What if we remove the stigma of authors using AI. We say, have at it, use all the AI you want. What then? The market is still finite. The authors are still competing with each other. They will still have to be good at creating compelling books that people want to read. Will the whole thing just blow over and AI would be "just another tool" that authors use to get their work out?
Discoverability starts to break for new authors when more new books are published each day than humans on the earth.
Established authors have the name recognition to compete as you say.
This has happened with other accelerants in various media/fields:
1. easy access to video recording and editing equipment has made it a lot easier to produce videos on sites like YouTube;
2. easy access to audio recording and editing (Audacity, etc.) has made it a lot easier to produce podcasts and other audio content (via LibriVox, Apple Podcasts, etc.);
3. easy access to writing software and self-publishing (Amazon, fan fiction sites, blogging platforms) has made it a lot easier to produce stories and books;
4. easy access to game engines and tools (Unity, Unreal, Godot, Twine, RenPy, etc.) have made it a lot easier to produce games.
Yes, and as Howey explains in TFA those things might be good for consumers and creators who create for fun, but they are not good for people who create in order to earn a living.
you are not taking into account that creators can be funded in different ways. For example like in Patreon.
You can give part of your money to fund a creator that wants to create in order to earn a living.
I believe that is better when people create for fun. If they need to create to earn a living they are forced to create and that is not the best incentive to create. Fun is a better incentive
> I believe that is better when people create for fun. If they need to create to earn a living they are forced to create and that is not the best incentive to create. Fun is a better incentive
I'm not sure that's true (thousands of famous creative works from the Sistine Chapel to the Benin Bronzes were created on commission/for remuneration), but even if it is, how are creators gonna eat? If the answer is "get a day job", I think that excludes a lot of folks from practically being able to create things. Patreon is not a great way to pay the bills for all but the most famous and popular people on it.
With IA, creation is cheap. It's inevitable that automation would make some jobs disappear. There's no solution, less people will be able to earn a living for creating art, I think.
What do you think about this?
I think that's probably at least somewhat true, and regrettable/something to be worked on in your community, and a very different statement from
> [it] is better when people create for fun. If they need to create to earn a living they are forced to create and that is not the best incentive to create. Fun is a better incentive
There will be less creators that earn a living by creating. But I believe there will be more art.
E.g. after Michelangelo created his style, then IA can mimick it almost for free. Imagine people with great talent like him, expressing their ideas and also being able to use IA to create, plus thousands of less talented people basing their AI art on them.
What if other LLMs were charged to read the work as well? And those other LLMs were actually in the persona of aspiring authors hoping to learn so they can later sell their work?
There's an entire potential economy there without humans necessarily involved at all, kind of busted by recent Anthropic precedent admittedly.
AI destroys your writing voice. There are authors who I enjoy not only because they write a compelling story, but they do so in such a way that is lyrically enjoyable. Engineers fall into the trap of thinking that if the slop machine emits the Internet-average sentence to describe a character’s actions, then it will suffice for all audiences and works of literature. “Add more adjectives and flowery language” will only net you a novel that reeks of cheap perfume. I guess we’ve lumped all of this under “taste” these days, but that’s what the AI author lacks. Without it, it’s probably going to be fine for producing summer beach reads (which could be quite lucrative!), but it needs to escape the mean it was trained on to be a truly unique, compelling voice.
You are ultimately stating that there's something unique about human minds that cannot be replicated by machines. It may be so, or not.
I think I was fairly clear that I’m talking about these machines, not all machines that exist or could exist. If I wasn’t, please read “AI” as “state of the art LLMs as they exist today.”
A super AI that could exist in the future won't "destroy your writing voice"?
As long as we add the stigma of them getting paid for their AI's effort too.
Then it could absolutely work.
Why would there need to be a stigma for getting paid based on a tool they used?
Do other authors have a stigma for using a word processor instead of a typewriter?
Artist have a stigma for using photoshop instead of canvas?
> Why would there need to be a stigma for getting paid based on a tool they used?
Is it being used a tool, or is it being used as a ghostwriter? There is often stigma attached to that when done by humans.
> Artist have a stigma for using photoshop instead of canvas?
Yes, that used to very much be the case. Now it is often considered a different form of expression, so loses a lot of the stigma mostly by not pretending to be what those looking down on it are comparing it to.
Similar in the debate between CGI and practical effects.
Perhaps if AI-backed authors are willing to have their work classed as a different type of writing they can skip by the comparison-stigma too?
If it's being used as a ghostwriter, they don't get copyright protection, making it harder to profit off the work.
If they are actually doing some work (editing significantly after generation) then they are protected on two fronts (currently, active cases may change this):
* as discussed elsewhere in these threads, the judgements pertaining to copyright not applying to generated work all only seem to cover entirely generated work where there is very little human activity after the prompt.
