Hot take: I think it’ll be pretty much the same as it was. If anything it will get better.

You will still have gatekeepers and taste makers. Publishing houses will screen fiction for well-written and interesting fiction. Word-of-mouth, personal recommendations, and endorsements from people you respect will continue to outweigh algorithms, if you care.

For cheap reads, how much of a difference is there between James Patterson’s 734th beach read thriller and what an LLM with a 50m token context window can produce? Does it matter that it’s not written by six ghostwriters? Probably not to the median Hudson News buyer.

For non-fiction, it’s easier to gather research and related materials. If you were cherry-picking facts to make a narrative, yeah, that’s easier, but it’s not like we haven’t gotten really good at that anyway. Again, there will be cooling off periods for scholarship to be debated and coälesce.

What will get better is people asking questions and getting well-researched pieces on a specific niche or confluence of topics. AI is just-good-enough-to-be-dangerous now. It will get better. We’ll learn to harness it (literally) to iteratively fact check and cite sources. We will build repositories with heavily sourced facts for it to build upon. It will be pulling together “truths” that can be traced, then incrementally adding inference across those, which can then be verified and are a new fact.

I read a lot. I love, love, love new and original authorship. I deeply value writing as a craft. There will be a lot of garbage. More than there is now, at an incredible rate.

And we’ll figure it out.

My worry is less about scholarship than the next generation of readers and authors. It is too easy to be lazy right now. Too easy to skip the difficult work of struggling with ideas. Yapping with Claude probably (?) doesn’t have the same rate of retention and reinforced learning _in humans_ as digging through source material and writing by hand.

Growing critical thought, in my experience, has always been the much harder problem. Not sure we’re in for a good time on that front.

The James Patterson point is spot on and - to expand on your point, the internet arguably took the tastemakers / gatekeepers down a peg, AI could be what brings them back.

publishing houses will gatekeep for well-selling fiction and non-fiction.

Publishing houses will screen fiction for well-written and interesting fiction.

Why would they start now?