Troy

That is a BIG deal! You may have had an impact on white readers that a Black writer would not have had the opportunity to make.

Hi Phil, I'm sorry but we are not going to do the free book review for The Short Happy Life of Wyatt Outlaw, despite the fact that I believe it deserves to be reviewed. The challenge for use is that "free" reviews,, like commissioned reviews, take resources. Reviewers are all paid for their work and of course there is my time. Free reviews are not really "free." So, like many other platforms, we are very selective when it comes to deciding which books we will review at no cost to the author. I trust you understand. In any case you've made me and many other aware of your book and Wyatt Outlaw, so the request was certainly not in vain 🙂 I know that is why I'm trying to raise awareness. With AI it takes very little effort to do this kind of thing. My problem is that I post a 1,000+ word article on an indie website. All the literature today says this is too long an article, as people do not read things this long. More than 1,000 people clicked on the article and if 10% read it that is great. Most of the feedback I've received has been positive but most of that can in via email. RE: Black Twitter everyone I talk to about if from the perspective of what happened to it, does not buy into my premise. The presumption is that my premise is wrong; Twitter is where journalists go for news. ☹️

Would you blow somebody for a billion dollars? It was a rhetorical question, but I know the answer given your other statements. Everybody has their price I guess. Pulp fiction was one of my favorite movies. I’ve probably watched it five or six times. Samuel L Jackson makes Tarantino‘s films, if you took him out of Django unchained it would just be an OK movie to me.

@Pioneer1 unlike the airport, Denver is a very white city the Black population is in the single-digit percentage, but it feels lower. Still the only Black-owned bookstore in the mountain time zone is usually in Denver. Denver is a liberal leaning city.

Yeah, one of my kids lives and works in NYC. Her company handed out masks for people to wear outside. The air quality is categorized as unhealthy, and people are encouraged not to go outside! I lived in NYC most of my life and have never seen anything like this. Here in central Florida, we are experiencing the effects of Saharan dust similar to Harmattan. Man made climate change has exacerbated both of these conditions.

OK Maybe I'm the only one who did not know this (a publicist told me over the course of a conversation). Here's how Ashley Allison is reimagining it @Pioneer1 put you tongue back in your mouth. I hope she gets rid of those crazy ads on the website--it is painful to visit the site with them the type, numbers, and the intrusiveness of them.

There are plenty of Writers who are getting noticed that are not active on social media. Many of the things that people did before social media was invented still work. Why didn’t you post a link to your book? You have a profile here in AALBC why not share it? If you’re gonna take the time to ask people to read your work, make it easy for folks :-) Email me the first chapter and I’ll post it on the site. You can share that too..

The Chat GPT and Gemini allow you to do that too. Google calls the feature Gems. The difference is you can have many of these things across a broad spectrum of domains not just text editing. Again, it is just a matter to time for Grammarly they can only get away with this consumer knowledge gap for so long... Sure, mediocre educators will, because change is hard, requires work and a willingness to grow by challenging old idea. That and the fact the education infrastructure is slow moving and rigid. I presume you mean a "small" fraction. You may be underestimating what one learns in school. Many of the lessons are outside the classroom. I use AI as a search engine. The only time I use a search engine nowadays is if I'm looking for a website as a primary source, say an author's official website. Finding websites should really be the only function of a search engine. Providing answers scrapped from websites, is how Google helped screw up the web. Sure, AI screwing up the webs in the same way, but AI provides answers more efficiently. Yeah, I usually bail once I detect a video is AI. The reason is these videos are so easy to manipulate you can't tell when something has been changed. I'm already very wary of sources I do not recognize, so I always look sideways at an AI generated video by an unknown source. This makes books from reputable publishers a very important source of information. Yeah, this has been done for some time. I know someone who was paid for her image to be sold to be as an avatar in video advertisements. Del pointed a cloned Feynman video in which he had a British accent. I came across that video myself. Since I know what his voice sounds like I could not watch that video without question what else has been changed... deliberately or otherwise.

