> What else could this sick and twisted mind have cooked up? I wanted more. I clicked on Bette’s author page; this was the only title listed. Through the penumbral fog of half-sleep, squinting one-eyed at my phone, I googled, “a girls.quest for healthy watinf bette santinir.” Even the politely auto-corrected version yielded no meaningful results
> And then things got spooky. When I opened my Kindle again, there, illuminated by the inoffensive whitish glow of my device, was an ad for A Girl’s Quest for Healthy Eating. Only, it was vaguely distorted. Like a spot-the-difference Highlights game, here was the same book with minor discrepancies. This cover featured several little girls, presumably all on healthy eating quests of their own. The page count was slightly different. And most distressing of all, the author's name: Bette Santinir. In other words, Santini plus R. Where had I seen this name before? Oh right: from one minute ago when I misspelled Santini, Santinir.
> As the very editor of this Substack texted me, “If you didn’t have pics of this, I would think you were schizophrenic.”
I really wish the supposed pictures had been included in the piece.
The linked Reddit posts include other people seeing the same pattern, which seems to be to that the same AI-generated works are listed under many different slightly-differently-spelled author names, presumably to show up more in search ranks.
Forget whether it's true. We have here an essay that says, quite explicitly, "if I didn't have pictures of this, I would be called insane". It doesn't include any of the pictures. How does that happen? What's the right conclusion to draw from that?
> And then things got spooky. When I opened my Kindle again, there, illuminated by the inoffensive whitish glow of my device, was an ad for A Girl’s Quest for Healthy Eating. Only, it was vaguely distorted. Like a spot-the-difference Highlights game, here was the same book with minor discrepancies. This cover featured several little girls, presumably all on healthy eating quests of their own. The page count was slightly different. And most distressing of all, the author's name: Bette Santinir. In other words, Santini plus R. Where had I seen this name before? Oh right: from one minute ago when I misspelled Santini, Santinir.
> As the very editor of this Substack texted me, “If you didn’t have pics of this, I would think you were schizophrenic.”
I really wish the supposed pictures had been included in the piece.