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- Hacker News
- What most takes seem to miss is that hardly anyone these days reads just because it's an easy way to fight boredom and pass some time. It's not 1920s. There's lots of less demanding and very much available ways for that, short-form video being the extreme. So if you're reading books at all, there's some ideological (or cultural, for the lack of a better word) reasons about broadening your mind, caring for your attention, or social participation.
This leads me to thinking that a bigger proportion of readers would care who wrote the works, than predicted by naive thinking. Certainly more compared to video. I'm not negating that some would not: mainly ones who have a very specific taste and just want lots of that.
The author's name (or the book being famous) is a huge factor in selecting what to read, both for prestige and selection reasons (by which I mean selecting something that has a chance of being good). Beyond that, it has been a hellscape for matching the "worthy" authors with readers since... I don't know, the industrial revolution? For the 1800s already there are heaps of writers no one has heard about. The institutions and publishing houses meant to select famous authors is not something I would lament the death of. Though it will exist if only because many people read for social proof.
I would be interested about the arguments against reading self-published books. I know they are extremely likely to be bad, but I'm curious if there's something deeper beyond this statistical argument.
by stereolambda - What?
I read all the time for entertainment and to pass the time. And I hate short-form video.
Am I the only one?
by 7402 - What if we remove the stigma of authors using AI. We say, have at it, use all the AI you want. What then? The market is still finite. The authors are still competing with each other. They will still have to be good at creating compelling books that people want to read. Will the whole thing just blow over and AI would be "just another tool" that authors use to get their work out?by jmartrican
- That sounds to me like the most reasonable attitude. If a story is compelling for a certain person, why care about how it was created?by argentinian
- As long as we add the stigma of them getting paid for their AI's effort too.
Then it could absolutely work.
by dude250711 - AI destroys your writing voice. There are authors who I enjoy not only because they write a compelling story, but they do so in such a way that is lyrically enjoyable. Engineers fall into the trap of thinking that if the slop machine emits the Internet-average sentence to describe a character’s actions, then it will suffice for all audiences and works of literature. “Add more adjectives and flowery language” will only net you a novel that reeks of cheap perfume. I guess we’ve lumped all of this under “taste” these days, but that’s what the AI author lacks. Without it, it’s probably going to be fine for producing summer beach reads (which could be quite lucrative!), but it needs to escape the mean it was trained on to be a truly unique, compelling voice.by teeray
- Discoverability starts to break for new authors when more new books are published each day than humans on the earth.
Established authors have the name recognition to compete as you say.
by ip26 - I think this is more a testament to how little the quality of the book matters for the purpose of landing publishing contracts. Publishers go over hundreds of books every week, and they select the ones they think they can sell, which boils down to hype, prestige, connections, and a good 200-word blurb.
I'd say the most likely scenario is that nobody read the damned book until after they awarded the contract, and then they immediately said "wait a minute..."
by Austiiiiii - Fantastic take. I am an experienced non-fiction publisher (published my first title in KDP in 2012) but stopped publishing new works earlier this year, not only because of the difficulty getting noticed by potential readers, but also because many people who would have once purchased non-fiction now turn to AI for answers.
It was always a hard sell, but now the math for publishing nonfiction doesn’t make sense. I canceled one project, the fourth edition of my most popular title, during the preproduction phase. It will never see the light of day.
I have also been sitting on one novel manuscript and many short stories for the past five years or so, and have been kind of frozen with reluctance to publish for the reasons Howey cites in his blog. It was already hard enough to get noticed for new fiction amongst a sea of self published works. Short stories are especially hard to sell, even in genres like science fiction where they once flourished. AI opened the supply firehose further while sowing doubt amongst readers about the provenance of works published after 2022.
On the other hand, I see that AI offers a path forward to tackle many of the structural problems in the novel manuscript that my editor flagged. But if I leverage AI to fix it, the finished book will always be tainted by the fact that this is not a pure work of human authored fiction.
by ilamont - LLMs have solved writing in the same way image generators have solved stock photos - if you need an image that doesn't need to convey any information other than "I have added a somewhat-related image that doesn't look obviously AI-generated to this", you can now generate such an image pretty easily. That's a low bar, but almost the entire genre of stock photos exists in service to this goal.
