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Generative AI floods and dilutes the market for books

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Re: Generative AI floods and dilutes the market for books

#61

Post by plastic-enjoyer »

sieve wrote: post #55
plastic-enjoyer wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean, you’re right in a way that motifs, stylistic devices and archetypes recur in fiction, and that an LLM could produce similarly inspired texts – so what? That’s no reason not to write yourself – unless you don’t enjoy writing and just want some sort of result, some sort of product. And you sound as though you don’t actually enjoy writing, but would still like to produce a book. But why bother at all if you don’…

Think of it this way. You like well-designed houses. Like looking at them, living in them. So you design a house per your liking having bought a plot overlooking a stream and a meadow. And you hire someone to build it for you. You may not enjoy the actual process of building, but you do like living in the final product, right? It is the same with books. Reading a story based on a plot of your design, and characters y…

So, if you hire a builder to implement your design, the end product is functional, i.e. it should provide you with shelter and keep you warm. The builder's craft serves a purpose beyond itself. But when you "hire" an LLM to write prose, what is the functional product? It's the prose. You don't read a novel and then throw away the sentences to get at the story underneath. The sentences are the story. So outsourcing the writing isn't like hiring a builder, it's more like designing a house and then handing someone else the keys.

Re: Generative AI floods and dilutes the market for books

#62

Post by gabriel666smith »

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?

I can understand being interested in it from a Modernist perspective.

It's both a new technology that maps a geometry to existing language - which is very interesting from several literary theory POVs - and represents a new kind of typewriter. If you're interested in innovative techniques in fiction, I think LLMs are arguably deeply interesting. Mass-producing slop, however, is probably quite limited in terms of its theoretical interest, and in how it changes the craft.

Personally, an example of how I use gen AI when writing is that I sometimes use a little text editor I wrote. It polls a local model, and grabs the 50 most-likely next token(s), rounded to one word, based on where the cursor is.

"Voice" in fiction was already about how the author chooses to deviate from the expected-next-word. So - while you could just use the tokens returned - I find myself using them much more often to choose what words to avoid using, or how to deviate from the expected outputs, and where it might be most interesting to do that.

I think there's plenty of interesting things that can be done with gen AI in terms of fiction writing, but I think we're quite a long way from working all of them out yet. Wholesale slop generation is one of the most obvious - and most boring - things writers can do with an LLM.

Re: Generative AI floods and dilutes the market for books

#63

Post by illwrks »

sieve wrote: post #60
illwrks wrote: post #35

I have been tinkering with this over the past few months. One story with a specific genre and demographic target, but as I've been reading each draft there are so many small issues that crop up, inconsistency across various parts of the story, items that are introduced, questions that go unanswered etc. Unless your goal is to become an editor of AI content, it's not worth the effort. Perhaps in time it will be better…

> inconsistency across various parts of the story, items that are introduced, questions that go unanswered etc. This is a workflow problem. What the LLM normally needs: - very basic outline: what the story is about - basic cast of characters: like fiction/plays of the 18-1900s Then you go chapter-by-chapter. But the most critical thing is that you MUST provide the chapter beats. From start to end. Location, environme…

I won't go into too much detail, but I have a plot outline, development bible, story mountain, character outlines, style guide and more. I have four agents running on various tasks; writing, error checking, consistency and critique. They can generate a good story but there are holes and issues so it's far from perfect and I wouldn't give it away for free, never mind put a price on it.

To add to this, in my 9-5 I work as a designer. Colleagues in other parts of the business sometimes come to us with stuff they have created using AI tools. To a layman they look really good, but if you know what to look for you can spot the issues.

At this point in time my opinion is that any AI generated thing is great at making fools of the unaware, or those who are not looking at something critically. It can create something that looks like a duck, walks like a duck, quacks like a duck, but on closer inspection it's not a duck.

Re: Generative AI floods and dilutes the market for books

#64

Post by obscurette »

I grew up and went into school in seventies in Soviet Union. I remember myself discovering local libraries, bookstores etc. I still love books, I have a lot of them, but process of discovery is very different. When I was young almost every book I found in library or bookstore about topic I was interested in, was almost certainly worth to read. Publishing books was slow and expensive process and there was a very slim chance that not good books were published at all. During last decades it hasn't been a case any more and I had to develop a skills how to find a stuff worth to read – what reviews to trust etc. In AI age these skills became almost worthless as well and I trust only recommendations from people I know and trust.

