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Comment by Taywee | Hacker News Reader

This wave of AI has the power to be incredibly transformative for good, but not given any of the current economic or copyright systems we have now.

I don't know how any of the proponents can pretend that this isn't an abject disaster on the horizon for anybody who depends on copyright to make their living.

This is the natural progression to the unnatural properties of the shared delusion of pretending like ideas are property or that it every was natural to keep them artificially scarce. If we lived in an ideal system where ideas are free, copyright didn't exist, and artists and programmers could survive and thrive without the ability or need to hoard their work as if they were physical goods, this would be a non-issue. The system was antiquated for the needs of the modern world for multiple human generations already, and this is the dam breaking.

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> I don't know how any of the proponents can pretend that this isn't an abject disaster on the horizon for anybody who depends on copyright to make their living.

OK, I'll bite. How is the an abject disaster on the horizon for... let's say, novelists?

My wife is a novelist who widely participates in fiction writing communities, and a lot of competitions have had to stop taking submissions entirely due to AI work flooding all the submissions. There's been drama on and off recently with AI generated covers, too. Some waves have been made with people winning contests with AI generated short stories. Agents are absolutely inundated with AI queries, and it's only going to get worse as the technology gets better.

It's actually really scary for writers right now. You just have to look at the huge amount of AI generated attempts and think "what do we do when the writing gets really good? What do we do when most novels are mostly AI generated?"

People have spent decades working their ass off to get good and try to get their work sold, and they come out the end of this tunnel right into an era telling them that they're just about to be obsolete.

> What do we do when most novels are mostly AI generated?

Much of modern fiction is farmed out or padded for page count. ChatGPT may be the death of anonymous online writing communities. It doesn't portend is the end of fiction or writing altogether.

That's not true of novel writing in the least, and clearly not what I was talking about. AI is already heavily impacting fiction and writing communities. How many active novelists do you hang out with? The ones I know are talking a lot about how much harder it's already making their lives, especially the ones who are still trying to get picked up by their first agent.

> How many active novelists do you hang out with?

Small number. Acquaintances. Published. They complain about e.g. getting into the Paris Review or New Yorker, now. I imagine traditional gatekeepers are screwed. But not authors. Even if their job transitions to expert prompt engineering and editing, that's a niche.

So you didn't know how absolutely crushing it is to spend years trying to get your first novel published while working full time in a manual position, and find that you moved from competing with hundreds of other people every time you send a query to an agent to thousands of mostly AI generated queries, with signs pointing to dozens coming from the same people?

Or how crushing it is to be told that the right solution is to just abandon your dream and start generating a novel a month instead of writing?

I know a lot of authors, published and unpublished. This technology is thrilling for corporations, worrying for the established, and absolutely annihilating for somebody who is just trying to get started. Many of the unpublished ones have given up and just self publish to ~zero sales, because they want to actually have their book out there.

Expert prompt editing is not a niche most people want, and it's not one most people will get. It's not a movement from X authors producing Y novels to X prompt engineering editors producing Y novels. It's a movement to X/N prompt editors producing Y novels. Even as an expert AI user, the progression is way fewer people doing way more work, and the death of the dream for the very vast majority.

What's screwed is nearly everybody.

> you didn't know how absolutely crushing it is to spend years trying to get your first novel published while working full time in a manual position, and find that you moved from competing with hundreds of other people every time you send a query to an agent to thousands of mostly AI generated queries, with signs pointing to dozens coming from the same people

No, I don't. But I don't see this as the end of the art. I certainly see no evidence of those AI-generated queries pushing out legitimate novelists.

The last time we saw a copyright struggle like this was Napster. After a lot of ire we eventually landed on Spotify, shows, and merch. Musicians seem fine this time around, but graphic designers are in for a world of hurt. Artists and musicians mostly already starve, unless they're extremely lucky and famous.

Every class of artist will now be able do more than they could alone in the world before AI. They no longer need institutional capital to make big, ambitious works.

Graphics designers will have tools and will make movies and interactive fictions. They'll build their own following.

It'll look like YouTube and the rise of the YouTuber, except bigger and broader.

Yeah and we can give money to AI so it can read/watch/review all the extra content we don’t already have enough of.

There isn't enough content that tailors to my interests. In fact, there's barely any.

Nearly every film I watch, I question the director's choices. I'd do casting and set dec differently. I'd change the music and design.

The plot and writing and character development are the things that can irk me the most.

Very seldom do I finish an experience and feel sated. When it happens, I feel elated and the experience sits with me for days. But that's not frequent enough.

We all deserve more, not less.

I feel generally there is too much but I can respect your desire for more tailored content. It just seems discovery would be difficult in such a landscape.

... and streaming services being silos for content, so I'm not sure the 'last round' was even all that beneficial[0] in the long run. Anyway... RRRRR!

As to AI-generated content: Who knows?

[0] Towards humanity and creative endeavor in general.

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