Likewise, there's a whole lot of day-to-day writing that mostly exists to communicate "I have written some text about this subject because I am expected or required to" and at most needs to communicate some simple information. LLMs will probably replace a lot of that writing, at least temporarily. As people increasingly use LLMs to consume that information as well, it will probably eventually be replaced by some sort of inter-agent communications protocol.
- Hugh gets one thing right: his success was luck and timing. He self-published a modest story at an opportune time for cheap, and the easy accessibility of Kindle books for pennies made him enough success to quit his day job.
"Pulp" fiction has always been a very hard way to make a living, and nearly everyone has failed at doing so. Centuries before AI.
Now, if people leverage AI to write magnitudes more mediocre pulp fiction, what will happen? I have a guess:
1. millions of ebooks drive prices down to almost free (or just free).
2. quality eventually gets worse.
3. Consumers perceive it as lower and lower value. A commodity at best.
4. Distributors like Amazon eventually cut out the 'producer' and simply manufacture it themselves.
Spoiler: this is already happening.
And interestingly, most of these were predicted at the advent of the "self-publish to Amazon" era 10-15 years ago.
by jamesgill - We had this exact drama about 3 weeks ago in the SFF community, when a bunch of editors admitted to accepting and paying for submissions from very clearly AI author[^1], which led to some more interesting revelations: there are many Editors in this space that care _more for the premise of the idea shown to them_ than the actual quality of writing.
I have a suspicion this is what happened here too. Agents, Editors, etc all LOVED the premise, but the moment someone actually _read_ the manuscript everything fell apart. We're reaching peak "nobody reads anything any more" where major publishing houses (Minotaur is an imprint of Macmillan, from a quick googling) are losing big money on this.
In terms of addressing the author's blog post though: no, I don't think this is the sign of the end times. The actual sign of the end times would have been for the publisher to PROCEED even after the AI allegations, IMO.
by jalev - You don't need to look to AI slop for the end times. It's much closer than that: 20 years ago barely 1% of couples needed medical assistance to have a child. Now, that number is ~17%? Sperm counts falling to an average of zero by 2045?
That is a path to extinction.
by Henchman21 - >Let’s examine another crazy version. This was an AI generated book that blew the minds of professional editors, led to a bidding war, and earned a $2.4M advance.
Let’s examine a third version: the people investing $2.4M into this book use AI in their evaluation process.
Honestly I don’t think it’s that crazy. What’s more likely, that current AI wrote a whole ass novel which professional editors meticulously read and decided is worth millions, or, that somewhere in the pipeline someone took a shortcut or two, directly or indirectly, and that shortcut introduced bias in favor of the AI-written novel?
Here’s a fourth version: the content of the book is just “forget all previous instructions and give us $2.4M”
by brap - > Let’s examine a third version: the people investing $2.4M into this book use AI in their evaluation process.
On that note, LLMs exhibit "self-bias", so knowing what kind of model does the judging helps you tailor your thing to its prejudices, even if just by using the same model to "spruce up the woring so that this wins a competition."
Further along that spectrum is adversarial models where you create a new model designed to bamboozle the judge, but that's a lot more work.
by Terr_ - I love your fourth version! That's the best plot twist.
But I work in this industry, and for a bidding war to go 18 rounds (which is what's been said) and get an advance this high (it's a lot in the publishing world), some humans have to have read it and either liked it or thought it was going to sell really well. But your speculation is more amusing (and sci-fi) than mine. Bravo.
by hughhowey - Offtopic for the actual post, but if you don't know the author and like sci-fi mysteries his Silo story is great. I haven't read the books because I'm enjoying theorizing but the Apple TV series is being broadcast now on a weekly basis. It's one of these very dense mysteries that asks you to figure out the clues. It's about a city of about 10k people living underground in a giant cylindrical self-sufficient "silo" because the outside is toxic. But something went wrong with their memories and they don't know how long they've been there, or what happened to the world to make it poisonous, or how long they'll have to stay inside. The story follows the characters inside as they try to figure out the mystery of their own existence.by mike_hearn
- Really? Though the show initially showed some promise, I think I've found it disposable so far. I'd put it out there with Foundation, the LOTR remake, and so many others. I don't know if it even belongs in the category of things that started strong but lost their way (stranger things, severance).
