upvote
> It is difficult to think that someone who writes for pleasure would abandon it simply because of the exponential volume of AI-generated text.

But the "exponential volume of AI-generated text" turns "writing for pleasure" into a solitary act. There's no chance you'll be able to quit your day job, because people like what you do any will pay for it. So many people faking it with AI means that it'll be struggle to get any attention at all for what you've put so much effort into.

reply
The truth is much "pursuit of art" is a status exercise by those with the leisure capacity to do so, and this only maintains status because most people do not have the spare time and energy to put into it.

In the event everyone is sitting around with time on their hands wondering what to do and we have machines that spit out endless reams of anything it is a very curious question what exactly it is most people would end up doing, which would probably be some new status seeking exercise.

reply
Whoa, fascinating: what to call this paradox I'd never considered before?

From the blog post:

> 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.

But with this and your other comment [0] about humans churning out 10 articles a day and changing the idea of what's "valuable" leads me to a bit of a conundrum I can't quite unwind:

If AI took over all the boring jobs (chores, labor, etc.) and we had all the time in the world to be creative, and we did just that, to the effect of humans generating dramatically more from "creative" ventures, have we created the same scenario, from a different approach? What then?

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49122692

reply
> From the blog post:

>> 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.

In the world we're actually building, it's the opposite. We're on track for the robots to take the creative jobs, leaving boring and dirty jobs for the humans.

reply
My guess is energy gets redirected towards sport, and everything associated with it. It's already often an abstracted form of things that used to be work (sailing, hunting etc.), but it's also something more unique that a machine participating in makes no sense.
reply
Writing has always been a solitary act.
reply
'act' as in a play, but now with no audience. So all that hard work of memorizing lines, rehearsing, and vocal lessons becomes an experience only the actors can enjoy by themselves.
reply
I've never heard about writers writing with an audience. A real one at least. Of course there's always an imaginary reader.

Performing and writing couldn't be any more different or attract different types of people.

reply
I agree, but I do think it makes the book industry more difficult. A flood of books makes it makes it harder for new authors to make it. Just like a new youtuber has a very difficult time. Eventually publishers will turn to AI just to deal with the volume on submissions, and then it will become just like YouTube, where an algorithm decides who wins and loses.

At the same time, readers will have to sift through an insane amount of books to find what they like. It is already kind of like this, even before AI. This causes people to rely more on reviews and word of mouth, which becomes a volume game and is also influenced by the algorithms.

I don't think it is the end times for literature, and for those who put the work in, they can find their places. But it is a whole new set of challenges.

reply
Photography was not the end of painting.

It was, however, a blow to painting as a vocation where a lot of your work was in the form of portrait painting.

reply
It, plus video, also made painting culturally irrelevant. Approximately no one cares about paintings whatsoever. Books of modernity soon to follow I'm sure.
reply
> holds real value when it is of high quality

Does it? This assumption is the core of the entire problem.

It might do as some, bluntly, self indulgent exercise but beyond that in society scarcity of things other people need and want is what drives value.

We are in for an absolutely huge rebalancing of what it is that is considered valuable.

reply
Interesting standpoint. Do not forget what makes you human, and that's why there are a lot of different opinions and valuable, subjective literary articles.
reply
> and valuable, subjective literary articles

There you go again.

I suspect if everyone on earth produced subjective literary articles at the rate of ten a day you would cease to consider them valuable, let alone a machine that can create them on demand.

reply
Thank you for your opinion. To be more specific, there are many subjective views on what value is. I didn't mean a literary piece always has market value if nobody is buying it, but it can still be valuable educationally as a masterful or sublime example of literature.
reply
You are deliberately skirting the core problem which is your perception of value is completely warped by supply and demand.

If you have a surplus of something then it will cease to be of value to you. For example you do not actually "value" air, since it is everywhere and so we ignore it, but stuck somewhere where it is not you will come to appreciate it fairly quickly.

You seem to believe there is something magic and wonderful about literature, but this is because you have only ever lived in an environment where it is scarce and not dangerously abundant. The next stage is to claim "but it's not literature" even when it's the exact same strings of words merely constructed by machines and not humans, which is curious because up until now it had always been assumed that had the monkey succeeded in typing out Shakespeare it would still have been as valuable as had Shakespeare written it himself.

reply