Comment by DrewADesign
2 days ago
Bad faith argument. Did the printing press write shitty books? No. It didn’t even write books. Does AI write shitty books? Yes. Constantly. Millions.
Books took exactly the same amount of time to write before and after the printing press— they just became easier to reproduce. Making it easier to copy human-made work and removing the humanity from work are not even conceptually similar purposes.
Nitpick: the press of course did remove the humanity from book-copying work, before that the people copying books often made their own alterations to the books. And had their own calligraphic styles etc.
But my thought was that the printing press made the printed work much cheaper and accessible, and many many more people became writers than had been before, including of new kinds of media (newspapers). The quality of text in these new papers was of course sloppier than in the old expensive books, and also derivative...
Printing a book, either by hand or with printing equipment, is incomparably different to authoring a book. One is creating the intellectual content and the other is creating the artifact. The content of the AI-generated slop books popping up on Amazon by the hundred would be no less awful if it was hand-copied by a monk. The artifact of the book may be beautiful, but the content is still a worthless grift.
What primarily kept people from writing was illiteracy. The printing press encouraged people to read, but in its early years was primarily used for Bibles rather than original writing. Encouraging people to write was a comparatively distant latent effect.
Creating text faster than you can write is one of the primary use cases of LLMs— not a latent second-order effect.
Initially the printing press resulted in LESS writers, because people just copies others works. In fact, they had to establish something called intellectual property law in order to encourage people to write again.
It was the other way around. See eg https://www.maximum-progress.com/p/the-printing-press-nfts-a... - "In 1843 alone 14,000 new works were published in Germany, close to the publication rate today in per capita terms." .. "Publishers knew that once a manuscript was out in public it could be cheaply copied by other printing press owners, so instead they sought out new manuscripts in pursuit of a first mover advantage on publishing. In addition, they created fancy special editions for wealthy customers to differentiate their product from what other printers could easily copy with mass market paperbacks."
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