I grew up and went into school in seventies in Soviet Union. I remember myself discovering local libraries, bookstores etc. I still love books, I have a lot of them, but process of discovery is very different. When I was young almost every book I found in library or bookstore about topic I was interested in, was almost certainly worth to read. Publishing books was slow and expensive process and there was a very slim chance that not good books were published at all. During last decades it hasn't been a case any more and I had to develop a skills how to find a stuff worth to read – what reviews to trust etc. In AI age these skills became almost worthless as well and I trust only recommendations from people I know and trust.
I have been tinkering with this over the past few months. One story with a specific genre and demographic target, but as I've been reading each draft there are so many small issues that crop up, inconsistency across various parts of the story, items that are introduced, questions that go unanswered etc. Unless your goal is to become an editor of AI content, it's not worth the effort.
Perhaps in time it will be better but you will need a proper pipeline to write, assess, track changes etc... perhaps all that's needed is a GitHub of sorts for writing.
However... what is the chance of any book finding an audience if there are so many to compete with. It might make more sense in having something created just for you though.
> inconsistency across various parts of the story, items that are introduced, questions that go unanswered etc.
This is a workflow problem.
What the LLM normally needs:
- very basic outline: what the story is about
- basic cast of characters: like fiction/plays of the 18-1900s
Then you go chapter-by-chapter. But the most critical thing is that you MUST provide the chapter beats. From start to end. Location, environment, events, any critical conversations. For a chapter that is 2-3K words, this chapter outline often becomes 2-400 words or more. Because you have the story in your head, you can handle the stuff that the LLM is likely to screw up.
There are ways to build a system where the LLM can keep track of many things, but then that becomes programming, which is just as boring.
I won't go into too much detail, but I have a plot outline, development bible, story mountain, character outlines, style guide and more.
I have four agents running on various tasks; writing, error checking, consistency and critique.
They can generate a good story but there are holes and issues so it's far from perfect and I wouldn't give it away for free, never mind put a price on it.
I feel like the genie is out of the bottle. Second order effects and third order effects to markets all around, societal impacts deriving from economic changes and changing incentives galore are yet to be seen. Appreciation of original creative works, motivation to create original works when AI can spit out vast amounts of content, (newly) the effort required to even discover and curate original work that's been created with intention and thought, etc., a lot of these new things have to be reckoned with.
But it doesn't feel good. At the moment it feels scary. Crossing my fingers we get through this somehow.
The problem is not about money it is that we are made massively culturally poorer by the flood of ahistorical, amoral, incoherent, rococco, contradictory yet plausible shit produced by LLMs.
Both the internet and books have been flooded with ‘content’ which appears like human content but has no coherence or intention to it and tends to fall apart completely the longer form the story.
Even our autocomplete is being infected with LLM suggestions, distorting and guiding how people write.
This is a VERY significant problem for our culture long term.
I don’t see any other way past this other than regulation:
We need authenticated online spaces where your account is linked to a real, government issued ID. This way, moderating content becomes feasible again. Bans will hold value, since you can’t just create new accounts all the time. I predict people will gravitate towards authenticated markets (and social media).
I for one am sick and tired of second guessing every text I‘m reading, at least give me someone to hold accountable.
Or maybe we just collectively impose severe social sanction on people trying to pass off low effort slop as their own work and stop calling it ‘artificial intelligence’?
> Bans will hold value, since you can’t just create new accounts all the time.
People will just flood to places that are not official and where they'll be able to express their views freely. That's how these things have always turned out to be.
In other words, let's say that I'll get banned from the likes of FB or IG as a result of me trespassing my government's ideological wishes, well, tough luck for FB and IG (and fuck them while I'm at it), I'll just make an account on a platform that won't abide by EU/Romanian (I'm Romanian myself) propaganda, where I'll still be able to share views with people thinking similar thoughts to what I think.
the market they analyse is specifically self-published fiction. Most of the traditionally published books are not AI generated and they make significantly more money as a category than self publishing does. It is not really possible to flood that market in this form with 0 entry barriers.
So yes, allowing AI slop in a market where anyone can publish anything and quality is not a very strict criteria, of course it will dillute the market. But we are unlikely to see this shift in traditional publishing houses.
