Even leaving aside the fact that 90% of the slop an “AI” crapped out wouldn’t be worth reading in the first place, of what value is the culture of absolute solipsism you’re proposing?
I would think we’re all rather beyond the age of asking our parents to tell us a story about a pretty unicorn and being satisfied with whatever meandering narrative they supply — is that really all you think books are? There’s no meaning the author was conveying, no value in a shared culture experiencing and interpreting the same work and building a common understanding, this can all just be effortlessly replaced by endless atomized autogenerated slop for piggies?
Plenty of human-written books are bad. There are already genres where the way to get rich seems to be to crap out a narrative that hits the right keywords (or claim that you have - who's going to check?), tick the right representation checkboxes, pay the right influencers and bot farms to make it go viral on social media, and tada, there's your bestseller. While AI-generated books are not very good at the moment, there's nothing that inherently makes them better or worse than human-written books; ultimately it's the content that counts.
I've been saying for years that curation is now a bigger problem than creation. AI is only accelerating the existing trend.
AI's gonna need a competent developmental editor, and to be applied incrementally with human decisions and input in between, for at least a while longer (we'll see if it keeps progressing past that—seems likely, but one never knows)
[EDIT] To be clear, it won't need those things to produce a story at all, but AI-assisted stories that have had significant human input applied will be notably better than wholly-AI ones (the kind of on-demand storytelling you're alluding to) for some time yet.
