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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

#71

Post by grey-area »

FreeTrade wrote: post #50
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...

So a book that was “stunningly good, everyone fell in love with it. It’s a book that appeals to absolutely everyone.” now won't be published because AI was used to create it? Personally I prefer stunningly good over exclusively human created.

I'd want to read it before passing judgement on the quality of it, not trust the word of the author's agent, one Marc Gerald of 'Europa Content', who you are quoting here. It appears a lot of people in the chain up to the editor failed at their job here, probably because they are submerged in slop submitted using LLMs and maybe the first chapter was good and had work put into it.

Clearly the editor didn't think it was stunningly good, or they wouldn't have flagged it up.

Re: Generative AI floods and dilutes the market for books

#72

Post by grey-area »

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…

No, this is a problem with the nature of LLMs and the text they generate.

Re: Generative AI floods and dilutes the market for books

#73

Post by MasterScrat »

inigyou wrote: post #26
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…

Prominent and formerly good youtuber Hank Green was just caught reading an AI script. In a video about the bouba/kiki effect he just read out something like "You're right to push back on this. If you'd like, I can reword this..." and didn't even flinch, didn't edit the sentence out, because his brain has been rotted by AI use.

> he just read out something like "You're right to push back on this. If you'd like, I can reword this..." and didn't even flinch

Can you please provide sources for this? My understanding is that he used the expression "I appreciate the pushback" in a context in which it made sense (responding to criticism), and people flagged that it sounded LLM-like.

There’s some poetry seeing people complaining about how LLM provide unreliable information in a confident tone, who then go on to share incorrect information in a confident tone.

Re: Generative AI floods and dilutes the market for books

#74

Post by sieve »

grey-area wrote: post #72
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…

No, this is a problem with the nature of LLMs and the text they generate.

I do not expect the LLMs to do everything. They are assistants. You still bear the responsibility of stitching everything together into a cohesive whole. Make changes as required.

That is where expectations differ I guess.

Re: Generative AI floods and dilutes the market for books

#75

Post by plastic-enjoyer »

sieve wrote: post #69
plastic-enjoyer wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

When I take you at face value, it makes even less sense to me. If what you care about is the characters and the plot, you already have those, you wrote them yourself. That's what your 100-200 pages of notes are you mentioned in your previous post. So what exactly is the LLM adding? It's expanding your notes into prose you claim not to care about. You're generating 800 pages of the thing you say doesn't matter to you, which is a lot of effort spent on something you're indifferent to. Also, I do believe that the separation between prose and characters isn't as clean as you suggest.

Re: Generative AI floods and dilutes the market for books

#76

Post by FinnLobsien »

I don’t see a world in which this doesn’t just annihilate the current market for books.

If I can write a query into Amazon for a book on topic X, I can write that query into ChatGPT or whatever and cut out the middleman.

Some of this may work in the short term while some people still equate the format “book” with “went through a rigorous process”.

That erosion was underway before AI (e.g. on Amazon I instinctually ignore any self-published Kindle books), but I can’t imagine this will last.

I think/hope the market will somehow make human-written books easy to recognize.

Re: Generative AI floods and dilutes the market for books

#77

Post by illwrks »

sieve wrote: post #66
illwrks wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I think that's probably the best approach right now.

Re: Generative AI floods and dilutes the market for books

#78

Post by grey-area »

sieve wrote: post #74
grey-area wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, this is a problem with the nature of LLMs and the text they generate.

I do not expect the LLMs to do everything. They are assistants. You still bear the responsibility of stitching everything together into a cohesive whole. Make changes as required. That is where expectations differ I guess.

But they generate objectively bad text. Why do you need an assistant to do that?

Perhaps for some uses (say a summary of some business document, or generating code which is then discarded or edited) that's acceptable. For literature, do you really feel they are useful tools? So many changes would be required IMO that you're better off just writing the story you want to tell.

Re: Generative AI floods and dilutes the market for books

#79

Post by skeledrew »

Love it. The next step that I've been patiently waiting for, even before LLMs were a thing, is the automatic generation of anime from manga. Got works that I've been wishing for so long would get an anime adaptation, or even in progress anime that fell off with parts of the manga left uncovered. Going to be wild when people can point AI to a manga with the prompt "adapt this into an anime series/movie, using the style of X other manga with an anime adaptation". Heck it's actually already possible, given Hell Grind[0] exists; just for someone to bring the particular pieces together.

[0] https://higgsfield.ai/original-series/hell-grind/episode-1

Re: Generative AI floods and dilutes the market for books

#80

Post by skeledrew »

sieve wrote: post #9
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 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…

Just self-publish! That's the route I think many authors are moving towards.
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