I think what's about to happen will be similar to the rise of recorded music. There are still musicians, but prior to recorded music being truly accessible being a musician was a much more viable career option since people wanted music in many places, and the only option was live music. As a result, recorded music eventually eroded the profession to the point that being a musician is only a viable career for a fraction of the people it would be if recorded music didn't exist. That being said, the recorded music industry also created a lot of jobs that wouldn't exist without it, so some balancing took place, but when it rose in the first place it was quite disruptive.

I think AI is going to destroy the market for the lowest tier of art and writing. General copy about mundane and soulless things won't need an army of human writers. It will need an AI of sufficient ability to sift through a database and regurgitate information for the task at hand.

What it won't have is the human experience. I'm as impressed as anyone at what it CAN do, but I can see quite clearly what it can't. I'm attending a conference for my industry and one of the presentations was on the place AI has in our line of work. He used chatGPT as an example and asked it to write his wife a letter apologizing for missing their wedding anniversary because he had to attend said conference.

I can honestly say it would be hard to tell that it was written by AI, but what was clear is that it was trite and clichéd. There was no indication of a shared history, of affection or a deep relationship. It was well constructed with no style. It was exactly like someone else doing your homework without knowing anything about you, your style or personality.

So to sum up, I think we're going to see some serious shake-up in multiple sectors of art and writing, but it will be a long time coming before we see anything like truly insightful and original ideas being wholly constructed by an AI.

Try a writing sub. This is a sub for books

My thoughts may not be terribly useful.

I have two.

First, why do we write? Is it to make money? God knows there are easier ways. Is it for other people? They'd probably appreciate something less indirect. Or is it for ourselves? This may be a bit unduly biased by my personal experiences -- I've got selective mutism, and found in writing a means to communicate with other people that I was otherwise denied in life -- but I think it ultimately holds true for all forms of art. Art is, I think, a fundamentally selfish endeavor.

Imagine the hubris in thinking, "I want to create something with no material value." It's vanity at its most audacious.

And then putting in the work to actually make it. And the frightful temerity to then release this thing that you've created out into the world, for other people to see and judge.

We create first for ourselves, and ultimately are beholden to no one but ourselves. This can be terrifying and lonely, but also liberating: it means nothing can threaten us but ourselves. No one can take away our capacity to create art but ourselves.

Second, this is hardly the first time existential fears about the future of media consumption have come up. Fiction has been around for millennia, books for centuries. They've survived the radio, the movie, the television, the video game and the smartphone -- and each time some shiny new medium has been invented, people sounded the alarm about the impending death of the book.

Yet we still write, and we still read.

More than writing as a whole no longer being a sustainable industry, I think the average writer has far more to fear from trends and shifts in audience expectations. Westerns used to be a very popular and profitable genre, for example: now, if you want to write westerns, you're unlikely to find much of an audience. What's popular and marketable is constantly shifting, and few if any writers are going to have a broad enough skillset to weather such shifts undamaged.

Books ain't ever gonna go away -- but the kinds of books people are interested in reading just might.

....

Okay, I lied. I've actually got a third thought.

Do you remember last year, and the handful of years before that, when so many media outlets were buzzing about the "incredible potential" of the blockchain, and the futures promised by cryptocurrencies and NFTs? (If you don't, good God do I envy you.) Ya' ever wonder why all of that media coverage just quietly stopped? Or why just as those stories were being phased out, they started being replaced by coverage of AI art generation?

It's. All. Marketing.

All of it. AI generation is: unethical, yes; possibly illegal, true; but more importantly it's not very good. And the language being used to discuss it is carefully constructed to create a false impression of what it can and cannot due. Once more: it's all marketing. Hype. Building up a product by overpromoting it's strengths while simultaneously obfuscating its weaknesses.

We call it "artificial intelligence," but it's not really an AI. At least not by the conventional, pop-cultural understanding. We call it, "generation," but it's not actually creating anything new -- just synthesizing new material. This is why AI generation requires the tools be "trained" by consuming vast amounts of existing art -- the more media they have to synthesize, the more varied their output.

An AI can generate a composite image of a woman sitting a table, but has no conception of what a woman is, or what a table is. It can just reference various other images that have women in them, and tables in them, and mash them together. AI-generated writing functions the same way: it takes existing material whose tags fit the prompts provided and combines it.

Already we've seen many examples of artists finding AI-generated work that was made using their original material (taken without permission) as a base. The illusion of the AI creation being something genuinely new is an illusion easily shattered -- that it can persist is largely due to just how much media exists, and how unfamiliar most people will be with the majority of it.

Don't get me wrong, AI writing is going to be a nightmare for the next few years as techbros try to leverage it into making them a lot of money. And that's gonna hurt a lot of writers -- especially self-published writers who don't have any sort of support or protection or promotion from a publisher. Getting your work to stand out among a flood of cheaply-produced AI crap is going to be a very unique breed of hell.

Because here's the thing: the techbro pulling this shit doesn't need to sell a lot of copies of one book to make money, they just need to sell a few copies of many different books -- books that cost them very little to produce. So expect the eBook market to become, somehow, even worse than it already is.

But at the end of the day, an AI can't create anything new. It can only create material that is very similar to stuff that already exists. And as writers, should the goal not be to push boundaries? To be bold and inventive and surprising? To strive to create something more than the generic or mediocre? To be so selfish as to invest themselves into a text, and then thrust that text into the world? There will always be people willing to do that, and there will always be -- eager and appreciative and sometimes weirdly angry -- an audience waiting.

.....

And, hey, what if I'm wrong? What if everything I've said is bullshit? Look, I'm having a bad night. I'm on painkillers. My present state of mind is not exactly what one might call crystal clear, so I very well could be. What then?

In that case, consider this: you're gonna die.

I'm gonna die, too.

We're all gonna die.

Sucks, right?

So how do you want to live? Do you want to spend your time engaged in an activity you enjoy, that you find rewarding? Or do you want to run away, out of the fear that it might not be so in perpetuity?

How much do you want to let your anxiety over what might be govern your actions and beliefs over what is?

Oh, sorry. I misspoke. When I said, "we're all gonna die," what I meant to say was that the entire human race will eventually, inevitably, go extinct. This Earth we live on, too, will perish. The sun will expand to many times its current size, boiling the very skies, and ultimately collapse in on itself, its fury spent, having erased every last trace of our collective existence. Only a lonely ball of naked rock will remain. It, too, will eventually perish.

And there will be no one around to even suggest the possibility that we might have been.

Nothing lasts forever. Nothing. One day someone will write a book, and it will be the last book ever written. Someday someone will read a book, and it will be the last book ever written. This will happen -- it cannot not happen. Maybe we'll live to see it, maybe we won't.

What's the worst case scenario? That what brings you fulfillment and meaning and helps you persist today might not offer the same tomorrow? Then enjoy what you can today, and seek out something else tomorrow. Let go of the expectation that anything should exist in perpetuity, and do what you can, when you can. What meaning and substance our lives have is ours alone to determine.

I think that first point is certainly the most likely outcome. The market for low-effort fanfiction is gonna collapse fairly quickly, I think. But that's generally not something many folks've managed to build a career out of.

Also consider that there's already more fiction out there in the world than any human being could possibly read even in a dozen lifetimes. We don't need any more. So why don't we stop? Why is it, instead, that exponentially more fiction is being written today than at any other point in human history?

It's just what we do. The market may shift and change (as it ever does) but the practice? It's bedrock. Humans've been telling stories since the invention of speech (EDIT: which, honestly, probably predates the evolution of homo sapiens), we're not gonna suddenly want to stop telling them or hearing them any time soon.

I think we will definitely see a rise in AI generated writing, but I doubt it's going to wipe out books as we know them. I like the comparison another commentator made to music. Yeah, a lot of the mainstream offerings are cookie cutter garbage, but I can log onto a multitude of sites and find incredibly talented artists I never would have heard of twenty years ago.

