I think this is much more likely than any of his predictions: "buying and reading a book" becomes even less of an isolated activity than... it already is becoming. Instead it's more and more a media product, attached to authors/characters that are big in other formats, specifically, video. Because people are reading less and watching more video to begin with, entirely separate from AI.

David Goggins is kind of a perfect example of this. There is zero value in an AI-written book that isn't attached directly to his public persona and media presence. Maybe today he can use AI to write the book, but it's still tied to his video media of doing tough challenges, etc. An AI-first author writing such books would get nowhere, as he/she has no credibility.

That all aside, I actually think the most philosophically interesting result of LLMs is that ideas actually end up mattering a lot more than execution. The LLM can't really think for you, and so your knowledge and experiences are actually what matters, as it determines "what you prompt."

In short, the authors that win the future will be ones with robust personal brands and a big social media footprint. The days of the mysterious writer that gets chosen and published by a small group of elites at the publishing house is probably over... at least until the ecosystem becomes so messy that curators become necessary again.

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mohamedkoubaa 6 hours ago | parent [-]

Ghostwriting has been the norm in many subgenres of nonfiction for a while now

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keiferski 6 hours ago | parent [-]

Exactly, so in the "dystopian" future, people just use AI to write the books they were already having a ghostwriter make.

If the books are original enough to be perceived as not-AI, the mind behind it will be creative enough to make the AI origin moot.

	▲	mohamedkoubaa 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Originality is an interesting thing. Books are a physical medium of organizing and distributing information by gluing a bunch of flat papers between covers. Properties like originality do not follow from the physical medium itself. Publishers of travel guides in book form use the physical medium as an instantiation of the class of "interesting coffee table adornment expected to contain wit". Does that imply an expectation of originality? I would argue it does not. Publishers of speculative science fiction, on the other hand, instantiate objects of the class "examinations into the human condition using technology as a lens". For this class, the use of LLMs is an abomination. There are other subgenres of science fiction, of course, for which these sensibilities would be misplaced.