> Let's say, just for the sake of argument, that AI can eventually serve to level the playing field for everything. It outputs novels, paintings, screenplays - whatever you ask it for - of such high quality that they can't be discerned from the best human-created works. In this world, the only way an individual human matters in the equation is if they can encode some unique insight or perspective into how they orchestrate their AI

It's an insightful point, but I think there's more going on. It seems that quite a lot of the people consuming media and art do actually care how much it's the product of a human mind vs generated by a machine. They want connection with the artist. Maybe it's a bit like organic produce. If you give me a juicy white peach, I probably can't tell whether it's an organic one, lovingly raised and harvested by a farmer with a generations-in-the-family orchard, or one that's been fertilized, pesticide-sprayed, and genetically-engineered by a billion dollar corporation. But there's a very good chance I care about the difference. I'm increasingly getting the impression that a big swathe of consumers prefer human-made art. Probably bigger than the percentage that insist on organic produce. There will be a market for human-created works because that's something that consumers want. Yes, some authors will cheat. Some will get away with it. It'll start to look a lot like how we think of plagiarism.

Maybe the strength of that preference varies in different parts of the industry. Maybe consumers of porn or erotica or formulaic romance or guilty pleasure pop songs don't care as much about it being human-produced. Probably no one cares about the human authenticity of the author of a technical manual. But I suspect the voters at the Oscars and Grammys and Pulitzers will always care. The closer we are to calling something "art", the more it seems we care about the authenticity and intention of the person behind it.

The other thing I think is missing from the debate is the shift from mass-market works to personalized ones. Why would I buy someone else's ChatGPT-generated novel for twenty bucks when I could spend a few cents to have it generate one to my exact preferences? I'd point to the market for romance novels as one where you can already see the seeds of this. It's already common for them to be tagged by trope: "why choose", "enemies to lovers", "forced proximity", etc. Readers use those tags to find books that scratch their very specific itch. It's not a big jump from there to telling the AI to write you a book that even more closely matches your preferences. It might look even less like a traditional "book" and more like a companion or roleplay world that's created by the AI as you interact with it. You can see seeds of that out there too, in things like SillyTavern and AI companion apps.