So a book that was “stunningly good, everyone fell in love with it. It’s a book that appeals to absolutely everyone.” now won't be published because AI was used to create it?
Personally I prefer stunningly good over exclusively human created.
Gen AI is at a point now where it can write good chapters. You still need a human editor to make it coherent, plug plot holes and tie it all together.
So if you can write a good book, but can't write good chapters, a Gen AI ghostwriter is an ideal tool.
Output quality will vary.
> Over this period, the number of books with observed sales in a quarter grew 19.2-fold, while quarterly revenue grew only 8.9-fold.
That's very interesting, and not as dramatic a dilution as I'd expected over the period (2023 - 26), or even close to as dramatic an increase in overall number of titles (achieving a sale) as I expected.
This sample is limited to what the study's authors have defined as "self-published genre fiction", which isn't representative of the market as a whole, and has very different economics compared to, for example, fiction titles published by "Big 5" publishers.
Whether the sales of non-self-published books are potentially being diluted is an interesting question, because it will tell us slightly more about where those AI sales might be coming from. I'd like to know unit and revenue numbers for non-self-published titles for the same period, in the same Amazon categories - on the off-chance anyone here has BookScan access and that's something you can pull.
Overall, though, this seems like a relatively optimistic result. If the economics don't work in the longer-term - the dilution effect ends up not being worth the token cost & labour, unless you can "hit" relatively reliably - we'll end up with less slop, put out by slop-auteurs running book farms, which I think is a fine outcome.
This is not without precedent by any stretch - the only meaningfully new part of that would be the writing mechanism. It strikes me as a possible eventual equilibrium that's both realistic and makes logical sense.
Putting aside the AI-fiction panic, and "the novel is dead" hyperbolics (which is something that's been said about as long as novels have existed), it probably will settle around a % of low-budget genre fiction being slop - as it always has been.
It feels a little patronising to suggest readers looking for anything more "serious" will be seduced and have their sales diluted by mass-produced LLM outputs. Readers deserve more credit than that, I hope.
But it looks, to me, really hard to read anything directionally on that at all, especially without equivalent numbers on titles from actual publishers.
This is a surprise: Books with no AI text lose the most ground in genres with high AI diffusion, and most of all where Kindle Unlimited availability is high. Great to know this about creativity.
The market for books has been flooded far before AI. Millions of books are published each year, many more self published and unpublished. Sturgeon's law (90% of everything is crud) predates AI by many decades.
You need a mechanism to filter out the crud. There are many, some better than others.
The overwhelming majority of content on Youtube is also plagued by AI.
You're 6 minutes in a documentary about Russo-Ottoman wars and only then you start noticing something's wrong, paintings are made up, the voice sounds similar to voices of other videos and the script has an odd non-human character to it.
Then you dig into it, and indeed it's a bunch of crap prompts glued together on top of some lame ai-generated internet research.
Prominent and formerly good youtuber Hank Green was just caught reading an AI script. In a video about the bouba/kiki effect he just read out something like "You're right to push back on this. If you'd like, I can reword this..." and didn't even flinch, didn't edit the sentence out, because his brain has been rotted by AI use.
I think it is just natural end of certain type of creators. They start as single person, slowly get maybe small team to help with filming and editing. And then when you need to keep producing content the script writers come. And now they are just face reading whatever is given to them. And then well there is to speed up the slowest part of process script and custom art. AI enters to this. And now they are already too far gone to care.
It's funny cause on the embedded youtube app they show you like 30 second clip and in about 10-15 seconds AIsm makes it pretty clear it's just going to be a grating voice over with horrible prose.
I wonder if this spells the end for online bookshops. I can imagine that small bookshops – or even online bookshops that focus primarily on selling curated books – are the future.
The book retail in my city is thriving, and consists mainly of shops where the owners curate the books.
I hate these headlines. It's not generative ai that floods the market for books. It's people using Generative AI to flood the market. It's always the same something gets attributed to technology while it's people doing it. Scrutinize the people not the technology.
Why do people use Gen AI for writing? What's the motivation? For academic papers, it's probably citation metrics and the number of publications. For novels, it's likely economic factors. If those factors disappear, would people still use Gen AI for writing?
I can understand being interested in it from a Modernist perspective.
