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Comment by jambalaya8 | Hacker News Reader

This is <sarcasm>good</sarcasm>. It should eventually make writing not a viably profitable career for anyone also. How the heck will people ever stand out and not just be grey goo? How will anyone know what is good versus garbage?

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We are going to go back to human-only networks for filtering the garbage into a trusted set of recommendations. Maybe where the only music you can trust are local artists you can see live. Or where the books you read are from a friend-of-a-friend who knows the author. Maybe the world of tomorrow looks more like the world we left behind.

I think 100% of the books I've read in the last year have been recommendations from friends. This is kind of annoying as I'd like to be able to give them recommendations in return, but ... limited time.

I wish that I could doomscroll literature instead of short videos, but the economics apparently don't work out.

I used to recommend books to friends generally when I was young, then I started getting really specific about what books to recommend to whom as I got older. I wonder what stuff like this (and AI in general) will cause more of?

Knowing that some songs are by local artists who I could go see live doesn't tell me very much about the quality of the music, unfortunately. My friends recommending the music does though, assuming we have similar taste.

So the algorithmic system could potentially destroy itself.

Neat!

Would publishers be willing to go to the level of pulling a Milli Vanilli where they hire people to make appearances as the author? Or would a litmus test to see if an author has attended any book signings be valid?

That sounds like a cost of doing business so the question is whether using this method increases profit more than any other.

Removing book tours increases profit once people know your name.

Fewer and fewer author appearances are in person. Book signings are being limited more and more to the author's name and are done via pre-order, with the readings and chats done online (especially with well-known authors). Book tours are much more rare than they were. Book tours are expensive.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JT_LeRoy#Exposure

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