Ask HN: Why does it matter if no one reads your novel as long as the AIs do?
AI can in principle surface content that you create that no humans consume directly. And it could even credit and financially compensate you whenever this happens.
So it seems that you can have a creator-only economy where all humans create and the AIs do most of the consuming.
And stuff that the AIs surface in their replies allows humans to indirectly consume some of your content (in which case you would be credited and financially compensated) and perhaps even lead to them directly consuming it as a result of the free advertising.
Do you think this is workable as a future model for creation and consumption (and not just for novels)?
We're already at the point where, for the vast majority of novelists (which is where I'm most knowledgeable), writing is not a primary source of income. With the exception of the very few bestsellers who are super-famous, most have other jobs or a spouse to provide income (and, in the US, health insurance). So most authors aren't doing it only for the money.
It's also hard to imagine a situation where authors are paid when AI ingests or remixes their work; this is already not the case. Legal cases have slapped down _piracy_, but it seems that _training_ is considered fair use, so long as the AI company buys at least one copy of the book.
There's no reason for the AI companies to bother paying anyone for their work.
But let's ignore all of that.
I write so I can tell the story. I write so other people can enjoy it -- so I can gross them out, or shock them with a clever plot twist they should've seen coming, or make them think about something differently, or let them have a moment of heartwarming joy, or just escape into a wild adventure of my own imagining. Otherwise, I'd just say "Odysseus had a long trip home" and be done.
If nobody reads my book unless it's been processed by an AI and mashed up with the writing of others... then nobody's actually reading _my_ book, and I see no purpose to throwing my work into the grinder.
Disclosure: I write novels, have one published, and plan to publish more, but I very much do not make a living off of them. Most of the (unlikely) futures in which I rely on writing income alone assume massive savings from my current tech job.
Ai can be that somebody with exquisite taste and it can probably tell a good novel versus a bad one. It can also figure if an idea is unique or generic. I can understand Ai as a paying consumer. Generic stuff: $5.. superb: $100k.. That way quality of human writing can be appreciated at least by some entity since many humans will eventually give up.
Alas, at present, AI mostly serves to fill my email folder with vapid praise that clumsily restates the back-of-the-book blurb and then tries to get me to give someone else money for dubious (nonexistent) marketing services.
LOL..
I can only see this making sense for reference books, not novels. I don’t know why an AI would ever be bringing up a novel that no one has read. As it stands, it’s only going to bring up novels that I’m asking about or asking for ideas on what to read. Having it tell me to read random novels no other human has read is not valuable, that’s just an ad for a book that probably isn’t any good.
Novels are made for people, not for AI.
I also don’t know where this payment model comes from. These AI companies have all shown that they can and will use the collective works of humanity to train, while giving nothing back to the writers, artists, scientists, developers, etc who created it all.
The novel might have some interesting ideas that are relevant to the user’s prompt.
Might. But most users want answers that are accurate, not fiction.
If it’s not something anyone has read or heard of before, it would be indistinguishable from the AI just making it up.
When people use quotes from fiction, a big part of the value is the recognizability of the book/author.
If your world only revolves around money and nothing else and you have no interest in, I don't know, actual contact with your readers, then why not, I guess...
But I think even purely economically this won't work: For starters, who would set the price for your book?
Your book would become an exchangeable commodity, with the "purchase decision" done solely by AIs (and their companies), not the "readers". The financial success of your book would depend on whatever criteria AIs use to decide about including your content or not, not your (human) readers (or what's left of them). As with most commodities, this would enter a "race to the bottom" that would probably leave you with pennies - or steer your writing into a direction that you were never intending to go in.
Just a question: In such a system, why would you still write the book yourself and not have an LLM write it?
No, of course not. Unless by writing a novel, you mean that the writing is done fully by a LLM and the author is just doing it for the money. This is a very silly question, it should be obvious that the writing itself is important, it's like asking a musician if they are okay that their recorded song is never heard, but instead people will hear some LLM generated garble similar to it.
That should have already happened. The AI companies should had first created a market where people submit there stuff to be included in the training. It would have been slower progress but it would have been better for public adoption and their own reputation. I've heard people are getting paid now, not sure, but they definitely yoinked all the content without permission, when it could have been an entire market around it.
So yeah, I think that's a good idea, and why I want AI to stay away from being used for one-shot creative output. Luckily that is still not very good, at least not for unique and creative applications.
AI is incredible for consumption. Using it as an assistant for summarisation and learning I think is fine. But it should stay very far away from creation of anything.
> And it could even credit and financially compensate you whenever this happens.
It could, but it doesn't.
Also, have you considered that perhaps creative people who write novels actually want people to directly consume their work, and not indirectly?
Mathematicians seem content with having only a few people read and understand their proofs in full.
That sort of writing is very different, with very different motivations, than something like a novel.
A novel not read by humans could still influence future novels indirectly because its ideas are mentioned in AI responses. And you would get credit and financial compensation for those ideas that are mentioned.
I really do wonder sometimes whether these questions you post are trolling or if you truly don't understand how humans work on a fundamental level.
> A novel not read by humans could still influence future novels
That isn't at all relevant to why I engage in creative writing.
Have you considered that mathematicians aren't writers?
Or that your original framing was having no one, rather than "only a few people," read your work?
Do you think mathematicians would be content with having no one but AIs read their work? I don't think so.
This will be the reality of math soon. Complicated proofs will only be checked completely by AI.
That doesn't actually answer any questions, but I doubt mathematicians are entirely thrilled about the prospect of having their field automated, even if they still get paid.
Damn. I was accessing HN on another device, and missed who the author of this post was.
I write for humans.
If no human is reading what I write, then there's no point in publishing it.
But you could still get credit and financial compensation.
Mathematicians write proofs that only a few people read in full and understand. And yet, they are fine with that.
> But you could still get credit and financial compensation.
Sure, but that doesn't make up for the loss of the primary reason for writing the material in the first place.
> Mathematicians write proofs that only a few people read in full and understand. And yet, they are fine with that.
As I said in another comment (before I saw this), that sort of writing is very different, with different motivations and target audiences, than writing something like a novel. Apples and oranges.
Interesting concept. But who pays Ai? there has to be an ultimate consumer no matter who the creator is. Humans are the only ones that would take the credit. Can Ai say, it was my idea, nope! LOL