text might have progressed (since the software has only to be refined to respond to an input {speech} which by design matches the output {writing} syllable by syllable already) but language-to-language (where the software has to initiate an interpretation of meaning) is still bad, and has made no progress at all. Many people think it has improved, but that's because they haven't looked at the history. There were some quite decent translations of simple sentences being done with mainframe help in the 1950s already, and the modern online versions are exactly as good/bad/limited as those. I sincerely thought in the 1980s that machine translation was only a matter of time, but as speed and memory have improved vastly since then while machine translation quality has made exactly zero progress, I am now more than sceptical.

I would be more receptive to this automated book idea, but by dropping that clanger about machines being able to translate, the programmer exposes himself as simply not knowing what he's talking about.

OMG. I had no idea anyone had pulled off such to this degree. So either this is very well done hype or I have missed something rather large.