[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I know a lot of authors, published and unpublished.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 Many of the unpublished ones have given up and just self publish to ~zero sales, because they want to actually have their book out there.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.