Poetry books can sometime be printed in extremely small numbers, by local printers, with basically no trappings of regular publishers. Think “local poet ran off fifty copies of their slim volume, and sold them for fifty cents from the counter of their country store.” I’ve encountered some before, although this looks much nicer. It was definitely possible to get a local print shop to do this sort of thing; now there are websites that handle it.

Hey, let’s ask some internet randos what their opinion about a question of fact is. Rather than, y’know, just looking up said fact.

“I can guarantee [insert idle supposition here]. Source: Feelings.”

The anecdotal one?

Right now “AI” is just a souped-up version of Google Autocomplete: it puts words together which often go together. If you read about a page of it, you realize it is pointless in the most basic sense of the word: it has no point or goal, it just meanders in a stream-of-internet-consciousness. The books put together using it are going to be drops in an ocean of cheap crap.

In the longer term, sure, it could it could upend authorship, but in the longer term it could upend a lot of other things too, in ways which are fruitless to speculate in detail about right now since so much is unknown.

I found myself doing a reread of Lord of the Rings. The old stories never end; we’re in one of those old stories now, and the people in them had a lot of chances of turning back but didn’t, as Samwise would say.