Get rich quick scams, this market existed before GenAI. They’d hire ghost writers, and then put them on audible.

Now it’s easier than ever. So the market explodes. But it makes legit writers harder to find. Its bleak.

It’s easier than actually writing, which is very hard to do well; authors spend years working on books.

Doesn’t really matter what the original motivation was (money, reputation, fame), people will use LLMs as a shortcut to generate text, and we’re all poorer because of it.

Even if all extrinsic motivations for writing disappear, some people will continue to write (without AI) for personal reasons.

And even at that point, others will continue to write using AI to simulate being one of those people.

I have hundreds of plot ideas from 40 years of reading and watching crappy books and films/tv. Never had the time or energy to explore those. LLMs let me try out various plots. To see which ones work and which don't. I haven't really thought about publishing anything though. Too much work and bureaucracy.

The thing is ... ideas matter just as much as the writing. You cannot simply say: "Hey Claude, write me a Sherlock Holmes pastiche set in the bronze age."

I have found that a 1:4 to 1:8 ratio gives nice results. That is, for every 4-8 paras of expected output, you must provide 1 para worth of character detail, plot beats etc. So you would need 100-200 pages of your own writing to produce 800 pages worth.

But most people are lazy. So the output is too.

I can understand being interested in it from a Modernist perspective.

It's both a new technology that maps a geometry to existing language - which is very interesting from several literary theory POVs - and represents a new kind of typewriter. If you're interested in innovative techniques in fiction, I think LLMs are arguably deeply interesting. Mass-producing slop, however, is probably quite limited in terms of its theoretical interest, and in how it changes the craft.

Personally, an example of how I use gen AI when writing is that I sometimes use a little text editor I wrote. It polls a local model, and grabs the 50 most-likely next token(s), rounded to one word, based on where the cursor is.

"Voice" in fiction was already about how the author chooses to deviate from the expected-next-word. So - while you could just use the tokens returned - I find myself using them much more often to choose what words to avoid using, or how to deviate from the expected outputs, and where it might be most interesting to do that.

I think there's plenty of interesting things that can be done with gen AI in terms of fiction writing, but I think we're quite a long way from working all of them out yet. Wholesale slop generation is one of the most obvious - and most boring - things writers can do with an LLM.

I've gotten yearly performance reviews that have been obviously ChatGPT-generated. People are just lazy.

Some HR systems even support that and have AI writing/rewording integrated.

Corporate hellscapes intensifying, I guess.

"back then", you had to write for months to get a book out, and it sold 20 copies and you earned $20.

Now you can do it in minutes, get 50 books out, 20 of them sell 10 copies, you've earned $200.

(i might be exaggerating the times and earnings, but the point stands)

Spamming online marketplaces with massive amounts of slop. Even if you only get a few sales per book, you win in volume.