Do people really find it difficult to understand why someone would use AI to write a book? Because I don’t think being so facile serves this long-overdue conversation.

Yes writing a book is satisfying, meaningful, edifying work. So is building your own house. Not everyone can access the resources and tolerate the discomfort required to do it. Also it takes fucking forever. High risk, low reward.

To thrive in our economy I think many if not most Americans can intuit that the goal is to make the most money possible for the least amount of work possible. Obviously many of us resist this; otherwise we’d be clocking in at Palantir or what have you.

If anything, to “make” books in an hour or so that thousands of people pay $9.99 for and spend more time reading than you spent writing puts you on the winning side of capitalism. Can we not acknowledge that?

I think rather than “why would anyone do this??” the better question to ask would be something like, What does it mean that to publish a book with as little labor as possible is the system working at its efficient best?