It's both a new technology that maps a geometry to existing language - which is very interesting from several literary theory POVs - and represents a new kind of typewriter. If you're interested in innovative techniques in fiction, I think LLMs are arguably deeply interesting. Mass-producing slop, however, is probably quite limited in terms of its theoretical interest, and in how it changes the craft.
Personally, an example of how I use gen AI when writing is that I sometimes use a little text editor I wrote. It polls a local model, and grabs the 50 most-likely next token(s), rounded to one word, based on where the cursor is.
"Voice" in fiction was already about how the author chooses to deviate from the expected-next-word. So - while you could just use the tokens returned - I find myself using them much more often to choose what words to avoid using, or how to deviate from the expected outputs, and where it might be most interesting to do that.
I think there's plenty of interesting things that can be done with gen AI in terms of fiction writing, but I think we're quite a long way from working all of them out yet. Wholesale slop generation is one of the most obvious - and most boring - things writers can do with an LLM.
It’s easier than actually writing, which is very hard to do well; authors spend years working on books.
Doesn’t really matter what the original motivation was (money, reputation, fame), people will use LLMs as a shortcut to generate text, and we’re all poorer because of it.
I have hundreds of plot ideas from 40 years of reading and watching crappy books and films/tv. Never had the time or energy to explore those. LLMs let me try out various plots. To see which ones work and which don't. I haven't really thought about publishing anything though. Too much work and bureaucracy.
The thing is ... ideas matter just as much as the writing. You cannot simply say: "Hey Claude, write me a Sherlock Holmes pastiche set in the bronze age."
I have found that a 1:4 to 1:8 ratio gives nice results. That is, for every 4-8 paras of expected output, you must provide 1 para worth of character detail, plot beats etc. So you would need 100-200 pages of your own writing to produce 800 pages worth.
A bunch of ideas doesn't make a book. Actual writing takes place, the length of each sentence, the specific choice of words, the pace, the choices, the editing. It's literally an art. Nobody wants to read what ChatGPT wrote based on your prompts.
Of course you can use it to quickly try out stuff, for some editorial tasks and such. But unless you learn the craft of writing I don't think others will want to read any of this stuff.
I have read thousands of books in my lifetime. I don't really have too many hobbies outside of reading. Trust me when I say there is an audience for literal crap. LLMs actually raise the bar significantly. I do not think they will ever exceed Hugo, or TS Eliot, or Borges, but they are far superior to the random author publishing random crap every single day.
Can the writer use AI to improve their output ... is the only outstanding question.
> It's literally an art.
So was making clothes, or shoes, or cabinets, or knives, or cooking, or so many other things. Now we mass produce all of them.
People are too precious about man-made art. I don't see the point. Every book ever written might have some novelty value of its own. But it mostly has the same plots, character archetypes and other tropes found in other fiction. We think there is something special about human writing. But LLMs have read the same stuff we have. And produce similar inspired writing.
I mean, you’re right in a way that motifs, stylistic devices and archetypes recur in fiction, and that an LLM could produce similarly inspired texts – so what? That’s no reason not to write yourself – unless you don’t enjoy writing and just want some sort of result, some sort of product. And you sound as though you don’t actually enjoy writing, but would still like to produce a book. But why bother at all if you don’t enjoy writing? Writing as a hobby carries no stakes that would in any way justify the use of LLMs. There is nothing that needs to be optimised in order to produce value.
'Writing' covers a lot of creative tasks. You might very well enjoy creating plots, characters, ideas, situations, but find the actual business of putting thousands of words down on a page tedious.
Think of it this way. You like well-designed houses. Like looking at them, living in them. So you design a house per your liking having bought a plot overlooking a stream and a meadow. And you hire someone to build it for you. You may not enjoy the actual process of building, but you do like living in the final product, right?
It is the same with books. Reading a story based on a plot of your design, and characters you built, dealing with situations you conceived of, and having conversations you directed works for me ... even if an LLM assisted with the writing duties.
So, if you hire a builder to implement your design, the end product is functional, i.e. it should provide you with shelter and keep you warm. The builder's craft serves a purpose beyond itself. But when you "hire" an LLM to write prose, what is the functional product? It's the prose. You don't read a novel and then throw away the sentences to get at the story underneath. The sentences are the story. So outsourcing the writing isn't like hiring a builder, it's more like designing a house and then handing someone else the keys.
