Generative AI floods and dilutes the market for books
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Re: Generative AI floods and dilutes the market for books
#2Why do people use Gen AI for writing? What's the motivation? For academic papers, it's probably citation metrics and the number of publications. For novels, it's likely economic factors. If those factors disappear, would people still use Gen AI for writing?
Re: Generative AI floods and dilutes the market for books
#3I don’t see how this market ("mostly" AI-written books) won’t get arbitraged to death with the cheaper and open-weight models that keep coming out
Re: Generative AI floods and dilutes the market for books
#4Why do people use Gen AI for writing? What's the motivation? For academic papers, it's probably citation metrics and the number of publications. For novels, it's likely economic factors. If those factors disappear, would people still use Gen AI for writing?
Get rich quick scams, this market existed before GenAI. They’d hire ghost writers, and then put them on audible.
Now it’s easier than ever. So the market explodes. But it makes legit writers harder to find. Its bleak.
Re: Generative AI floods and dilutes the market for books
#5Why do people use Gen AI for writing? What's the motivation? For academic papers, it's probably citation metrics and the number of publications. For novels, it's likely economic factors. If those factors disappear, would people still use Gen AI for writing?
Even if all extrinsic motivations for writing disappear, some people will continue to write (without AI) for personal reasons.
And even at that point, others will continue to write using AI to simulate being one of those people.
Re: Generative AI floods and dilutes the market for books
#6I don’t see how this market ("mostly" AI-written books) won’t get arbitraged to death with the cheaper and open-weight models that keep coming out
The problem is not about money it is that we are made massively culturally poorer by the flood of ahistorical, amoral, incoherent, rococco, contradictory yet plausible shit produced by LLMs.
Both the internet and books have been flooded with ‘content’ which appears like human content but has no coherence or intention to it and tends to fall apart completely the longer form the story.
Even our autocomplete is being infected with LLM suggestions, distorting and guiding how people write.
This is a VERY significant problem for our culture long term.
Re: Generative AI floods and dilutes the market for books
#7I don’t see how this market ("mostly" AI-written books) won’t get arbitraged to death with the cheaper and open-weight models that keep coming out
the market they analyse is specifically self-published fiction. Most of the traditionally published books are not AI generated and they make significantly more money as a category than self publishing does. It is not really possible to flood that market in this form with 0 entry barriers.
So yes, allowing AI slop in a market where anyone can publish anything and quality is not a very strict criteria, of course it will dillute the market. But we are unlikely to see this shift in traditional publishing houses.
Re: Generative AI floods and dilutes the market for books
#8Why do people use Gen AI for writing? What's the motivation? For academic papers, it's probably citation metrics and the number of publications. For novels, it's likely economic factors. If those factors disappear, would people still use Gen AI for writing?
Even if all extrinsic motivations for writing disappear, some people will continue to write (without AI) for personal reasons. And even at that point, others will continue to write using AI to simulate being one of those people.
Some people may continue using AI and publish books but the amount of AI slop would be dramatically lower without extrinsic motivations.
Re: Generative AI floods and dilutes the market for books
#9Why do people use Gen AI for writing? What's the motivation? For academic papers, it's probably citation metrics and the number of publications. For novels, it's likely economic factors. If those factors disappear, would people still use Gen AI for writing?
I have hundreds of plot ideas from 40 years of reading and watching crappy books and films/tv. Never had the time or energy to explore those. LLMs let me try out various plots. To see which ones work and which don't. I haven't really thought about publishing anything though. Too much work and bureaucracy.
The thing is ... ideas matter just as much as the writing. You cannot simply say: "Hey Claude, write me a Sherlock Holmes pastiche set in the bronze age."
I have found that a 1:4 to 1:8 ratio gives nice results. That is, for every 4-8 paras of expected output, you must provide 1 para worth of character detail, plot beats etc. So you would need 100-200 pages of your own writing to produce 800 pages worth.
But most people are lazy. So the output is too.
Re: Generative AI floods and dilutes the market for books
#10For any kind of online entertainment really.
The overwhelming majority of content on Youtube is also plagued by AI.
You're 6 minutes in a documentary about Russo-Ottoman wars and only then you start noticing something's wrong, paintings are made up, the voice sounds similar to voices of other videos and the script has an odd non-human character to it.
Then you dig into it, and indeed it's a bunch of crap prompts glued together on top of some lame ai-generated internet research.