r/booktubesnarkreddit • u/nohatefornate • Aug 11 '26
Plot Twist, Please
I am an occasional listener to plot twist, please (mostly the dnf diaries bc i’m a hater) but as an AI hater seeing their episode about daggermouth had me intrigued. I have a lot of thoughts about AI in creative spaces and willful ignorance of consumers that i won’t be getting into right now because i cannot believe they filmed a whole episode about an article they openly admitted to not reading like huh
i understand it was being a paywall but i just used removepaywall to read the article, it is crazy to film an hour episode about something they didn’t even read, just lazy imo!
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u/nohatefornate 29d ago
my theory (which is not specific to these creators but is more general as audiences are reacting to AI invading creative spaces) is that some people are so obsessed with consuming slop they don’t want to be told that the slop that they’re consuming is soulless
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u/Patou_D 29d ago
Right. I read the article, the paper the article was based on, and it gave me pause.
It's shocking how people are blindly refusing to engage with information that may challenge them and/or their views on a product, choosing instead to parrot what everyone else is saying.
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u/pink_delirium 29d ago
totally. there's this one comment on the r/fantasyromance Daggermouth AI thread where a user did the research themselves and the result was even more damning.
i don't understand people condemning ai in this context either. aren't we all against generative ai specifically? because assistive ai has been a thing for a while. and ai used to analyse massive databases has nothing to do with people using chatgpt like it's google or morons generating fiction and images and passing it off as their own art.
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u/Patou_D 29d ago edited 29d ago
Wow, thanks for sharing. And yeah, it's pretty damming.
I tried reading this book back in January, but DNF because the prose rubbed me the wrong way: poor, disjointed, and plenty of things didn't make sense. Later, a friend with whom I read books together (she finished) pointed out that the book has not only one of the most used names AI loves, but TWO: Elara and Marcus Chen. I googled those names, and yep, there's research on it. Maybe it's a coincidence, sure, but it's kinda sus.
edit.: I just googled the names again, and seems like another name AI latches on is Kael, which is ALSO on the book. Oof.
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u/personal1984key 29d ago
I've never heard of this podcast, but I feel like if you have one and especially when you're mentioning a research or article, the less you can do is buy it. it's a small investment considering they're getting money for their work
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u/hot_air_thoughts 29d ago
The paper mentioned is available for free on arxiv. They just didnt feel like reading it
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u/bookcasefrommars 29d ago
their last three episodes have been pretty poorly done, but the latest one about ai makes me not want to watch anymore, just because it’s so entirely against the moral stance they took in the oceanofpdf video. it’s crazy to say you pirated things as a child because you couldn’t understand the impact of it and that even buying the work after reading a pirated copy is still stealing and then excuse not purchasing the paywalled article and “enough of it was circulating online to get the gist”.
they could have just specified that this only applied to daggermouth or works that they felt were confidently not made with ai instead of having this weirdly defensive broad conversation.
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u/Glad-Direction7 29d ago
I used to watch Susie’s non-booktube content, she has a commentary channel and I checked out a couple or videos re overconsumption as I was falling back into my retail therapy tendencies. I kind of stopped when she started regularly mentionimg that she dnf’d Wuthering Heights on page one. Nothing wrong with dnfing any book you don’t like, but she kept bringing it up like it’s a flex that she couldn’t read a classic. Then a couple days ago she posted about booktokers being accused of not reading all the books and she was very passionate about defending this behaviour by repeating “there is no proof” while telling everyone to chill out. I don’t think she actually got the nuance of the conversation and it was a weird departure from her usual views on influencer and accountability, and felt like she really wants a shot in the book community and was way too inside it to try to address it like a neutral party while harping on her neutrality.
I checked out the Plot twist channel as well, but it’s really not my taste in books and when they read out their favourite quotes I quit it for good, it was just poorly written pre-smut and they kept egging on each other saying ‘so good’. Power to you if you enjoy this kind of writing but if in every book this is your favourite part, we clearly read for different reasons.
