Member-only story
How AI is choking out new writers
It’s bad, but not for the reason you think
“If your writing is actually any good,” a follower mused at me smugly, “surely you’d be easily above the AI slop you’re so sneering about?” I have to admit, that was my initial view when AI first started churning out azure orbs and fantastical smells. I’m better than that. I’m better than any of that, even if you forced me to type with my left foot. I’m good enough, I thought, arrogantly. I’m literary, florid, sardonic, high-prose. This doesn’t impact me. I’m not going to write Crystal Werewolf: Love and Melodies. I’m not competing with the kind of hyper-commercial content farming that is at risk here. That actually, wouldn’t be the problem.
The problem is the sheer, unrelenting sewer-flow of slop at every single stage of entering and fighting for a spot in the industry. It’s not 1 immoral far-flung content farm: it’s roughly 2,000,000 globally. Not just churning out posts or ads: churning out over 50,000 ‘books’ ‘screenplays’ and ‘short stories’ ‘poems’ a day. And it’s lucrative; when the average salary is just $2,911 a year, and you can make $50 dollars a day on the right slop mash up, everyone is doing it. Everyone. Don’t believe me? 8,000 AI books have been uploaded to Kindle Unlimited alone today. Amazon recently introduced limits to how many you can upload to curb this: you can now only upload 3 books. A day.
