Authorship?

Another day, another point-miss.

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It’s estimated that 500,000 to 1 million books are published each year, and that’s excluding self-published material. The publishing market has become saturated, with the average book selling less than 200 copies. But suppose one person could “generate” not just a few books in a lifetime, but hundreds every year? That’s exactly what a man named Tim Boucher has done. Drafting a whole book takes him less than a workday.

If AI books become more and more common, it might get harder to define “authorship.” While Boucher made the inputs, AI did the generating. So, who’s the author? And what might this do to copyright issues? It might be too early to speculate, but the foundation is being laid for even more saturation of the marketplace and the ambiguity of authorship.

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Saturation is the problem, not AI. Saturation has also happened in scientific “publishing”, where tenure forces a young prof to churn out dozens of Least Publishable Units each year.

Cui bono? As in any gold rush, suppliers bono. Amazon bono. In academia, Springer and Elsevier bono. On the web, Substack and Medium and Reddit bono.

Is there any advantage to the prospectors? Yes, but not monetary. Constant practice is the only way to develop a skill. When you’re practicing FOR AN AUDIENCE, intending the product to be bought and used, the skill develops much faster. When you’re just writing in your own private journal, not intending to be read, development is much slower.

More importantly, good writing may be recognized and cultivated if it’s available in public channels. For this purpose it’s better to avoid copyrights and money.

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There have always been book factories. Dime novels and adventure series and thrillers have been manufactured by boiler rooms of anonymous scribblers for 200 years. Winston Smith’s porn machine wasn’t a parody of the Soviet system or a preview of AI, it was a parody of the authorial industry as Orwell knew it.