To the point you have to wonder if the reduced reading for pleasure levels in many places are due to understandably not being able to tell what is worth reading, especially given the enthusiasm the modern book industry has for promoting absolutely uninspiring crap.
all global text-for-money marketplaces (books, newsletters, onlyfans chats, etc.) will soon require ID verification to participate, or otherwise, substantial proof that there is a human in there somewhere
Frankly the amount of books available from before LLM is staggering. The supply will long outlive me. So why would I buy any AI generated one? That is unless it starts producing something really good. Until that happens I suspect there is no real market for AI books.
Oh and btw amount of human generated crap is also so great that I has long became a problem for me to find good thing in that sea.
I grew up and went into school in seventies in Soviet Union. I remember myself discovering local libraries, bookstores etc. I still love books, I have a lot of them, but process of discovery is very different. When I was young almost every book I found in library or bookstore about topic I was interested in, was almost certainly worth to read. Publishing books was slow and expensive process and there was a very slim chance that not good books were published at all. During last decades it hasn't been a case any more and I had to develop a skills how to find a stuff worth to read – what reviews to trust etc. In AI age these skills became almost worthless as well and I trust only recommendations from people I know and trust.
I have been tinkering with this over the past few months. One story with a specific genre and demographic target, but as I've been reading each draft there are so many small issues that crop up, inconsistency across various parts of the story, items that are introduced, questions that go unanswered etc. Unless your goal is to become an editor of AI content, it's not worth the effort.
Perhaps in time it will be better but you will need a proper pipeline to write, assess, track changes etc... perhaps all that's needed is a GitHub of sorts for writing.
However... what is the chance of any book finding an audience if there are so many to compete with. It might make more sense in having something created just for you though.
> inconsistency across various parts of the story, items that are introduced, questions that go unanswered etc.
This is a workflow problem.
What the LLM normally needs:
- very basic outline: what the story is about
- basic cast of characters: like fiction/plays of the 18-1900s
Then you go chapter-by-chapter. But the most critical thing is that you MUST provide the chapter beats. From start to end. Location, environment, events, any critical conversations. For a chapter that is 2-3K words, this chapter outline often becomes 2-400 words or more. Because you have the story in your head, you can handle the stuff that the LLM is likely to screw up.
There are ways to build a system where the LLM can keep track of many things, but then that becomes programming, which is just as boring.
I won't go into too much detail, but I have a plot outline, development bible, story mountain, character outlines, style guide and more. I have four agents running on various tasks; writing, error checking, consistency and critique. They can generate a good story but there are holes and issues so it's far from perfect and I wouldn't give it away for free, never mind put a price on it.
I feel like the genie is out of the bottle. Second order effects and third order effects to markets all around, societal impacts deriving from economic changes and changing incentives galore are yet to be seen. Appreciation of original creative works, motivation to create original works when AI can spit out vast amounts of content, (newly) the effort required to even discover and curate original work that's been created with intention and thought, etc., a lot of these new things have to be reckoned with.
But it doesn't feel good. At the moment it feels scary. Crossing my fingers we get through this somehow.
I don’t see how this market ("mostly" AI-written books) won’t get arbitraged to death with the cheaper and open-weight models that keep coming out
The problem is not about money it is that we are made massively culturally poorer by the flood of ahistorical, amoral, incoherent, rococco, contradictory yet plausible shit produced by LLMs.
Both the internet and books have been flooded with ‘content’ which appears like human content but has no coherence or intention to it and tends to fall apart completely the longer form the story.
Even our autocomplete is being infected with LLM suggestions, distorting and guiding how people write.
This is a VERY significant problem for our culture long term.
I don’t see any other way past this other than regulation:
We need authenticated online spaces where your account is linked to a real, government issued ID. This way, moderating content becomes feasible again. Bans will hold value, since you can’t just create new accounts all the time. I predict people will gravitate towards authenticated markets (and social media).
I for one am sick and tired of second guessing every text I‘m reading, at least give me someone to hold accountable.
Well that doesn't require a regulation. You can just create this space.
A space "regulated" by id. its obvious and its going to happen
When people talk about regulation it's usually government regulation.
