I might have predicted decades ago that superhuman chess AI would end chess, but the game is more popular than ever. I suppose that the same could be true of fiction. If not, why not?
Sure, and cars can beat human runners under most typical racing conditions.
I might be adding epicycles here but imo in chess and sports the competition itself is what’s exciting (whether you’re watching or playing), whereas in the arts most people care more about the finished product than how the arts ranks or fits in the meta.
Like I happen to care about who’s the best writer in XYZ circumstances and how they compare to others, but I think this is unusual. Has more to do with being someone who enjoys this “meta-game” and fancies himself good at this type of pop literary criticism, than about how much I care about people vs ideas per se.
There might be some subgenres of writing that are majority parasocial (like memoirs, or traumaposting blogs) but weighted by either commericial revenue or literary merit I’d expect in way under half of writing for the primary draw to be parasocial.
In the world when AI is unambiguously better than humans at writing of all sorts and styles, there’s enough economic disruption that I’m hesitant to make positive claims about what incentives will or will not motivate anyone to do anything.
As long as you are not completely alone in preferring human written fiction, the existence of “better” fiction is irrelevant. You are the market, you are the judge, and writers don’t need that large of an audience to supply, if it’s a dedicated one. Many great writers would also write whether they got paid or not, some whether anyone reads it or not, and in an AGI world that could be more true rather than less.
I might have predicted decades ago that superhuman chess AI would end chess, but the game is more popular than ever. I suppose that the same could be true of fiction. If not, why not?
Sure, and cars can beat human runners under most typical racing conditions.
I might be adding epicycles here but imo in chess and sports the competition itself is what’s exciting (whether you’re watching or playing), whereas in the arts most people care more about the finished product than how the arts ranks or fits in the meta.
Like I happen to care about who’s the best writer in XYZ circumstances and how they compare to others, but I think this is unusual. Has more to do with being someone who enjoys this “meta-game” and fancies himself good at this type of pop literary criticism, than about how much I care about people vs ideas per se.
There might be some subgenres of writing that are majority parasocial (like memoirs, or traumaposting blogs) but weighted by either commericial revenue or literary merit I’d expect in way under half of writing for the primary draw to be parasocial.
In the world when AI is unambiguously better than humans at writing of all sorts and styles, there’s enough economic disruption that I’m hesitant to make positive claims about what incentives will or will not motivate anyone to do anything.
As long as you are not completely alone in preferring human written fiction, the existence of “better” fiction is irrelevant. You are the market, you are the judge, and writers don’t need that large of an audience to supply, if it’s a dedicated one. Many great writers would also write whether they got paid or not, some whether anyone reads it or not, and in an AGI world that could be more true rather than less.