AI Has Plunged the Book Publishing Industry into Utter Chaos | Hacker News Reader

AI Has Plunged the Book Publishing Industry into Utter Chaos

wsj.com

24 pointsgalsapir21 comments

The influx of AI into the creative industries should be considered and responded to as an attack, because it is one. It's malicious actors trying to undermine and destructively extract value.

It's still painfully obvious when a novel was written by AI--the quality is nowhere near good enough--but that's not actually the point; the point is the sheer volume of spam which clogs up search results and harms discovery.

the blatant theft and re-appropriation has to be the largest scale attack on the human psyche/soul/whatever you want to call it this world has ever seen.

at this point, the only solution i can see is wholesale rejection of all technologically produced novelty.

we need harder lines drawn in the sand, person by person

Word. But here we have about 300 sweaty nerds claiming 'AI training is like learning' and similarly misguided hogwash. Not sure how such a culture war can be won against people with no regard for intellectual property, the beauty of art and a fleet of propaganda chatbots (yes, I'm dying on that conspiracy theory hill any day).

agreed. creatives themselves have nothing to worry about because AI generated novels are a very poor imitation of one crafted by humans.

the issue is the review processes from publishers cant scale

I don't think that is right. There is always a commercial and non commercial duality to art. Artists need money. Many artists hone their craft and make their money by producing commercial products, corporate music or web ads or whatever. I think your prediction is naive; this will take a huge, irreversible toll on art.

yep. i think it talked about a lot in the context of research, but not enough (or maybe im just not exposed to it) in relation to the arts.

I wonder if we're headed for a future where it is almost completely impossible to make money off human-made "authentic" art because it simply can't compete with the effort-to-dollar ratio of slop.

The trends weren't all that good prior to AI even; economics nearly killed the 2D animation and traditional still art, though what remained still had some semblance of an intersection between "authentic art" and "viable career".

More and more I feel like the only things that will ever be taken as authentic and meaningful are the things that are released for free, as they prove definitively to the audience that there was no motive to produce the sort of meaningless, pseudo-wireheading, shapes-and-colours slop that AI creators are greatly incentivised to do so.

People will still write compelling literature without instructing a machine to do it wholesale (often without even bothering to conceal the scaffolding in the response.) But it may look more like Wattpad or AO3 with more skill; hobbyist, on the side, given generously to an audience at zero cost.

Economic trends meant we were moving towards patronage models anyway, whether singular or distributed. It seems like mass one-shot payment for media is almost dead. The exception might be video games, thanks in part to console lock-in.

Curious that technology will send us back to the world of Michelangelo and the Medici and so on. No more professional artists funded broadly, just pets of the rich.

That's not necessarily true. Patreon, Twitch, and Onlyfans all reproduce the patronage relationship at microscale. Instead of a commissioned sculpture you might get a shout-out on chat, but the cost to you was also much cheaper.

I don't think "produced for free" is a salve to this, completely, at least.

People spending time/effort/resources on Authentic Stuff have to eat, and there's no shortage of people who have some other income source posting slop for the social standing/clout/attention of being an artist/a recomp dev/an emulator dev/etc.

Someone close to me is a folk musician who’s done surprisingly well, at least getting by as a full-time performer. Much of what people are paying for when they get tickets to see her is the feeling of proximity to non-artificial, unalienated human culture. It’s traditional (lots of the tunes are hundreds of years old, passed down mostly orally), but it’s a living tradition. Extraordinary. Take my money.

The coming slopnami may well be the end for many artists, but for her and others already trading in an unfakeable way on the idea of authenticity, it might be a blessing in disguise.

that works for musicians who can continue to get paid for live performances; harder for writers

I've paid to see writers speak many times over the years. There's some kind of business model there, though I haven't tried to analyze the sustainability.

Indeed. It’s a real tragedy.

Slopnami. I am going to borrow that one ...

(I had seen "slopocalipse" - tsunami feels more material.-

blacksmiths--gone machinists--mostly gone hand looms--gone wheelwrights--gone newspapers--mostly gone circuit designers--mostly gone draftsmen--gone secretarial workers--gone

Automation (software and mass-production equipment) has transformed our world and our lives.

I'm just some guy watching what's happened over the past 50 years. But this trend is only accelerating. There will be many more industries that are "transformed" by technology.

Art is not solely an industry.

The discourse and discussion between Benjamin and Adorno is an interesting tidbit in this context.

> I wonder if we're headed for a future where it is almost completely impossible to make money off human-made "authentic" art because it simply can't compete with the effort-to-dollar ratio of slop

I disagree. It will create a subculture of people that appreciate human arts like never before.

The vast majority will consume slop, sure, but there is a growing cohort, especially from younger people, that explicitly seek man-made art. An example: YouTube has been inundated by AI mixes by talentless hacks, and when you happen upon a mix by a real human, the majority of comments are along the lines of “thank you for keeping the arts alive. I have had enough of that AI shit” - none of them care if it tastes or sounds good enough, they reject AI slop on pure principle, and so do I. I don’t give a shit how good the machine fakes are nowadays, I just avoid it altogether, and find in appreciation of human ingenuity and creativity like never before in my life.

But yes, as I said, the vast majority will consume slop, but then again the vast majority have no taste whatsoever and would consume “manmade slop” like pop music and superhero blockbusters, and there is no hope for redemption for them. (I am being shamelessly elitist here). The masses will not have cared about the arts anyway. All AI has done is for artists to take their craft more seriously, and to more clearly separate the wheat from the philosophical zombies with a Suno subscription that still don’t get why humans create and appreciate art.

I read a lot and I’m not that scared about AI books because I seek the interesting ones (in my subjective opinion) and don’t buy the cheapest at the airport shop to pass the time, which is the niche that’s getting disrupted here.

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