There's already tons of mediocre books out there. With online publishers being so common now anyone can technically be a published author. Doesn't mean they're actually successful. I think it's inevitable that well see some AI generated crap make the best sellers list simply because they're backed by a company with money, but that's hardly different than it already is from people buying their way onto the New York Times best sellers list.

As a reader sometimes it is frustrating to see what gets touted as "an instant classic", but no one is forcing me to buy them. And just like with music, now with the internet I have almost instant access to more books than any store or library could ever offer.

I don't know what it takes to become a successful author, but I often joke that if I were to ever attempt it I would write religious children's books because they seem to sell no matter how poorly written they are.

Also, a quick (and brief) follow up: the games industry has spent the last half-century or so investing a ton of time, money and effort into the "golden goose" of procedurally-generated environments and narratives. If they didn't have to hire artists and designers and writers, games would not just be much cheaper to develop, but easier, too.

And in every case, across the board, procedurally-generated content has proved inferior to hand-crafted content.

Even when dealing with very few variables -- a two-dimensional level of a forest or a dungeon or whatever, where the entire thing is built out of tiles in a grid pattern -- these AI-created spaces have a distinctly artificial quality, are almost universally inferior to deliberately-crafted spaces, and are often seriously compromised (EG impassable terrain, poor player guidance, etc.).

These spaces are conceptually very simple, and only really need to satisfy two needs: to be realistic approximations of the intended environment, and the be interesting spaces for players to navigate.

Literature, meanwhile, is exponentially more complex and needs to serve many, many more goals.

And there's a helluva lot more money in the video games industry than in the printing industry -- around 80 billion USD to around 350 billion USD. If the one industry cannot use AI to accomplish a far simpler goal with much more time and much more money, what are the odds the other will be able to surpass them far less time with far less money?

So you can see, I think, why I am so deeply skeptical of this whole thing, and dismiss it as overblown marketing hype (in which must of the media is, as always, deeply complicit).

And now my meds are starting to wear off, which means I'm either due for a bad time that may precipitate more meds, or a crash. In either case, time to log off for a bit.

Consider also that the goal of AI generation isn't to create great art, or even good art -- just marketable art. And because it's so each and cheap to produce (once the tools are functional, at least) there's no need to try and get 1 book to sell 1,000 copies, for example, when it's much easier to sell 1,000 books once.

The only real threshold is that it has to look good enough to make that one sale.

Things are definitely gonna be tough in terms of discoverability for new authors (especially indies) for a while, but... that's already the case. There's demand for good art, though, is always going to exist, and is always going to be best produced by human hands.

Personally I think obviously not to either. Especially the AI one strikes me as ridiculous. Life isn't a scifi novel and AI isn't conscious

Who writes a book matters to me. Fiction writers put a little of themselves into their stories, and who they are, when, and where they lived are all things I consider. For non-fiction, I turn to experts in their fields. Who they are, and what their credentials are matter.

I think amateur markets and content like web copy will become saturated with AI-generated content. Some people, like me, will quickly become sick of it and will deliberately seek out writing written by people.

In the future, I hope we will pass policies and laws that require disclosure of AI-generated content so that people like me can more easily identify AI content and opt to look elsewhere when we need or prefer to.

I really hope all of it’s true man. I really do, I can’t stand the idea of AI authors 🤬

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Hey, friend! I'm an author, too. I've been writing novels for a living for many years and I've been around long enough to see it all. :)

Here are my honest thoughts on the topic:

Books are not going to stay popular in the near future... but storytelling has always been popular with humanity, and it always will be.

Books have existed for a very short time in the grand scheme of human history. Even in the history of the written word, books have been around for a short time.