Or maybe we just collectively impose severe social sanction on people trying to pass off low effort slop as their own work and stop calling it ‘artificial intelligence’?
> Bans will hold value, since you can’t just create new accounts all the time.
People will just flood to places that are not official and where they'll be able to express their views freely. That's how these things have always turned out to be.
In other words, let's say that I'll get banned from the likes of FB or IG as a result of me trespassing my government's ideological wishes, well, tough luck for FB and IG (and fuck them while I'm at it), I'll just make an account on a platform that won't abide by EU/Romanian (I'm Romanian myself) propaganda, where I'll still be able to share views with people thinking similar thoughts to what I think.
Sounds like everything is proceeding according to plan.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-gGLvg0n-uY
There was a case a while back now of an AI generated mushroom identification book filled with inaccuracies.
Problem is short of filtering out anything published after 2023 it’s almost impossible to find something that isn’t slop now.
> Problem is short of filtering out anything published after 2023
Is it even feasible to filter this? Such metadata can be easily faked too in a lot of contexts.
You don’t use metadata. You use old book reviews and historical top charts.
We can basically only read well known books from the past.
the market they analyse is specifically self-published fiction. Most of the traditionally published books are not AI generated and they make significantly more money as a category than self publishing does. It is not really possible to flood that market in this form with 0 entry barriers.
So yes, allowing AI slop in a market where anyone can publish anything and quality is not a very strict criteria, of course it will dillute the market. But we are unlikely to see this shift in traditional publishing houses.
$2m crime novel deal collapses amid questions over AI use
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2026/jul/31/crime-novel-de...
So a book that was “stunningly good, everyone fell in love with it. It’s a book that appeals to absolutely everyone.” now won't be published because AI was used to create it?
Personally I prefer stunningly good over exclusively human created.
Their entire analysis is based on the assumption that Pangram 3.3 is a reliable tool for detecting AI-generated content. What if not?
Gen AI is at a point now where it can write good chapters. You still need a human editor to make it coherent, plug plot holes and tie it all together. So if you can write a good book, but can't write good chapters, a Gen AI ghostwriter is an ideal tool. Output quality will vary.
> Over this period, the number of books with observed sales in a quarter grew 19.2-fold, while quarterly revenue grew only 8.9-fold.
That's very interesting, and not as dramatic a dilution as I'd expected over the period (2023 - 26), or even close to as dramatic an increase in overall number of titles (achieving a sale) as I expected.
This sample is limited to what the study's authors have defined as "self-published genre fiction", which isn't representative of the market as a whole, and has very different economics compared to, for example, fiction titles published by "Big 5" publishers.
Whether the sales of non-self-published books are potentially being diluted is an interesting question, because it will tell us slightly more about where those AI sales might be coming from. I'd like to know unit and revenue numbers for non-self-published titles for the same period, in the same Amazon categories - on the off-chance anyone here has BookScan access and that's something you can pull.
Overall, though, this seems like a relatively optimistic result. If the economics don't work in the longer-term - the dilution effect ends up not being worth the token cost & labour, unless you can "hit" relatively reliably - we'll end up with less slop, put out by slop-auteurs running book farms, which I think is a fine outcome.
This is not without precedent by any stretch - the only meaningfully new part of that would be the writing mechanism. It strikes me as a possible eventual equilibrium that's both realistic and makes logical sense.
Putting aside the AI-fiction panic, and "the novel is dead" hyperbolics (which is something that's been said about as long as novels have existed), it probably will settle around a % of low-budget genre fiction being slop - as it always has been.
It feels a little patronising to suggest readers looking for anything more "serious" will be seduced and have their sales diluted by mass-produced LLM outputs. Readers deserve more credit than that, I hope.
But it looks, to me, really hard to read anything directionally on that at all, especially without equivalent numbers on titles from actual publishers.
This is a surprise: Books with no AI text lose the most ground in genres with high AI diffusion, and most of all where Kindle Unlimited availability is high. Great to know this about creativity.
The market for books has been flooded far before AI. Millions of books are published each year, many more self published and unpublished. Sturgeon's law (90% of everything is crud) predates AI by many decades.
You need a mechanism to filter out the crud. There are many, some better than others.
90% of crud filtering mechanisms are crud.