* even if the generated work is public domain, the derived work (the edited version) is not necessarily so (much like Disney's derived works created from the tales of Hans Christian Andersen's writings).
If they are not doing significant work after the ghostwriting, then sod'em, they are earning the stigma of essentially committing fraud to get that profit from the work.
The issue is that word processors and photoshop replace the traditional technique of art. AI replaces the expression of art. Since the invention of the camera made representation trivial, the art community has moved towards viewing expression as the soul of art.
Surely having the idea and curating the result actually is work?
And pricing is determined by what someone else will pay for something, so if people want to read it and the author is charging for it . . . that's up to them if they want to make a trade about it.
The odd thing is this attempt at gatekeeping what other people value.
> pricing is determined by what someone else will pay for something
That’s so reductive that even Keynes would probably take issue.
Discoverability is the axis of competition in this context, not price. The market has not effectively found out how to identify quality in order to price it, so externalities rule instead: pre-existing authors with recognizable names, whatever genre publishers like at a given moment (famously disconnected from what people actually want to buy), how many energy drinks a crabby editor has had by the time they get to your manuscript, and so on.
Search engine and recommendation systems were supposed to ameliorate those externalities. They didn’t.
Price is determined by what someone is willing to pay but value isn't. If the value from art comes from expression, then LLMs directly attack the core value of art.
LLMs don't impede human expression.
Damien Hirst, among many other prominent modern and historical artists, famously employed teams of human assistants to execute the bulk of the work. In the Hirst case that extended to the spot paintings, many of which he had very limited involvement in as a direct feature of the concept of the work itself.
Something tells me that doesn't alter the value of the art as expression of the intention of the artist, and not the assistant be it human or machine. In the spot painting case he was deliberately playing with this idea to the degree it added to the perceived value.
That's a great point! I wonder if the difference might be that, as you mentioned, Hirst's lack of direct involvement was part of his artistic message. I wonder "work where the medium is part of the message" might just be an exception to the rule? Although in general I am suspicious of whether AI art is really art, I would consider it art if using AI was part of the message. However, does that generalize to other messages that people use art to communicate?
Have you ever seen the end credits of a movie. It’s not made by one person either. Just like cathedrals aren’t built by one person.
But someone has the vision and make it real. That which is real is a medium from one soul (or many) to you.
I still have to see someone using LLM to share a soulful vision of his.
That sounds to me like the most reasonable attitude. If a story is compelling for a certain person, why care about how it was created?
Part of the appeal of literature generally and the novel in particular is that it provides you with an incredibly intimate connection to the subjectivity of another person, though they may be long dead, or the speaker of another language, or from a far away part of the world that you would never be able to visit yourself.
I would argue that a story can mainly provide a connection with your own subjectivity. If it moves something in you, that's what mainly matters.
If your goal by reading is too learn about the subjectivity of another real person, then yes, read human authors. You said it, that's it's part of what a book can offer, but there can be other reasons for reading
> If it moves something in you, that's what mainly matters.
This is a values question. Many would say that literature has a role in modeling certain behaviors and teaching lessons that are functional in society. Basically the fables and proverbs idea. Simply catering to what feels nice and what reinforces the biases and wishes of readers is not the same thing. Yes, most of literature is already crap and simply caters to readers instead of challenging them. But if you RLHF your way to AI literature that people "engage with" the most, you will get unvirtuous literature that doesn't do this function. Of course you're welcome to disagree with this entire framing and purely see reading as hedonistic pleasure and nothing else.
As you say, that already occurs with human made commercial crap literature.
A person directing an IA could also lead it to build a story that teaches values.
True, but it's easier to get lazy and to just wire it up to an automatic engagement farming loop with no human input. Imagine the worst form of audience capture possible.
What's wrong with that? There's the low quality slop for the people who desire it, and then there's the high quality literature that's appreciated by people with good taste, and that cannot be easily produced
Off topic, but you name is somewhat ironic. Argentina's most famous writer, Jorge Luis Borges, built much of his career on the idea that writing is inextricably and inherantly linked to its author.
Completely agree with Borges in that. When the author is an AI, there's no human author, the result is a mix of what information it was feed, how its algorithms work, and what does the person giving commands to the IA asks. There's some link to the person who directs the IA.
I believe Borges would have loved IA.
At the very least there is no doubt in my mind that he would have used it to create something intellectually provocative! Maybe something in the spirit of "Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote"?
This mindset is called "death of the author" [1] and the quick summary is that the author's intent doesn't matter. Most book people I know disagree with it.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Death_of_the_Author
What does matter? That's completely subjective. If the intent of the author matters to you, then, to you, it does.
There's not an abstract "not mattering of the intent of the author" independent of different people with certain values.
You could say that the intent of the author is the number one issue that matters. That's completely subjective, that's just, like, your opinion, man.