[dahart]

> because why would AI change that

Why wouldn’t AI change it? Everyone is expecting that it will, and it’s already starting to happen, just visit Amazon. The biggest reasons are that low-effort AI produced works by lazy authors & publishers may drown out the great works and make the tiny percentage far tinier and much harder to find, which may prevent many great works from ever being “discovered” and recognized as great. The new ability for many people without skill to use AI produce works that compete with skilled manual creation is a huge disincentive for creators to spend their lives studying and honing their skills. I’d bet there’s a hollowing out of the arts already occurring in universities globally. My interaction with college students over the last couple of years has very suddenly and dramatically turned into discussions about AI and concern about whether there will even be jobs for the subjects they’re studying.

[krageon]

Amazon has always been chock-full of ghostwritten amazon turked books, which were hot garbage easily on the level of chatgpt 3.5. The advent of AI won't change the cesspit of useless despair, because it's already so full you can't wade through all of it. Having more shit in a pit full of shit doesn't make it more shitty, especially if you had to wade through it to find a single pebble.

[dahart]

Sure it does. The ratio of good to bad absolutely matters. It determines the amount of effort required, and determines the statistical likelihood that something will be found and escape the pit. People are still writing actual books despite the ghostwritten garbage heap. If that ratio changes to be 10x or 100x or 1000x worse than it is today, it still looks like a majority garbage pile to the consumer, yes, but to creators it’s a meaningful 10, 100 or 1000x reduction in sales for the people who aren’t ghostwriting. AI will soon, if it doesn’t already, produce higher quality content than the “turked” stuff. And AI can produce ad-infinitum at even lower cost than mechanical turk. This could mean the difference between having any market for real writers, and it becoming infeasible.