Books took exactly the same amount of time to write before and after the printing press— they just became easier to reproduce. Making it easier to copy human-made work and removing the humanity from work are not even conceptually similar purposes.
But my thought was that the printing press made the printed work much cheaper and accessible, and many many more people became writers than had been before, including of new kinds of media (newspapers). The quality of text in these new papers was of course sloppier than in the old expensive books, and also derivative...
What primarily kept people from writing was illiteracy. The printing press encouraged people to read, but in its early years was primarily used for Bibles rather than original writing. Encouraging people to write was a comparatively distant latent effect.
Creating text faster than you can write is one of the primary use cases of LLMs— not a latent second-order effect.
We have probably greatly increased quality volume since then, but not 100x or 1 billion x.
> It all started going wrong with the printing press.
Nah. We hit a tipping point with social media, and it's all downhill from here, with everything tending towards slop.
