It's really interesting hearing moderate takes from an author. It feels like most people with strong enough opinions to make a blog post are either (reasonably)

It's really interesting hearing moderate takes from an author. It feels like most people with strong enough opinions to make a blog post are either (reasonably) digging in against ai or have completely given up. It feels like the majority of people who self-identify as readers have extremely high standards and don't realise it, there is clearly a large amount of overlap between chatbots and some chunk of human authors. It's already better at technical writing than I ever was, I'm just fine with it because I never wanted to be a technical writer. I really appreciate that Hugh has the humility to talk about this transition in comparable terms to the one that launched him. It's definitely democratizing the ability to produce words in a similar way but I'm less sure it's otherwise meaningfully comparable. This feels like more of a re-cetralization: we're moving back towards the established players being the only ones able to write novels. Its just that the established players are now model weights being used by different people but with the same biases. Instead of blocking new authors via controlling access to publishing, chatbots and the people using them are functionally DDOSing every open channel for humans to get read and seem to be breaking the pipeline. As an aside, the idea of streamer authors is fascinating. It'd be a completely new thing, it's like the maximalalist version of authors in serial mediums being overly sensitive to the immediate response to each chapter and overcorrecting. Excellent read overall, thanks for sharing.