I was kind of trying to become an author, in my case a writer, and I spent a lot of time perfecting my style and polishing my chapters, and studying the novels I read to write well and interestingly. But a month ago I finally gave up when, after studying the material and asking other people, I realized that I had no chance.
And if there is a chance, then for a year or several to become the author of AI, and I did not want to stoop to such a level, for me it is the greatest shame and insult. Alas, soon there will be much more real art in the comments than in these generated empty shells.
Yeah, I’m damn offended, and yeah, I think I’ve made a post like this before, but now I just want to have a heart-to-heart talk, and now I’m damn hurt, and I keep writing, and I don’t even know why, but I feel like I have to.
Yes, unfortunately, in addition, I am not a native English speaker, so this post may read strangely or stupidly, alas, but I apologize.
The reality is that statistically you are more likely to win $1 million in the lottery than to become an author in the US who can live on their income from writing fiction. It does still happen but the people who’s work leads them to become full time authors are extraordinarily lucky, talented, hard working, AND again, lucky.
So you have to write for the joy of writing and expect to have a day job. And if that writing makes money, that’s great and you should keep doing as much of it as you can. But please accept that it’s not going to be your income driver for the foreseeable future.
Because of AI, I will probably never be able to make a decent living from this, or at all. Before AI, there was still some chance, but now it is simply destroyed, and it does not matter if I spend 10 years or less, my creativity will not be needed by anyone if AI does it faster, cheaper and also better.
But your thoughts are quite relevant for the current time.
This was true even in the 90s I’m sad to say. It’s one of the reason I didn’t pursue fiction writing as a career 30 years ago. I don’t think AI will replace any working authors because poorly written slop and computer generated text are both a lot older than today’s LLMs craze.
The field of authorship has been in a slow decline for a long, long time. It has a lot to do with the way the book Publishing industry was run in the middle and later half of the 20th century. We stopped valuing authority and authors and it became a less valuable occupation. This happened to teachers and a lot of other thought-based fields too.
Oh, how damn right you are, I just remember some cult writers of the past who lived no better than ordinary workers, if not poorly on the brink of survival.
Only in the future, thanks to these AIs, even earning a penny from writing will be a miracle even for the talented and lucky.
I don’t think that’s the case. Most people don’t want to consume AI-generated content, especially books. Pretty sure there aren’t any really popular books that are AI-generated. Just some bottom-tier slop on sites like Amazon, made to fool people into believing they’re real books. If you’re competing with those, you wouldn’t have been successful anyway. Being a successful author has always been very hard and involves a lot of luck.
Well, how to say in the future no amount of effort will be enough. Only having a cult status and a niche will help, otherwise you will have to go to a regular job or even die of hunger if you have serious health problems.
The final stage of capitalism seems to scream: make as much money as possible at any cost, no matter who suffers in the process.
Yeah I’ve given up on making a living off of art. I’ve pivoted to trying to just share it for free as much as I can. Honestly I think big corporate studios would have way less of a market if community art was more of a thing. It’d be nice to have local art and culture around rather than soulless corpo slop. I think those communities would process the world in a healthier way.
I hear you though. It really really sucks ass that literally no one (if you round) gets to make a living doing art. And (if you don’t round) those that do get to make a living on it generally come from a very small subset of the available cultures.
This is a good thing to be mad about. It affects how everyone sees the world.
Honestly, I wanted to make money from art so that I would have more free time to make my works as bright and high-quality as possible. Otherwise, when you come home from work, you are already such a vegetable that even writing a small bad piece of text is already a miracle.
But the idea of making art free sounds strange to me, or can you make it free and then hope for donations?
Donations would be great. I dream of mine would be to get a large enough following to live a decent life off of donations and just make art. Kinda far fetched, but it would be great.
I know one person I’ve found that did that is Chris from Airwindows. His art is a bit technical, but he makes interesting audio software and shares it all open source. I donate a bit to him.
There are examples of people who have become so iconic in their own niche that after decades they have five to ten thousand dollars a month on Patreon.
But with donations it’s very difficult, you need to create something damn unique, with your own unique voice and even humor. But yes it is possible, although because of AI this opportunity is slowly closing.
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Oh, it’s the harsh truth, there’s nothing to say about it. There used to be a tiny chance, on a miracle level, and now there’s not even that.
Either you work for free, like a [BAD WORD], or you’ll be thrown out in the trash like a mongrel.
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Well, there’s nothing particularly surprising about that, I’ve already learned the hard way what a hell it is, if anything, I write light novels because I’ve received information that regular books or just novels are a very bad idea and few people can make money from them, and with light novels the chances are higher, but they’re still shitty, and because of AI people have become suspicious now, so you have to be damn unique and talented to get noticed by even a few people.
In short, it looks like I’ll have to find my niche instead of chasing money and popularity.
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Yes, I think everyone who wants to do art in our time simply has to know how business works, otherwise, alas, most likely nothing will come of it.
And you are also right about creating a niche, I forgot that proverb, if you want to shine among the bright stars, to be noticed, you will have to at least change your color to a unique.
And let’s give a bonus excerpt: an experienced mercenary was walking through an overgrown forest, he had not been able to find an exit to any path for several days, although he was warned not to go deep into the forest on Monday, but he didn’t care because he heard that the same dryad milker had finally woken up and he, as a brave warrior, could not miss such a rare opportunity…
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