6 ms·
Generative AI floods and dilutes the market for books
- jdw64 2mo agoWhy do people use Gen AI for writing? What's the motivation? For academic papers, it's probably citation metrics and the number of publications. For novels, it's likely economic factors. If those factors disappear, would people still use Gen AI for writing?
- podgietaru 2mo agoGet rich quick scams, this market existed before GenAI. They’d hire ghost writers, and then put them on audible. Now it’s easier than ever. So the market explodes. But it makes legit writers harder to find. Its bleak.
- swat535 2mo agoIronically, I wonder if all these AI stuff is going to spin up a new industry for "organic content" that is verified to be human produced. Then they would be selling at a higher price due to this, increasing the profits for digital authors.
- _diyar 2mo agoEven if all extrinsic motivations for writing disappear, some people will continue to write (without AI) for personal reasons. And even at that point, others will continue to write using AI to simulate being one of those people.
- quikoa 2mo agoSome people may continue using AI and publish books but the amount of AI slop would be dramatically lower without extrinsic motivations.
- sieve 2mo agoI have hundreds of plot ideas from 40 years of reading and watching crappy books and films/tv. Never had the time or energy to explore those. LLMs let me try out various plots. To see which ones work and which don't. I haven't really thought about publishing anything though. Too much work and bureaucracy. The thing is ... ideas matter just as much as the writing. You cannot simply say: "Hey Claude, write me a Sherlock Holmes pastiche set in the bronze age." I have found that a 1:4 to 1:8 ratio gives nice results. That is, for every 4-8 paras of expected output, you must provide 1 para worth of character detail, plot beats etc. So you would need 100-200 pages of your own writing to produce 800 pages worth. But most people are lazy. So the output is too.
- epolanski 2mo agoBut why would I want to read that? Just give me the prompt at this point.
- sieve 2mo agoYou could say that for any book. People are too precious about man-made art. I don't see the point. Every book ever written might have some novelty value of its own. But it mostly has the same plots, character archetypes and other tropes found in other fiction. We think there is something special about human writing. But LLMs have read the same stuff we have. And produce similar inspired writing.
- plastic-enjoyer 2mo agoI mean, you’re right in a way that motifs, stylistic devices and archetypes recur in fiction, and that an LLM could produce similarly inspired texts – so what? That’s no reason not to write yourself – unless you don’t enjoy writing and just want some sort of result, some sort of product. And you sound as though you don’t actually enjoy writing, but would still like to produce a book. But why bother at all if you don’t enjoy writing? Writing as a hobby carries no stakes that would in any way justify the use of LLMs. There is nothing that needs to be optimised in order to produce value.
- grey-area 2mo agoIt’s easier than actually writing, which is very hard to do well; authors spend years working on books. Doesn’t really matter what the original motivation was (money, reputation, fame), people will use LLMs as a shortcut to generate text, and we’re all poorer because of it.
- ajsnigrutin 2mo ago"back then", you had to write for months to get a book out, and it sold 20 copies and you earned $20. Now you can do it in minutes, get 50 books out, 20 of them sell 10 copies, you've earned $200. (i might be exaggerating the times and earnings, but the point stands)
- charlieyu1 2mo agoI had about 2000 hours invested in a few books. I think I have made less than $2/hour so far after all the years.
- Gigachad 2mo agoSpamming online marketplaces with massive amounts of slop. Even if you only get a few sales per book, you win in volume.
- photios 2mo agoI've gotten yearly performance reviews that have been obviously ChatGPT-generated. People are just lazy. Some HR systems even support that and have AI writing/rewording integrated. Corporate hellscapes intensifying, I guess.
