[OskarS]

Yeah, not too worried. AI might kill the "self-published Amazon eBook market of garbage genre novels", but honestly there's very little value there. The suggestion that an LLM could write a Hilary Mantel novel, or a Robert Caro biography, is so far beyond ludicrous that it's not even worth arguing.

I don't know who these people are that are reading books so bad that an LLM could plausibly replicate the work, but if that market is killed by a swarm of AI-written nonsense, honestly: who cares?

> Now that AI books exist, the probability that I will ever blind purchase another eBook on Amazon from an unknown author drops to zero.

This is a thing people do? Like... before AI? Not even reading extract or anything? You just see a cover and a title and go like "sure, I'll spend my hard-earned cash to make a 30 hour investment in this thing I know nothing about"?

The best version of this argument you can make is that it's about the treadmill: great writers aren't born great writers, they have to write a lot of crap first to become great writers, and this market is how you do that. Take that away, you don't get any more great writers. But I don't particularly buy that either: there are very few writers I love that were able to successfully make a living selling self-published Amazon eBook garbage until they got good enough to actually be picked up by a publisher.

Journalism, however, is a different story: plenty of great writers (fiction or non-fiction) got their starts as journalists and honed their craft writing small pieces there, and that is a market that is under total threat from AI. That's maybe a cause for concern. But I don't think it's an existential threat to literature as an art form. I don't think that's ever going to go away.

[wincy]

I can tell you who is reading books every night that are absolutely terrible and don’t require a coherent plot! Children. My kids and I have been crafting a few sentences of some absurd plot then reading a story about it generated by ChatGPT.

My daughter got so excited that she drew pictures of the Chicken Nugget and Cookie brothers and showed them to me after work, it’s like a choose your own adventure book but you can really actually choose your own adventure.

Personally I find the stories vapid and boring but before I was reading some brain dead story about Ariel using her favorite Dinglehopper to brush her hair, so whatever.

We are also reading Little House on the Prairie which I consider a little more “high brow”, and the girls really like that, too. But kids are easy to please and it has been interesting.

[OskarS]

That's a fair point, children's literature (a wonderful and valuable genre) will certainly be under threat. I would probably suggest that nothing an LLM would come up would stay with a person for decades like (say) Were The Wild Things Are. I'm Swedish, so I grew up on Astrid Lindgren, and some of those books move me to this day when I think back on them. I imagine many Americans still find Dr. Seuss hilarious in the same way.

> We are also reading Little House on the Prairie which I consider a little more “high brow”, and the girls really like that, too. But kids are easy to please and it has been interesting.

Yeah, that's kind of my point :) do you think an AI could write Little House on the Prairie? I don't. Sooner or later the vapid and nonsensical plots from LLMs stop being that amusing, and you need to feel real human connections to the things you're reading. That's the reason you read books, after all.

[disgruntledphd2]

> Yeah, not too worried. AI might kill the "self-published Amazon eBook market of garbage genre novels", but honestly there's very little value there.

I'm not convinced. Speaking as someone who's ended up selecting for a bunch of the good (i.e. picked up by publishers) authors for self-published genre novels, I definitely feel less likely to actually put in the effort after a bunch of bad experiences, and certainly if it's LLM generated.

I'm pretty sure I'd nope out, but because there's so much crap it's hard to pay enough attention to find the gems.

At this point, I'm selecting based on prior knowledge and the Hugo longlists, which is depressing as it selects against the interesting new stuff that I'd like to find.

> This is a thing people do? Like... before AI? Not even reading extract or anything? You just see a cover and a title and go like "sure, I'll spend my hard-earned cash to make a 30 hour investment in this thing I know nothing about"?

Yes, many many times. Mind you, I tend to exclusively focus on books for entertainment, and most books aren't that expensive (especially after spending a few years buying academic published statistical books) but I agree with the OP in that I'm becoming less likely to do this (but to be fair, this was happening before LLMs became super convenient and popular).

Actually, thinking about it, I find it pretty unlikely that any current LLM could actually write a coherent novel, given the context window. You'd probably need to do some kind of chain to make it work, i.e. generate synopsis, then recursively generate more text. It would also likely be super inconsistent unless you kept feeding the previous parts in.

Hmmmmm....in a world where I have more free time, I might take a stab at getting LLaMa to do this.

[dsign]

> self-published Amazon eBook market of garbage genre novels

"Even after two months on their prolonged, glamorous, non-sleep shopping spree, she couldn't resist the allure of his white shirt over his hard pectorals. He wasn't at all like the other men in her life, vapid things that would spend a lot of time in the gym trying to lose weight, instead of just being outright gorgeous and indulging her social needs."

A part of me agrees with your statement: people indulges themselves a lot in junk literature, as they do in junk mates and unfulfilling social events. And yet, I have known myself for enjoying junk food and junk literature and sorely missing partners who were certified by their backwater witch-doctor from Hornborga as having too small of a brain for even a minor demon to consider possessing.

We may end up in a world where some people will enjoy AI-generated content, and some people will be at war with the death of the soul that comes with it. I'm decidedly in the second camp.

[ZiiS]

An LLM seems by far the most likly to be able to write a Hilary Mantel novel to me. May need to be a fair bit biger then ChatGPT-4 but given no living human ever has it dosn't have much compitition.