[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.