I’ve been reading a lot of books lately about the emergence of dance music in general and acid house in particular so I was very interested to see a new title on Amazon last year, “Lost in the Acid Dreams: Exploring the Oldskool Acid House Rave Scene of 1988” by David Jack Gregg. I just got around to starting it yesterday, and I was disappointed to find that it has clearly been generated with ChatGPT. Perhaps I should have been tipped off by its short page count (72) and low low price (£2.88), but it had never even occurred to me that I might be tricked into buying this kind of drivel.
I’ve submitted a review to Amazon but it has yet to be published so I thought I’d post it here also as a warning. This “author” has several other books on topics such as Techno and DnB so it’s not unlikely that some of our members might be tempted to pick them up. If anyone is looking for a quality book on (one part of) dance music history, I can highly recommend “Join The Future: Bleep Techno and the Birth of British Bass Music” by Matt Anniss. Simon Reynolds’ “Energy Flash” is also an excellent account of the broader scene.
And before anyone asks “what’s wrong with AI generated content anyway?”, the issue here is that the blurb represents the book as being written by a human author, as well as calling it “groundbreaking” and “extensively researched”. I’ve no doubt that AI generated text has its uses, and I’ve used it myself at times, but charging money for this nonsense while misrepresenting the way it was created is fraud. I’ll now be contacting Amazon to get my money back and have this book either removed or clearly labelled as AI generated.
My review
The Amazon page for this book claims that it was written by human author David Jack Gregg. Having read every other available book on the Acid House phenomenon, as well as spent some time messing around with ChatGPT, I can confirm that this book was not written by a human, but rather it was generated by ChatGPT or a similar Large Language Model AI. This book contains almost no specific details about the Acid House era. Chapter 6, titled “DJ Culture and the Mix tape Phenomenon (sic)” is 664 words long and does not contain the name of a single DJ. The first time that any artist is mentioned is in chapter 8, “Fashion Artist’s & Style: The Acid House Look (sic)”, when the book cites Acid Trax by DJ Pierre (sic) and Acid Tracks by Phuture as two different pioneering Acid House releases. They are, as anyone with a familiarity with the genre would know, two different vinyl pressings of the same track.
No cities, clubs or record labels have been mentioned up to this point either. In fact, the only proper noun used up to this point is a passing mention of the TB-303 bass synth. This book is a collection of mindlessly repeated cliches that read like the voiceover introduction to a cheap TV documentary about the rave era. I’ve included a screenshot of the end of chapter 6 to give you an idea of the writing. “In this chapter, we celebrate the DJ… Join us as we delve into the magic behind the turntables, the alchemy of mix tapes, and the profound impact of DJ culture on the world of acid house.” This is the END of the chapter.