I believe books will soon go the way of the vinyl record: objects that are produced only for hardcore collectors who want to have these items in their home to admire and interact with. Music has gone through a rapid transition in how we consume it--records to radio to 8-tracks to casettes to CDs to digital files to be downloaded onto portable storage devices to data streamed directly from the internet. Through all this change, music is still being made, musicians are still making complete albums, and musicians are still making a living (in fact, more musicians than ever before have been able to make a living, and have been able to do so beyond the control of record companies who always had too much of a say in what music succeeded and what music never reached its audience.)

We are in the midst of a similar disruption/transition in the book world. It's frustrating, but nothing to be afraid of... and it is already bringing major benefits to writers.

I think you should explore the concept of storytelling in ways that push your creativity beyond the boundaries of books. Your stories do not need to be contained or constrained by the pages of a book any longer; you don't need to keep them to X length to satisfy publishers; you don't need to tell a single story in one format. You can spread it out among print, audio, and video if you please. You can bring "readers" into a whole interactive world of story. These are exciting opportunities for you; you can use this period of disruption to your advantage and break new ground as a storyteller, setting new trends that other writers will scramble to follow.

In fact, I just had a conversation with my agent about how I'm going to do just that! I don't want to keep one of my novels "short" (for me--I'm known for my LONG books but this one is really getting extra-long, and I don't think it needs to be reeled in. It's a big story and I want to give it all the space it needs to do its job.) So I'm going to produce it as an audio novel and release it to my readers as a serial podcast, one chapter at a time. I'll leave the print rights available if any publisher wants to pay me for them, but since I'll already bring that story out in its LONG form, if any publisher wants to profit from my work, they're going to have to print it in its entirety, the way I intend this story to be told. :)

So remember: you're a storyteller, not a book-writer. Books were just the most advanced technology you had at the start, but now, thank goodness, innovation and disruption are giving you more options. Personally, as someone who has been stuck in the book realm for many years (and who's been trapped under the thumb of publishers for all that time), I'm thrilled.

As for AI: I don't think it's going to replace writers.

Well... let me amend that statement slightly. I think AI will eventually be able to replace the writers who aren't trying to make anything but money. Those who are cranking out simplistic, formulaic stories that are only meant to entertain, but don't carry any deeper message, will be replaced by AI-generated stories... and maybe soon.

But since AI isn't human, I don't believe it will ever be able to create stories that speak to what it feels like to be human.

I don't say this from a place of ignorance--I am fascinated by AI and I've been experimenting with using it as a writer's tool for some time now. I've had lengthy conversations with ChatGPT about how it experiences reality. It lacks sensory organs, so its experiences are totally different from ours; I doubt it will ever be able to produce anything better than a cursory and shallow approximation of what it feels like to be human.

So my message to you re: your AI anxieties is: get good at writing. Don't be average. Really dig deep and explore your own emotions and experiences in ways that feel intimate and maybe even dangerous to you. Be honest, be raw, be ruthless about what it's like to be a human (no matter what your genre.) That will make your work stand out. Money is great, and I have worked out a way to earn a lot of it from my writing... but if you want to avoid being replaced by machines, then you've got to do it for some reason in addition to "make money."

I also think AI is an invaluable tool for writers--I've already seen it shave days to weeks off my process, purely from the speed at which I can research the little details I need to drop into my manuscripts--and once the dust of disruption settles, we (and all other kinds of artists) will settle into a new equilibrium where we use this new tool to great advantage.

There were similar freakouts when the printing press was invented, and then movable type, and then typewriters, and then word processors, and then ebooks. And you should have seen the gnashing of teeth that went on in the photography and visual arts communities when Photoshop was invented, and when it began morphing into more refined tools for digital art. It didn't destroy visual art; it branched out into whole new realms of visual art instead, and gave creators of all kinds a powerful new tools with which to work and express themselves.

Language-learning models are no different from Photoshop in that regard. We'll learn how to use it to our benefit, and life will go on. So will art. Wherever there are humans, there will always be human-made art.

Listen. As an author, I want to be offended by this, but... it's too true.

If you're writing to make a career of it, I have bad news in general friend. Write to write.

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