"A non-fiction writer friend of mine "wrote" a novel last year using AI as a goof. It was, well, awful. But he put it online to see what would happen. A year and a half later, it's still bringing in a few thousand dollars a month."
The only surprising thing about that is that one product generates so much money - care to share the platform it was published on?
Your friend sounds very much like one of mine - a musician and vocalist, they agonise over every bar, every phrase, redone over and over until it's perfect. And the result is amazing, I admit. But the truth is that "amazing" is really only relevant to other musicians and true aficionados of their genre - many of whom are musicians anyway. To everyone else, who just wants to listen to a nice song, their most basic first attempt is more than adequate.
I suspect the same applies to writers. Plot structure, characters, pacing, edited into perfection - anything less is grossly inadequate to the professional wordsmith, but the vast majority of their audience just wants to read a story in the genre that interests them.
Galling to the true artist, I know, and there will always be people who prefer genuinely human-produced material simply because it is human made. But most people are just happy to get their fix of whatever genre floats their boat. Plebs, my friend calls them, while they bemoan their wasted effort.
I call them willing, if undiscerning customers. Give them what they want with minimum effort and maximum profit. There is nothing to stop our friends from spending hours on their latest project, sweating blood over details, while an LLM pays the bills with minimally adequate material that keeps the plebs coming back for more.
The very idea is heresy to them, of course. But LLMs are here to stay, producing more content, more quickly than a human could dream of. Might as well jump on the bandwagon and make some cash - it's that or be ground beneath its wheels.