- gabriel666smith 2mo agoI can understand being interested in it from a Modernist perspective. It's both a new technology that maps a geometry to existing language - which is very interesting from several literary theory POVs - and represents a new kind of typewriter. If you're interested in innovative techniques in fiction, I think LLMs are arguably deeply interesting. Mass-producing slop, however, is probably quite limited in terms of its theoretical interest, and in how it changes the craft. Personally, an example of how I use gen AI when writing is that I sometimes use a little text editor I wrote. It polls a local model, and grabs the 50 most-likely next token(s), rounded to one word, based on where the cursor is. "Voice" in fiction was already about how the author chooses to deviate from the expected-next-word. So - while you could just use the tokens returned - I find myself using them much more often to choose what words to avoid using, or how to deviate from the expected outputs, and where it might be most interesting to do that. I think there's plenty of interesting things that can be done with gen AI in terms of fiction writing, but I think we're quite a long way from working all of them out yet. Wholesale slop generation is one of the most obvious - and most boring - things writers can do with an LLM.
- MasterScrat 2mo agoI don’t see how this market ("mostly" AI-written books) won’t get arbitraged to death with the cheaper and open-weight models that keep coming out
- grey-area 2mo agoThe problem is not about money it is that we are made massively culturally poorer by the flood of ahistorical, amoral, incoherent, rococco, contradictory yet plausible shit produced by LLMs. Both the internet and books have been flooded with ‘content’ which appears like human content but has no coherence or intention to it and tends to fall apart completely the longer form the story. Even our autocomplete is being infected with LLM suggestions, distorting and guiding how people write. This is a VERY significant problem for our culture long term.
- encrux 2mo agoI don’t see any other way past this other than regulation: We need authenticated online spaces where your account is linked to a real, government issued ID. This way, moderating content becomes feasible again. Bans will hold value, since you can’t just create new accounts all the time. I predict people will gravitate towards authenticated markets (and social media). I for one am sick and tired of second guessing every text I‘m reading, at least give me someone to hold accountable.
- epolanski 2mo agoFor any kind of online entertainment really. The overwhelming majority of content on Youtube is also plagued by AI. You're 6 minutes in a documentary about Russo-Ottoman wars and only then you start noticing something's wrong, paintings are made up, the voice sounds similar to voices of other videos and the script has an odd non-human character to it. Then you dig into it, and indeed it's a bunch of crap prompts glued together on top of some lame ai-generated internet research.
- Gigachad 2mo agoYouTube essays have been slop for a while though. Before AI it was just people reading the Wikipedia page on the topic.
- Panoramix 2mo agoThe point is that now it's dramatically worse by volume
- inigyou 2mo agoProminent and formerly good youtuber Hank Green was just caught reading an AI script. In a video about the bouba/kiki effect he just read out something like "You're right to push back on this. If you'd like, I can reword this..." and didn't even flinch, didn't edit the sentence out, because his brain has been rotted by AI use.
- Ekaros 2mo agoI think it is just natural end of certain type of creators. They start as single person, slowly get maybe small team to help with filming and editing. And then when you need to keep producing content the script writers come. And now they are just face reading whatever is given to them. And then well there is to speed up the slowest part of process script and custom art. AI enters to this. And now they are already too far gone to care.
- MasterScrat 2mo ago> he just read out something like "You're right to push back on this. If you'd like, I can reword this..." and didn't even flinch Can you please provide sources for this? My understanding is that he used the expression "I appreciate the pushback" in a context in which it made sense (responding to criticism), and people flagged that it sounded LLM-like. There’s some poetry seeing people complaining about how LLM provide unreliable information in a confident tone, who then go on to share incorrect information in a confident tone.
- rvz 2mo agoThis is what "Abundance" is.
- inigyou 2mo agoWhat is "Abundance"?
- rvz 2mo agoWhenever you hear anyone from an AI lab talking about "Abundance", it is the deliberate over-supply of goods (generated by them) on the market; with prices reaching near 0. This is what is happening with the low-hanging fruit of digital software, art, music and writing. "Abundance" can be a great thing depending on who you ask but a nightmare for those who are selling quality.
- cyanydeez 2mo agonah this is more the illusion of choice.
- bryanlarsen 2mo agoThe market for books has been flooded far before AI. Millions of books are published each year, many more self published and unpublished. Sturgeon's law (90% of everything is crud) predates AI by many decades. You need a mechanism to filter out the crud. There are many, some better than others.
- nancarrow 2mo ago90% of crud filtering mechanisms are crud.
