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)?
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.
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?
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.
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?
That isn't at all relevant to why I engage in creative writing.
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.
Mathematicians write proofs that only a few people read in full and understand. And yet, they are fine with that.
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.