That market already exists and has existed for quite some time, you make it sound like literature has always been an AI dominated market and salt of the earth people are finally about to get their chance. I assume this is not what you meant and that I am missing something or possibly you know something that I don't and my perception of reality is fundamentally flawed. The latter is more fun but I suspect the former to be more accurate.
More to the point, I think there is a good sized market out there for AI writing, many who are into technology are going to want to read what AI can produce; this will take some writing away from people but it will be minor and most of the writing jobs which AI will take are those that the bulk of writers complain about, those jobs they say destroy their souls and rob them of their artistic freedom, the contract jobs.
Junk like Buzzfeed news and similar sites that just regurgitate other content existed before ChatGPT, I guess those serve some purpose, though I've always thought they mainly exist to host ads and to trap people in a maze of links and pop-ups. ChatGPT can write that junk just as well as a person.
At this point LLM-produced "writing" sticks out because it has no voice, it just repeats and walks around some point derived from the prompt, like someone summarizing Wikipedia articles. I will just click off of that stuff until I find something written by a real person. I hope more people do the same. The novelty will wear off sooner or later and we'll recognize LLM-generated writing as nothing more than vapidly useless filler. In a culture schooled with writing presented as a chore, where the number of words in an essay matters more than an original thought, LLMs promise to relieve a lot of people of the burden of thinking and writing.
People losing their jobs to ChatGPT don't even call themselves writers, at least not seriously. They produce content, most of it regurgitated the same way ChatGPT does it. If I produced content for online click farms I would worry about so-called AI. I don't think Murakami or Cormac McCarthy have to worry, but James Patterson might get replaced by an LLM (if that didn't happen already -- hard to tell).
In my own profession, some programmers already express fear for their future because Github Copilot and ChatGPT can write code just as good as they can. That should tell them to level up their skills, because if whatever they do can just get automated away by a glorified auto-complete they weren't adding enough value in the first place.
Exaggerated voices might give you variety, but I don't actually want to read a piece on the style of any of those voices. I would, however, be intrigued if it could write like me, or like any of the famous nonfiction writers who I've consciously patterned my style after (Isaac Asimov, Mary Roach, Cecil Adams, Michael Pollan)?
Much of the existing LLM have been trained to sound dry and always the same and require creative promoting to get around that, but they very much so are capable of creative, thoughtful pieces based on increasingly long amounts of information and instruction you can provide.
That capacity to fool people with apparently meaningful and creative content may have some value in the market, but I think that value amounts to the same value the market assigns to what currently gets churned out by people working in "content production." Not zero, but not the same value we assign to actual creative writing.
Small complaint, Buzzfeed News was serious legitimate journalism, and made some of the most important investigative journalism achievements of the past decade. Buzzfeed (sans News) is the garbage clickbait side of the company.
> At this point LLM-produced "writing" sticks out because it has no voice, it just repeats and walks around some point derived from the prompt, like someone summarizing Wikipedia articles.
You're thinking of OpenAI's products. Raw LLMs do not sound like ChatGPT, which has been RLHF-trained into the soulless automaton you describe. LLaMA for example is less coherent, but is indistinguishable from a real person in its tone and mannerisms. If you ask ChatGPT a very ridiculous dumb question it will politely answer it fully, like an obedient untiring servant. LLaMA will tell you to stop being an idiot, just as a human on Reddit or HN would.
The ability to imitate someone's tone (long a staple of satirical writing), or to fool a lot of unread people, no doubt represents a true achievement for LLMs. But people easily fool themselves and believe what they want to believe, so LLMs simply play into the limitations of human models and explanations for the world rather than representing a new form of conscious being.
I think we can see an analogy in craft production versus mass production. Today machines can produce (for example) furniture of very high quality, rivaling or exceeding the output of a craft carpenter or joiner. The mass-produced goods cost less to make and have good-enough quality, and can even sometimes fool people into thinking a skilled person made their table. That doesn't mean we should call those machines carpenters or conclude the machines possess the same skills. With LLMs we see mass production at scale come to writing and some other trades (law, customer support, etc.) that we like to think of as requiring actual skill. Maybe other trades such as programming will also fall to LLM mass production. But that happens because the jobs consisted mainly of rote and repetition in the first place, and require little creativity or intelligence to imitate.
I mean, if you look at the barrage of reboots, franchise installments and "memberberry" sequels that make up the bulk of cinema blockbusters...
If the quality is only half as good but the AI can put out orders of magnitude more material faster, that could be the direction that may be preferred by some content publishers.
Naturally, there's no accounting for taste.
Artificially, we'll just have to see what passes.
Except kids learn everything with tapes, updated and improved using new knowledge created by a rare few, beamed into their heads rather than depending on LLMs.
It's also a Stargate episode: https://www.gateworld.net/sg1/s3/learning-curve/