I don't think that it's necessarily true, but the big problem is that discoverability is almost impossible, and that the investment to know how good a book might be is much higher than other forms of media. It's also why you might get more out of books, you have to make some efforts to ingest them, but this means it's a problem if you have no idea how good it might be.

Let’s not resort to such exaggeration. There’s a fuck of a lot more humans on earth today than in the 1600, something like 16x globally with some regions growing more than others. Literacy was also generally low in 1600 as in sub 20%.

Further, up until recently the first few rungs of surviving as an author looked a lot like abject poverty today.

> reading any modern fiction, likely ever. It isn’t like there isn’t more than I could read in multiple lifetimes already out there

Well said. It’s also true for movies these days which are predictable and algorithm tailored minus a couple of directors.

Sad but true, and I'm in the same boat. I'm sure you and I will miss a few gems of contemporary fiction, but wading through so much garbage and over hyped mediocrity just isn't worth it. The dreck of the past is mostly filtered out for us already, simply by the passage of time and the survival of quality.

Unfortunately, like most other kinds of commercial art, the mere presence of generated literature waters down the market enough to make actual literature essentially a leisure activity. Sure there was always crap, derivative filler books — it’s just that the ratio will now be 1000x worse and the better of the books just won’t justify the funding for intensive work and novel research that they used to, so even the good ones will probably be worse. Yet another example of the efficiency-obsessed more cheaper > less more expensive mentality making our world worse.

My last novel took over a year to write and edit, going through dozens of revisions. The novel before that took almost five years.

For a laugh I used grok to generate a 35,000-word slop novel, it took twenty prompts and a few hours, it even threw in a nice cover. From there it would have took me another 30 minutes to release it as an ebook on Amazon under a different pen-name. This is what I and the world of indie authors are up against. It is already hard for non-established authors, this may be the final nail in the coffin for most. My first book is now free, but good luck anyone ever finding it.

I've noticed entire publishers on Amazon which are just fly-by-night AI slop, probably printed on-demand too.

For example, I stumbled on https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0DT4TKY58 and had never heard of the author. Their page (https://www.amazon.com/stores/author/B004LUETE8) suggested they were incredibly prolific in a huge number of areas which already felt off. No information about "Robert Johnson" was available either. The publisher, HiTeX Press (https://www.amazon.com/s?k=HiTeX+Press) has a few other authors with similarly generic names and no information available about them, each the author of numerous books spanning a huge array of topics.

It feels even more bewildering and disheartening to see AI slop come into the physical world like this.

> AI books should come with warning labels

I disagree. AI use is diffuse. An author is specific. Having people label their work as AI free is accountable in a way trying to require AI-generated work be labeled is not.

> similar to those found in cigarettes

Hyperbole undermines your argument. We have decades of rigorous and international evidence for the harms from cigarettes. We don’t for AI.

Nothing futile about defense of humanity! Art forgers and technofrauds will never be true participants in culture.

> you would need AI to do the work of detection

Why?

They keep trying this with digital cameras signing the data and it's always a complete failure.

It's a social problem at heart and piling on yet more technology won't fix it.

> some piece of work was human created

Are thoughts and ideas creations? Or you just mean the literal typewriting?

How do you prove an idea is original and you have been in a vacuum not influenced _by anything at all_?

If anything The Hunger Games is the perfect example that you can get away with anything you want, and that was almost 20 years ago.

Everything is a remix https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nJPERZDfyWc or if you hate your life https://tvtropes.org/

This depends on the subject of the book, but there are enough books written pre-1970 (or some other year one is comfortable with, before the era of “book spinners”, AI etc) to last multiple lifetimes. I used to spend hours and hours in bookstores, but so many books these days (AI or otherwise) don’t seem that interesting. Many, many books could just be 3 page articles, but stretched to 150 page books.

So yeah, simply filtering by year published could be a start

The normal writing 'journey' is several months, or years, of hard work and multiple revisions. I invest a little of my time explaining the journey on my blog, and also include the text in the prefix of my novels that it was written by a real human. It is my way of saying I was invested in the story, but it is pretty naive to think this will work in the age of AI today.

I also wrote an article on my blog that you are mainly writing for yourself and your family, friends and followers these days, the algorithm is very unlikely to get you outside of that word-of-mouth audience, unless you pay $$, go full-in promoting on social media (which may backfire), or are extremely lucky. With AI the algorithm has become the enemy and finding genuine indie authors is unfortunately getting harder.

An authoring device akin to this, perhaps? https://roc.camera/

> wondered if there was some way to make a "proof" that some piece of work was human created

Self certification backed by a war chest to sue those who lie.

Maybe they could prove it using blockchain!!!

No need to invent more tech to mitigate techslop.

People will know by reputation alone, which cannot be fabricated.

Even if every single page was hand written on camera, that could not prove that no AI was used.

Did the author come up with the main ideas, character arcs or plot devices himself? Did he ever seek assistance from AI to come up with new plot points, rewrite paragraphs, create dialog?

The only thing which really matters is trust.

This has the same problems any DRM has. People who want to bypass the process will find a way, but legitimate people get caught up in weird messes.

I'm so happy I'm not doing any school/academic work anymore, because AI writing detection tools (I learned English though reading technical docs; of course my writing style is a bit clinical) and checking the edit history in a Google Docs document would've both fucked me over.

> can't actually verify

Why? Can't it be done same way it's done with copyrighted material: by checking the authors process?

(Because at least in EU law permits writing basically same thing, if both authors reached it organically - have a trail of drafts, other writing process documents. As long as you proved you came upon it without influence from the other author.)

Proving that you done it without AI can be similar. For example - just videotaping whole writing process.

Now, as for if anyone cares about such proofs is another topic.

No technical ability required to verify humans as humans. You just have to close your laptop and meet at a coffee shop. Surprisingly many deals are done this way, because humans like other humans.

> I don't care if AI wrote the book, if the book is good.

Not so sure. Books are not all just entertainment but they also develop one's ouook on life, relationships, morality etc. I mean, of course books can also be written by "bad" people to propagate their view of things, but at least you're still peeking into the views and distilled experience of a fellow human who lived a personal life.

Who knows what values a book implicitly espouses that has no author and was optimized for being liked by readers. Do that on a large enough scale and it's really hard to tell what kind of effect it has.

What about capitalism created AI? China is not a purely capitalistic society and they have AI too… I don’t see anything specific about capitalism that brings about AI. In fact much of the advances in it came about through academia, which is more of a socialist structure than capitalist.

I’m curious why you see this as a problem created by capitalism, rather than another cause?