The End of an Era

Note that LLMs aren't useless, since they have other strengths which can make them equal or better than humans in certain applications. For instance, they can tirelessly review code for silly mistakes, making them useful in cybersecurity.

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).

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".

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”

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.

[^1]: https://www.bona-books.com/news/we-bought-an-ai-story

"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.

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.

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.

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..."

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.

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.

I would definitely watch this.

But good writing is more than just conveying information. To me it's about connecting to a voice. This is a rare quality and AFAIK I have never experienced this with AI generated text or even with 99% of human written text for that matter.

I fully admit that we have been surpassed by the machine in the ability to entertain. And the biggest problem with that is that entertainment is the primary factor that drives the popularity and consequently the financial success of a book. If a writer's primary purpose is to entertain, then they should be very worried. But if their primary purpose is to convey something from within themselves, the LLM cannot replicate this. They may however lose that portion of their audience to whom the communication of profundity is merely collateral to being entertained.

I'm not a professional writer, but when I do write, I do so with the intention of expressing something that I feel, which before being thought out and written exists as something not linguistic. The language is a means for the expression of this deeper experience whose communication is the end. But an LLM on it's own is not able to convey internal experiences that it does not have. If it seems that way, it is only achieved by manipulating and rearranging the experiences of the authors that make up it's training data.

Likewise, even if the reader does know about the author and think the author is a bad person, they still read the book, watch the movie, listen to the song, etc

The reality is most people don’t get invested in the creators or the creation. It’s just a good story and all the meta-stuff doesn’t affect most people’s consumption.

So, that is to say, AI writing, music and all the other arts will be commercially successful.

Now, there will also be a market for human-created content, which people will consume specifically because the content is human-created.

Also, I think he's too enthusiastic about the future of readers. In my opinion, reading books will be a very rare hobby pretty soon. The decline started more than 10 years ago.

I don't know. But I do think, or rather I hope, real voices will prevail. But publishers (including KDP) have a rough road ahead of them, if they also want that. Just search YouTube for tutorials on how to spam Amazon with AI generated works, hoping for a break out. It is sad.

Is anyone working on cryptographic human-crafted attestation, without feeding the work into LLMs?

Dowloadable,freemium [2] but the Premium is 20 Espees. So, what's an Espee, other than an award from ESPN? (ESPY)

[0] https://hughhowey.com/neo-a-word-processor-for-authors/

[1] https://github.com/smeans/neo

[2] https://neotechnologies.io/app-details.php?app=neo-word

I just watched:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Eo5w2S-h5dI

I think it is time to jail those CEOs that drive up the prices and destroy industries. RAM prices up 350%? ALL AI companies are in my opinion a mafia structure that must be eliminated. They not only force us to have to overpay (or be stuck) but also destroy industries downstream, thus eliminating jobs. All that cost should be paid by Microsoft, Facebook, Google, Amazon etc...

Does he really hold on this until the end of the article? (sorry, I had no time to read through it). It doesn't matter how well and sophisticated the writing is, what counts is the human connection. A human is talking to me through the writing. I am not interested in having communication with a machine, I want the vibes only humans can send and receive …

If I'm reading something I either want to be entertained or I want some specific information. If it's to be entertained then the story has to be good (writing doesn't necessarily need to be that good) and I haven't seen any AI generated stories that are that compelling. If it's informational then I can either ask an LLM directly and get something tailored for me, or I'm also interested in the emotional and human side, which an LLM can only imitate, since it has no theory of mind.

Alternatively most blog posts could have been paragraphs. Most books could have been single chapters. Most newspaper articles could have been tweets.

That being said, most readers want you to hold your hand step by step. They don't want to the outline: they want you to give them a story. Most people and writers know this already. To me, it was new.

Is it just a case of throwing more and more resources at a pattern recognition machine with no upper limit except the energy of the universe and the economy of the algorithms?

Someone else suggested the maximum intelligence is capped as the average intelligence of its training data, which is an interesting take.

Loss of human touch is a problem. Playing a chess game while being aware that the opponent is a bot, is not same as playing against a human.

The "plasticification" is something we wanted all along, supported it through excitement and awe. Science is the plastic.

Building something that supersedes us may have always been our purpose. Until skynet turns on us I’ll be happy to say I lived at the exact time it happened.

I hate being a snob, but when we read "artificial Intelligence is writing about as well as humans", maybe take that with a grain of salt? It has not been my experience that AI writing is remotely near a "good" human writer.

Nonsense and beauty ascendant! Poesy freed from several centuries’ fuligin tyranny of the novel and horrid mass literacy; windmills again a just and proper enemy!

This new muse will mate with the corpse of epistemology to produce a second coming of baroque obscurant gnosticism. A fine time to be a scholar or a priest, the 2100s.

So what am I missing? What’s the most charitable explanation for how anyone can think LLMs are good at writing?

Will the effect of the book be the same on readers?

From a perspective of classic materialism the effect should be the same.

But what if the thought is material?

How does the world change then if AI takes over a significant portion of writing.

I can imagine something like ChatGPT Work with markdown/python/CSV's can do quite some magic for such writers.

