Hacker News Reader

Comment by TrackerFF | Hacker News Reader

In the current climate with large language models, I predict that the expected payoff for writing a book will plummet sharply toward $0, due to the sheer saturation.

Not all books, of course - but the ones that are geared toward passive income. Imagine some guy with a small bot-farm that manages to generate thousands of different "authors", and generate similar books for each and every one of those - then spam the living sh!t out of marketplaces. And then tens of thousands of other people do the same, because they follow the same tutorial.

Before you know it, there are millions and millions of different books on the same topic, all somewhat unique - in the sense that they've been generated by a LLM, and not copy/pasted like in the good ol' days.

It's going to be fun.

View on HN

> Before you know it, there are millions and millions of different books on the same topic, all somewhat unique - in the sense that they've been generated by a LLM, and not copy/pasted like in the good ol' days.

At this point everyone will just need their own LLM to digest all the crap and help the user sort though it.

Now I'm imagining a world full of LLMs, everyone uses an LLM, attention spans are reduced even further, LLMs give instant answers, social media algorithms become even more effective. And yet, LLMs get things wrong in this new world, LLMs produce content other LLMs consume and mistakes spread. Someone discovers the LLMs are wrong, they try to spread the word, but people are skeptical and believe their LLMs instead, and attention spans are too short to have a real dialog about the matter. Falsehoods propagate. -- Sounds like a Black Mirror episode.

> Sounds like a Black Mirror episode.

Sounds like "Fall, or Dodge in Hell" by Neal Stephenson.

Also the Reticulum in Anathem, although that was caused deliberately by spam filter vendors to create a need for their spam filter wares.

To me this brings back the need for publishers as content curators. If, as you say, the act of writing itself loses inherent value, or at least the inherent filter of effort, then people will stop reading... Unless someone can guarantee actual effort went into the book.

Traditional publishing, due to the AI crapflood, is going to become even more inaccessible and exclusionary than it already is. You thought querying was the worst nightmare it could be before November 30, 2022? You sweet summer child.

I don’t think anyone has a good sense of how this problem will be solved. It’s possible that commercial writing is done. True literary work will still have a chance if it spreads by word of mouth but I don’t know how society will pay for it.

Trad pub isn’t likely to save us. There will be more profit in gaming these new capabilities than in trying to protect elitist literary sorts, most of whom don’t make any money.

> True literary work will still have a chance if it spreads by word of mouth but I don’t know how society will pay for it.

I don't understand, this seems like a leap in logic I am not following. Assuming a good book is identified by it's target audience why wouldn't people pay money for the book?

Yeah, I think most literary authors in North America string together teaching gigs along with grants and fellowships.

I'm more interested to see what happens to authors like James Patterson, who doesn't even write his books, but instead gives an initial idea to another writer and then acts more as an especially opinionated editor and taskmaster (and, eventually, a famous brand). Maybe that sort of author will thrive?

We need to solve online reviews. How can we make them credible? This alone could fix so many problems.

My not wholly pessimistic (I guess) take is that the market both for books and content more generally is already so flooded with crap that LLMs may not make things much worse. There's at least an argument that publishers remain relevant as a brand and if you need to have lunch with the right person in NY or London to cut through the noise? <shrug> (And, admittedly saying this as someone who wrapped a book outline in London with an acquisitions editor.)

The thing is, folks were already churning out junk for Amazon and getting robo reviews. Some made/make a lot of money doing this.

AI just makes the task of curation all the more important.

My impression is that this has already been the case for many years, only presumably being mostly done my humans!

Already Amazon is being bombarded with book submissions

I sell programming ebooks on regular expressions, CLI one-liners like grep/sed/awk, Vim, etc.

My fear has been that AI tools will replace the need for such books. Didn't think of the angle that books themselves will be automatically generated.

I've been seeing lower sales past few months, but not sure if it is just normal downturn or AI related, etc.

I would think google already replaced the need for such books. You think people would be better at asking "AI" than asking google?

One difference is that you get solutions without having to dig through the search results. And you can iterate while retaining current context.

I would expect books to be pretty safe. I can see people paying a premium for no ai books and stores declaring as much.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com