i imagine if books can be published to some e-book provider through an API to extract a few dollars per book generated (mulitiplied by hundreds), then eventually it'll be borderline impossible to discover an actual author's book. breaking through for newbie writers will be even harder because of all of the noise. it'll be up to providers like Amazon to limit it, but then we're then reliant on the benevolence of a corporation and most act in self interest, and if that means AI slop pervading every corner of the e-book market, then that's what we'll have.

kind of reminds me of solana memecoins and how there are hundreds generated everyday because it's a simple script to launch one. memecoins/slop has certainly lowered the trust in crypto. can definitely draw some parallels here.

The same way good law-abiding folk are harmed when Heroin is introduced to the community. Then those people won't be able to lend you a cup of sugar, and may well start causing problems.

AI books take off and are easy to digest, and before long your user base is quite literally too stupid to buy and read your book even if they wanted.

And, for the record, it's trivial to "out compete" books or anything else. You just cheat. For AI, that means making 1000 books that lie for every one real book. Can you find a needle in a haystack? You can cheat by making things addictive, by overwhelming with supply, by straight up lying, by forcing people to use it... there's really a lot of ways to "outcompete".

> It feels more like we just want to punish people, particularly rich people, particularly if they get away with stuff we're afraid to try.

If by "afraid to try" you mean "know to be morally reprehensible" and if by "punish people" you mean "punish people (who do things that we know to be morally reprehensible)", then sure.

But... you might just be describing the backbone of human society since, I don't know, ever? Hm, maybe there's a reason we have that perspective. No, it must just be silly :P