[SCdF]

Agreed, and were gonna see this everywhere that AI can touch. Our filter functions for books, video, music, etc are all now broken. And worst of all that breaking coincides with an avalanche of slop, making detection even harder.

There is this real disconnect between what the visible level of effort implies you've done, and what you actually have to do.

It's going to be interesting to see how our filters get rewired for this visually-impressive-but-otherwise-slop abundance.

[kykat]

My prediction is that reputation will be increasingly important, certain credentials and institutions will have tremendous value and influence. Normal people will have a hard time breaking out of their community, and success will look like acquiring the right credentials to appear in the trusted places.

[b00ty4breakfast]

That's been the trajectory for at least the last 100 years, an endless procession of certifications. Just like you can no longer get a decent-paying blue collar job without at least an HS diploma or equivalent, the days of working in tech without a university education are drying up and have been doing so for a while now.

[lotsofpulp]

The recent past was a nice respite from a strict caste system, but I guess we’re going back.

[cbm-vic-20]

This isn't new- it's been happening for decades.

[jbreckmckye]

Maybe my expensive university degree was worth it after all

[yoyohello13]

I have a sci-fi series I've followed religiously for probably 10 years now. It's called the 'Undying Mercenaries' series. The author is prolific, like he's been putting out a book in this series every 6 months since 2011. I'm sure he has used ghost writers in the past, but the books were always generally a good time.

Last year though I purchased the next book in the series and I am 99% sure it was AI generated. None of the characters behaved consistently, there was a ton of random lewd scenes involving characters from books past. There were paragraphs and paragraphs of purple prose describing the scene but not actually saying anything. It was just so unlike every other book in the series. It was like someone just pasted all the previous books into an LLM and pushed the go button.

I was so shocked and disappointing that I paid good money for some AI slop I've stopped following the author entirely. It was a real eye opener for me. I used to enjoy just taking a chance on a new book because the fact that it made it through publishing at least implied some minimum quality standard, but now I'm really picky about what books I pick up because the quality floor is so much lower than in the past.

[SCdF]

Yes, I have not bought a few books after reading their free chapters and getting suspicious.

Honestly: there is SO much media, certainly for entertainment. I may just pretend nothing after 2022 exists.

[simoncion]

If you've some time to burn, write the author and/or his publisher and let them know that the guy's new ghostwriter sucks shit. If this is very seriously making your consider not picking up the next book in the series, be sure to mention that.

If folks just stop purchasing the new books, they can imagine a reason for the lost sales that's convenient for them, but if folks tell them why they stopped purchasing, there's a lot less room for that kind of nonsense.

[Eddy_Viscosity2]

People will build AI 'quality detectors' to sort and filter the slop. The problem is of course it won't work very well and will drown all the human channels that are trying to curate various genres. I'm not optimistic about things not all turning into a grey sludge of similar mediocre material everywhere.

[dimwiddle]

Is there a way to have a social media platform with hand-written letters, sent with ravens? That's AI proofed... for a while at least!

[joncoded]

Exactly, and we will have those who will "game" the "detectors" like they already "game" the social media "algorithms" :\

[Eisenstein]

I believe that a history of written work verified by stylometry will be a viable reputation system.