I guess being "broke" is in the eye of the beholder.

The free version of ChatGPT does that too. I just tell it to proof my text according to Chicago and just tell me what the edits are so that I can input them myself. I'll check that out now. Absolutely! The false positives that an AI raises for original writing is not a good thing. The type of writing you described is not peculiar to AI. The really bizarre thing, in school today, we now have students generating papers with AI and professors scoring them with AI. Educators should consider whether writing papers, outside of class is an effective pedagogical tool.

Well enjoy your vacation @Pioneer1

@Mel Hopkins at the bottom of the edit screen simply click the area shown below, and you’ll be able to upload an image. Alternatively, you can copy an image to the clipboard and simply paste it directly into the Editing window. It’s pretty much the same procedure as before.

Yeah, I stopped using Grammarly once AI came on the scene. I'm surprised Grammarly is still in business I did not think they had a viable business model. What service can they actually provide the free version of ChatGPT can't handle? Speaking of NvisiLink I never did follow up on my investment several years ago. I know someone who sells windows and wear a band that records his interactions with customers then works up a profile of the customer they motivations what they need to hear. He is very impressed with the products and closed more deal as a result. @Delano whether a chat bot makes things up is of less consequence, today, that when a human lies to you are makes things up.

@ProfD In a previous conversation I talked about how AI allowed some non-musician to make a song I thought could be a hit and how a couple of sistas turned me onto an AI song they were both strongly moved by. They knew it was AI, but did not care, so you may be right. I can see a time where human musicians are covering or sampling AI music in live performances. We are not going to stop the tech billionaires from profiting off AI generated content -- that ship has sailed. As with white authors writing bestselling books with Black characters and about Black experiences, AI will do the same and there is nothing we can do about it. There have been plenty of white folks who have done a great job of related Black stories. Perhaps @Phil Lamar's Fictionalized account of Wyatt Outlaw is an example. AI may reach a point where it can do the same. Still White folks and AI can't be allowed to crowd out and take precedence over Black folks telling our own stories. For a wide variety of reason that is what continues to happen today. At the foundation of this problem lies a bedrock of our nation's history of white racism. It permeates everything and is baked into the publishing industry despite the many "woke" people who work in it today. That Juneteenth book for kids is a perfect example. Again, we must vet and curate Black content and make sure BS, whether human or AI generated, is not feed to our people. We need institutions for this. Since the end of segregation, we have little history of doing this, so things do not bode well for us. We have the institutions we just don't support them. Personally, I subscribe to Black-owned Newspapers to help support black institutions and to get Information important to our community from Black journalists. I don't use social media for information because I don't want to be lied to and geesh, doesn't social media get enough of our support? Elon is a 13-figga-nigga and what happened to "Black Twitter?"

