[volkk]

> Are AI-written books getting published?

actually i think they are. lots of e-book slop

> If they start out-competing humans, is that bad?

Not inherently, but it depends on what you mean by out-competing. Social media outcompeted books and now everyone's addicted and mental illness is more rampant than ever. IMO, a net negative for society. AI books may very well win out through sheer spam but is that good for us?

[qup]

Nobody has responded to me with anything about how authors are harmed, so I don't really get who we're protecting here.

It feels more like we just want to punish people, particularly rich people, particularly if they get away with stuff we're afraid to try.

[volkk]

> Nobody has responded to me with anything about how authors are harmed

i imagine if books can be published to some e-book provider through an API to extract a few dollars per book generated (mulitiplied by hundreds), then eventually it'll be borderline impossible to discover an actual author's book. breaking through for newbie writers will be even harder because of all of the noise. it'll be up to providers like Amazon to limit it, but then we're then reliant on the benevolence of a corporation and most act in self interest, and if that means AI slop pervading every corner of the e-book market, then that's what we'll have.

kind of reminds me of solana memecoins and how there are hundreds generated everyday because it's a simple script to launch one. memecoins/slop has certainly lowered the trust in crypto. can definitely draw some parallels here.

[consteval]

> Nobody has responded to me with anything about how authors are harmed

The same way good law-abiding folk are harmed when Heroin is introduced to the community. Then those people won't be able to lend you a cup of sugar, and may well start causing problems.

AI books take off and are easy to digest, and before long your user base is quite literally too stupid to buy and read your book even if they wanted.

And, for the record, it's trivial to "out compete" books or anything else. You just cheat. For AI, that means making 1000 books that lie for every one real book. Can you find a needle in a haystack? You can cheat by making things addictive, by overwhelming with supply, by straight up lying, by forcing people to use it... there's really a lot of ways to "outcompete".

> It feels more like we just want to punish people, particularly rich people, particularly if they get away with stuff we're afraid to try.

If by "afraid to try" you mean "know to be morally reprehensible" and if by "punish people" you mean "punish people (who do things that we know to be morally reprehensible)", then sure.

But... you might just be describing the backbone of human society since, I don't know, ever? Hm, maybe there's a reason we have that perspective. No, it must just be silly :P

[satvikpendem]

> know to be morally reprehensible

In your opinion, not to everyone. There has been no actual argument as to why it's supposedly "morally reprehensible."

[consteval]

I just explained how it's morally reprehensible. The argument is right there, above the quote you chose to quote. Neat trick, but I'm sorry, a retort that does not make.

[satvikpendem]

You didn't explain anything about why it is so, you just said it is, hence why I said it's your opinion. If you can't explain why, in more concrete terms, then there is no reason to believe your argument.

[consteval]

I just explained how AI books are able to cheat - they make more, faster, cheaper, and win based not on quality, never on quality, but rather by overwhelming. Such a strategy is morally reprehensible. It's like selling water by putting extra salt in everything.

Consumers are limited by humanity. We are all just meat sacks at the end of the day. We cannot, and will not, sift through 1 billion books to find the one singular one written by a person. We will die before then. But, even on a smaller scale - we have other problems. We have to work, we have family. Consumers cannot dedicate perfect intelligence to every single decision. This, by the way, is why free market analogies fall apart in practice, and why consumers buy what is essentially rat poison and ingest it when healthier, cheaper options are available. We are flawed by our blood.

We can run a business banking on the stupidity of consumers, sure. We can use deceit, yes. To me, this is morally reprehensible. You may disagree, but I expect an argument as to why.