131–140 of 141 posts
> But I can’t help but feel that the effort meant something. Each person that put in the effort is one additional review point. Thinking, Writing, Editing, Proofing, Publishing, Distributing, Selling... At every step, a human had the opportunity to say "no, this is bad". And the fact that they didn't is a vote of quality and reputation. These days presumably every step can be automated without a human in the loop at…
At every step, a human had the opportunity to say "no, this is bad". And the fact that they didn't is a vote of quality and reputation. Romantic image. Doesn’t hold. Traditional publishing has pushed out lots of poorly edited slop for decades; it didn’t start in 2022.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Thanks for the book. If you want to update it, why don't you slap a 2nd edition on the cover and some No AI sigil (I saw this strategy on the books of Nils M Holm from Lulu).
It does not matter, to be honest. Slowly people are realizing that nobody checks anything anymore, and when they check, nobody cares about positives or negatives, be them true or false. Actually, if you write something by hand today, all you’re doing is slowing yourself down, because truthfully nobody else will do that. Do you really think that you will have 100 times the benefit for doing 100 times more work than th…
All I know is that when I see a new self-published book on Amazon, I go and check the author's page to see how many books he published and at what intervals. If I see 10 books published in the same year on various subjects I avoid it like the plague. Life is too short to waste my time reading slop.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> one generation can't "get" the entertainment of the next generation. It has always been like that. Given the quality of 2026's entertainment, looks like they had a point. And likely they had one at 2006 and 1986 and 1966 too.
This is Sturgeon's Law: "ninety percent of everything is crap". But the corollary to it is the fact 10% of everything isn't crap, and just as there always has been crap, there always has been excellence. Just less of it.
But different times absolutely can have worse production.
You are not alone. I like to read Harry Potter fan fiction [1] and I have started checking the publication date when Im searching for something new to read. I started doing this passively and realized it after the fact. Have you ever met someone who could say all and do the right things but never made you feel anything, or your gut was sensing an ulterior motive? It's a magic trick we are all bewitched by at some poi…
I left a few creative writing forums I had been a member of for over a decade because of how much garbage was being posted. Perhaps even more upsetting than the number of people flooding the front page with reams of nonsensical AI prose was the number of people who saw nothing wrong with this and, instead, heaped praise on it and enthusiastically cried for more of it. It was profoundly alienating to see hundreds of p…
This will work for a little while but this can't go on indefinitely: no one is going to want to stick to 30+ year old books. We should probably work on developing standards for what we want in a book instead of clinging to a losing position.
You are not alone. I like to read Harry Potter fan fiction [1] and I have started checking the publication date when Im searching for something new to read. I started doing this passively and realized it after the fact. Have you ever met someone who could say all and do the right things but never made you feel anything, or your gut was sensing an ulterior motive? It's a magic trick we are all bewitched by at some poi…
Thank you for the recommendation! I opened it out of curiosity and I'm already a chapter deep :)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I left a few creative writing forums I had been a member of for over a decade because of how much garbage was being posted. Perhaps even more upsetting than the number of people flooding the front page with reams of nonsensical AI prose was the number of people who saw nothing wrong with this and, instead, heaped praise on it and enthusiastically cried for more of it. It was profoundly alienating to see hundreds of p…
Wonder if the people liking were socket puppet's in order to encourage the patreon donations.
(The phone-vs-computer element also can't be discounted - it's much, much harder to do in-depth long form discussion on a smartphone. Input is a hassle, and doing a bunch of research is extremely annoying when you can't open multiple windows and an editor.)
After 2023 or so, a new problem popped up: posters would read a chapter, hallucinate a series of events that never happened, get mad about what they thought they had read, and then attack the author! Arguments born from a complete lack of reading comprehension were breaking out in all the busiest story threads, with waves of reports every time a new chapter was published. It would not be an exaggeration to say that the average IQ of the board had dropped 20 points.
There was also the monetization aspect to consider; fanfiction used to be by fans, for fans - the work of amateurs, in every sense of the word (amātōrem, 'lover'). While that certainly didn't mean everything was /good/, it at least meant it was a work born of genuine passion. The new authors treated it like a business, churning out updates every week and advertising to readers that they could read several chapters ahead on their patreon. Without even touching the ethics of the matter, you can imagine how the incentives changed the output.