agreed. creatives themselves have nothing to worry about because AI generated novels are a very poor imitation of one crafted by humans.

the issue is the review processes from publishers cant scale

the blatant theft and re-appropriation has to be the largest scale attack on the human psyche/soul/whatever you want to call it this world has ever seen.

at this point, the only solution i can see is wholesale rejection of all technologically produced novelty.

we need harder lines drawn in the sand, person by person

blacksmiths--gone machinists--mostly gone hand looms--gone wheelwrights--gone newspapers--mostly gone circuit designers--mostly gone draftsmen--gone secretarial workers--gone

Automation (software and mass-production equipment) has transformed our world and our lives.

I'm just some guy watching what's happened over the past 50 years. But this trend is only accelerating. There will be many more industries that are "transformed" by technology.

Economic trends meant we were moving towards patronage models anyway, whether singular or distributed. It seems like mass one-shot payment for media is almost dead. The exception might be video games, thanks in part to console lock-in.

> I wonder if we're headed for a future where it is almost completely impossible to make money off human-made "authentic" art because it simply can't compete with the effort-to-dollar ratio of slop

I disagree. It will create a subculture of people that appreciate human arts like never before.

The vast majority will consume slop, sure, but there is a growing cohort, especially from younger people, that explicitly seek man-made art. An example: YouTube has been inundated by AI mixes by talentless hacks, and when you happen upon a mix by a real human, the majority of comments are along the lines of “thank you for keeping the arts alive. I have had enough of that AI shit” - none of them care if it tastes or sounds good enough, they reject AI slop on pure principle, and so do I. I don’t give a shit how good the machine fakes are nowadays, I just avoid it altogether, and find in appreciation of human ingenuity and creativity like never before in my life.

But yes, as I said, the vast majority will consume slop, but then again the vast majority have no taste whatsoever and would consume “manmade slop” like pop music and superhero blockbusters, and there is no hope for redemption for them. (I am being shamelessly elitist here). The masses will not have cared about the arts anyway. All AI has done is for artists to take their craft more seriously, and to more clearly separate the wheat from the philosophical zombies with a Suno subscription that still don’t get why humans create and appreciate art.

I read a lot and I’m not that scared about AI books because I seek the interesting ones (in my subjective opinion) and don’t buy the cheapest at the airport shop to pass the time, which is the niche that’s getting disrupted here.

Someone close to me is a folk musician who’s done surprisingly well, at least getting by as a full-time performer. Much of what people are paying for when they get tickets to see her is the feeling of proximity to non-artificial, unalienated human culture. It’s traditional (lots of the tunes are hundreds of years old, passed down mostly orally), but it’s a living tradition. Extraordinary. Take my money.

The coming slopnami may well be the end for many artists, but for her and others already trading in an unfakeable way on the idea of authenticity, it might be a blessing in disguise.

I don't think "produced for free" is a salve to this, completely, at least.

People spending time/effort/resources on Authentic Stuff have to eat, and there's no shortage of people who have some other income source posting slop for the social standing/clout/attention of being an artist/a recomp dev/an emulator dev/etc.