Publishers served a really valuable purpose of curation and keeping good authors productive.

Now we have the double whammy of a consolidated publishing system pumping out whatever James Patterson’s assistants churn out and and a long tail of drivel, both AI and regular slop.

And to make this worse: these days even the blurb are written by LLMs, some of them pure word salad. Just last week I left comments with two authors to see to it that the blurb at least resembles English even if the content still doesn't make sense. We're being completely dehumanised and treated like NPCs, just a lubricant to keep the machine going.