They Said A.I. Would Kill Human Authorship; Instead It's Raising Real Authors' Profile.
Ever since A.I. went consumer-grade three years ago, the question on authors’ lips has been “Will large language models make us obsolete?”
Now that the experiment has been running long enough to yield some measurable results, the publishing industry is starting to discover the answer.
And to the doomsayer’s surprise, that answer looks to be that A.I. isn’t replacing writers. What it’s doing instead is changing the value proposition for readers.
Last week, two seemingly contradictory stories popped up within days of each other. First, researchers studying more than 14,000 self-published genre novels on Amazon found that books containing 25 percent or more A.I.-generated text have now captured significant market share.
More to the point, the glut of books competing for readers has grown much faster than the money those readers are spending. In other words, each new title is fighting for a smaller slice of the same pie.
Second, the Financial Times reported that more and more publishers are mulling over ways to distinguish books written by people from those produced with generative A.I. Some executives have floated labels like “Human Authored.” The industry expectation is that readers will seek out books bearing the unmistakable marks of human imagination.
At first glance, those developments seem to suggest opposite conclusions. One says A.I. is overwhelming the market. The other touts genuine authorship as the new selling point.
But dig down into both reports, and you soon find they are describing the same phenomenon from two different angles.
Read the full post on Substack.
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