- bryanlarsen 2mo agoEven worse, it changes over time. Goodreads used to be great, but have gone down hill since Amazon bought them. Friends are great sources, but your interests diverge.
- k__ 2mo agoThe ratio of good books to slop (AI or not) was far to bad for humans to reasonably filter 20 years ago.
- fidotron 2mo agoTo the point you have to wonder if the reduced reading for pleasure levels in many places are due to understandably not being able to tell what is worth reading, especially given the enthusiasm the modern book industry has for promoting absolutely uninspiring crap.
- trentor 2mo agoI hate these headlines. It's not generative ai that floods the market for books. It's people using Generative AI to flood the market. It's always the same something gets attributed to technology while it's people doing it. Scrutinize the people not the technology.
- cyanydeez 2mo agoWelcome to the grift economy: it's the marks fault and no one does anything
- FreeTrade 2mo agoGen AI is at a point now where it can write good chapters. You still need a human editor to make it coherent, plug plot holes and tie it all together. So if you can write a good book, but can't write good chapters, a Gen AI ghostwriter is an ideal tool. Output quality will vary.
- plastic-enjoyer 2mo agoI wonder if this spells the end for online bookshops. I can imagine that small bookshops – or even online bookshops that focus primarily on selling curated books – are the future. The book retail in my city is thriving, and consists mainly of shops where the owners curate the books.
- illwrks 2mo agoI have been tinkering with this over the past few months. One story with a specific genre and demographic target, but as I've been reading each draft there are so many small issues that crop up, inconsistency across various parts of the story, items that are introduced, questions that go unanswered etc. Unless your goal is to become an editor of AI content, it's not worth the effort. Perhaps in time it will be better but you will need a proper pipeline to write, assess, track changes etc... perhaps all that's needed is a GitHub of sorts for writing. However... what is the chance of any book finding an audience if there are so many to compete with. It might make more sense in having something created just for you though.
- sieve 2mo ago> inconsistency across various parts of the story, items that are introduced, questions that go unanswered etc. This is a workflow problem. What the LLM normally needs: - very basic outline: what the story is about - basic cast of characters: like fiction/plays of the 18-1900s Then you go chapter-by-chapter. But the most critical thing is that you MUST provide the chapter beats. From start to end. Location, environment, events, any critical conversations. For a chapter that is 2-3K words, this chapter outline often becomes 2-400 words or more. Because you have the story in your head, you can handle the stuff that the LLM is likely to screw up. There are ways to build a system where the LLM can keep track of many things, but then that becomes programming, which is just as boring.
- illwrks 2mo agoI won't go into too much detail, but I have a plot outline, development bible, story mountain, character outlines, style guide and more. I have four agents running on various tasks; writing, error checking, consistency and critique. They can generate a good story but there are holes and issues so it's far from perfect and I wouldn't give it away for free, never mind put a price on it. To add to this, in my 9-5 I work as a designer. Colleagues in other parts of the business sometimes come to us with stuff they have created using AI tools. To a layman they look really good, but if you know what to look for you can spot the issues. At this point in time my opinion is that any AI generated thing is great at making fools of the unaware, or those who are not looking at something critically. It can create something that looks like a duck, walks like a duck, quacks like a duck, but on closer inspection it's not a duck.
- niemenghui 2mo agoThis is a surprise: Books with no AI text lose the most ground in genres with high AI diffusion, and most of all where Kindle Unlimited availability is high. Great to know this about creativity.
- FpUser 2mo agoFrankly the amount of books available from before LLM is staggering. The supply will long outlive me. So why would I buy any AI generated one? That is unless it starts producing something really good. Until that happens I suspect there is no real market for AI books. Oh and btw amount of human generated crap is also so great that I has long became a problem for me to find good thing in that sea.
- Invictus0 2mo agoall global text-for-money marketplaces (books, newsletters, onlyfans chats, etc.) will soon require ID verification to participate, or otherwise, substantial proof that there is a human in there somewhere
- blurayfin 2mo agoTheir entire analysis is based on the assumption that Pangram 3.3 is a reliable tool for detecting AI-generated content. What if not?
