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Comment by class3shock | Hacker News Reader

This - "So far there’s no sign that authors are being put out of work"

is a contradiction to this - "but the internet and low end book stores like Amazon kindle are being flooded with LLM slop."

I'm not sure there there are labor statistics to look at but it seems impossible that the coming-into-existance of a tool that generates mass amounts of cheap product, with zero skill required, in a field wouldn't displace skilled workers in that field.

- https://www.economist.com/leaders/2026/09/24/dont-let-ai-kil... - https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/2026/09/ai-authors-im... - https://fortune.com/2026/09/14/ai-slop-books-amazon-marketpl...

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Why would it be impossible? You're discounting the most probable case, which is that the AI writing is not a substitute for a skilled writer.

Edit: Turns out both Judge Alsup and Judge Chhabria agree that this is not obvious and would need to be defended. Here's Chhabria's statement on the evidence for market dilution:

> As for the potentially winning argument—that Meta has copied their works to create a product that will likely flood the market with similar works, causing market dilution—the plaintiffs barely give this issue lip service, and they present no evidence about how the current or expected outputs from Meta’s models would dilute the market for their own works.

When the plaintiffs don't even attempt to argue the point, that's pretty telling.

Either authors are all equally highly skilled, or we care only about defending the good ones...

We only care about defending the good ones. Why would we want to defend badly written human output?

It certainly makes it harder to discover human authors, because stores are flooded with plausible but terrible books from morons using LLMs to generate text modelled on other books that are doing well. I don't think that is 'displacing' human authors though, which implies replacing with equivalents?

I'd say it has displaced people like photographers and illustrators more, as businesses are willing to use free generation to replace illustrations/decoration that they didn't value very much in the first place, and are more forgiving of the slop that LLMs produce (you see this in low-end advertising a lot now).

Strange that they are being used to replace many of the things we value in life with low-quality imitations of human work.

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