Authors are a small cost to publishers. They literally work for free to produce content and afterwards work free again to promote it. There is no better deal in business. The high costs of publishing have little to do with authors and replacing them with LLM content risks a public backlash against the cost of books. Will the public accep…
Authors are a small cost to publishers. They literally work for free to produce content and afterwards work free again to promote it. There is no better deal in business. The high costs of publishing have little to do with authors and replacing them with LLM content risks a public backlash against the cost of books. Will the public accept a mere %10 reduction in the price of books (the authors royalties) that were written by AI? Not likely. They'll want them practically free. Note I am talking about the products of large publishing houses. Independent operations run by one or two people and producing only e-books could get away with it. But if you are printing books, getting rid of authors is a bad idea.
Millions of books are already sold via subscription (eg KU) or for less than a dollar. Amazon eBook royalties are 35%/70%. Their paperback royalties are 60%. That's a noticeable amount at volume. For just one large publisher, a $250m chunk of like for like sales has been sliced from their genre market over the last decade, mostly by eBook self publishing, picked up mostly by KDP. Any opportunity for unit margin increases would be welcomed by a company's shareholders.
As with processed/frozen vs chef-cooked/organic food, readers will pay a premium price for a premium human-written book product. But most won't.
Right now authors bear the cost of formatting e-books and also printing when they sell on Amazon. It's very hard to make money through print books if you use Amazon's service though as you need to price your book high enough to cover costs. Most self-published authors work with printers in China, for example, to lower costs. Amazon shuffles off as much of the cost of producing books to others. Publishers have been complaining about this for years. Anyway, I'm not sure we're disagreeing in much. Amazon might be able to grow it's share of cheap genre fiction ebooks and super low quality paperbacks. It's just not clear LLM's are viable as authors since human fees are a tiny part of publishing costs.
Good points. But traditional publishing remains stuffed full of human-based process friction. Automation of 'manuscript workflow management' may be slow to come, but it will shake things up, as sure as DTP dumped the typist profession, no matter how bad writers still are at typing (or tech).
If LLMs will be able to create passable fiction, then I could just cut out the middleman altogether. Instead of paying a human author to create fiction using LLMs, I could just use an LLM to create my own custom fiction.
But, that's a hypothetical problem at the moment. LLMs can't produce compelling fiction because they don't have a well-developed theory of mind.
That's my point. But, similar to the Turing test, creating fiction doesn't require sentience, consciousness or the practical application of psychology or philosophy. We already happily anthropomorphise animals and robots. It just requires a machine to win a place at the 'imitation game' table. And 'compelling' will continue to remain in the eye of the beholder-cum-buyer.
". . . creating fiction doesn't require sentience, consciousness or the practical application of psychology or philosophy."
Well, technically you're right. LLMs *can* create fiction of some kind. The question is how many people will enjoy reading it. An entertaining novel involves suspense, psychological insight, and unexpected twists and turns. The author has to anticipate the reactions of the readers to some extent, which requires a sophisticated theory of mind. An A.I. program of some kind might be able to do this someday, but it probably won't be an LLM.
I've tried using ChatGPT-4 to write fiction and the results weren't that interesting. ChatGPT is very good at mimicking prose style (e.g., it can produce stuff that sounds like D.H. Lawrence or Edgar Allen Poe), but the writing had no real direction; it just cranked out descriptive paragraphs that didn't tell a story or lead anywhere.
I'm sure somebody will find a way to monetize LLM fiction and it might even be lucrative, but I doubt that LLM-produced novels will rise to the top of the best-seller list any time soon.
But their potential use in automating the publishing pipeline to replace human copy editors, proofreaders etc is no doubt being explored by companies looking to cut costs.
Authors are a small cost to publishers. They literally work for free to produce content and afterwards work free again to promote it. There is no better deal in business. The high costs of publishing have little to do with authors and replacing them with LLM content risks a public backlash against the cost of books. Will the public accept a mere %10 reduction in the price of books (the authors royalties) that were written by AI? Not likely. They'll want them practically free. Note I am talking about the products of large publishing houses. Independent operations run by one or two people and producing only e-books could get away with it. But if you are printing books, getting rid of authors is a bad idea.
Millions of books are already sold via subscription (eg KU) or for less than a dollar. Amazon eBook royalties are 35%/70%. Their paperback royalties are 60%. That's a noticeable amount at volume. For just one large publisher, a $250m chunk of like for like sales has been sliced from their genre market over the last decade, mostly by eBook self publishing, picked up mostly by KDP. Any opportunity for unit margin increases would be welcomed by a company's shareholders.
As with processed/frozen vs chef-cooked/organic food, readers will pay a premium price for a premium human-written book product. But most won't.
Right now authors bear the cost of formatting e-books and also printing when they sell on Amazon. It's very hard to make money through print books if you use Amazon's service though as you need to price your book high enough to cover costs. Most self-published authors work with printers in China, for example, to lower costs. Amazon shuffles off as much of the cost of producing books to others. Publishers have been complaining about this for years. Anyway, I'm not sure we're disagreeing in much. Amazon might be able to grow it's share of cheap genre fiction ebooks and super low quality paperbacks. It's just not clear LLM's are viable as authors since human fees are a tiny part of publishing costs.
Good points. But traditional publishing remains stuffed full of human-based process friction. Automation of 'manuscript workflow management' may be slow to come, but it will shake things up, as sure as DTP dumped the typist profession, no matter how bad writers still are at typing (or tech).
If LLMs will be able to create passable fiction, then I could just cut out the middleman altogether. Instead of paying a human author to create fiction using LLMs, I could just use an LLM to create my own custom fiction.
But, that's a hypothetical problem at the moment. LLMs can't produce compelling fiction because they don't have a well-developed theory of mind.
That's my point. But, similar to the Turing test, creating fiction doesn't require sentience, consciousness or the practical application of psychology or philosophy. We already happily anthropomorphise animals and robots. It just requires a machine to win a place at the 'imitation game' table. And 'compelling' will continue to remain in the eye of the beholder-cum-buyer.
". . . creating fiction doesn't require sentience, consciousness or the practical application of psychology or philosophy."
Well, technically you're right. LLMs *can* create fiction of some kind. The question is how many people will enjoy reading it. An entertaining novel involves suspense, psychological insight, and unexpected twists and turns. The author has to anticipate the reactions of the readers to some extent, which requires a sophisticated theory of mind. An A.I. program of some kind might be able to do this someday, but it probably won't be an LLM.
I've tried using ChatGPT-4 to write fiction and the results weren't that interesting. ChatGPT is very good at mimicking prose style (e.g., it can produce stuff that sounds like D.H. Lawrence or Edgar Allen Poe), but the writing had no real direction; it just cranked out descriptive paragraphs that didn't tell a story or lead anywhere.
I'm sure somebody will find a way to monetize LLM fiction and it might even be lucrative, but I doubt that LLM-produced novels will rise to the top of the best-seller list any time soon.
True, they're more of a text generation accelerator/author's assistant at the moment, as with this account of Sudowrite usage: https://www.thecreativepenn.com/2023/02/08/how-i-used-generative-ai-tools-for-my-short-story-with-a-demons-eye/
But their potential use in automating the publishing pipeline to replace human copy editors, proofreaders etc is no doubt being explored by companies looking to cut costs.