I was just informed from my boss and HR that my entire profession is being automated away.

[highplainsdem]

70. I'm all in favor of tech that helps writers, and there have been many such changes. A writer Stephen King's age

has benefited from a lot of them.

When he started out, he would have had to type (or have someone type for him) a clean manuscript (redoing a page if there were too many errors rather than a few that could be corrected with white out or correction tape), probably with carbon paper for his own copy. He would have mailed that out with a cardboard backing so the manila envelope didn't get crumpled, and he would have sent it out with an SASE, a self-addressed stamped envelope, so his manuscript could be sent back to him if (1) it didn't sell, in which case getting it back in good enough shape to submit elsewhere was important to avoid retyping, or (2) the editor could return it after marking changes they wanted.

Editors, if they paid decently at all, did NOT want simultaneous submissions - did not want to waste their time reading and maybe jotting down editorial changes they'd request, only to find out the manuscript had already sold elsewhere. They wanted to see a clean typed manuscript that didn't look like it had already been sent elsewhere.

That need for a clean typed manuscript probably reduced the number of submissions editors got. It required more actual work.

Later editors began to accept photocopies of manuscripts, but they still warned against simultaneous submissions, unless they paid so much less than other markets they were desperate.

Word processors, especially word processing software in PCs, made things sooooo much easier.

But you still needed a decent printer. Editors did not want to ruin their eyes trying to read anything from a dot matrix printer. Inkjet printers were better. Best of all were laser printers, but they weren't cheap. The first laser printer I bought for myself, in the 1980s, cost me $1,200 - equivalent to almost $3,500 today.

And you still had to snail-mail manuscripts. You needed a manuscript.

It's so much easier today, with online submissions.

And ALL that change has been for the better, in terms of giving writers more time for actual writing as opposed to producing manuscripts.

But at least before genAI, actual WRITING was required. Unless someone was stupid/dishonest enough to plagiarize or they had a ghostwriter, you had to come up with the words for the text you were selling.

With genAI, that's no longer necessary. Thanks to AI companies stealing all the writing they could to train their AI, any lazy nitwit with a half-baked idea can give an AI text generator a prompt, and the AI tool will churn something out. What they churn out might contain words the fake writer has never used and might never even have seen before, but some of those nitwits will still try to claim it's THEIR writing because it was their half-baked idea in the prompt, and they'll think they deserve to make money off it, and they'll add to the tsunami of AI slop flooding both editors at traditional publishers and self-publishing platforms.

This is NOT a technological advance - not in any way an improvement - for real writers, editors trying to find good writing, or readers who are going to be offered more and more AI slop.

This is a disaster.

It's also a disaster for teachers trying to teach writing, and for students who - if they use genAI - will miss out on learning both the reasoning and the creativity that learning to write will teach.

But the AI companies don't care. And the non-writers trying to exploit text generators don't care - about either that damage done, or the immeasurably great theft of intellectual property for the initial training of AI.

In some cases AI companies are striking deals with publishers, not because they really want to compensate writers and publishers for the real value of the work that was stolen, but because they hope showing some minor effort to provide some who are being victimized with some trivial compensation will stave off lawsuits and help with PR. And desperate publishers might agree, in the belief that the work will be stolen anyway and they have to strike a deal with a devil who just wants them out of the way and will hasten their demise. And the writers will get hurt most of all.

But hey, there's a legion of fake writers with half-baked ideas and no interest in actual learning and work who will be thrilled with this...until they figure out the AI companies gaining control of publishing don't need fake wannabe writers, either.

At least not if enough consumers are fine with AI slop and don't care if human writers and artists are destroyed.