Amazon is doing little to stop wholesale AI-assisted piracy of books. But now cartoonists get free tech support. So that’s even, right?
Cartooning wasn’t an easy way to make a living before generative AI came along.
Now we’re going to have to get smarter.
And more human.
Jason Chatfield and I had a great chat this week about AI and what it means for us as cartoonists and in general.
AI slop is overwhelming Amazon
I don’t shop for things on Amazon that much, but when I do, I know what I’m looking for. If you don’t know what you’re looking for, it is becoming increasingly difficult to find it. As Jason pointed out, publishers and authors are finding their books are being copied by people using AI to generate “guides” to those books, or even books pretending to be by the authors. When the AI slop merchants get sales from these fakes, they funnel the money back into advertising to put those books at the top of your search feed.
Read Arctic Circle on Comics Kingdom
Certainly when I was looking for a book about ketogenic diet for dogs, I found that Amazon was no use. It used to be the best search engine in the world to find books when you didn’t know the title. But I was given so many titles of books that were complete AI nonsense. Which is why I’m writing a proper book about Molly’s experience with flea treatments, seizures and a ketogenic diet. But whether I will have success selling that on Amazon is debatable. It could be lost in an overwhelming list of AI slop.
AI might help discoverability
Joanna Penn, who has a podcast about self-publishing and independent publishing, says (note that this is the transcript; if you listen to the podcast the wording is slightly different, but has the same gist),
I’ve been using ChatGPT for at least the last year to find fiction and non-fiction books as I find the Amazon interface is ‘polluted’ by ads.
I’ve discovered fascinating books from authors I’ve never heard of, most in very long tail areas. For example, Slashed Beauties by A. Rushby, recommended by ChatGPT as I am interested in medical anatomy and anatomical Venuses, and The Macabre by Kosoko Jackson, recommended as I like art history and the supernatural. I don’t think I would have found either of these within a nuanced discussion with ChatGPT.
This is an example of how AI is becoming better at searching for information and how this provides an opportunity for us as creators. Because it isn’t having our work ripped off that is the major threat to our careers—it’s obscurity. We need to be more discoverable, which comes back to having good work out there and allowing AI to find it.
Before it rips it off.
AI as tech support
AI has been useful for me lately as tech support. I try and keep all my digital devices going for as long as possible, partly because of the environmental cost of trashing perfectly good tech and partly because I can’t afford to upgrade all the time or pay for ongoing subscriptions to things like Adobe Cloud.
I have an old monitor that has worked well for over a decade, but when I plugged it into my new laptop, it didn’t show a thing. I had an HDMI cable that would connect the two HDMI ports but nothing happened.
I took a picture of the back of the display, uploaded it and my laptop specs to Gemini, and asked how I could make it work. Not only did it tell me how to use the front buttons of the display to get to a hidden menu to select the right HDMI port input, it also gave me additional advice on how to optimise my display.
- Go to System Settings > Displays.
- Select your Dell monitor and check the Colour Profile.
- If it looks “off,” try selecting sRGB IEC61966-2.1.
- Pro Tip: If it still looks washed out, macOS might be sending a “Limited Range” signal. A free app called BetterDisplay can force the Mac into “Full Range RGB” mode, which makes the colours pop exactly like they should.
Totally worked.
I have been using Google and YouTube for over two decades as my tech support. But there is no way I could have got this specificity of advice without searching for hours or even longer. I would probably have given up and bought a new monitor. AI search uses more power than conventional searches, but there are environmental benefits here in terms of not trashing perfectly useable tech.
Since then, I’ve also used Gemini to get a new Wacom tablet to work properly with a 2009 Mac Mini (running the last version of Photoshop that I could buy before Adobe switched to subscriptions).
And it helped me find the secret menu to program my storage heaters so that they would recharge overnight and not at random. I didn’t have to call out a storage heater expert (ie. someone who can press three buttons simultaneously for five seconds).
AI has saved me a lot of money lately.
But I still wouldn’t trust it to do my taxes.
If you liked anything in this post, please share it.
Thank you for being one of the good humans.
Alex
P.S. I’m afraid to type this in case I jinx things, but Molly has been good this week:
- After her church biscuit-induced episode the week before, she has been seizure-free, despite snaffling what looked like a burger bun from near a playground.
- She has had the opportunity to go for a border terrier (paid subscribers who have read the ebook about Molly will know they are Enemy Number 3) who was growling at her, but she was focused on her ball instead.
- And she has not lost any balls or been swept down any rivers, despite insisting on playing with the ball in the raging River Piddle.
I know it can’t last, but you have to take the wins and enjoy them while you can.
This article was first published on Alex’s substack and is reproduced here by very kind permission.
