Like with programming, I’m sure there are ways AI can help authors and subject matter experts be more productive, and hopefully help readers learn from the works created.
However at the current moment, I have few good tools to discern signal from noise.
Is the human co-author an experienced Lisp programmer who used an AI authoring tool to ease the process of writing a book?
Or is he/she an AI grifter, looking for quick cash by asking an AI to churn out thousands of words he/she has no understanding of and no care as to whether they are helpful or correct.
No. Claude isn’t a person and has nothing to say on any topic without a human providing the prompt.
Again, if I wanted Claude to write me a book about lisp or anything else, I’d ask it too. I ask AI tools to do stuff everyday, not clear value you are adding by inserting yourself between the tool and the readers who have the same access to the same tool.
If you think the stuff has value and you’re sharing it for free, that’s great, but I don’t know you from Adam, so your recent flood of HN posting doesn’t inspire confidence, it just looks like self promotion of AI slop being churned out at a rapid pace.
I dispute that you have the right to put blatantly generated stuff under a license of your choice.
It was produced by ripping off countless copyrighted texts scraped from the Internet and used without permission.
If you actually wrote the book yourself and got Claude to correct some grammar errors and such, that would then be different. The result would still be influenced the aforementioned texts, but in such a way that it is overwhelmingly a derivative of your own text.
> I'm not trying to claim it as my own.
This is from the flag-killed Lisp submission:
>> About the Author
>> This book was written by someone who believes that Lisp is not just a programming language but a notation for expressing thought, and that parentheses are not obstacles but wings that let your code fly.
You are absolutely claiming it as your own, there is no mention of LLMs, Claude, or AI generating this content. The only hint that claude is involved in this is in the Git repository details themselves, but both commits are from you, not from claude.
> I carefully craft and review these
> I'm not trying to claim it as my own
I'm confused, is it your book, or not?
here's an idea. you call it a "FOSS book"? OK, treat writing it like an open-source project.
start a public GitHub repo. have your chatbot generate chapter 1. commit it to the repo, and in the commit message document the LLM prompt you used. "you are an established author writing a book called Teach Yourself Quantum Computing in 24 Hours" or whatever.
then, whatever "careful" edits you make manually to that LLM output, do those as separate commits/PRs. show your work. the LLM is going to hallucinate and get subtle details wrong, your role as a human co-author is theoretically to be a subject-matter expert and catch those mistakes.
> Just trying to be a good community member here. What are your thoughts?
and
> Moot point amongst all the haters.
LLMs are often configured to be extremely agreeable and friendly with their users. if you spend a lot of time talking with a chatbot, that may become a subconscious expectation you have for all conversations, including with regular ol' humans.
you've gotten some very mild and reasonable pushback in this thread. jumping immediately to talking about "all the haters" is a bit of an over-reaction.
codingdave•4mo ago
So linking to an AI-generated book may not be the same situation, so technically not against the rules... but probably is against the spirit of the site, so is probably not going to be appreciated by the community.
DavidCanHelp•4mo ago
ThrowawayR2•4mo ago
"Please don't use HN primarily for promotion. It's ok to post your own stuff part of the time, but the primary use of the site should be for curiosity."
The HN guidelines are available at the link at the bottom of the page.