What Is Happening to Publishing? (opens in new tab)

For the past 5-6 years I've been writing a book in my spare time. The outline of it is how reason emerges in past societies from the needs of social complexity, how it's lessons get converted into rules and rituals, which in turn remove any competitive advantage of aquiring reason, ending it to setup a new cycle. And in the meanwhile LLMs became the ultimate heuristic of humanity.

I've gotten it 60-70% ready, and I really don't know if it'll have an audience in a post-AI world. I never meant to strike big with it, but I'm now wondering if thousands of hours of research and writing can amount to more than a novelty gift I'd give to friends.

It's a bad short story. Whether it was generated at the hands of humans or a computer isn't really relevant. Speaking in riddles is cheap now, so authors better learn how to surprise the reader in simpler, more readable words. It seems to be something that LLMs are quite bad at.

I liked the playfulness of:

  Mixed metaphors which sound nice at first glance, but slip away from meaning like an echo chasing itself off a cliff.

  Similes that catch in your mind like river trouts tangled in the roots of a redwood tree.

Also mentions some interesting AI tells, for AI generated stories.

If I liked reading fiction, I wouldn't care if it was AI generated or AI-assisted, as long as there were good reviews or an indication that it's good to read. Otherwise I'd probably never find it as I wouldn't sift through AI's duds until I find a story I like.

I don't care for fiction but I like music. If I like a track, I would still like it if it was AI generated. I would love it, in fact. That would mean I likely wouldn't have to wait a long time before the artists release a new track.

If it sucks, if it's obvious slop, etc. - I'll notice or someone would tell me via reviews or thumbs down or something like that.

Earlier today there was a comment somewhere about the possibility of modern art happening by chance - that it would be fake, have no human process behind and so on. Personally, I don't care about the process behind it. I care about the art. Maybe that makes it "entertainment" for me, not "art", but it's just 2 words for the same thing. I wouldn't care if a dish was made by a Star Trek replicator or by someone's grandma who had worked all her life to perfect it.

Other people want other things, I get it, but I don't really care. I'm not afraid I'll get stuck in some weird local maximum of AI-generated music (or fiction or food), just as I haven't got stuck listening to the radio - I can search and find various types of music.

I recently built and delivered an AI-driven novel-writing program. The architecture involved chaining the Claude, GPT, and Gemini APIs together so they could cross-critique and iteratively revise the text, while systematically saving key plot points and lore chapter-by-chapter. (Serialized 'web novels' published on a per-chapter basis are a massive industry here in Korea). AI has already heavily infiltrated the fiction space in Korea, and it looks like the exact same trend is hitting the US.

Personally, I find it incredibly easy to spot AI-generated text in Korean, but catching it in English is much harder for me. That being said, they still have very distinct, overused patterns. You constantly see words like 'ultimately' or 'structural,' and they rely heavily on highly formulaic 'X is Y' sentence structures.

On the point of the impermeancy of digital media, I will say that actual traditional podcasts with distributed by rss can and are downloaded by design which means just like with books, a publisher can only destroy their own copies not listener copies. Also even if we pretend that YouTube podcasts can’t be deleted, most of the major ones also publish traditional podcast feeds too.

I wondering about other thing - I'm assuming that publishers are now using LLM's en-masse to "proofread", do initial evaluation, do editorial work etc.

So if an author abstained from using LLM in the writing process - isn't then new, original, not yet on the market book ending up in the LLM training data corpus even before it hits the market?

Publishers loose money on most books and most advances they pay authors, and are simply gambling for the big hits.

Loses some credibility with this footnote; https://resobscura.substack.com/p/what-is-happening-to-publi...

> I suspect the hum obsession has something to do with LLMs “awareness” that their “physical selves” exist in data centers.

The worst thing about this is not really that somebody might have had AI help writing a story, but that an editor thought they could get any kind of useful information from asking an AI whether the story was written by AI. If there's any hope of editors staying ahead of this phenomenon, they will need to educate themselves a lot better about how it actually works.