But the fiction is a product of the author's lived experiences. If the author had lived a different life, they would have written a different book. Or none at all. Without life experience, where would stories even come from? Why would they matter at all?
This is the entire issue though. We’ve boiled creation down to “consumable content” like we are all in a boardroom talking market strategy. I am reading a book to enrich my life. Yes I enjoy popcorn entertainment and “low brow“ stuff, not everything needs to be Citizen Kane, but what does it say about us if we’re willing to just sit around “consuming” LLM content which is just facsimiles of actual creation by real people? What is the point when we have more “content to consume” than ever before? It’s just saturating us with impersonal stuff lazily achieved by scraping the real thing and prompting until it outputs something acceptable. Why is the person even making it? The answer unfortunately is almost always “a quick buck,” so I’m not sold.
What is the point of reading a middling fantasy book that a person didn’t even create when there are already likely countless fantasy books in existence/being written right now?
Anything.
While I subscribe to an absurdist viewpoint rather than the nihilists, attempting to take an objective view on what one should consume is a difficult and most likely completely incorrect task.
The entire talk of should we mass product LLM crap generally side tracks the discussion of 'how can we create a world where everyone can consume mindless crap instead of endless toil'.
...and you don't need to know those things, that's insane. But you very likely are, even (not so) subconsciously, questioning some of these things.