> Why do you say people have to do it?

Gotta eat, yo

Somehow people made enough to eat before LLMs became all the rage a couple years ago. I suspect people are still making enough to eat without having to use LLMs.

The existence of LLMs in the market will push real wages down and then the people currently making a living we be faced with three main choices. Choice 1 - embrace the chaos and start using LLMs to help you work so you can churn out more cOnTeNt to survive. Choice 2 - don't embrace the chaos by starting to use LLMs and just work more hours of the day to match the output of the machine. Choice 3 - leave writing and either join another profession or start delivering for Uber.

If you find yourself in a situation where you write one book at the same time as your peers are writing ten, how can you keep up? Also how can you justify to yourself not using it if nobody around you seems to value that, and even worse, is pushing you to actually use it? I find it hard to find a reason why you would. Unless we see a super strong reader revolution that collectively decides to shun AI and pay more money for all-human books.

Read that last sentence and tell you think that’s reasonable and likely to happen?

What you're describing here is actually a much more broad problem in the book industry, in my opinion. Almost every book written today is written with only one goal in mind, selling as many copies as possible.

People don't have to use LLMs (they don't seem to be AI yet) because they can simply choose not to. For authors, write books that you want to write because you believe you have a story to tell. Worry about perfecting your stories and enjoy the process of writing, don't be an author just for the sales. Once you peek behind the curtain and learn the economics of the book industry, you'll realize there's very little opportunity for making enough cash to even worry about shotgunning a mountain of LLM books into the world anyway.