[dzink]

Everyone wants and needs to be heard. Writing is another way of achieving that - putting the message in an internet bottle and letting it float. Your audience may live in another age, past you, but your message is still alive and maybe immortal. By writing you are getting better at writing. You are also getting better at noticing things worth writing about. You are putting a (hopefully) rare perspective into the world. If you can survive the cringes of reading your own past work, and not be demotivated by the lack of feedback, you feel fortunate. Fortunate not if you make a living off of it, or if it becomes important, but if the person you actually intended the writing for ends up reading at, enjoying it, and replying back.

If one day some AI supersedes humans and produces the most perfect writing on the planet, humans will not stop writing. Because writing is not about achieving perfection, but about feeling heard, eventually.

[corsac]

And if any AI ever produces great writing, it will only be because it has become capable of genuine originality, as many human beings already are and will continue to be no matter what AI does. Rare perspectives aren't going to get exhausted, either by AI or by an increasing human population with more literacy and leisure time. For every piece of low-hanging fruit that gets plucked, several seeds get scattered and new trees spring up.

[cs137]

I don't think AIs will ever be capable of truly great writing, but within 30 years (if not sooner) they will be capable of (a) writing clickbait articles capable of going viral, (b) waging complex PR campaigns including the creation of author personalities that do not actually exist, and (c) fooling literary agents and publishing houses and selling thousands or millions of copies.

This problem already exists in the bottom reaches of the self-publishing ecosystem--the AI-generated scammy "books" don't sell very well, but they take no effort to create--which could lead to a resurgence of traditional publishing's flagging prestige, but that would be short-lived, because New York publishing is probably no more than 10 years from getting Sokal'd in a high-profile way.