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Human artistic successes are indicative of survivorship bias. AI just makes this more visible because the productivity is so much higher.
It also amplifies the effect through the amplified productivity. That is, you can achieve greater success with a lower mean quality, because instead of having a thousand humans write a thousand works and then pick the best one, you can write ten million AI works and then pick the best one, allowing you to select more standard deviations up. Which means that there will be literal millions of AI slop work of very low average quality just in the hope that one will rise to the top.
This makes discovery a lot harder and waste more time from pioneers reading slop in order to find the good stuff.
I’m not a ‘math wizard’, but something about this seems off. Shakespeare didn’t write one hundred plays and then choose the best few dozen to publish. He developed his playwriting ability until he was at a skill level to consistently put out good content. If AI lacks the underlying skills to create good works, then should we expect even one in a trillion of its works to be as good as Macbeth, or should we regard the creation of such a thing as physically impossible unless underlying conditions are met? It seems like it’s less a matter of statistical probability than physical possibility.
Survivorship and selection bias works on the population level as well as the individual work level. How many hundreds or thousands of playwrights existed in Shakespeare's time? And yet most are forgotten, while the best of the best (Shakespeare's works) are what are remembered and enjoyed and studied.
Also, there definitely is variation within an individual author's works. How much time and effort do people spend studying "Two Gentlemen of Verona"? Is it actually a good work? Personally I haven't read it, but given how little it's talked about or ranked on people's lists, my guess is that it's mid and the only reason anyone ever talks about it at all is because Shakespeare is famous for his other plays. That is, Shakespeare wrote 38 plays and, while his skill was well above average, and therefore his average work is higher than the average play, they're not all Hamlet. But one of them was. He didn't write a hundred plays and then only publish the best, he wrote 38 and then published them all and then got famous for the best few (which in turn drove interest in the rest above what they actually deserve on their own merits).
In-so-far as AI is likely to vary less in "author" talent since whatever the most cutting edge models are will be widely copied, we should expect less variance in the quality of individual works. But there will still be plenty of variation, especially as people get better at finding the right prompts and fine-tuning to create different deliberate artistic styles (and drop that stupid em-dash reliance).
I tentatively agree that there are limits to this. If you took AI from 5 years ago there is no way it would ever produce anything publishably good. If you take AI from today I don't think it could ever reach the upper tier of literature like Shakespeare or Terry Pratchett. However this statistical shotgun approach still allows one to reach above their station. But the top 1% of AI work today might be able reach Twilight levels, and if each of those has a 1 in million chance of going viral and being the next Twilight, then you only need to publish a hundred million of them and hope you get lucky. Clearly we've observed that you don't need to be Shakespeare in order to get rich, its as much about catching the public interest and catering to (and being noticed by) the right audience as it is about objective quality, and that's much more a numbers game.
I do think that AI lacks the proper level of coherence and long-term vision to properly appeal to a targeted audience the way something like Twilight or Harry Potter does. But a human curator (or possibly additional specialized AI storyboard support) could probably pick up the slack there (although at that point it's not quite the shotgun approach, more of a compromise between AI slopping and human authorship, and mixes the costs and benefits of both)
Shakespeare and his contemporaries had to pay an upfront cost that was significantly higher. They had to write (already a rare skill) a manuscript and had convince at least one theatre manager to read their work. This means their innate skill had to be high enough that their first (or second, or third if they were persistent) play was of sufficient quality already.
A modern ShAIkespeare can produce and publish a new play every weekend. We need Lord StrAInge's Men, a troupe of AIs that can read, review and dismiss AI slop just as quickly as it's written instead of relying on avid human readers.
An AI that can accurately identify and dismiss slop is 90% of the way towards producing quality content, since you could just build the generative AI with that skill built in (and train them on it).
Which is to say, maybe in 10 years this will be a mostly non-issue. If they reach the point where they can generate thousands of genuinely high quality and entertaining stories, I'll happily consume the content. I think "human authorship" as a background principle is overrated. It has some value, but that value is overrated in comparison to the actual inherent value of the work. The problem with slop is that it's not very good, regardless of whether it's generated by humans or AI. Once it's good then we're good.
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Some writers, Stephen King comes to mind first, are famous for writing prolifically and then substantially editing down their products. Although maybe not quite that ratio.
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Not true. Human works that find great success usually do so based on their merits as artistic products. AI works that find success usually do so as flukes. Put out millions of AI created light novels and occasionally one of them will slip through some quality filtering service. Their success is predicated on the inability of these services to filter quality 100%, and they enjoy an advantage over the shittiest of human works in this regard based only on the scale of their output.
I've seen enough experiments showing successful art and music are mostly random to think this is definitely not true.
People walk through an art gallery and are asked to rate their favourite pieces. It's like an even split.
When you mix in "experts" to tell people whether the art is good or bad, the random walk disappears and everybody just agrees with them.
You're describing three hundred years of the publishing industry.
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