I don't think "AI will kill the author", but will AI kill the "professional author"? In the sense that, there are people out there today whose career it is full time to write, but if AI decimates the publishing industry, those opportunities might no longer exist. We might end up in a world where, authors still exist, but it becomes a hobby, and nobody can write as profession anymore.
The mere existence of a powerful tool that can help you write is seductive. And more and more authors will resort to it eventually, if not to completely replace human writing, but to supplement and partially replace human writing. This might mean that 100% hand written prose might become more and more rare, as the majority of articles become a blend of AI and human writing.
I mean the first one has pretty much already happened. It is very rare for a writer to be full time on just their books alone.
The second one is probably going to happen, but I do feel artists are doing themselves a disservice. Art in a lot of ways is made up in the choices we make.
I mean this is not a new phenomenon. It has always been hard to impossible to make a living from writing alone, be it prose or journalism. Historically, most famous writers came from very wealthy families and were only able to be full time writers because they could afford to just live off their estate.
There was a period of time, let's call it the early Stephen King era because he is the epitome, where a person could actually make a living out of publishing work.
Stephen King, Joanne Rowling etc. are unique phenomena, and not by any means representative for the writing profession overall. The vast majority of writers, just like artists and musicians, always had to have a day job. This was the case before AI as well.
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u/Uptons_BJs 1d ago
To me there's really two fears here: