Contrepreneurs: The Mikkelsen Twins

The 'book factory business oppportunity' trend spotted in the article is explored in depth in this excellent Dan Olson video: [VIDEO] It is a great and informative watch.

Relevant high quality and interesting video that dives in to the world of get rich quick book dumping schemes: [VIDEO]

One thing to note is that if you're not on Amazon, your book will still be on Amazon. Cory Doctorow points out[0] that their copyright detection systems only detect reuploads of on-platform books, and people scamming Audible with duplicates of books are rampant. I suspect this is part of why there isn't a huge contingent of angry authors jumping ship, because they can't reliably deny Amazon their work anyway. You're supposed to be able to just tell platforms "no, take this down". That comes from DMCA 512, that thing that indie creators absolutely hate because its far more useful as a censorship tool than for copyright enforcement[1]. If someone else reuploads your book to Amazon you have to actually find that reupload, buy it to validate that it is your work, take it down (and dox yourself in the process), and then repeat, forever. Outright infringement isn't the only scam either - ghostwriting and reselling lightly-edited GPT-3 copy[2] is also rampant on the platform, and there's even people selling courses on how to resell fake books[3]. This may eventually destroy Amazon's brand reputation, but it takes a long time to fall down the Trust Thermocline[4] when you're a giant like Amazon. The $10 royalty punishment makes absolutely no sense to me and I do not understand what the hell Amazon's motive is there. Except perhaps to bluff-charge indie writers into devaluing their work ahead of time. It reminds me of how Apple pushed for $0.99 songs for so long that the RIAA was will

I guess this is more of a case of garbage in - garbage out. The original sentence itself is not well-structured. But people who write like that and don't edit it; won't care of how the AI reads it. I don't feel like this is a product for carefully producing audiobooks, but to create them by the pound, so to speak. I'd say it's a move for the "make your own business through audiobooks" people [1] -- very strange for Apple. [1]: I didn't know this audience existed until I saw this video on it (and the cons that happen) from Dan Olson: [VIDEO]

Reminds me of the excellent folding ideas video on these sort of scams: [VIDEO] In the video he talks about a course (which is a scam) selling a different scam of getting a ghostwriter to write a crappy book, getting someone else to record it, and then publishing it to audible to make money. which seemingly did work for a short period of time but no longer does. I guess this is the same sort of thing, except cutting out the ghostwriter.

Somewhat related, and might give insight. This seems like the next step of the "hustle culture" this video explores, definetly worth a watch: [VIDEO] People looking to get rich quick write (or pay sweatshops to write) very low effort, poorly researched books about obscure topics. They put them on amazon, maybe make some money, then repeat. The video explores one of those buyable programs to get you involved in all of that. Seems like chatGPT is being used as the next tool in this process

Apparently, you've never watched those start-up tutorials sold on YouTube. Half the course is spent on arguing that by paying $2000 to learn how to make your own iOS apps, you're "investing in yourself". And of course the people that run the course make most of their money from running the course and not from actually releasing iOS apps... I recommend "Contrepreneurs: The Mikkelsen Twins" by "Folding Ideas" [VIDEO]

So far AI art is doing the opposite: increasing the amount of crap that people produce. The kinds of people who were once limited to underpaying ghostwriters to make spam books for Audible[0] can now chuck together a few prompts to ChatGPT and Stable Diffusion and get the same result. Yes, you have to be good at art in order to make good art with AI, but that doesn't matter when your goal is to create spam. The idea that artists should "do stuff for the joy of creating" is just plain insulting, too. They already do that . While artists would love to see, say, AI art models that were trained with licensed or public-domain data; training data theft isn't even their biggest concern. Their biggest concern is having the fun sucked out of their job as the artful minutae of drawing or writing is replaced with finding the correct combination of words to make Stable Diffusion draw the character you want with exactly the same details every time. It would be like if you worked at a PC building shop and one day the boss said "Actually we're just going to be an Apple authorized reseller now." The thing that's destroying artists' jobs being trained on their own work is just insult to injury. To be clear, though, AI doesn't "steal and resell content" in the vast majority of cases, either. Regurgitation is a thing, but the cause is duplicate data in the training set making it advantageous to memorize a few images to improve loss metrics. Most diffusion model architectures are not big enough

This is actually a spin on an existing git-rich-quick scam ( [VIDEO] ). Version 1.0 had people hiring low cost ghostwriters for hundreds of dollars to bang out a book on some SEO topic. Now you use the same playboy with "AI," with far less upfront cost.

