This is what "Abundance" is.
Generative AI floods and dilutes the market for books
11–20 of 110 posts
Re: Generative AI floods and dilutes the market for books
#12I 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 wil…
$2m crime novel deal collapses amid questions over AI use
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2026/jul/31/crime-novel-de...
Re: Generative AI floods and dilutes the market for books
#13I 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 in…
I don’t see any other way past this other than regulation:
We need authenticated online spaces where your account is linked to a real, government issued ID. This way, moderating content becomes feasible again. Bans will hold value, since you can’t just create new accounts all the time. I predict people will gravitate towards authenticated markets (and social media).
I for one am sick and tired of second guessing every text I‘m reading, at least give me someone to hold accountable.
Re: Generative AI floods and dilutes the market for books
#14The market for books has been flooded far before AI. Millions of books are published each year, many more self published and unpublished. Sturgeon's law (90% of everything is crud) predates AI by many decades.
You need a mechanism to filter out the crud. There are many, some better than others.
Re: Generative AI floods and dilutes the market for books
#15Why 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 Sherloc…
But why would I want to read that?
Just give me the prompt at this point.
Re: Generative AI floods and dilutes the market for books
#16Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 in…
I don’t see any other way past this other than regulation: We need authenticated online spaces where your account is linked to a real, government issued ID. This way, moderating content becomes feasible again. Bans will hold value, since you can’t just create new accounts all the time. I predict people will gravitate towards authenticated markets (and social media). I for one am sick and tired of second guessing ever…
Sounds like everything is proceeding according to plan.
Re: Generative AI floods and dilutes the market for books
#17Why 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?
It’s easier than actually writing, which is very hard to do well; authors spend years working on books.
Doesn’t really matter what the original motivation was (money, reputation, fame), people will use LLMs as a shortcut to generate text, and we’re all poorer because of it.
Re: Generative AI floods and dilutes the market for books
#18The ratio of good books to slop (AI or not) was far to bad for humans to reasonably filter 20 years ago.
Re: Generative AI floods and dilutes the market for books
#19I 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 in…
There was a case a while back now of an AI generated mushroom identification book filled with inaccuracies.
Problem is short of filtering out anything published after 2023 it’s almost impossible to find something that isn’t slop now.
Re: Generative AI floods and dilutes the market for books
#20Why 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?
"back then", you had to write for months to get a book out, and it sold 20 copies and you earned $20.
Now you can do it in minutes, get 50 books out, 20 of them sell 10 copies, you've earned $200.
(i might be exaggerating the times and earnings, but the point stands)