I think we should require professionals to disclose whether or not they use AI.

Imagine you’re an author and you pay an editor $3000 and all they do is run your manuscript through ChatGPT. One, they didn’t provide any value because you could have done the same thing for free; and two, if they didn’t disclose the use of AI, you wouldnt even know your novel had been fed into one and might be used by the AI for training.

If you live anywhere that has extreme temperatures, your car will last longer if you park it inside. Bonus, you don’t have to scrape the snow off and sit there idling for 10 min to warm it up in the winter.

So if I walked into a restaurant that specialized in a certain cuisine (choosing the right one out of hundreds is a skill, right?) and wrote down a list of ingredients, and the restaurant made me a meal with those ingredients according to however the restaurant functions (nobody can see into the kitchen, after all), does this make me a chef?

The part that isn’t mentioned in this article is the onus of marketing. Now that anyone can self publish with almost no overhead, more than a million books are published every year. How many of those even get noticed? Sometimes it feels like people see the same 10-20 books on the bestseller list (which is gameable btw) and think that’s all there is to read.

These days, traditional publishers don’t do any marketing on behalf of authors unless they feel it’s a sure thing, similar to how they give out advances. If you are already famous or have large social media following, you’re far more likely to get an advance or a marketing effort. Everyone who self publishes, and even most who are traditionally published, have to do their own marketing. Most writers are not marketers, and this is where they fail, no matter how good their book might be.

Personally, I think the big publishers will collapse soon and the whole industry might move to a subscription model ala Spotify. That would probably be worse for writers, but no one seems to be able to come up with a solution that makes book writing a more viable career.