Print-on-demand means that paper books will be just as flooded with LLM sludge as eBook stores. I think we are at risk of regressing back to huge publishers being de-facto gatekeepers, because every easily accessible avenue to getting published is going to get crushed under this race to the bottom.
Likewise with record labels if platforms like Spotify which allow self-publishing get overwhelmed with Suno slop, which is already on the rise (there's some conspiracy theories that Spotify themselves are making it, but there's more than enough opportunistic grifters in the world who could be trying to get rich quick by spamming it).
> The Fifty Shades trilogy was developed from a Twilight fan fiction series originally titled Master of the Universe and published by James episodically on fan fiction websites under the pen name "Snowqueen Icedragon". Source : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fifty_Shades_of_Grey
The AI is already tainted with human output.... If you think its spitting out garbage it's because that's what we fed it.
There is the old Carlin bit about "for there to be an average intelligence, half of the people need to be below it".
Maybe we should not call it AI rather AM, Artificial Mediocrity, it would be reflection of its source material.
The issue is that the AI shit is flooding out anything good. Nearly any metric you can think of to measure "good" by is being gamed ATM which makes it really hard to actually find something good. Impossible to discover new/smaller authors.
Scale matters. The ability to churn out bad writing is increasing by orders of magnitude and could drown out the already small amount of high quality works.
While it's true that the volume of bad writing is increasing, our ability to analyze and refine this sludge is also improving. Just as spell check and grammar check give instant feedback why not AI instant feedback about writing quality / originality / suitability / correctness / … ? If instant feedback can improve spelling and grammar why not these other things?
