AI Has Plunged the Book Publishing Industry into Utter Chaos

Planktonne•about 2 hours ago

The influx of AI into the creative industries should be considered and responded to as an attack, because it is one. It's malicious actors trying to undermine and destructively extract value.

It's still painfully obvious when a novel was written by AI--the quality is nowhere near good enough--but that's not actually the point; the point is the sheer volume of spam which clogs up search results and harms discovery.

ashleyn•about 3 hours ago

I wonder if we're headed for a future where it is almost completely impossible to make money off human-made "authentic" art because it simply can't compete with the effort-to-dollar ratio of slop.

The trends weren't all that good prior to AI even; economics nearly killed the 2D animation and traditional still art, though what remained still had some semblance of an intersection between "authentic art" and "viable career".

More and more I feel like the only things that will ever be taken as authentic and meaningful are the things that are released for free, as they prove definitively to the audience that there was no motive to produce the sort of meaningless, pseudo-wireheading, shapes-and-colours slop that AI creators are greatly incentivised to do so.

People will still write compelling literature without instructing a machine to do it wholesale (often without even bothering to conceal the scaffolding in the response.) But it may look more like Wattpad or AO3 with more skill; hobbyist, on the side, given generously to an audience at zero cost.

jschveibinz•about 2 hours ago

blacksmiths--gone machinists--mostly gone hand looms--gone wheelwrights--gone newspapers--mostly gone circuit designers--mostly gone draftsmen--gone secretarial workers--gone

Automation (software and mass-production equipment) has transformed our world and our lives.

I'm just some guy watching what's happened over the past 50 years. But this trend is only accelerating. There will be many more industries that are "transformed" by technology.

ungut•about 2 hours ago

Art is not solely an industry.

purpleflame1257•about 3 hours ago

Economic trends meant we were moving towards patronage models anyway, whether singular or distributed. It seems like mass one-shot payment for media is almost dead. The exception might be video games, thanks in part to console lock-in.

mrwh•about 3 hours ago

Curious that technology will send us back to the world of Michelangelo and the Medici and so on. No more professional artists funded broadly, just pets of the rich.

purpleflame1257•about 3 hours ago

That's not necessarily true. Patreon, Twitch, and Onlyfans all reproduce the patronage relationship at microscale. Instead of a commissioned sculpture you might get a shout-out on chat, but the cost to you was also much cheaper.

throwaway_7274•about 2 hours ago

Someone close to me is a folk musician who’s done surprisingly well, at least getting by as a full-time performer. Much of what people are paying for when they get tickets to see her is the feeling of proximity to non-artificial, unalienated human culture. It’s traditional (lots of the tunes are hundreds of years old, passed down mostly orally), but it’s a living tradition. Extraordinary. Take my money.

The coming slopnami may well be the end for many artists, but for her and others already trading in an unfakeable way on the idea of authenticity, it might be a blessing in disguise.

Bluestein•about 1 hour ago

Slopnami. I am going to borrow that one ...

(I had seen "slopocalipse" - tsunami feels more material.-

insane_dreamer•about 1 hour ago

that works for musicians who can continue to get paid for live performances; harder for writers

EvanAnderson•about 1 hour ago

I've paid to see writers speak many times over the years. There's some kind of business model there, though I haven't tried to analyze the sustainability.

throwaway_7274•22 minutes ago

Indeed. It’s a real tragedy.

thunderfork•about 3 hours ago

I don't think "produced for free" is a salve to this, completely, at least.

People spending time/effort/resources on Authentic Stuff have to eat, and there's no shortage of people who have some other income source posting slop for the social standing/clout/attention of being an artist/a recomp dev/an emulator dev/etc.

AI Has Plunged the Book Publishing Industry into Utter Chaos

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