People like you, the author, and me all share this sentiment. It motivates us to seek out authentic voices and writing that’s associated with specific humans.

People like you, the author, and me all share this sentiment. It motivates us to seek out authentic voices and writing that’s associated with specific humans. The commodity end of the writing market may well have been automated, but was that really the kind of writing you or the author or I ever sought out in the first place? I can get mass-manufactured garments from Shein if I want, but I can also still find tailors locally if it’s worth it to me. I can buy IKEA or I can still save up for something made out of real wood. I can “shoot a cinematic digital film” on my iPhone but the cineplex remains in business and the art film folks are still doing their scrappy thing (and still moaning about its economics). I can lap up slop from an academic paper mill journal or I can identify who’s doing the thinking in a field and read what they’re writing or saying. And the funny thing is that none of those human-scale options commands all that much of a premium in the scheme of things. There may be less human-scald work to go around and thus fewer small enterprises plying a specific trade, but any given one of them just has to put food on the table for a number of humans roughly proportional to the same level of output as always. It seems to me that there’s no special virtue in the specific form that the mass publishing market took over the last century or however long: my local grocery store chain’s division producing weekly newspaper circulars probably employed more people than J Peterman has. But there was and remains a place for quality. If anything—as you point out—the AI schlock has sensitized us to the value we place on a human voice. And at some level, once people notice that they miss that quality, isn’t there a sense in which they become more willing to seek it out and pay for it if necessary?