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Generative AI floods and dilutes the market for books

arxiv.org

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Re: Generative AI floods and dilutes the market for books

#51

Post by sieve »

Panoramix wrote: post #46
sieve wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

A bunch of ideas doesn't make a book. Actual writing takes place, the length of each sentence, the specific choice of words, the pace, the choices, the editing. It's literally an art. Nobody wants to read what ChatGPT wrote based on your prompts. Of course you can use it to quickly try out stuff, for some editorial tasks and such. But unless you learn the craft of writing I don't think others will want to read any of…

I have read thousands of books in my lifetime. I don't really have too many hobbies outside of reading. Trust me when I say there is an audience for literal crap. LLMs actually raise the bar significantly. I do not think they will ever exceed Hugo, or TS Eliot, or Borges, but they are far superior to the random author publishing random crap every single day.

Can the writer use AI to improve their output ... is the only outstanding question.

> It's literally an art.

So was making clothes, or shoes, or cabinets, or knives, or cooking, or so many other things. Now we mass produce all of them.

Re: Generative AI floods and dilutes the market for books

#52

Post by plastic-enjoyer »

sieve wrote: post #31
epolanski wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But why would I want to read that? Just give me the prompt at this point.

You could say that for any book. People are too precious about man-made art. I don't see the point. Every book ever written might have some novelty value of its own. But it mostly has the same plots, character archetypes and other tropes found in other fiction. We think there is something special about human writing. But LLMs have read the same stuff we have. And produce similar inspired writing.

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’t enjoy writing? Writing as a hobby carries no stakes that would in any way justify the use of LLMs. There is nothing that needs to be optimised in order to produce value.

Re: Generative AI floods and dilutes the market for books

#53

Post by inigyou »

Invictus0 wrote: post #44
inigyou wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well that doesn't require a regulation. You can just create this space.

A space "regulated" by id. its obvious and its going to happen

When people talk about regulation it's usually government regulation.

Re: Generative AI floods and dilutes the market for books

#54

Post by Gigachad »

FartyMcFarter wrote: post #38
Gigachad wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> Problem is short of filtering out anything published after 2023 Is it even feasible to filter this? Such metadata can be easily faked too in a lot of contexts.

You don’t use metadata. You use old book reviews and historical top charts.

Re: Generative AI floods and dilutes the market for books

#55

Post by sieve »

plastic-enjoyer wrote: post #52
sieve wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You could say that for any book. People are too precious about man-made art. I don't see the point. Every book ever written might have some novelty value of its own. But it mostly has the same plots, character archetypes and other tropes found in other fiction. We think there is something special about human writing. But LLMs have read the same stuff we have. And produce similar inspired writing.

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 you built, dealing with situations you conceived of, and having conversations you directed works for me ... even if an LLM assisted with the writing duties.

Re: Generative AI floods and dilutes the market for books

#56

Post by bluecheese452 »

FartyMcFarter wrote: post #38
Gigachad wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> Problem is short of filtering out anything published after 2023 Is it even feasible to filter this? Such metadata can be easily faked too in a lot of contexts.

We can basically only read well known books from the past.

Re: Generative AI floods and dilutes the market for books

#57

Post by FreeTrade »

plastic-enjoyer wrote: post #52
sieve wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You could say that for any book. People are too precious about man-made art. I don't see the point. Every book ever written might have some novelty value of its own. But it mostly has the same plots, character archetypes and other tropes found in other fiction. We think there is something special about human writing. But LLMs have read the same stuff we have. And produce similar inspired writing.

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.

Re: Generative AI floods and dilutes the market for books

#58

Post by gabriel666smith »

> Over this period, the number of books with observed sales in a quarter grew 19.2-fold, while quarterly revenue grew only 8.9-fold.

That's very interesting, and not as dramatic a dilution as I'd expected over the period (2023 - 26), or even close to as dramatic an increase in overall number of titles (achieving a sale) as I expected.

This sample is limited to what the study's authors have defined as "self-published genre fiction", which isn't representative of the market as a whole, and has very different economics compared to, for example, fiction titles published by "Big 5" publishers.

Whether the sales of non-self-published books are potentially being diluted is an interesting question, because it will tell us slightly more about where those AI sales might be coming from. I'd like to know unit and revenue numbers for non-self-published titles for the same period, in the same Amazon categories - on the off-chance anyone here has BookScan access and that's something you can pull.

Overall, though, this seems like a relatively optimistic result. If the economics don't work in the longer-term - the dilution effect ends up not being worth the token cost & labour, unless you can "hit" relatively reliably - we'll end up with less slop, put out by slop-auteurs running book farms, which I think is a fine outcome.

This is not without precedent by any stretch - the only meaningfully new part of that would be the writing mechanism. It strikes me as a possible eventual equilibrium that's both realistic and makes logical sense.

Putting aside the AI-fiction panic, and "the novel is dead" hyperbolics (which is something that's been said about as long as novels have existed), it probably will settle around a % of low-budget genre fiction being slop - as it always has been.

It feels a little patronising to suggest readers looking for anything more "serious" will be seduced and have their sales diluted by mass-produced LLM outputs. Readers deserve more credit than that, I hope.

But it looks, to me, really hard to read anything directionally on that at all, especially without equivalent numbers on titles from actual publishers.

Re: Generative AI floods and dilutes the market for books

#59

Post by pen2l »

I feel like the genie is out of the bottle. Second order effects and third order effects to markets all around, societal impacts deriving from economic changes and changing incentives galore are yet to be seen. Appreciation of original creative works, motivation to create original works when AI can spit out vast amounts of content, (newly) the effort required to even discover and curate original work that's been created with intention and thought, etc., a lot of these new things have to be reckoned with.

But it doesn't feel good. At the moment it feels scary. Crossing my fingers we get through this somehow.

Re: Generative AI floods and dilutes the market for books

#60

Post by sieve »

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, environment, events, any critical conversations. For a chapter that is 2-3K words, this chapter outline often becomes 2-400 words or more. Because you have the story in your head, you can handle the stuff that the LLM is likely to screw up.

There are ways to build a system where the LLM can keep track of many things, but then that becomes programming, which is just as boring.

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