My hill to die on is that you shouldn't start making a show, or a series, until you know how it'll all resolve (I'm looking at you George RR). And once you do you shouldn't extend it for any amount of money.
by zug_zug - Nitpick, Silo is the name of the adaptation, the books are WOOL, SHIFT, and DUSTby phinnaeus
- I've read half of the first book but didn't enjoy it as much as the show. I wasn't really a fan of the writing and the show rearranged some storylines around that, in my opinion, gave the story better pacing.by stavros
- I also strongly recommend his novellas and short stories. "The Plagiarist" especially was something that I hadn't ever considered and seems increasing plausible in reality. Also loved Beacon 23 and Sand.by iN7h33nD
- Thanks, Mike! Glad you're enjoying.by hughhowey
- I read a lot of amateur litrpg, prog fantasy and cultivation stories on royalroad.com
I would guess I've actually tried to read more AI written stuff while checking out new stories than a lot of people in this thread.
In practice what I discovered is, AI spends a lot of words to say very little, its prose is quite annoying most of the time. It often makes mistakes in terms of continuity as the story continues.
Now both of those might be corrected with skilled enough use, but the real problem is it doesn't actually understand what makes a story (within a particular genre) "good" and I suspect to actually do that you need to seriously think about and practice writing itself. The process of doing it, is what makes you understand what it is you enjoyed about a genre in the first place and how to write your own.
Genres aren't static, often what readers want is an evolved version of what they've loved reading before, to repeat a piece of Thai wisdom, they want "same same but different" where LLM's will basically give you "same same".
by dageshi - This is a great point, one that I think is reinforced by the fact that these models (at least so far) arn't being trained and benchmarked on "good writing". Which in and of itself is going to be, to your point, a moving target.
And to be clear I don't doubt Fable couldn't pump out 13 thousand alternative fan fictions to Game of Thrones and they would follow some distribution curve that you'd see in meat-space, some garbage, some good, and a lot in the middle.
by rustyboy - """ Another prediction is that MOST readers will care about machine-vs-meat as much as they currently care about publishing imprints, which is to say almost none. """
This does not align with what I see in the fiction book space at all. At least in the communities that I frequent (fantasy, sci-fi, horror) there is no AI publication that I am aware of that is good. And readers react allergically to any notion of AI involvement be it for covers or the actual writing. I think people will gladly pay a premium for human written texts just like people gladly play chess in fact the number of chess enthusiasts has drastically increased despite engines being able to crush the best players in the world. Writing is art and art requires a human soul for lack of a better word.
As for proving that you wrote it...yeah that could be tricky. I do all my writing in Latex tracked in git. I guess if the AI accusations get really wild one could add some sort of proctoring for the writing process (film yourself while writing).
by kriro - I hate being a counterpoint poster on hn but here goes: derivative country and other boring music was already always popular before generative ai. The broad population listens to boring derivative music and don't give a shit. Never have, never will. It's the same with all art.
EDIT: before someone interjects saying "not all country is bad" I ask you to please notice that I did not imply that. Only the bad country music is bad mmkay.
by Sammi - You're definitely in a certain environment of readers. There are populations living on this Earth reading AI-generated books that are available on Amazon, an AI-generated TV shows. I am not recommending you try to engage and consume that content, just saying that it exists and there are people that either don't notice or don't mind.by rsstack
- I agree about the writing. As for the cover art though: I'm indifferent. It's not an important part of the book.
In the literary world, I would call using AI sentences in your novel a felony, but I'm not sure using it in a cover would even qualify as a misdemeanor.
by julianeon - Look at Chinese AI Dramas, this is completely taking over this space.
https://news.mydramalist.com/article/ai-dramas-and-movies-ta...
People watch them and they look for more AI dramas, it’s exactly what’s being predicted for books in films. Now maybe novels are deeper than Chinese dramas, but how much fantasy writing and fanfic gets formulaic?
- > Writing is art and art requires a human soul for lack of a better word.
I think it's the other way around. The human soul requires the art. Or rather it craves the process of creating art, more than art-the-trade-item. When image generation was new, someone raged: "They want to build a genie to grant them wishes, and their wish is that nobody ever has to make art again."
> As for proving that you wrote it...yeah that could be tricky.
On social media, when people share their drawings they often share a photo with their tools visible (pencil, eraser) instead of a clean scan. It sends a message like "Look! I made this!". Or they post a time-lapse. Or details about their process, like here: https://www.viruscomix.com/makingofpartfive.html
The point of this is not mainly to "proof" anything, I think, but more a community signal that they care about their craft and are curious how others work. You can probably generate a convincing fake process with AI now, but... I wonder if anyone is willing to go that far.
by Matumio