Will the New Chatbots Mean the End of the Novelist?

Over the years I have remarked again and again the reports that writers' wages--and certainly the wages of writers of fiction--have long been collapsing. The result is that, while the chances to "make a living" writing fiction (or anything else) have always been few, the path far from straightforward, the remuneration usually paltry relative to the effort and skill one put in--and one might add, society at large deeply unsympathetic to the travails in question (just ask Balzac, or London)--it does not seem unreasonable to say that matters have just gone on getting worse this way.

Consider, for instance, how even in the middle years of the last century there were writers who scraped by (sometimes did better than scrape by) selling short stories to pulp fiction magazines. Any such thing seems unimaginable today--in an age where writers have it so tough that they are giving away vast amounts of quite readable content, and finding no takers. Meanwhile what could be salable seems an ever smaller category as a good many old reliable genres die (consider action-adventure fiction, for example), and what does sell, if always reliant on authors' platforms and "brand names" to persuade consumers to take a look (just remember the unpleasant truths spoken by Balzac's vile Dauriat), the reliance on those supports would seem to have only grown greater and greater, while one is struck by how new platforms and new brand names are not emerging, hinting at the game being one of milking an aging and dwindling consumer base. (Just look at the paperback rack. The thriller novelists you will find there are pretty much the same ones you saw in the '90s--James Patterson, John Grisham and company, with Tom Clancy and Clive Cussler still writing somehow to go by the bylines.)

Indeed, it seems to me safe to say that the key factor here has been the shift in the relation of supply to demand. People spend a lot less time reading fiction than they used to do, their leisure time increasingly consumed by audiovisual media. (I suspect that in this century far more people have played Tom Clancy video games than read Tom Clancy novels.) Meanwhile, due to the widening of educational opportunity, the number of those who endeavor to become published authors has grown, with publishing fiction, while a nearly impossible task for anyone who does not have fame or nepotism on their side, still seeming more plausible than trying to make it as a writer in the more glamorous but more closed-off film and television industry. Still, whatever one makes of the cause, the result is inarguable--and the writers' troubles may well escalate if what we are hearing about chatbots bears out. Whatever writers, critics or readers may think, publishers--who are first, last and always businessmen, moving literature as they want any other good (again, I refer you to Balzac)--prefer to keep putting out the same old stuff that has had takers in the past, and it is inconceivable that they would balk at replacing writers with chatbots. For the moment, of course, they are barred from taking such a course by the limits of those bots, which are much better at producing short work than long (and truth be told, not producing that very well). However, if we see the progress some expect they may get to the point where a human would only be needed to clean up the result--and maybe do a lot less clean-up in the process--within a decade's time, and publishers will not hesitate to exploit the possibility (such that the Jack Ryan and Dirk Pitt novels of ten years hence, and the Alex Cross novels too, may be churned out by some new iteration of GPT). The only question then would be whether there will still be a big enough audience for those books to make the venture profitable.