this post was submitted on 01 Jan 2026
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Not super related but a friend of the family I’m visiting stopped by yesterday and was bragging about her son, who recently prompted an LLM to write a fantasy series “in the style of the Witcher”, did some loose editing, and published the books on amazon. She wrapped up with “He did some research and it isn’t even plagiarism!”
I tried to look occupied with something else, but she explicitly called out to me “What do you think?” It took everything I had not to lunch into an anti-AI rant starting with “Actually, his pollution of the literary space syphoning money away from real authors is plagiarism, and here’s why!”
This is a perfect example of why AI will succeed no matter how mind-numbingly stupid it is: it will give people the warm and fuzzies without having to do jack shit. Yes, they "prompted" the LLM. Yes, they "edited" the output, and yes it was published on the biggest fucking commercial website to exist in the history of man. All of those "achievements" pale in comparison to writing an actual book with your own creativity and words and finesse. But since most people can't expect themselves or their offspring to pull off such a difficult feat, this 'second-place' surrogate will do just fine and so we will all pay with what few resources we haven't already annihilated in order to keep the gears grinding a little longer. 🙏
I weep. It was excruciatingly hard already to find someone interested in your work to bring it to market, agents literally drown in awesome books they can't publish profitably. A perfect example - A Confederacy Of Dunces - couldn't find an agent/publisher until after the writer's death, then immediately won a pulitzer. this was the late 60's-70s iirc.
Now add the torrent of new writers with an interconnected world wide network.
Then add the tsunami of AI garbage.
We're going to lose masterpieces because of that tsunami, and instead we'll get AI garbage.
Not just in this field. Crap is drowning out real work in the sciences as well as arts. Both in terms of where funding goes as well as the output. It's a cultural disaster.
scientific publishing was hurting bad (signal to noise and ethics issues) before AI... yeah, this is gonna be really bad.
The web also got bad before AI. The last time you could do a web search and find pages written by enthusiastic experts and hobbyists just sharing what they have to say on the topic of your query was, like, 2005. Then, it flipped. The advent of web ads meant people could easily make money from publishing websites. Sounds great. Except it brought in people whose main goal was making money, not sharing what they love. So then the results of your queries are links to pages covering the topic in the most superficial way and the author is a total nobody if you even know who the author is. There are businesses who figure out what users are searching for and then vomit out websites targeting those popular queries.
The same happened to YouTube. Like 99% of YouTube at this point has to be video essay channels with clickbait videos on superficial topics way longer than they need to be and released on a very frequent schedule. Early YouTube was one hit wonders. Ain't no incentive to publish regularly without ad revenue.
The good was being drown out by the bad before AI. AI is only accelerating it.
The participants in this are so selfishly rotten. I can't imagine I'd be able to sleep at night.
This generation of AI won't "succeed", I will be surprised if any current companies survive the eventual bubble pop. The LLMs will survive obviously as any other useful tech does.
With the amount they have been funded, borrowed and valued at they need to replace a mass of workers with "Agentic AI" to make the trillions of return they expect/need in like 4 years from now. LLMs doing this is a pipe dream, more GPUs won't make an LLM sentient. And every other use case is a losing proposition for these companies.
that doesn't mean it will be bought and read, not in the large numbers, so hold your horses there.
and i have to say i find the story not very trustworthy. i can't imagine that llm would generate such long text and it would make enough sense that editing it wouldn't need more work than writing the text from scratch.
Lol show me one example where ai is decent. It is nowhere close to talented people. Maybe on uni student level
Plus it is not hard to get "published" on Amazon. Literally anyone can.
"Maybe next he can try writting a book! :)" then stare into their soul
Gross. I would be dissapointed if that was my son
Well you'd have to find something to be proud of, and if this is his greatest accomplishment then pickings must be slim indeed...
Assuming he's a kid, that's a bit of a shitty take. Mom likely understands about half of what's going on and just proud he did something that's not watching brain rot YouTube.
If it was indeed a take, maybe. What I wrote is known as a "joke". At least, that's what I call it when I say or write something that I don't necessarily think is true, but I do think is funny to write or say.
As far as the actual act of prompting a "novel" out of an LLM and self publishing on Amazon goes, it's mostly harmless and I'm not mad. He could be doing much worse things with access to an AI model.
Why did you hold back? It would be a lot better to just be honest about it.
And one can be honest and tactful, which really is the best way to get people to think about things.
Absolutely! You don't have to be an asshole just because you are being honest. How you say things matter a lot.
Just let it go and don't even ask for the book title is probably enough between 2 old friends.
I don’t know this woman, but she’s close with people I care about and responding to her bragging about her son with “His actions are terrible and here’s why” would have stirred up drama. I’m not going to convince her that I’m right and her son is wrong in the five minutes we had together.
Sounds like two failed abortions in two generations.