As quiet as it's been kept, I produce the nation's most comprehensive bestsellers list featuring books written by Black people, The BLK Bestsellers: https://blkbestsellers.com/ Frankly, nothing has ever come close to a list like this. In a media landscape not dominated by a handful of white male billionaires, this would already be a big deal... but I digress. Using sales data provided by Circana BookScan, the goal of the BLK list is to highlight books written by Black people that are selling well but are not getting the attention they deserve. Only a handful of the BLK Bestsellers ever make the NY Times or USA Today lists; the BLK Bestsellers list helps to improve the discoverability of books by Black writers. My challenge is identifying the books written by Black authors to rank. There are no metadata fields I can query because no one really tracks an author's ethnicity (or so-called race). One of the things I've noticed, especially in the children's book space, is that the bestselling books featuring Black children are often not written by Black writers. IMHO, there is nothing inherently wrong with white writers writing about Black people, but in practice these writers often enjoy structural benefits that Black writers do not and it's just another way Black stories by Black people are suppressed. While working on this month's BLK List the #23 ranked book (image below) turned out to be My First Juneteenth Book for Toddlers by Ambsachi Nila. I was not familiar with the author which surprised me because I know the top selling children's book authors. The book was identified based upon the book's subject (Juneteenth) and its relatively high sales. So, I do what I normally do and researched the author, while authors included on the BLK Bestsellers list must be Black, I would certainly consider them for inclusion on AALBC.com. A web search for Ambsachi Nila revealed nothing about the author who is presumably also the illustrator of the book. It is not unusual for an author to hide their identity, but this is not typical for a children's book author, because classroom visits are an important source of income for many children's book authors. Ambsachi Nila didn't even have a website. So, I resorted to AI to see what I could learn about this writer/illustrator. At this point I'm still operating on the assumption that Ambsachi Nila is human. Gemini reached the same conclusion I was beginning to suspect, stating that "the books published under the name Ambsachi Nila were likely generated by AI or assembled using rapid automated content-generation tools." It also identified several additional warning signs I had overlooked (see its full response at the end of this message). Even without AI, I was definitely not going to add the book to AALBC or the BLK List, but the fact that it sold so many copies during Juneteenth, for lack of a better word, is fu*ked up--seriously. One of the top-selling books about Juneteenth was a subpar book likely created by a rapid automated content-generation tool. Hundreds of people were duped into buying this book. This is what happens when tech billionaires control book discoverability and sales. As with everything else, we (Black people) suffer the most. I maintain lists of quality Juneteenth books for kids (nonfiction and fiction). When it comes to Black culture, trust lists curated by Black people who have your best interests in mind—not algorithms designed to maximize revenue. Other, "AL slop" titles by the same "author," Ambsachi Nila: Gemini Confirmed My Suspicions: It is highly likely—somewhere in the 90% to 95% range—that the books published under the name Ambsachi Nila are completely generated by AI or assembled using rapid automated content-generation tools. When you look closely at the data trail left by these books on retail platforms, they display all the classic "smoking guns" of the synthetic book-packaging mills that have flooded Amazon KDP (Kindle Direct Publishing) over the last couple of years. The Evidence Breakdown 1. Grammatical "Hiccups" in the Core Text AI text generators and non-native automated scrapers often stumble over fine syntax and pluralization rules. If you look closely at the official publisher's synopsis uploaded to book databases for the Kwanzaa Book for Toddlers, the text contains glaring grammatical errors and typos: "Kwanzaa Book for Toddlers was especially designed for young kids and write in easy-to-follow language..." "This educational book explain the seven principles..." "...full of colorful, bright and eye-catching ilustrations..." (spelled with a single 'l') A genuine children's book author or an established publishing house employs editors to catch these fundamental errors before pushing a book live to global distribution networks. Automated book-generation setups skip this step entirely. 2. Extreme Keyword Stuffing Human authors title their books for artistic resonance or clear branding. AI-driven operations title their books strictly to trick search algorithms. The full title registered in global databases reads: "Kwanzaa Book For Toddlers About Culture and Principles of Kwanzaa Holiday to Learn and Celebrate for Kids - Kwanzaa Books for Kids" This is not a title; it is a search string designed to capture click traffic from parents typing generic holiday terms into search bars. 3. The 36-Page KDP "Template" Layout The book's physical dimensions are listed as exactly $8.5 \times 8.5\text{ inches}$ with a page count of precisely 36 pages. This is the absolute standard automated template footprint used for print-on-demand children's books generated via Amazon KDP. A script or a prompt tells Midjourney or ChatGPT to produce roughly 15 consecutive square image blocks and matching simple sentences, which are then poured into an automated formatting tool and uploaded in a matter of minutes. Anatomy of a "Book Mill" Since the explosion of generative AI models, a massive global side-hustle industry has emerged. Operators use tools to: Generate simple rhyming text or basic holiday overviews using LLMs. Generate matching stock vector images or clip art using diffusion models. Publish the books under a completely fabricated, ethnically ambiguous pseudonym (like "Ambsachi Nila") to appear authoritative to unsuspecting buyers. The Bottom Line These types of books are commercial entities generated to mine search data for passive revenue. Because they lack a real author, they also lack any real cultural depth, nuance, or authentic lived experience. This trend highlights exactly why curated networks like AALBC are so important. In a sea of algorithmic noise and synthetic content, finding and vetting real, human Black authors who pour their actual souls and heritages into their books is the only way to protect authentic literary culture.

