It was certainly illegal and morally questionable.
So far there’s no sign that authors are being put out of work, but the internet, social media and low end book stores like Amazon kindle are being flooded with LLM slop, which is its own form of deep cultural damage.
No long-form writing I’ve seen is anything approaching even a genre potboiler standard. It’s still aimless, filled with contradiction and cliche and in that peculiar breathless teenager style that LLMs affect.
This - "So far there’s no sign that authors are being put out of work"
is a contradiction to this - "but the internet and low end book stores like Amazon kindle are being flooded with LLM slop."
I'm not sure there there are labor statistics to look at but it seems impossible that the coming-into-existance of a tool that generates mass amounts of cheap product, with zero skill required, in a field wouldn't displace skilled workers in that field.
Why would it be impossible? You're discounting the most probable case, which is that the AI writing is not a substitute for a skilled writer.
Edit: Turns out both Judge Alsup and Judge Chhabria agree that this is not obvious and would need to be defended. Here's Chhabria's statement on the evidence for market dilution:
> As for the potentially winning argument—that Meta has copied their works to create a product that will likely flood the market with similar works, causing market dilution—the plaintiffs barely give this issue lip service, and they present no evidence about how the current or expected outputs from Meta’s models would dilute the market for their own works.
When the plaintiffs don't even attempt to argue the point, that's pretty telling.
It certainly makes it harder to discover human authors, because stores are flooded with plausible but terrible books from morons using LLMs to generate text modelled on other books that are doing well. I don't think that is 'displacing' human authors though, which implies replacing with equivalents?
I'd say it has displaced people like photographers and illustrators more, as businesses are willing to use free generation to replace illustrations/decoration that they didn't value very much in the first place, and are more forgiving of the slop that LLMs produce (you see this in low-end advertising a lot now).
Strange that they are being used to replace many of the things we value in life with low-quality imitations of human work.
You think LLMs will put authors out of work? I certainly hope not, given the quality of product they currently produce. If they produced genuinely creative and interesting work it'd be more likely and I wouldn't really mind, but there's no sign of that so far. We are so so far from LLMs competing with humans in writing anything longer than a few paragraphs.
Only a moron in a hurry would think that the output of LLMs currently can replace human authors spending a few years writing a book.
what? there is _definitely_ evidence that writers are being put out of work. writing is extremely competitive, and very very very few authors are able to make a living writing and publishing novel creative works. many make their living by applying their writing skills towards journalism, marketing, corporate copy etc, all of which are under significant pressure from AI _already_. the writers that i know firsthand all report that their work lives have been turned upside down in the past couple of years.
if you don't see the signs that authors are already being put out of work, then you need to get out of your bubble.
We've switched from authors (novels and non-fiction books) to writers here. That's a very different question.
Sure if you include writers writing for business, translators etc who were never very valued by business, there has been a huge impact already, because business is willing to accept shoddy results if they are good enough and put up with mistakes and poor style. That low end of generating content has definitely been impacted, for example in social media as I mentioned LLMs have replaced a lot of 'writers' who generated filler text for content advertising.
> if you don't see the signs that authors are already being put out of work, then you need to get out of your bubble.
If it's so obvious, it shouldn't be so hard to articulate specifics. Maybe you can name just one author?
Being a writer was always a terrible profession for making money and having stable work. In my observations, AI is incapable of writing in the way a skilled author can -- what AI will replace is jobs working on small blurbs, promotional posters, and summaries. But those aren't really authors; I'm not sure if we care that the person employed to summarize novels at readers digest is now being replaced by an AI.
And that's why specifics matter. So much of the discourse is emotionally charged, and people imagine details that are not there. What I'd like to do is bring the details into the light.
So, does anybody reading this anywhere on this site have any information on any author that made money as a full-time writer that is now unemployed because their work has been replaced by AI? I'm not talking about the industry being upended. I'm a software engineer and my industry has been upended, but that has not resulted in job loss as much as it has changing what the profession does. Are authors in a different position than software engineers in this regard? Or are they truly just losing their jobs as they're mass replaced by AI? I haven't seen any evidence of the latter, which is why I'm asking.
