Generative AI floods and dilutes the market for books

Post by inigyou » Sun, Aug 02, 2026, 12:15 PM UTC

encrux wrote: post #13

grey-area wrote: post #6

Earlier 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…

Post by trentor » Sun, Aug 02, 2026, 12:15 PM UTC

Post by nancarrow » Sun, Aug 02, 2026, 12:16 PM UTC

bryanlarsen wrote: post #14

The 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 Millions of books are published each year, many more self published and unpublished.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.

Post by Gigachad » Sun, Aug 02, 2026, 12:16 PM UTC

jdw64 wrote: post #2

Why 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?

Post by Panoramix » Sun, Aug 02, 2026, 12:17 PM UTC

Gigachad wrote: post #24

epolanski wrote: post #10

For 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 glue…

YouTube essays have been slop for a while though. Before AI it was just people reading the Wikipedia page on the topic.