If my understanding is close to correct, than I can see why the million dollar advance was withdrawn.

This is just untrue.

There's a lot of money in claiming it's true, with varying levels of hedging and insincerity, but AI writing follows the pattern of AI everything else: if you're not competent to judge quality, then you think it is high quality.

David Goggins is kind of a perfect example of this. There is zero value in an AI-written book that isn't attached directly to his public persona and media presence. Maybe today he can use AI to write the book, but it's still tied to his video media of doing tough challenges, etc. An AI-first author writing such books would get nowhere, as he/she has no credibility.

That all aside, I actually think the most philosophically interesting result of LLMs is that ideas actually end up mattering a lot more than execution. The LLM can't really think for you, and so your knowledge and experiences are actually what matters, as it determines "what you prompt."

In short, the authors that win the future will be ones with robust personal brands and a big social media footprint. The days of the mysterious writer that gets chosen and published by a small group of elites at the publishing house is probably over... at least until the ecosystem becomes so messy that curators become necessary again.

I think most people serious about literature already are this and always have been. Y’know, it is not hard to write a novel. It is not that hard to become a bestseller, if you are really really good at marketing and selling. Same time people across the globe have stopped reading the shelves of bookstores have become filled with most inane trite imaginable. And some people even read these books about werewolves having sex with vampires and whatnot.

Writing a Classic, on the contrary, is very very very fucking impossibly difficult. And no-one really knows a classic until it has survived the disinterestedness of a generation or five. Kids have now apparently found The Count of Monte Cristo recently. Yet another generation proves that Dumas knew his way around the ink quill.

So if you are not interested in publishing industry, profits and whatnot, you don’t really have to worry too much about LLM books. Only thing you need to do is wait a generation. Hell, few summers and no-one remembers most of the books published today. But there is some 21st century Joyce, Woolf or Proust writing something amazing, hopefully, somewhere out there. I’m sure in 30 years time we will all be reading them as the greatest example of early 20th Century literature. Meanwhile, there’s plenty of old books last a few lifetimes.

Some of us just want an outlet that we control. Even though nobody will ever read it.

Haha, I feel like this is true for a lot of things that people argue in the ai vs. non-ai space.

Bertrand Russell famously predicted* that machines would allow everyone to “work” no more than 4 hours a day. I just had a thought when reading Hugh’s article - what if work is by and large the thing that connects most of us with one another and compels us to be creative and learn about the universe? And TBH the thought already feels trite in advance; both religious and wealthy people have said this before for various reasons.

I’ve had the same ideal in mind for many years. It would be amazing if I could work less and devote more time to art & music, reading & travel, socializing & community projects. But using AI for work (writing code) isn’t making that happen yet and doesn’t feel like it’s even aiming in that direction. Now that we have machines that can do most of my job, I’m starting to worry because there are some signs that it might not lead to utopia, starting with how it’s beginning to demotivate otherwise strong and curious programmers from wanting to be better programmers.

I don’t know, it’s too early to draw conclusions. But is anyone feeling like LLMs are giving them more time? They’re helping me work on more things, and produce more output. They’re helping me context switch more easily and work on things between meetings. They’re also sometimes tiring, and I’m often using them instead of talking to someone. They’re not yet freeing up time, and it doesn’t feel like lack of better models is the problem.

[*] Russell’s “In Praise of Idleness” doesn’t age quite as well as I remembered. :P https://harpers.org/archive/1932/10/in-praise-of-idleness/

If we could fix these, we could have bike lanes in places where they make sense

This seems like a truly wild prediction to me.

LLMs can synthesize data in useful ways for all sorts of purposes, and I can see how they could be helpful in the process of a human editing and refining a work of fiction they are creating, but I can't imagine why I'd ever tolerate a work of fiction actually generated by an LLM.

The authorship and craft matters, the translation of human feeling and thought to the page matters. This isn't code where it either does what it's supposed to or does not.

Fiction from a machine is of no value.

"In my dream world, the robots do all the boring jobs and humans spend all their time being creative, connecting with one another, learning about the universe, and sharing our ideas and creations in a great big prosperous circle. I believe such a utopia is possible. It does not violate the laws of physics, so much the laws of human nature."

What irritates me is when people say "human nature" but what they actually mean is "capitalism" or "the profit motive". Common among people who have fallen into the trap of what Mark Fisher called "capitalist realism", a capturing of the imagination by the cultural concept in the west that capitalism will be with us forever, or that it is the natural state of humanity.

The best comparison is photography. Instantly, a whole career path of portraiture was tossed out the window. Go to a museum and you see portrait after portrait - the best ones. There were millions of shitty ones made at all levels of society, and that job was replaced by cameras. But painting didn't go away, it got weird, it became anti-camera and more human, in a way.

This splitting of purpose and amplification of humanness is going to ramp up. Expect everyone to grow a taste for weirder, unprocessed music, experimental novels, wild and unexpected designs. Art is human communication and AI brings that into sharp relief.

