In this context by proper authors I mean authors published by real publishers, for a start. Generally, most are hostile to LLM writing.

Also, like… why do you think people write books or make art? In the vast, vast majority of cases it is not to make money (virtually none of them do). It’s to _make_ something. Where’s the feeling of accomplishment in making them if you just told an LLM to shit something out? Like, who would bother?

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II2II 5 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Publishing is a business. There will be real publishers who are interested in using AI for the sake of making money. Even when a publisher has integrity and refuses to sell AI generated books, they have to contend with authors who are only interested in making money.

I'm not sure if I'm using the right term here, but publishers have been using rotating ghost writers to write series for generations and many of the authors have been happy to translate outlines into books just to earn a living. (I know of ghost written series that my father read as a child. I'm by no means young, and he had children late in life before it became fashionable to wait to have children until they were older.)

> In the vast, vast majority of cases it is not to make money (virtually none of them do).

If you're suggesting that virtually no authors write books to make money, I would suggest that is not true and the landscape is going to change for the worse. There are constraints on how many authors write books purely to make money because writing takes time and effort, with the returns being notoriously low. AI eliminates the time and effort factor. Returns don't have to be high if it is being generated by a content mill. If anything, diluting the market will result in lower returns for human authors -- discouraging them from writing in the first place.

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rsynnott 5 hours ago | parent [-]

> they have to contend with authors who are only interested in making money.

This isn’t _really_ a thing. If you’re into writing for the money, you’re probably in the wrong business. Even some quite successful/popular authors have a day job; only a very few can support themselves on it.

	▲	II2II 5 hours ago \| parent [-]
		My apologies for a lack of clarity in that sentence, but I meant that publishers have to contend with people who are willing to use generative AI to make money by writing books for them. That said, real people write for all sorts of reasons. Money is definitely one of them. Sometimes it is out of ignorance (e.g. they don't know that few books earn much money). Sometimes it is out of delusion (e.g. some authors are clearly raking in the money, they think they will too).

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mosura 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> Where’s the feeling of accomplishment in making them if you just told an LLM to shit something out? Like, who would bother?

Exactly. Find something else to do.

From this perspective the mere existence of AI tools for this stuff devalues all competing possible results, whether the tools are used or not, simply because there will be so much possible everything (media wise) on demand to match the whims of any consumer so they lose interest.