Established authors have the name recognition to compete as you say.
1. easy access to video recording and editing equipment has made it a lot easier to produce videos on sites like YouTube;
2. easy access to audio recording and editing (Audacity, etc.) has made it a lot easier to produce podcasts and other audio content (via LibriVox, Apple Podcasts, etc.);
3. easy access to writing software and self-publishing (Amazon, fan fiction sites, blogging platforms) has made it a lot easier to produce stories and books;
4. easy access to game engines and tools (Unity, Unreal, Godot, Twine, RenPy, etc.) have made it a lot easier to produce games.
You can give part of your money to fund a creator that wants to create in order to earn a living.
I believe that is better when people create for fun. If they need to create to earn a living they are forced to create and that is not the best incentive to create. Fun is a better incentive
I'm not sure that's true (thousands of famous creative works from the Sistine Chapel to the Benin Bronzes were created on commission/for remuneration), but even if it is, how are creators gonna eat? If the answer is "get a day job", I think that excludes a lot of folks from practically being able to create things. Patreon is not a great way to pay the bills for all but the most famous and popular people on it.
What do you think about this?
> [it] is better when people create for fun. If they need to create to earn a living they are forced to create and that is not the best incentive to create. Fun is a better incentive
E.g. after Michelangelo created his style, then IA can mimick it almost for free. Imagine people with great talent like him, expressing their ideas and also being able to use IA to create, plus thousands of less talented people basing their AI art on them.
There's an entire potential economy there without humans necessarily involved at all, kind of busted by recent Anthropic precedent admittedly.
Then it could absolutely work.
Do other authors have a stigma for using a word processor instead of a typewriter?
Artist have a stigma for using photoshop instead of canvas?
Is it being used a tool, or is it being used as a ghostwriter? There is often stigma attached to that when done by humans.
> Artist have a stigma for using photoshop instead of canvas?
Yes, that used to very much be the case. Now it is often considered a different form of expression, so loses a lot of the stigma mostly by not pretending to be what those looking down on it are comparing it to.
Similar in the debate between CGI and practical effects.
Perhaps if AI-backed authors are willing to have their work classed as a different type of writing they can skip by the comparison-stigma too?
* as discussed elsewhere in these threads, the judgements pertaining to copyright not applying to generated work all only seem to cover entirely generated work where there is very little human activity after the prompt.
* even if the generated work is public domain, the derived work (the edited version) is not necessarily so (much like Disney's derived works created from the tales of Hans Christian Andersen's writings).
If they are not doing significant work after the ghostwriting, then sod'em, they are earning the stigma of essentially committing fraud to get that profit from the work.
And pricing is determined by what someone else will pay for something, so if people want to read it and the author is charging for it . . . that's up to them if they want to make a trade about it.
The odd thing is this attempt at gatekeeping what other people value.
That’s so reductive that even Keynes would probably take issue.
Discoverability is the axis of competition in this context, not price. The market has not effectively found out how to identify quality in order to price it, so externalities rule instead: pre-existing authors with recognizable names, whatever genre publishers like at a given moment (famously disconnected from what people actually want to buy), how many energy drinks a crabby editor has had by the time they get to your manuscript, and so on.
Search engine and recommendation systems were supposed to ameliorate those externalities. They didn’t.
Something tells me that doesn't alter the value of the art as expression of the intention of the artist, and not the assistant be it human or machine. In the spot painting case he was deliberately playing with this idea to the degree it added to the perceived value.
But someone has the vision and make it real. That which is real is a medium from one soul (or many) to you.
I still have to see someone using LLM to share a soulful vision of his.
If your goal by reading is too learn about the subjectivity of another real person, then yes, read human authors. You said it, that's it's part of what a book can offer, but there can be other reasons for reading
This is a values question. Many would say that literature has a role in modeling certain behaviors and teaching lessons that are functional in society. Basically the fables and proverbs idea. Simply catering to what feels nice and what reinforces the biases and wishes of readers is not the same thing. Yes, most of literature is already crap and simply caters to readers instead of challenging them. But if you RLHF your way to AI literature that people "engage with" the most, you will get unvirtuous literature that doesn't do this function. Of course you're welcome to disagree with this entire framing and purely see reading as hedonistic pleasure and nothing else.
A person directing an IA could also lead it to build a story that teaches values.
I believe Borges would have loved IA.
There's not an abstract "not mattering of the intent of the author" independent of different people with certain values.
You could say that the intent of the author is the number one issue that matters. That's completely subjective, that's just, like, your opinion, man.