Generative AI floods and dilutes the market for books

I have been tinkering with this over the past few months. One story with a specific genre and demographic target, but as I've been reading each draft there are so many small issues that crop up, inconsistency across various parts of the story, items that are introduced, questions that go unanswered etc. Unless your goal is to become an editor of AI content, it's not worth the effort.

Perhaps in time it will be better but you will need a proper pipeline to write, assess, track changes etc... perhaps all that's needed is a GitHub of sorts for writing.

However... what is the chance of any book finding an audience if there are so many to compete with. It might make more sense in having something created just for you though.

Gen AI is at a point now where it can write good chapters. You still need a human editor to make it coherent, plug plot holes and tie it all together. So if you can write a good book, but can't write good chapters, a Gen AI ghostwriter is an ideal tool. Output quality will vary.

I don’t see how this market ("mostly" AI-written books) won’t get arbitraged to death with the cheaper and open-weight models that keep coming out

Their entire analysis is based on the assumption that Pangram 3.3 is a reliable tool for detecting AI-generated content. What if not?

This is a surprise: Books with no AI text lose the most ground in genres with high AI diffusion, and most of all where Kindle Unlimited availability is high. Great to know this about creativity.

The market for books has been flooded far before AI. Millions of books are published each year, many more self published and unpublished. Sturgeon's law (90% of everything is crud) predates AI by many decades.

You need a mechanism to filter out the crud. There are many, some better than others.

For any kind of online entertainment really.

The overwhelming majority of content on Youtube is also plagued by AI.

You're 6 minutes in a documentary about Russo-Ottoman wars and only then you start noticing something's wrong, paintings are made up, the voice sounds similar to voices of other videos and the script has an odd non-human character to it.

Then you dig into it, and indeed it's a bunch of crap prompts glued together on top of some lame ai-generated internet research.

I hate these headlines. It's not generative ai that floods the market for books. It's people using Generative AI to flood the market. It's always the same something gets attributed to technology while it's people doing it. Scrutinize the people not the technology.

I wonder if this spells the end for online bookshops. I can imagine that small bookshops – or even online bookshops that focus primarily on selling curated books – are the future.

The book retail in my city is thriving, and consists mainly of shops where the owners curate the books.

all global text-for-money marketplaces (books, newsletters, onlyfans chats, etc.) will soon require ID verification to participate, or otherwise, substantial proof that there is a human in there somewhere

The ratio of good books to slop (AI or not) was far to bad for humans to reasonably filter 20 years ago.

Why do people use Gen AI for writing? What's the motivation? For academic papers, it's probably citation metrics and the number of publications. For novels, it's likely economic factors. If those factors disappear, would people still use Gen AI for writing?

Frankly the amount of books available from before LLM is staggering. The supply will long outlive me. So why would I buy any AI generated one? That is unless it starts producing something really good. Until that happens I suspect there is no real market for AI books.

Oh and btw amount of human generated crap is also so great that I has long became a problem for me to find good thing in that sea.

This is what "Abundance" is.