[erikpukinskis]

> I don't know how any of the proponents can pretend that this isn't an abject disaster on the horizon for anybody who depends on copyright to make their living.

OK, I'll bite. How is the an abject disaster on the horizon for... let's say, novelists?

[Taywee]

My wife is a novelist who widely participates in fiction writing communities, and a lot of competitions have had to stop taking submissions entirely due to AI work flooding all the submissions. There's been drama on and off recently with AI generated covers, too. Some waves have been made with people winning contests with AI generated short stories. Agents are absolutely inundated with AI queries, and it's only going to get worse as the technology gets better.

It's actually really scary for writers right now. You just have to look at the huge amount of AI generated attempts and think "what do we do when the writing gets really good? What do we do when most novels are mostly AI generated?"

People have spent decades working their ass off to get good and try to get their work sold, and they come out the end of this tunnel right into an era telling them that they're just about to be obsolete.

[JumpCrisscross]

> What do we do when most novels are mostly AI generated?

Much of modern fiction is farmed out or padded for page count. ChatGPT may be the death of anonymous online writing communities. It doesn't portend is the end of fiction or writing altogether.

[Taywee]

That's not true of novel writing in the least, and clearly not what I was talking about. AI is already heavily impacting fiction and writing communities. How many active novelists do you hang out with? The ones I know are talking a lot about how much harder it's already making their lives, especially the ones who are still trying to get picked up by their first agent.

[JumpCrisscross]

> How many active novelists do you hang out with?

Small number. Acquaintances. Published. They complain about e.g. getting into the Paris Review or New Yorker, now. I imagine traditional gatekeepers are screwed. But not authors. Even if their job transitions to expert prompt engineering and editing, that's a niche.

[Taywee]

So you didn't know how absolutely crushing it is to spend years trying to get your first novel published while working full time in a manual position, and find that you moved from competing with hundreds of other people every time you send a query to an agent to thousands of mostly AI generated queries, with signs pointing to dozens coming from the same people?

Or how crushing it is to be told that the right solution is to just abandon your dream and start generating a novel a month instead of writing?

I know a lot of authors, published and unpublished. This technology is thrilling for corporations, worrying for the established, and absolutely annihilating for somebody who is just trying to get started. Many of the unpublished ones have given up and just self publish to ~zero sales, because they want to actually have their book out there.

Expert prompt editing is not a niche most people want, and it's not one most people will get. It's not a movement from X authors producing Y novels to X prompt engineering editors producing Y novels. It's a movement to X/N prompt editors producing Y novels. Even as an expert AI user, the progression is way fewer people doing way more work, and the death of the dream for the very vast majority.

What's screwed is nearly everybody.

[JumpCrisscross]

> you didn't know how absolutely crushing it is to spend years trying to get your first novel published while working full time in a manual position, and find that you moved from competing with hundreds of other people every time you send a query to an agent to thousands of mostly AI generated queries, with signs pointing to dozens coming from the same people

No, I don't. But I don't see this as the end of the art. I certainly see no evidence of those AI-generated queries pushing out legitimate novelists.