alt Hacker NewsI look forward to the day that AI companies pay large advances for new books.
It'll take a while before publishing collapses due to the availability of the same information via an LLM, but once this happens new books will get a lot more expensive for AI companies and a lot cheaper for everyone else.
I've been lead author and co-author on several books on programming. My first book sold tens of thousands of copies even though the writing was not just trash but a crime against humanity against anyone who had to read it. This was back in the day when the source code for the book was provided on request on a floppy, which was actually quite rigid because it was a Mac floppy.
My writing got better and better, and I got better publishers who actually hired editors, but the books sold fewer and fewer copies. Even crappy self-serving poorly written stackoverflow posts are often good enough. Then LLMs killed stackoverflow. Is that real ironic or Alanis ironic?
But I'm not holding my breath waiting for a book deal from OpenAI.