edit the question to: “How much do you care”
I love reading and am always on the hunt for a new book.
I’ve noticed an uptick in AI-generated books on Amazon. Often the AI books lack plot or experience of being human that leads to them reading as very machine-like. The author pages sometimes have AI generated photos too.
Oversaturation of this kind of content makes finding high quality, and human-authored text (which has more depth in my opinion) really hard. It’s also so frustrating for me because writing a book used to be a way to proclaim some sort of authority in storytelling, or if it’s non-fiction, a specific subject. Now, that hard work of creating authority is being shrunk down into some well-constructed prompts.
What are your thoughts on what finding books to read in the future will be like?
Do you care if a book is human authored or AI-created?
To what lengths do/would you go to find high quality reading by a human?
I don’t read books to connect with humans. If I wanted to do that, I’d talk to humans. The people who think they do that just by reading books are deluding themselves. At best, they connect with some imaginary ideal they have of someone. As if reading Asoiaf gives the average reader serious insight into Martin. It might for people who know about his life in detail and can draw connections from his story to his life, but not the average reader.
If an AI can write stories better than a human, then I’m all for it. The nonsensical ethics of “stealing” from human writers (as if human writers are suddenly losing a possession) to train AI is ridiculous. A human being able to use the words they “stole” more creatively or emotionally wouldn’t magically make it not stealing if it were actually were stealing.
If an AI were straightforwardly copy-pasting sentences word for word from human authors, there might be an argument there, but they don’t do that. Otherwise, you might as well claim that every human author who was inspired to write a magical school story by Harry Potter stole from JK Rowling.
Anyway, if or when AI can produce books better than human authors, I’m all for it. Fiction is for entertainment. If you want to learn about other people, read biographies.