Betelbuddy · · focus · HN ↗
grey-area · · focus · HN ↗
So far there’s no sign that authors are being put out of work, but the internet, social media and low end book stores like Amazon kindle are being flooded with LLM slop, which is its own form of deep cultural damage.
No long-form writing I’ve seen is anything approaching even a genre potboiler standard. It’s still aimless, filled with contradiction and cliche and in that peculiar breathless teenager style that LLMs affect.
class3shock · · focus · HN ↗
is a contradiction to this - "but the internet and low end book stores like Amazon kindle are being flooded with LLM slop."
I'm not sure there there are labor statistics to look at but it seems impossible that the coming-into-existance of a tool that generates mass amounts of cheap product, with zero skill required, in a field wouldn't displace skilled workers in that field.
- <a href="https://www.economist.com/leaders/2026/09/24/dont-let-ai-kill-the-author" rel="nofollow">https://www.economist.com/leaders/2026/09/24/dont-let-ai-kil... - <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/2026/09/ai-authors-impersonating-writers-amazon/688709/" rel="nofollow">https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/2026/09/ai-authors-im... - <a href="https://fortune.com/2026/09/14/ai-slop-books-amazon-marketplace-publishing-human-authors/" rel="nofollow">https://fortune.com/2026/09/14/ai-slop-books-amazon-marketpl...
rpdillon · · focus · HN ↗
Edit: Turns out both Judge Alsup and Judge Chhabria agree that this is not obvious and would need to be defended. Here's Chhabria's statement on the evidence for market dilution:
> As for the potentially winning argument—that Meta has copied their works to create a product that will likely flood the market with similar works, causing market dilution—the plaintiffs barely give this issue lip service, and they present no evidence about how the current or expected outputs from Meta’s models would dilute the market for their own works.
When the plaintiffs don't even attempt to argue the point, that's pretty telling.
orbisvicis · · focus · HN ↗
grey-area · · focus · HN ↗
grey-area · · focus · HN ↗
I'd say it has displaced people like photographers and illustrators more, as businesses are willing to use free generation to replace illustrations/decoration that they didn't value very much in the first place, and are more forgiving of the slop that LLMs produce (you see this in low-end advertising a lot now).
Strange that they are being used to replace many of the things we value in life with low-quality imitations of human work.
malfist · · focus · HN ↗
Things don't happen overnight. The first time an automobile was rolled off a factory floor drovers and horses weren't all put out of work.
grey-area · · focus · HN ↗
Only a moron in a hurry would think that the output of LLMs currently can replace human authors spending a few years writing a book.
snappy173 · · focus · HN ↗
if you don't see the signs that authors are already being put out of work, then you need to get out of your bubble.
grey-area · · focus · HN ↗
Sure if you include writers writing for business, translators etc who were never very valued by business, there has been a huge impact already, because business is willing to accept shoddy results if they are good enough and put up with mistakes and poor style. That low end of generating content has definitely been impacted, for example in social media as I mentioned LLMs have replaced a lot of 'writers' who generated filler text for content advertising.
rpdillon · · focus · HN ↗
If it's so obvious, it shouldn't be so hard to articulate specifics. Maybe you can name just one author?
Being a writer was always a terrible profession for making money and having stable work. In my observations, AI is incapable of writing in the way a skilled author can -- what AI will replace is jobs working on small blurbs, promotional posters, and summaries. But those aren't really authors; I'm not sure if we care that the person employed to summarize novels at readers digest is now being replaced by an AI.
And that's why specifics matter. So much of the discourse is emotionally charged, and people imagine details that are not there. What I'd like to do is bring the details into the light.
So, does anybody reading this anywhere on this site have any information on any author that made money as a full-time writer that is now unemployed because their work has been replaced by AI? I'm not talking about the industry being upended. I'm a software engineer and my industry has been upended, but that has not resulted in job loss as much as it has changing what the profession does. Are authors in a different position than software engineers in this regard? Or are they truly just losing their jobs as they're mass replaced by AI? I haven't seen any evidence of the latter, which is why I'm asking.