Re: Generative AI floods and dilutes the market for books

#65

Post by altmanaltman »

grey-area wrote: post #12
altmanaltman wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

Exactly my point. Self publishing does not have these entry problems or that level of money. This is the opposite of flooding the market with generative AI

Re: Generative AI floods and dilutes the market for books

#66

Post by sieve »

illwrks wrote: post #63
sieve wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> inconsistency across various parts of the story, items that are introduced, questions that go unanswered etc. This is a workflow problem. What the LLM normally needs: - very basic outline: what the story is about - basic cast of characters: like fiction/plays of the 18-1900s Then you go chapter-by-chapter. But the most critical thing is that you MUST provide the chapter beats. From start to end. Location, environme…

I won't go into too much detail, but I have a plot outline, development bible, story mountain, character outlines, style guide and more. I have four agents running on various tasks; writing, error checking, consistency and critique. They can generate a good story but there are holes and issues so it's far from perfect and I wouldn't give it away for free, never mind put a price on it. To add to this, in my 9-5 I work…

I tried the programmer's method. Automating stuff. Then I realized I prefer the wood carver's method. So I take it slow.

I think and write the outline for a chapter. Then I have the LLM produce it. I read the draft. Tweak things. Reroll. Take the best from multiple rolls and merge them to produce a organic whole. Manually patch the minor differences in pacing and tone.

Rinse and repeat.

It takes 100-250 hours across 3-4 months to produce a story. But I drop 99.9% of the stuff within the first day or two because the plot or characters do not work.

I use the web front end directly. Let's me switch between any model including Gemma 4 running locally.

Re: Generative AI floods and dilutes the market for books

#67

Post by bryanlarsen »

nancarrow wrote: post #25
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.

90% of crud filtering mechanisms are crud.

Even worse, it changes over time. Goodreads used to be great, but have gone down hill since Amazon bought them. Friends are great sources, but your interests diverge.

Re: Generative AI floods and dilutes the market for books

#68

Post by plastic-enjoyer »

FreeTrade wrote: post #57
plastic-enjoyer wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean, you’re right in a way that motifs, stylistic devices and archetypes recur in fiction, and that an LLM could produce similarly inspired texts – so what? That’s no reason not to write yourself – unless you don’t enjoy writing and just want some sort of result, some sort of product. And you sound as though you don’t actually enjoy writing, but would still like to produce a book. But why bother at all if you don’…

'Writing' covers a lot of creative tasks. You might very well enjoy creating plots, characters, ideas, situations, but find the actual business of putting thousands of words down on a page tedious.

Yes, but then you are just an idea guy. Why bother, when you are not interested in the act of writing, or worse, don't enjoy the experience of writing at all, including the struggles that come with writing? There are no stakes in writing as a hobby. Once fiction exists in abundance as a product, the question arises all the more as to why one should adopt a production-centred perspective on writing.

Re: Generative AI floods and dilutes the market for books

#69

Post by sieve »

plastic-enjoyer wrote: post #61
sieve wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Think of it this way. You like well-designed houses. Like looking at them, living in them. So you design a house per your liking having bought a plot overlooking a stream and a meadow. And you hire someone to build it for you. You may not enjoy the actual process of building, but you do like living in the final product, right? It is the same with books. Reading a story based on a plot of your design, and characters y…

So, if you hire a builder to implement your design, the end product is functional, i.e. it should provide you with shelter and keep you warm. The builder's craft serves a purpose beyond itself. But when you "hire" an LLM to write prose, what is the functional product? It's the prose. You don't read a novel and then throw away the sentences to get at the story underneath. The sentences are the story. So outsourcing th…

There is some stuff you read for the prose. Most books, I read for the characters and the plot. So the LLM-assisted output works for me.

Re: Generative AI floods and dilutes the market for books

#70

Post by grey-area »

altmanaltman wrote: post #65
grey-area wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

$2m crime novel deal collapses amid questions over AI use https://www.theguardian.com/books/2026/jul/31/crime-novel-de...

Exactly my point. Self publishing does not have these entry problems or that level of money. This is the opposite of flooding the market with generative AI

GAI is also being used by prospective authors applying to publishing houses, and they are in fact flooded with dross created with it, which is a serious problem for them.

To the extent that their reviewers get lazy and are not reading entire texts, as evidenced by this slipping through and then being caught by an editor (who did read the whole thing).

So no, this does not prove your point.

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