Get 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.

Even 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.

I 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.

It’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.

The 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.