Nov 17, 2022 07:00:00

When I bought the highly rated 'NFT Explanation Book' on Amazon, it was a book that was automatically generated by AI and was full of highlights.

Non-fungible tokens (NFTs) became a big boom for a time, with a single piece of NFT art valued at approximately $69 million (approximately 7.5 billion yen at the exchange rate at the time). When he purchased a book about NFTs, computer security expert Michał Zalewski reported that the book contained a list of descriptions that appeared to have been output by a text generation AI such as GPT-3. .

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Mr. Zalewski purchased about 10 of the highest-rated NFT-related books on Amazon at the end of 2021, when the NFT boom was at its peak. Mr. Zalewski bought the NFT book because he believed that ``in order to provide a balanced critique, one must become familiar with the views often advocated by proponents of NFT technology.''

Mr. Zalewski, who is skeptical about NFTs, said that after reading these books, he said, ``Every book leans toward the same argument that ``value is rarity,'' but my counterargument is simple: ``That's an exception.'' 'My children's doodles have a rarity value, but even if they were to be shown at an art exhibition, they would probably only get a nickel or two.'

The book that Zalewski said was particularly impressive was ' NFT FOR BEGINNERS .'

Amazon | NFT FOR BEGINNERS: The Simple Guide for Understand Non-Fungible Tokens and Economically Exploit the New Digital El Dorado. Learn How to Monetize Them Like Bitcoin. | Martin, Matt | Home Based

When Mr. Zalewski ordered this book, it was ranked third when searching for 'NFT' on Amazon, and had hundreds of five-star reviews. However, when Mr. Zalewski actually read it, he found that it was difficult to say that it was a good book.

For example, the following page describing how to invest in virtual currencies and NFTs states, ``Wait at least three months, buy up lagging currencies all at once, and then wait for the market to rise again.50 When the price increases by more than %, please sell all your virtual currency at once.This will give you a profit from the price increase.'' Although he is not wrong, it is not very realistic to set the standard for a sudden rise of more than 50%, and Mr. Zalewski comments, ``I can't help but smile at this kind of investment advice.''

As Mr. Zalewski advanced further into the page, the following sentences jumped out at him: ``NTF is part of the Strategic Development Group'' and ``NTF is an abbreviation for Net Price Calculator.'' The article was supposed to be about NFT (non-fungible token), but it is a text discussing 'NTF', and the initials of Net Price Calculator become 'NPC', so everything is different.

The random descriptions continued for several pages, and by the end, I had jumped to the topic of chemotherapy called 'NFP.'

Mr. Zalewski's first thought as to why such a description was created was that ``the book was written on behalf of a content farm that mass-produces thin, low-quality content.'' At these content farms, articles are created by cutting and pasting sentences created by many people without understanding the context, which can result in statements that are completely different from the main content. However, when Mr. Zalewski searched for words such as ``NFP chemotherapy'', there were no hits at all, so the line that an amateur copied the text from the Internet disappeared.

Ultimately, Zalewski concluded that the book was probably the output of a machine learning-based language model such as GPT-3. According to Zalewski, these language models are very strong for specific topics, but are not good at developing advanced theories. In particular, when generating long sentences, it can deviate from the topic or generate contradictory sentences for each paragraph.

As mentioned above, when Mr. Zalewski purchased this book on Amazon, there were many perfect reviews posted, but at the time of writing, there were only 34 reviews, with an average review score of 3.1 points, and 26% of the reviews were 1 star. It has the lowest rating of 1. Regarding the book, Zalewski said, ``Although there is no evidence, there is no doubt that we have stumbled across an early commercial example of a machine-generated book.'' The book quickly disappeared from the top of search results. , hundreds of fake reviews were also removed, which likely served their original purpose.'

Regarding the future of technologies such as text-writing AI, Zalewski said, ``GPT-3 is still years away from enriching our lives, but it is already providing some real content on the Internet.'' In a sense, it can be said that ``infinitely expandable technology has been realized''.And by using this technology, you can also make money and influence public opinion. So it's inevitable that this will happen.'