Novels seem the most protected from AI - pulp/romance/beach novels will be crushed by volume and the sad remains of the publishing industry along with it, but interesting human novels will be just fine. And, much like with photography, I think AI will eventually normalize to its own artistic medium with writing, where careful usage will allow more ambitious work to appear that wasn't possible before, like a novel written using only sestinas, for example.

AI has made creating content almost free. What it hasn't done is add free hours to our day to consume all this new content. The number of people who want to read a book this month is roughly what it was five years ago, and roughly what it'll be five years from now.

Supply is exploding into demand that is stagnant (at best) or falling. Upload a book to Amazon today — good cover, sharp title, a blurb you sweated over for a week — and there is no longer any reasonable expectation of an organic sale. The book goes up, and then nothing happens, indefinitely.

Five years ago that wasn't true.

The answer is paid advertising. Buy your way onto the shelf. Stand out from the slop. But every writer is being given the same advice at the same moment, and there are only so many slots. The price of the slots must rise. And will keep rising for as long as there are writers able to pay.

The old metric was it takes about $5 to sell a book via paid advertising. I think in a year we'll look back on that figure fondly.

The majority of us read ChatGPT/Claude/Gemini responses, even though they are, by definition, slop, because we probably asked some question (the one we did not really care about and just wanted to explore) and the response has some valuable information in it (maybe true, maybe not). So we read it.

If (or when?) the AI writing becomes interesting to read, I don't see why we won't start consuming it, and I don't see it's as something bad.

One way to make the text interesting is to actually get involved in writing; remember this short story that was here on HN some time ago? [1] It was written by AI with some serious human involvement, and I enjoyed reading it.

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47431237

[^2]: https://tolkiengateway.net/wiki/Category:Songs

Not so long ago the author / creator would have to be very skillfull and prolific to write-and-write-and-write… nowaways I fee like I (we?) are drowning in more and more content…

I'd take back substance over volume :/

I write mostly without AI but then I use AI for editing and grammar correction. Sometimes when I struggle with plot threads I ask AI for an advice. When I write about something that a have a vague understanding about I may ask AI to write a paragraph or two. I'm also open about it and warn reader in preface and mark generated text using italics.

As a new author I find AI both helpful and discouraging, because it CAN write better prose than me. I think text that's written for humans should be written by humans, but temptation to ramp up quality with zero effort is huge.

Then I experimented with different regimes when I only allow myself a couple of prompts at the end of the day when I done writing and only allow minor edits. At least my conscience is clear.

CGI is so expensive only the most generic and safe sci fi movies get made. I want a 30k movie with amazing effects.

As for writing, AI is great at filler. But a lot of books are brought for Instagram photos and social validation. Not to be actually read.

Self help books are like this. Maybe a few are good. Many are slop to funnel you into buying other products.

But with AI telling us what to buy, how long until we have books written specifically for LLMs ?

I’m sure they’ll be absolutely gibberish, but you can still pose with them on Instagram?

Documentation, marketing, prose, it’s all horrible slop writing, immediately recognisable regardless of model

I'm already being more careless with spelling and grammar because it gives authenticity.

Maybe people will revert to Jeffrey Epstein style prose to avoid any suspicion of slop..., e.g:

“no , bed, i, m laying on thefloor so it can't move.”

Only speak advantages of AI, no or a few trivial disadvantages.

There was/is a business position as a middleman of sitting between a storyteller and the printing press, called authoring or writing and that's slowly been denigrated for over a century by mechanical typewriters, word processors, spelling checkers, grammar checkers, now LLMs.

However there's always been a shortage of good story tellers with a story to tell, and for at least a century or two been a MASSIVE oversupply of the middlemen mentioned above, who end up failing. They can type, and they insist thats all they need, and the ability to spin a good yarn is just fluff or unimportant. Then they fail, so they're probably incorrect.

I suspect as long as the author can spin a heck of a good yarn based on his personal sailing experiences mixed in with whatever else, the author will have gainful employment in the book biz. As a storyteller. Not as "a guy who types really fast" or "a word processor technician" or whatever.

The middleman author who used to have a job writing generic romance novel #7994126 and was hoping to make money off writing #7994127 is probably utterly doomed. Why does the publisher need him if we have LLMs, or even better, why do we need publishers if we have LLMs and can enter a short simple plot just as well. "Claude generate me a 75K word romance novel similar to 'Just for the Summer' from last year but write all my favorite past characters into it. Especially character Anne she's my favorite."

But lets be realistic, those middlemen were already doomed anyway. Very few people in the book biz can spin a good yarn and that shows up in the stats of "failed writers". LLMs just mean they'll generate more scrap paper along the way to failure. But about the same percentage will sell books and about the same percentage will fail unless AI itself causes a substantial difference in readers tastes (honestly, I think not...)

Compare it to programming, about which we supposedly have more experience. LLMs generate more code that no one is responsible for nor understands fully. But does it make more or less successful startups? Nah, not really. Doesn't seem to have much effect on "idea people" at all. The people whom always generate bad ideas crash the plane with no survivors a little quicker, the people whom always generate good ideas make money a little quicker, most people in the middle are unaffected beyond change for the sake of change, which is always expensive.