For any kind of online entertainment really.
The overwhelming majority of content on Youtube is also plagued by AI.
You're 6 minutes in a documentary about Russo-Ottoman wars and only then you start noticing something's wrong, paintings are made up, the voice sounds similar to voices of other videos and the script has an odd non-human character to it.
Then you dig into it, and indeed it's a bunch of crap prompts glued together on top of some lame ai-generated internet research.
Prominent and formerly good youtuber Hank Green was just caught reading an AI script. In a video about the bouba/kiki effect he just read out something like "You're right to push back on this. If you'd like, I can reword this..." and didn't even flinch, didn't edit the sentence out, because his brain has been rotted by AI use.
I think it is just natural end of certain type of creators. They start as single person, slowly get maybe small team to help with filming and editing. And then when you need to keep producing content the script writers come. And now they are just face reading whatever is given to them. And then well there is to speed up the slowest part of process script and custom art. AI enters to this. And now they are already too far gone to care.
No passion, no independent research, only the drive to make money with as little effort as possible
It's funny cause on the embedded youtube app they show you like 30 second clip and in about 10-15 seconds AIsm makes it pretty clear it's just going to be a grating voice over with horrible prose.
YouTube essays have been slop for a while though. Before AI it was just people reading the Wikipedia page on the topic.
The point is that now it's dramatically worse by volume
I wonder if this spells the end for online bookshops. I can imagine that small bookshops – or even online bookshops that focus primarily on selling curated books – are the future.
The book retail in my city is thriving, and consists mainly of shops where the owners curate the books.
I hate these headlines. It's not generative ai that floods the market for books. It's people using Generative AI to flood the market. It's always the same something gets attributed to technology while it's people doing it. Scrutinize the people not the technology.
Welcome to the grift economy: it's the marks fault and no one does anything
Why do people use Gen AI for writing? What's the motivation? For academic papers, it's probably citation metrics and the number of publications. For novels, it's likely economic factors. If those factors disappear, would people still use Gen AI for writing?
I can understand being interested in it from a Modernist perspective.
It's both a new technology that maps a geometry to existing language - which is very interesting from several literary theory POVs - and represents a new kind of typewriter. If you're interested in innovative techniques in fiction, I think LLMs are arguably deeply interesting. Mass-producing slop, however, is probably quite limited in terms of its theoretical interest, and in how it changes the craft.
Personally, an example of how I use gen AI when writing is that I sometimes use a little text editor I wrote. It polls a local model, and grabs the 50 most-likely next token(s), rounded to one word, based on where the cursor is.
"Voice" in fiction was already about how the author chooses to deviate from the expected-next-word. So - while you could just use the tokens returned - I find myself using them much more often to choose what words to avoid using, or how to deviate from the expected outputs, and where it might be most interesting to do that.
I think there's plenty of interesting things that can be done with gen AI in terms of fiction writing, but I think we're quite a long way from working all of them out yet. Wholesale slop generation is one of the most obvious - and most boring - things writers can do with an LLM.
Get rich quick scams, this market existed before GenAI. They’d hire ghost writers, and then put them on audible.
Now it’s easier than ever. So the market explodes. But it makes legit writers harder to find. Its bleak.
It’s easier than actually writing, which is very hard to do well; authors spend years working on books.
Doesn’t really matter what the original motivation was (money, reputation, fame), people will use LLMs as a shortcut to generate text, and we’re all poorer because of it.
Even if all extrinsic motivations for writing disappear, some people will continue to write (without AI) for personal reasons.
And even at that point, others will continue to write using AI to simulate being one of those people.
Some people may continue using AI and publish books but the amount of AI slop would be dramatically lower without extrinsic motivations.
I have hundreds of plot ideas from 40 years of reading and watching crappy books and films/tv. Never had the time or energy to explore those. LLMs let me try out various plots. To see which ones work and which don't. I haven't really thought about publishing anything though. Too much work and bureaucracy.
The thing is ... ideas matter just as much as the writing. You cannot simply say: "Hey Claude, write me a Sherlock Holmes pastiche set in the bronze age."
I have found that a 1:4 to 1:8 ratio gives nice results. That is, for every 4-8 paras of expected output, you must provide 1 para worth of character detail, plot beats etc. So you would need 100-200 pages of your own writing to produce 800 pages worth.