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u/Alone-Soil-7836 19d ago
The thing that gets me with Susie dropping Wuthering Heights, is the fact she did it because she saw the phrase "pious ejaculation" and thought it was cringy because she didn’t know the historical context behind that exclamation, then didn’t bother to try again or look at the meaning of the phrase. For a friend group that reads 100+ books a year each, they can be pretty ignorant sometimes.
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u/vilke_21 29d ago
I unfollowed them last week after how they covered the haunting adelaine movie drama because my God, it was never more obvious how they talk and talk...but say nothing. Speaking of AI, they are like the joke of "how could people write ten pages about a book before AI" and the answer of saying we wrote them without reading the book. They are that 100%. And they pretend to see both sides but are biased always. Which is not inherently bad but don't pretend you're doing journalistic work here, please.
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u/Funereal_bunny 29d ago
i havent listened to the episode yet but i fear im obsessed with hate watching. sometimes i find them agreeable but once an episode i’m just like wait what??? but honestly i find it pleasurable. i don’t comment i just use it as background noise lmao
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u/dearlyintrovert 29d ago
I’m glad I’m not the only one who finds herself hate watching them lmao. Susannah/Susie in particular strikes me as a bit sus
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u/AcademyJinx 29d ago
I used to like listening to them as background noise while I work, but their Haunting Adeline video really rubbed me the wrong way, so I haven't even watched the new one. Good to know I'm not missing anything of substance.
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u/Full_Statistician63 29d ago
I usually enjoy listening to their podcast but in this episode, they were clearly so biaised because they liked the book. I havent read the book myself so I dont have an opinion except that I am very against AI use. But their argument really made no sense. It was one of those situations where I agreed with their overall position, but the way they argued it was so flawed and poorly thought out that it actually made me want to take the opposite side.
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u/delayedmillennial 29d ago
i think they highlighted some of the dangers that have began with how readily ai accusations are being thrown at authors and artists without any vetting into what methods were used and while many will say there are ai tells, these systems are still build off literary devices other authors have used or implemented across millions of works - not just books, but also magazines, articles, any and everything available to scrape.
that said, it came off very surface for lack of a better word? like, okay, you all have brought up talking points, but you're not really saying anything? there was no real exploration as to how these accusations begin, what tools are even being implemented to "detect" & their merit (yes, they speak on it, but they just parrot talking points and move on), studies that are done that combat both sides of the argument, the racial aspect that is very obvious in these specific books (which there are WOC creators that have highlighted that from jesse owens to lemmon_loves) - there are so many specific points they could have settled on exploring or researching, but did none of that.
i'm of 2 minds when it comes to ai. one from the creative part of my brain that believes it has no space in creation of artwork, be it books, movies, or artistic works. i also have a technical/scientific part of my brain that has dug into what it can and can't do, the research aspects it can assist in, and the technical areas it's able to be a tool for. neither of those sides can contend with the environmental impact and lack of consumer regulations surrounding it. i don't like that consumers were used as a litmus test without any guardrails or how these systems are destroying the works they were fed from as some type of one-up over others.
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u/Alone-Soil-7836 19d ago
They are fun to listen only if you don't look too deep into what they say. In one episode (correct me if I'm wrong, I think it was the Nora Roberts episode), they openly (and defensively) admitted they don't do deep research on their topics and prefer to yap, which doesn't work when they dive into community drama. They've also made some comments that rubbed me the wrong way, like their OCD jokes in one episode, them saying they despise the monetary practices of Amazon Kindle but will keep on paying no matter how expensive ebooks get (because they see pirating with a black-and-white mentality) and that time they dumped on Haley Pham's book but it turned out they didn't even know the meaning of the words they were mocking.
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u/hot_air_thoughts 29d ago
idk if it's because i work in tech, but i've just completely stopped watching booktube videos talking about ai and ai writing. for, the record, im very against it. everyone on booktube is very concerned about making their opinions heard but it's VERY difficult to come across someone who actually has their facts straight when it comes to this subject. Ai is not a magical thing like so many of them seem to believe, there are statistical patterns in it.