Frankly even that 1% will start to feel squeezed out by AI. Why hire a famous DM to write the next D&D campaign book(s) if you can get AI to do it? That's one more income stream lost, plus the opportunity for that writer to make money signing books and the like. Why wait for John Scalzi to produce another sf book when he already has many books out and you can train a chatgpt to make more of his style? Brandon Sanderson? Any number of beloved authors. Then, how will they build hype about their work, competing with themselves?
How will authors survive if ghost writing as an industry collapses into chatgpt? And also writing for IP? And also copyediting? And also... and also...
Writers aren't exactly a hoity toity class of people broadly. They usually make money through multiple streams of freelancing as well as sales, both of IP/ghostwriting and works under their name originally. This is especially because book advances are often so small an author cannot possibly live on them and don't get royalties until the advances finishes paying out, a process that can take over a year. Any slice chatgpt can take up is a slice removed from that revenue for authors.
> Why hire a famous DM to write the next D&D campaign book(s) if you can get AI to do it? That's one more income stream lost, plus the opportunity for that writer to make money signing books and the like. Why wait for John Scalzi to produce another sf book when he already has many books out and you can train a chatgpt to make more of his style? Brandon Sanderson? Any number of beloved authors. Then, how will they build hype about their work, competing with themselves?
It's the counterfeiting problem. Designers still succeed despite it, though it does cost them some revenue.
AI adds a lot more competition to the marketplace, sure. Anybody can produce anything that's "good enough." But you need to step up your marketing game and/or product quality to get people to prefer your product over something they can make themselves.
A book written in the style of John Scalzi is not a John Scalzi book. He still owns the rights to his IP. You continue buying his books because you want to hear how the official story continues, not read someone's shitty fanfiction knockoff.
> Why hire a famous DM to write the next D&D campaign book(s) if you can get AI to do it?
This is what I mean by make up your mind. Either the AI is producing the same quality content as writers or it's bad and produces worse content. Articles like these seems to be implying both things and it's confusing.
I never said it's the same quality. I said why hire a famous DM to write the next D&D campaign book(s) if an AI can do it? This means the D&D sales/marketing/executive staff decide they're perfectly okay with mediocre production of chatgpt if they save a chunk of money and rely purely on their brand to make sales, since they reduce their costs they don't have to sell that much either to make the same profit as before. Maybe it comes to bite them in the ass, but that will happen later and the DM has bills/family/food needs right now.
Sure, if they want to completely devalue there brand by releasing low quality stuff they can go ahead. People are not stupid, they will only tolerate low quality stuff for so long. Evident by the rise of self published RPG stuff. I'm not that familiar with that market, but I am familiar with Pro Wrestling. At some point WWE established a monopoly and it's quality slowly started going to shit. some people were completely writing off the industry in North america. But then slowly in 2000s we had the rise of independent promotions and eventually AEW. The whole thing is a beautiful display of capitalism and markets functioning. Monopoly is slowly being broken down because it started producing shit.
Sure, and in the meantime an established, talented DM will now have to struggle harder to eat because the established institutions no longer support their work. That's all I'm saying. Forcing titans of an industry to go back to struggling in indie spaces without their previous audience because industries don't value quality work is precisely why Ikea makes money hand over fist, way more than any freelance individual carpenter.
That's is sad indeed but that's the price we pay for living in a capitalist society. The only way to survive is to be productive in the market. During market adjustments a lot of people get shafted.
Who are the 1%? Will they ever become those new genre pioneers if they don't spend time working on some of that 99% work first? Which they might not do any more, if AI does it instead?
How will authors survive if ghost writing as an industry collapses into chatgpt? And also writing for IP? And also copyediting? And also... and also...
Writers aren't exactly a hoity toity class of people broadly. They usually make money through multiple streams of freelancing as well as sales, both of IP/ghostwriting and works under their name originally. This is especially because book advances are often so small an author cannot possibly live on them and don't get royalties until the advances finishes paying out, a process that can take over a year. Any slice chatgpt can take up is a slice removed from that revenue for authors.