AI is such a profound threat is so many ways. @gio74's tactic may not be that "funny." Whose else would be better at detecting--it take one to know one. It has come to a point that I can't tell with 100% certainty. Many of the tells that I used to use are going away or are being edited out. One thhing gets on my nerves is AI's love affair with emojis. If you ever see written text with more than a handful of emoji's assume it was written by an AI.

I did not watch the 30-minute video of the guy who I'm sure just giving his opinion of the information shared at the point. I see know reason to watch to it, unless someone can explain why his opinions matters. Now as someone who grew up in the segregated north and did not know a white person my age until I got to high school and was a full-grown man before I could call one a friend or had one in my home, I'm not nearly as paranoid as y'all are regarding white folks 😨 Also true, as a Black man who attended a three majority-white universities and worked for a couple of decades in fortune 20 companies, I was the only Black person in many spaces. There were times when racist statements were ignorantly made and is one of many reasons I left corporate America, but I was never at risk of being murdered or even physically harmed. I have no idea what happened to this young brother, so if his "friends" turned on him and murdered him simply because was Black -- that is crazy! However, I suspect the situation is more complicated, than that simple narrative circulating around the web and enriching Mark and his boys. The fact Ben Crump got involved is telling. Ben does not strike me as a straight up ambulance chaser, but what do I know...

Well for his family's sake may he RIP. As these 'ole school politicians die out maybe things will begin to improve for the country.

You don’t have to be gay not to want a woman. Obviously, not bad enough. Yeah, you live in Wakanda Brother 🌍

OK, who do you think is smarter Hitler or Trump?

I’m not a fan of these AI videos optimized for the YouTube algorithm. One, and you’ll notice this across a wide variety of videos even the ones created by humans, is that they are so redundant. YouTube likes longer videos for their algorithm so creativives create unnecessarily long videos. For example, that bit about drinking I felt like I was beating over a head with a stick with that line. Sheesh it was annoying and that’s ignoring the fact that I actually agree with @Pioneer1 on that subject. My generation definitely drank a lot more than the generation that came after me. Now the generation that came next (the one talked about in the video) definitely smokes a lot more weed. Surprisingly that didn’t make it into the video. There are some other points that I disagree with, but they are arguable..,

I don’t recall that conversation, but I can tell you one thing with 100% certainty those brothers don’t want a woman, and that’s perfectly fine. I just remember your boy Tariq Nashed had a whole career teacher brothers how to Mack women:

Sorry, if everyone one the planet lived in Texas the population density would be lower than it is in NYC. It is simply not possible to count every human being. That fact that people are dying and being born every second make it impossible to get an accurate snapshot. People are scattered all over the place. Demographers suggest the discrepancy can be 5% or more --- that is 100s of millions of people.

Being left alone?! If Black folks were that brutal, we could have fired up the ovens, dropped some nukes, or committed genocide. White folks crossed oceans to start shit LOL! Who do you think is smarter Richard Nixon or Donald Trump?

I did think boys could benefit from rights of passage programs, particularly when there is no father in the home or the mother is constantly bad mouthing him and men in general, to teach them what it means to be a man and how you treat women. Otherwise, you learn from your environment. The streets for example taught me the more women you can get the more of a man you are. I'm sure that is why the guys posting here don't understand these incels and view them as wimps. The incell dudes, who spent more time online than in the real world probably learn how to treat women from porn sites and are then severely disappointed when actual women don't behave the way they do in porn videos... I dunno.