In trying to write a book, it makes little sense to try to "compete" on speed or volume of output. There were already vast disparities in that among people who write, and people whose aim was to express themselves or contribute something of importance to people's lives, or the body of creative work in the world, have little reason to value quantity over quality. Probably if there's a significant correlation with volume of output, it's in earnings, and that seems both somewhat tenuous and like something that's addressable by changes in incentives, which seem necessary for a lot of things. Computers being able to do dumb stuff at massive scale should be viewed as finding vulnerabilities in the metrics this allows it to become trivial to game, and it's baffling whenever people say "Well clearly we're going to keep all our metrics the same and this will ruin everything." Of course, in cases where we are doing that, we should stop (For example, we should probably act to significantly curb price and wage discrimination, though that's more like a return to form of previous regulatory standards)

As a creator of any kind, I think that simply relying on LLMs to expand your output via straightforward uses of widely available tools is inevitably going to lead to regression to the mean in terms of creativity. I'm open to the idea, however, that there could be more creative uses of the things that some people will bother to do. Feedback loops they can create that somehow don't stifle their own creativity in favor of mimicking a statistical model, ways of incorporating their own ingredients into these food processors of information. I don't see a ton of finished work that seems to do this, but I see hints that some people are thinking this way, and they might come up with some cool stuff. It's a relatively newly adopted technology, and computer-generated art of various kinds usually separates into "efficiency" (which reads as low quality) in mimicking existing forms, and new forms which are uniquely possible with the new technology. I think plenty of people are just going to keep writing without significant input from LLMs, because while writer's block is a famous ailment, many writers are not primarily limited by their speed in producing more words. Like if you count comments on various sites and discussions with other people, I write thousands of words unassisted most days

This kind of gets to the crux of why these things are useful in some contexts, but really not up to snuff with what's being claimed about them. The most compelling use cases I've seen boil down to some form of fitting some information into a format that's more contextually appropriate, which can be great for highly structured formatting requirements and dealing with situations which are already subject to high protocol of some kind, so long as some error is tolerated. For things for which conveying your ideas with high fidelity, emphasizing your own narrative voice or nuanced thoughts on a subject, or standing behind the factual claims made by the piece are not as important. As much as their more strident proponents want to claim that humans are merely learning things by aggregating and remixing them in the same sense as these models do, this reads as the same sort of wishful thinking about technology that led people to believe that brains should work like clockwork or transistors at various other points in time at best, and honestly this most often seems to be trotted out as the kind of bad-faith analogy tech lawyers tend to use when trying to claim that the use of [exciting new computer thing] means something they are doing can't be a crime

So basically, I think rumors of the death of hand-written prose are, at least at present, greatly exaggerated, though I share the concern that it's going to be much harder to filter out spam from the genuine article, so what it's really going to ruin is most automated search techniques. The comparison to "low-background steel" seems apt, but analogies about how "people don't handwash their clothes as much anymore" kind of don't apply to things like books