> low quality self published garbage, algorithmic or otherwise. To elaborate on this - a common scam that people used to run was to pay a ghostwriter ~$750 to 'write' a 'book' that had ~50-80 pages of bullshit word salad. They'd then try to stick a real author's name on it, and try to sell it. (Amazon has started putting in a little bit of effort at detecting this scam, so now the scammers have pivoted[1] to selling suckers a training course on how to do this.) [1] [VIDEO]

Folding Ideas on youtube has an excellent explanation of the business model behind the rise of EBook Spam. The Mikkelson Twins are running a massive MLM scheme but instead of steak knives or scented candles, it's "training and support for creating your own EBook Passive Income Stream" which leads to what we see on Amazon ebook listings. The video also goes into the darker side of the incentives that lead people to commission ghostwriters, AI editors and the crushing labour demands of the people employed to write these books: [VIDEO]

Zoe Bee did a video essay[0] on her experience as a ghostwriter producing essentially the kind of junk that is now being automated with LLMs. In her case she was (somewhat unknowingly) paid to write unlicensed Minecraft stories. I think the video is worth a watch if you're not aware of the state of ebooks (especially on Amazon) prior to LLMs. It's also worth mentioning that this problem isn't limited to ebooks. There's also a cottage industry of mass produced minimal-effort audiobooks on Audible as part of various "passive income" scams. Dan Olson made a pretty good video essay[1] about one such scam where he actually played along for most of it and also gave it a try as a ghostwriter. [0]: [LINK] [1]: [VIDEO] EDIT: Considering the most cited examples are Amazon/Kindle and Audible, I think parallels can also be drawn to the proliferation of no-name brand Chinese whitelabel dropshipping products on regular Amazon. Everyone already knows not to trust Amazon reviews but at this point it's hard to find reputable brands for products you're not already familiar with (e.g. which of the one hundred brands featuring near identical products are actually brands you might find in a retail store rather than a random name slapped on the product in the same Chinese factory?). LLMs will definitely make reviews even more untrustworthy but they might also help generating even more plausible copycat product descriptions and designs.

Dan Olson also made video on the topic, because of course he did: [VIDEO] It was a bit before the AI boom, back when the bedrock of the scam economy was mostly gig platforms.

> One possible future is going back to a medium with higher cost of publication. Books. The grifters are all over that already. No AI necessary to generate and publish drivel. See “Contrepreneurs: The Mikkelsen Twins”¹ by Dan Olson² for an informative and entertaining documentary on the matter. ¹ [VIDEO] ² A.k.a Folding Ideas. A.k.a. the creator of “Line Goes Up – The Problem With NFTs”.

My impression is that there's a considerable overlap between people monetizing digital nomad content and what citizens of their residence country would call "shady characters". [LINK] [VIDEO]

That reminds me of the time that Folding Ideas' Dan Olsen wrote a book on an arbitrary subject to see how the economics of a passive income audiobook grift worked: [VIDEO]

> This is what I call meta advice. That’s what I call a grift. Your description reminded me of Dan Olson’s fantastic video on that type of strategy—where you make money by selling the idea that anyone can make passive income by doing something the seller doesn’t themselves do (anymore)—using the Mikkelsen Twins as the example. In Dan’s words (emphasis mine), the Mikkelsen Twins aren’t special, grifters like them are a dime a dozen. He chose them as the example “because they are of a type. They are a representative sample of a category of grift. And also because they’re kind of incompetent and that makes them entertaining ”. He’s not wrong. [VIDEO]

Dan Olsen ("Folding Ideas") actually uploaded a video about KDP spamming, "Contrepreneurs: The Mikkelsen Twins" [VIDEO] , in September 2022 just before ChatGPT 3 hit. Basically the whole turnkey infrastructure to automatically turn a prompt into a Kindle book was in full operation by then, just with human ghostwriters on Web portals in place of LLMs.

If you want an overly long slightly different version of that video, you could check out the Folding Ideas video [VIDEO]

a very entertaining, highly-recommended, and intense gonzo video essay on the topic of the courses scams [VIDEO]