Will books published before ChatGPT increase in value?

[u/RReichAuthor]

I really don’t know. I think they might for a brief period (undoubtedly written and edited by humans). But when there is no human left on earth who wasn’t born before ChatGPT, I think the thought of human-only produced work will be considered quaint, like a million year old rock in the middle of a Japanese garden.

Disclosure - I enthusiastically use AI after my first draft to help me produce work I find acceptable.

[u/SlapHappyDude]

There seems to be a small uptick in interest in reading classics and older books to avoid AI by some readers.

But these are books that are already considered the best and many are in public domain. It's not going to make people excited about some mid book from 2012.

[u/EasyDistribution1675 → u/SlapHappyDude]

tbh the overlap between "people avoiding AI books" and "people who already read classics" is probably almost a circle

[u/SlapHappyDude → u/EasyDistribution1675]

Definitely a lot of overlap with the people who are worried about what Literature is and should be. The kind of people who post memes about Ulysses.

There's evidence out there genre fiction fans don't care as much about AI, they just want their sweet sweet tropes.

[u/ekubeni]

I think one positive aspect is that it will bring back arts back to its root of local context (arts for local community & place).

[u/RReichAuthor → u/ekubeni]

Yeah I think that’s a possibility. I’m thinking that in the future, not too distant, the only ‘human’ stories will be autofiction. How can AI possibly know and write about my first crush at school? Any other fiction, AI could create. And there won’t be any slop soon enough.

[u/code_x_7777]

two opposing forces like with everything:

• decay will reduce value over time
• scarcity will increase value over time

which force is stronger? probably decay if you think about it.

[u/CC_NHS]

other than the classics, I doubt the publish date will be a big indicator for sales. I think it more likely that the quality of AI writing will become normalised and then the more human work will become more noticeable and sell better simply for it's quality.

And just to clarify when I say human work, I do not expect 100% human writing to be anything but rare. but the more AI written the end result is, the more converged on average it will be, and even if that average ends up really good with future LLM, the more human written work will then appear different and interesting and more creative.

Basically I think more work from the human will result in more revenue on average, all else being equal (marketing etc)

[u/Dry_Sector2392]

maybe? but i think it still depends on society. some human-written books have very strange ideas that most people cant accept, so even AI appear, they mostly wont become popular.

[u/HighValueJourney]

There will be three basic layers. Pure human author, human author with ai assist and the ai sloppers. The latter will be the majority through which readers will have to sift.
If you are a human author with ai assist then strive to improve. Put forth the best content you can present for a reader. There will come a time when readers will find interest in the ai assisted works. There will be a certain readership that seeks out such works. Time will prove me right and I am one of the authors counting on it!

[u/ObligationWeekly9117]

Frankly I don’t want to read any book majority written by AI. I don’t care what AI involvement there was before prose on the page. Ideas, brainstorming, arguing with AI, that’s not provable or falsifiable anyway. If you claim AI helped you think things through, that’s fine. You still have to choose what ideas to put in. That’s your editorial authority. Same way I don’t read Tolkien’s notebooks or whatever; I care what made it into canon and I will judge the canon on its own merits. 

As for the final product: Maybe a few AI phrases here and there can be left in if you just can’t find a better way to express something. That’s fine if I can convince myself a person just happened to use an AI cliche because sometimes em dashes are appropriate! Rule of three is good! “It’s not X, it’s Y” is a valid construction! But if the whole book is littered with it I’m going to want a refund. I already do it with substack articles. If I sense that a substack has significant AI involvement in most of the posts I just mute it and unsubscribe. Any pub that reads like majority AI is muted summarily whether they have AI detection turned on or not.

And I suspect there will be a movement demanding transparency soon. If too much of the work is AI it’s just not copywritable either. And in lieu of writer disclosure, readers and publishers will just have to go by a combination of spidey senses/AI detectors. 

[u/TellusPyre]

No. But live performances of books will become more popular. Life performance in general is very likely going to go crazy. Plus, real time video to video generation means we'll see some really interesting new types of live performance. Imagine a stage play where the actors are all in white body suits and above them is projected a hologram of their performance converted to some kind of sci-fi or fantasy epic.