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.
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.
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...
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.