But most people are lazy. So the output is too.
A bunch of ideas doesn't make a book. Actual writing takes place, the length of each sentence, the specific choice of words, the pace, the choices, the editing. It's literally an art. Nobody wants to read what ChatGPT wrote based on your prompts.
Of course you can use it to quickly try out stuff, for some editorial tasks and such. But unless you learn the craft of writing I don't think others will want to read any of this stuff.
I have read thousands of books in my lifetime. I don't really have too many hobbies outside of reading. Trust me when I say there is an audience for literal crap. LLMs actually raise the bar significantly. I do not think they will ever exceed Hugo, or TS Eliot, or Borges, but they are far superior to the random author publishing random crap every single day.
Can the writer use AI to improve their output ... is the only outstanding question.
> It's literally an art.
So was making clothes, or shoes, or cabinets, or knives, or cooking, or so many other things. Now we mass produce all of them.
But why would I want to read that?
Just give me the prompt at this point.
You could say that for any book.
People are too precious about man-made art. I don't see the point. Every book ever written might have some novelty value of its own. But it mostly has the same plots, character archetypes and other tropes found in other fiction. We think there is something special about human writing. But LLMs have read the same stuff we have. And produce similar inspired writing.
I mean, you’re right in a way that motifs, stylistic devices and archetypes recur in fiction, and that an LLM could produce similarly inspired texts – so what? That’s no reason not to write yourself – unless you don’t enjoy writing and just want some sort of result, some sort of product. And you sound as though you don’t actually enjoy writing, but would still like to produce a book. But why bother at all if you don’t enjoy writing? Writing as a hobby carries no stakes that would in any way justify the use of LLMs. There is nothing that needs to be optimised in order to produce value.
'Writing' covers a lot of creative tasks. You might very well enjoy creating plots, characters, ideas, situations, but find the actual business of putting thousands of words down on a page tedious.
Think of it this way. You like well-designed houses. Like looking at them, living in them. So you design a house per your liking having bought a plot overlooking a stream and a meadow. And you hire someone to build it for you. You may not enjoy the actual process of building, but you do like living in the final product, right?
It is the same with books. Reading a story based on a plot of your design, and characters you built, dealing with situations you conceived of, and having conversations you directed works for me ... even if an LLM assisted with the writing duties.
So, if you hire a builder to implement your design, the end product is functional, i.e. it should provide you with shelter and keep you warm. The builder's craft serves a purpose beyond itself. But when you "hire" an LLM to write prose, what is the functional product? It's the prose. You don't read a novel and then throw away the sentences to get at the story underneath. The sentences are the story. So outsourcing the writing isn't like hiring a builder, it's more like designing a house and then handing someone else the keys.
I've gotten yearly performance reviews that have been obviously ChatGPT-generated. People are just lazy.
Some HR systems even support that and have AI writing/rewording integrated.
Corporate hellscapes intensifying, I guess.
"back then", you had to write for months to get a book out, and it sold 20 copies and you earned $20.
Now you can do it in minutes, get 50 books out, 20 of them sell 10 copies, you've earned $200.
(i might be exaggerating the times and earnings, but the point stands)
I had about 2000 hours invested in a few books. I think I have made less than $2/hour so far after all the years.
Spamming online marketplaces with massive amounts of slop. Even if you only get a few sales per book, you win in volume.
The ratio of good books to slop (AI or not) was far to bad for humans to reasonably filter 20 years ago.
To the point you have to wonder if the reduced reading for pleasure levels in many places are due to understandably not being able to tell what is worth reading, especially given the enthusiasm the modern book industry has for promoting absolutely uninspiring crap.
all global text-for-money marketplaces (books, newsletters, onlyfans chats, etc.) will soon require ID verification to participate, or otherwise, substantial proof that there is a human in there somewhere
This is what "Abundance" is.
What is "Abundance"?
nah this is more the illusion of choice.
Frankly the amount of books available from before LLM is staggering. The supply will long outlive me. So why would I buy any AI generated one? That is unless it starts producing something really good. Until that happens I suspect there is no real market for AI books.
Oh and btw amount of human generated crap is also so great that I has long became a problem for me to find good thing in that sea.