This is a good point. If you ignore the fact that this is the ubiquitous understanding of what AI is and then envision a different, more charitable and far less popular definition of it, their point about ablism becomes more possibly arguable
I don't think any of them would think that "Using AI to help you write a 50k word short story" would necessarily indicate telling ChatGPT to just write the story for you based on a short description.
> If you ignore the fact that this is the ubiquitous understanding of what AI is and then envision a different, more charitable and far less popular definition of it, their point about ablism becomes more possibly arguable
I am pointing out that this is not, in my experience, a ubiquitous understanding of what AI is.
This is separate from what the impacts of AI are.
But I'll play and switch topics - a huge portion of publishers stopped accepting direct submissions from authors decades before AI was a thing, because of all of the human-written drivel.
If you want to be a published author and not self-publish (which I would argue is often a better situation than going with a lot of these smaller independent publishers to begin with), get an agent. You don't even have to be a particularly good author for this part - just invested enough to find agents that works in the space you are writing in and chatting with a few. They'll get your manuscript into the hands of publishers. That's their job.
We already created a whole profession pre-AI that largely exists to filter out the bottom of the barrel stuff because it was already overwhelming publishers.
I do not understand your point about agents other than I’m assuming that you’re pointing out that the flood of garbage has made their jobs more difficult as well.
Anyway, it does not make any sense to believe that humans are especially not-lazy when it comes to generative AI in particular.
https://www.vox.com/24141648/ai-ebook-grift-mushroom-foragin...
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Willy's_Chocolate_Experience
https://variety.com/2024/film/opinion/megalopolis-trailer-fa...
https://www.forbes.com/sites/mattnovak/2023/05/27/lawyer-use...
https://www.businessinsider.com/chatgpt-essays-college-cheat...
Your comment that I was replying to was literally about the "ubiquitous understanding of what AI is" in context of a definition. I stated that, in my experience, the definition and understanding of what AI is not ubiquitous, and that even the relatively uninformed know that AI has a spectrum of use cases. Neither of us have data, but you've now moved to discussing the quantitative amount of AI content you have exposure to and not whether or not people believe AI is only useful for mass producing garbage. They're different measures and you're conflating them, all while bringing up other tangentially related points.
Which brings us to your next line:
> I do not understand your point about agents
This is in direct response to another quote of yours:
> The enormous wave of AI-generated drivel that caused publishers and contests to pause accepting new work stands as evidence otherwise.
My point is that the norms for the publishing industry were to not allow direct submissions from authors to begin with, long predating AI. Specifically because the vast majority of submitted works were garbage - most of what humans write is not worth publishing, either. Even in the subset of independent publishing houses that do generally accept open submissions, the vast majority never get more than a cursory glance, and a significant portion of what does get published comes through an agent. The idea that publishers, independent or otherwise not accepting open submissions for manuscripts is some significant change or even a problem just ignores the realities of the industry. Any human serious about getting published should have always been trying to work with an agent to begin with - the commission fees are a bargain for the work they do, even beyond just having the in with the publishers to even get something looked at. They get paid out of your royalty so it's in their best interest to help you not only sign a deal, but also help you negotiate the best deal you can. The good ones will also have all of the stats and metrics around sales in your target demographic, etc. so they bring data to the negotiating table.
(I would note, however, that I'd highly recommend anyone who is looking at a deal with a smaller publisher to also examine the pros and cons of self-publishing - indie publishers don't have the sort of budget and reach that the giants of the world do, and depending on your appetite and ability for taking on some of the tasks they would handle, it might be worth doing so to keep more of the money in your own pocket.)
This entire hype cycle is based around that concept. Billions of dollars have been invested in that idea. Every day consumers and investors are pitched an Artificial Intelligence that can do your job, and in order to keep the money flowing the purveyors of this software blur the line between today’s capabilities and some vague greater future capability.
If your contention is “my friends and I are completely immune to marketing and this means that everyone else is too” then I’ve got kind of bad news for you about both the world writ large and your particular corner of it.
I am not sure if you saw any of the several very public examples of people using these tools in exactly the way they’ve been pitched to, so I’ll link to my post above: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41440126
And again I still have no idea what you’re talking about re: agents and the publishing industry in general. The industry was able to work with a signal-to-noise ratio of [x] pre-AI and that means it should work with a ratio of ∞x because agents exist? This is like saying that because the human body has a liver and has processed 2-3 units of alcohol per hour for all of history that humans can survive on a diet of 1,000 units per hour.
I don’t mean to sound rude but “the influx of garbage has no impact” reasoning is indistinguishable from gibberish to me. It may as well be a cat typing out an equal number of letters by walking across a keyboard in terms of how it makes sense in the real world.