- gabriel666smith 2mo ago> Over this period, the number of books with observed sales in a quarter grew 19.2-fold, while quarterly revenue grew only 8.9-fold. That's very interesting, and not as dramatic a dilution as I'd expected over the period (2023 - 26), or even close to as dramatic an increase in overall number of titles (achieving a sale) as I expected. This sample is limited to what the study's authors have defined as "self-published genre fiction", which isn't representative of the market as a whole, and has very different economics compared to, for example, fiction titles published by "Big 5" publishers. Whether the sales of non-self-published books are potentially being diluted is an interesting question, because it will tell us slightly more about where those AI sales might be coming from. I'd like to know unit and revenue numbers for non-self-published titles for the same period, in the same Amazon categories - on the off-chance anyone here has BookScan access and that's something you can pull. Overall, though, this seems like a relatively optimistic result. If the economics don't work in the longer-term - the dilution effect ends up not being worth the token cost & labour, unless you can "hit" relatively reliably - we'll end up with less slop, put out by slop-auteurs running book farms, which I think is a fine outcome. This is not without precedent by any stretch - the only meaningfully new part of that would be the writing mechanism. It strikes me as a possible eventual equilibrium that's both realistic and makes logical sense. Putting aside the AI-fiction panic, and "the novel is dead" hyperbolics (which is something that's been said about as long as novels have existed), it probably will settle around a % of low-budget genre fiction being slop - as it always has been. It feels a little patronising to suggest readers looking for anything more "serious" will be seduced and have their sales diluted by mass-produced LLM outputs. Readers deserve more credit than that, I hope. But it looks, to me, really hard to read anything directionally on that at all, especially without equivalent numbers on titles from actual publishers.
- pen2l 2mo agoI feel like the genie is out of the bottle. Second order effects and third order effects to markets all around, societal impacts deriving from economic changes and changing incentives galore are yet to be seen. Appreciation of original creative works, motivation to create original works when AI can spit out vast amounts of content, (newly) the effort required to even discover and curate original work that's been created with intention and thought, etc., a lot of these new things have to be reckoned with. But it doesn't feel good. At the moment it feels scary. Crossing my fingers we get through this somehow.
- obscurette 2mo agoI grew up and went into school in seventies in Soviet Union. I remember myself discovering local libraries, bookstores etc. I still love books, I have a lot of them, but process of discovery is very different. When I was young almost every book I found in library or bookstore about topic I was interested in, was almost certainly worth to read. Publishing books was slow and expensive process and there was a very slim chance that not good books were published at all. During last decades it hasn't been a case any more and I had to develop a skills how to find a stuff worth to read – what reviews to trust etc. In AI age these skills became almost worthless as well and I trust only recommendations from people I know and trust.
- garganzol 2mo agoShallow, haphazardly-written books full of mistakes were a thing even back then. It looks like the publication process expensiveness wasn't a good-enough filter since 1970s.
- FinnLobsien 2mo agoI don’t see a world in which this doesn’t just annihilate the current market for books. If I can write a query into Amazon for a book on topic X, I can write that query into ChatGPT or whatever and cut out the middleman. Some of this may work in the short term while some people still equate the format “book” with “went through a rigorous process”. That erosion was underway before AI (e.g. on Amazon I instinctually ignore any self-published Kindle books), but I can’t imagine this will last. I think/hope the market will somehow make human-written books easy to recognize.
- skeledrew 2mo agoLove it. The next step that I've been patiently waiting for, even before LLMs were a thing, is the automatic generation of anime from manga. Got works that I've been wishing for so long would get an anime adaptation, or even in progress anime that fell off with parts of the manga left uncovered. Going to be wild when people can point AI to a manga with the prompt "adapt this into an anime series/movie, using the style of X other manga with an anime adaptation". Heck it's actually already possible, given Hell Grind[0] exists; just for someone to bring the particular pieces together. [0] https://higgsfield.ai/original-series/hell-grind/episode-1 https://higgsfield.ai/original-series/hell-grind/episode-1
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