[throwaway2214]

this is the same in any field, 99% of human content is terrible, including this comment (and your comment)

the thing is, we need the other 1%, but when in absolute numbers it is small, you can still kind of find it, but imagine you have to look through 1 billion books to find one good book, it is as good as this 1% disappearing

[tjr]

Besides finding that 1% of good content, if AI is increasingly used to generate the 99%, then the people who otherwise would have written the 1% might not even bother pursuing the field any more. I am concerned that some subset of new good content is at risk of not even being made any more.

[virtue3]

It's fine, we can just develop AIs to find good content for us! /s

[swader999]

I notice the /s but I think for real, there's no point doing the find step if you have access to an AI. You'll just ask it to generate the story you want.

[alexb_]

It is quite astounding how blatantly you missed the point of the entire article. Let me post a snippet in case you skipped over it by accident:

> So books, from Blood Meridian to Hop on Pop, are in part a dialogue between writer and reader. But the machines generating these stories cannot participate in a dialogue. They’re Mechanical Turks, guessing what word comes next based on a mix of complex math and the labor of Kenyan contractors paid less than $2 an hour to make sure the responses aren’t too racist.

You cannot simply ask an AI to generate a story that carries any sort of meaning.

[frumper]

> You cannot simply ask an AI to generate a story that carries any sort of meaning.

First, AI stories don't have to be one prompt wonders where it does everything. It can be an iterative, or curated, process guided by a person. Second, AI is perfectly capable of putting together words that carry meaning. What magic sauce do your collection of words have that an AI wouldn't? They can quite possibly be the same exact words.

[swader999]

I get that but this AI stuff is evolving. The whole idea of finding stuff is fading fast.

[kurthr]

I'm a bit more hopeful for the auto generated (stable diffusion) illustration lowering the barrier for a good human writer, but I suppose I care more about the quality of content than the originality of images.

Wait until the children's books become the next battle ground for misinformation/agitprop. You could sneak stuff into images too I suppose.

[wnkrshm]

Why sneak, the article already shows that anyone with an agenda can now easily produce their own books, without much effort.