We're already at the point where, for the vast majority of novelists (which is where I'm most knowledgeable), writing is not a primary source of income. With the exception of the very few bestsellers who are super-famous, most have other jobs or a spouse to provide income (and, in the US, health insurance). So most authors aren't doing it only for the money.

It's also hard to imagine a situation where authors are paid when AI ingests or remixes their work; this is already not the case. Legal cases have slapped down _piracy_, but it seems that _training_ is considered fair use, so long as the AI company buys at least one copy of the book.

There's no reason for the AI companies to bother paying anyone for their work.

But let's ignore all of that.

I write so I can tell the story. I write so other people can enjoy it -- so I can gross them out, or shock them with a clever plot twist they should've seen coming, or make them think about something differently, or let them have a moment of heartwarming joy, or just escape into a wild adventure of my own imagining. Otherwise, I'd just say "Odysseus had a long trip home" and be done.

If nobody reads my book unless it's been processed by an AI and mashed up with the writing of others... then nobody's actually reading _my_ book, and I see no purpose to throwing my work into the grinder.

Disclosure: I write novels, have one published, and plan to publish more, but I very much do not make a living off of them. Most of the (unlikely) futures in which I rely on writing income alone assume massive savings from my current tech job.

If your world only revolves around money and nothing else and you have no interest in, I don't know, actual contact with your readers, then why not, I guess...

But I think even purely economically this won't work: For starters, who would set the price for your book?

Your book would become an exchangeable commodity, with the "purchase decision" done solely by AIs (and their companies), not the "readers". The financial success of your book would depend on whatever criteria AIs use to decide about including your content or not, not your (human) readers (or what's left of them). As with most commodities, this would enter a "race to the bottom" that would probably leave you with pennies - or steer your writing into a direction that you were never intending to go in.

Just a question: In such a system, why would you still write the book yourself and not have an LLM write it?

Most people who write novels do so because there’s something (a story, an idea) that they want to communicate to other humans. Sure, you can write a novel for purely commercial purposes, but most people who write do so for the love of storytelling. Which is an inherently social and interpersonal activity.

I can only see this making sense for reference books, not novels. I don’t know why an AI would ever be bringing up a novel that no one has read. As it stands, it’s only going to bring up novels that I’m asking about or asking for ideas on what to read. Having it tell me to read random novels no other human has read is not valuable, that’s just an ad for a book that probably isn’t any good.

Novels are made for people, not for AI.

I also don’t know where this payment model comes from. These AI companies have all shown that they can and will use the collective works of humanity to train, while giving nothing back to the writers, artists, scientists, developers, etc who created it all.

That should have already happened. The AI companies should had first created a market where people submit there stuff to be included in the training. It would have been slower progress but it would have been better for public adoption and their own reputation. I've heard people are getting paid now, not sure, but they definitely yoinked all the content without permission, when it could have been an entire market around it.

So yeah, I think that's a good idea, and why I want AI to stay away from being used for one-shot creative output. Luckily that is still not very good, at least not for unique and creative applications.