Is AI a threat to authors? Probably… Actual authors slave over novels for months at a minimum, years in some cases. AI authors can write one in a couple of hours…
First, a true story, written by me. As a young man in my twenties, I was quite desperate to publish a novel. I must have suffered a score of rejections. In my early thirties, I finally landed a deal, but it didn’t exactly go to plan.
Like every young author I half expected the world to faint away in admiration at my debut opus. In reality? I got four reviews, three tepid, one dreadful; otherwise I was met with total silence.
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Machine-written texts are now estimated to constitute more than half of all new books appearing on Amazon, the largest bookstore in human history.
You can gauge the scale of the problem from the fact that Amazon has introduced a rule forbidding “authors” from publishing more than 10 books per week.
Full article, HERE from Yahoo News. h/t Peter G
We’ve talked about this before, and ‘I’ believe AI writing will impact those of us that do it the old fashioned way… sigh…
From start to finish, it takes me roughly a year to write a 100,000 word novel, proof it, edit it, and have the cover designed. When an AI can do that literally in one day or less, I’m going to lose, unless people actually ‘like’ what I write.
And I have found that some like my westerns, and don’t like my MilSF, while others are just the reverse. That is why I write in both genres. And that doesn’t count the short stories, novellas, and other stuff I do.
Luckily, I don’t have to rely on my ‘income’ from writing to support me. But a lot of other folks do have full time jobs to ‘support’ their writing habit!
John Van Stry takes an even dimmer view than I do, but sadly I can’t say he’s wrong…
What say you folks???
I often wonder how many bloggers and other writers hated doing “school” writing such as about summer vacation, etc.
I have Kindle Unlimited and read about 15-20 books a month. I have noticed this uptick in AI slop novels. Page counts are usually 250 pages or less, topics are endlessly repeated, navel gazing (woe is me, “I must relive/remember the circumstances that led me to this situation”, is covered repeatedly in the storyline). I have stopped reading books that have gone 3-4 chapters to set the story. One went 6 chapters with navel gazing. The other problem is Amazon just recently did away with the Continue Author section and you now get more limited selections to view new authors, and frustration to find the good ones.
what would happen if most people ordering from Amazon requested “human author” books?? i find AI generated stories to be predictable
“only the names have been changed” formula copy and paste slop. most if not all are Harlequen romance boddice ripper quality
See what Vox Day is doing over at his Castalia place.
Hey Old NFO,
When AI does the only publishing, then we lose the “Humanity” in the written word, and that is the saddest thing about the whole endeavor
ff Topic, but very important.
I beg of all my fellow New Yorker’s to stand up and fight to make sure that this Disgusting Mayor is no where near Ground Zero on 9/11. Please!! Sign any petitions, if you are offered ant. And to protest in the streets. just make yourself heard! He’s friends with Hasan Piker. He’s taken smiling selfies with alleged 9/11 bombing co conspirators. He’s an America hating piece of shit that could not care less about innocent dead Americans!
No Zohran at Ground Zero! Please! Keep this Jihad loving Mayor away from that sacred ground! Please!.
Chocolate chip cookies.
Referring to the AI image generation that in 2-3 iterations of training off of AI images (vs real) the Golden Retriever looked like a chocolate chip cookie.
AI has improved, some, but it’s still easily recognizable. AIs writing about life? Isn’t that like the proverbial sex manuals written by celibate priests? AI isn’t, it’s still LLM, not creative and the old GIGO still applies.
I wouldn’t get worried anytime soon.
And this is why I’m sticking with authors and/or publishing houses that I know. Stuff written by humans for humans.
Read the afterword sections of the books you love, folks. Often your favorite authors will recommend other authors that are worth your time.
You might want to take their advice.
Total ban on AI authors.
Let the market decide; if no one buys AI dreck, Amazon will adapt. That’s assuming Amazon isn’t an AI itself,pushing AI drivel.
We have AIs reviewing AI-written resumes. That ain’t right.
OT: does anyone remember the title/author of a story wherein after an apocalypse, underground (in-the-ground, not as in subversive) fully automated newspaper presses issue the news? Using AI to search for the answer is not allowed.
I think people have different or stronger reactions depending on what they had priced in to their expected business model.
It almost says more about the person and their experiences and expectations than it does about their specific understanding of and forecast of AI. Almost, because very different people can fold over to the same ‘AI means this’.
In principle, you can interview me over many hours in a room with no electronic devices, and reasonably test my reading skills with paper. My handwriting is bad, and I am not yet proven with a typewriter, so a prohibitively expensive employer run composition test would probably not evaluate me strongly there. That said, my on the fly composition is erratic, and while I have confidence speaking off the cuff, that is also erratic in what impression you would have.
IE, if your use of my thinking skills is important, you can directly test my fitness for purpose. I do not put so high a value on my time that this is in principle a problem for me.
The problem for me in almost every organization is my contrarian jackassery. Which would not necessarily show up in an initial interview. Maybe after a couple months I start to understand the local group consensus enough to start looking for the blindspots. However, I have gone over five years in the same organization with only moderate self-inflicted problems from being obnoxious. I have hopes of being able to keep this reasonably under control, in the future.
Anyway, I have LLMs and image generation priced into my understanding of historic of technology, and economics for decades of effort to automate processes. I basically have for fifteen or twenty years understood that automation is something I would try to do.
I also have priced in that a lot of human produced knowledge product was not what I had thought it was when I was a child. I value statistical noise on the same weight as some human production, not because I value the noise, but because I have priced down the utility of that human’s thinking.
Basically, environmentalists are maybe the common enemy of all mankind. The people writing legislation about internet/computer regulation ‘for the children’ are speech controllers, and do not care about the damages that their government schools do to children; they are maybe common enemies of all mankind. The people in the EU, and elsewhere, who really valued international harmonization, are maybe common enemies of all mankind. Academics, technocrats, central planners, etc.
There are sane, political conservative, minarchist artists. The other artists I do not owe a jobs program to, I maybe do not owe anyone a jobs program.
We are maybe mid-technical revolution, and people trying to build permanent business cases around this technology are maybe screwed. But, if you are willing to take it as a temporary gamble to learn, and to occupy time while working towards being able to build a permanent business case…
It maybe will be possible to make a more permanent business case in a few years.