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Notes -
To add onto the other disagreeing replies here:
Consider the technology we use to make a cup of coffee. Once, you had to just boil ground coffee beans (presuming you already knew that you had to roast and grind them) in water. This made okay coffee, but you had to deal with the grounds. Then, we invented the percolator, which sprayed hot water over coffee and made for a crappy end result, but was probably more convenient overall.
Then came the Chemex, which took a bit more manual effort, but made good coffee. Then the almighty drip coffee machine was invented, which carefully dripped just-hot-enough water over the coffee grounds, and the end product was pretty good--maybe not as good as the Chemex, but still good enough, and very convenient. But then, then came along the Keurig K-Cup and all its derivatives, serving us coffee from plastic/aluminum pods. Is the end product as good as the older drip coffee, let alone as good as the Chemex coffee? Again, probably not, at least as far as aficionados would tell you, and yet, the K-cup has proven to be just so damn convenient that I would not be surprised to learn that the drip coffee machine was a declining product type.
This story of convenience beating out quality has happened in many fields of technology, and I feel that AI could play out the same way.
I don't think this analogy works for literature/art. It's already extremely convenient to find a piece of art/music/literature to consume. It takes a couple seconds to download something from the kindle store, you can listen to anything on Spotify within a few seconds, and every painting ever made is on google somewhere. How exactly can you get more convenient than this? I suppose there's an untapped market for specific fan fiction/ slashfics for niche fandoms, but archive of our own and fan fiction.net are chock full of almost anything you would want to read in this regard. There's so much slop out there we don't need AI to make any more of it.
In terms of search and customer service, there is certainly room for convenience, but the AI that I have seen implemented in these fields is simply worse than previous algorithmic (or human) implementations. I'll change my mind when I see something better.
True, there's already enough that's made by humans that one can find easily, and yet, we are getting generative AI pushed in our faces anyways. Every tech corporation is on a crusade to put an AI button within easy reach on UIs and even physical devices.
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This is where I disagree, at least in the realm of weeb fanart (I don't read/write fanfiction, but I imagine it's not dissimilar). There are orders of magnitude more possible niches and tastes than there are artists to fill them, such that I regularly run into concepts that I want to see that I simply cannot find that even one amateur illustrator has created and posted online.
For a concrete example, one common "genre" of fanart is having two characters voiced by the same voice actor cosplaying each other, sometimes in a way that directly copies official art of the character. I wanted to see fanart of Jean from Genshin Impact cosplaying Hitagi from Bakemonogatari (both voiced by Chiwa Saito), and done in a way that copies official promotional Bakemonogatari art, in a style as if drawn by Akio Watanabe (the actual artist who drew the actual official promotional art and did the character designs for the anime). Searching the usual places like Danbooru or Gelbooru or Pixiv, I found that not even a single example of such a cosplay fanart existed, much less one that directly copied official art and in the same style as the official artist. So I made some using Stable Diffusion. I've done similar things with other bits of fanart, based around scenarios I like to imagine they encounter in their fictional everyday lives, or in an alternate universe or whatever; unpopular characters don't get much fanart to begin with, and them doing niche activities is even rarer. Combine that with desire to see it in certain artists' styles, and you get a combinatoric explosion of possibilities that the rather limited number of skilled human illustrators simply can't fill.
I imagine fanfiction could have even more possibilities that go unfulfilled if not for generative AI, due to how many different combinations of character interactions and plot events there are. There's probably a million different Harry Potter/Ron Weasley slashfics on AO3, but does it have one that also sets it in the backdrop of a specific plot that some particular fujoshi wants, with the particular style of writing she wants to read, and with the specific sequence of relationship escalations and speedbumps that she wants to see? Maybe for some fujoshi, but probably not for most.
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