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.