I was kind of trying to become an author, in my case a writer, and I spent a lot of time perfecting my style and polishing my chapters, and studying the novels I read to write well and interestingly. But a month ago I finally gave up when, after studying the material and asking other people, I realized that I had no chance.
And if there is a chance, then for a year or several to become the author of AI, and I did not want to stoop to such a level, for me it is the greatest shame and insult. Alas, soon there will be much more real art in the comments than in these generated empty shells.
Yeah, I’m damn offended, and yeah, I think I’ve made a post like this before, but now I just want to have a heart-to-heart talk, and now I’m damn hurt, and I keep writing, and I don’t even know why, but I feel like I have to.
Yes, unfortunately, in addition, I am not a native English speaker, so this post may read strangely or stupidly, alas, but I apologize.
Stopped halfway reading. Wasnt really written interestingly enough
How can a non-native English speaker make things interesting and beautiful for native speakers? Maybe you should try writing for the French in their native language? :3
You right now
Yeah I’ve given up on making a living off of art. I’ve pivoted to trying to just share it for free as much as I can. Honestly I think big corporate studios would have way less of a market if community art was more of a thing. It’d be nice to have local art and culture around rather than soulless corpo slop. I think those communities would process the world in a healthier way.
I hear you though. It really really sucks ass that literally no one (if you round) gets to make a living doing art. And (if you don’t round) those that do get to make a living on it generally come from a very small subset of the available cultures.
This is a good thing to be mad about. It affects how everyone sees the world.
Honestly, I wanted to make money from art so that I would have more free time to make my works as bright and high-quality as possible. Otherwise, when you come home from work, you are already such a vegetable that even writing a small bad piece of text is already a miracle.
But the idea of making art free sounds strange to me, or can you make it free and then hope for donations?
Fuck that, write your book. I’ve never posted a picture online, but I love photography and take tons of photos. I’ve even got paid a few times (more of a tip than bill lol). If you enjoy writing, please don’t quit. And keep in mind we’re also seeing rapid decay of norms in society, you don’t know what the world looks like in 6 months, nevermind 6 years, we’ll always need artists though.
As they say, someone has to create art, otherwise we might drown in this corporate generative garbage in the future.
The reality is that statistically you are more likely to win $1 million in the lottery than to become an author in the US who can live on their income from writing fiction. It does still happen but the people who’s work leads them to become full time authors are extraordinarily lucky, talented, hard working, AND again, lucky.
So you have to write for the joy of writing and expect to have a day job. And if that writing makes money, that’s great and you should keep doing as much of it as you can. But please accept that it’s not going to be your income driver for the foreseeable future.
I think that’s true for the arts in general. Unless you are both extraordinary talented and are able to get lots of people to recognize that talent it’s hard to make a living in the arts. Art is a wonderful thing to be passionate about, and it is an important part of life and society despite how some people tend to downplay its value. It’s rarely stable work. There is a reason why there are tropes like the starving artist or actors waiting tables.
Because of AI, I will probably never be able to make a decent living from this, or at all. Before AI, there was still some chance, but now it is simply destroyed, and it does not matter if I spend 10 years or less, my creativity will not be needed by anyone if AI does it faster, cheaper and also better.
But your thoughts are quite relevant for the current time.
This was true even in the 90s I’m sad to say. It’s one of the reason I didn’t pursue fiction writing as a career 30 years ago. I don’t think AI will replace any working authors because poorly written slop and computer generated text are both a lot older than today’s LLMs craze.
The field of authorship has been in a slow decline for a long, long time. It has a lot to do with the way the book Publishing industry was run in the middle and later half of the 20th century. We stopped valuing authority and authors and it became a less valuable occupation. This happened to teachers and a lot of other thought-based fields too.
Oh, how damn right you are, I just remember some cult writers of the past who lived no better than ordinary workers, if not poorly on the brink of survival.
Only in the future, thanks to these AIs, even earning a penny from writing will be a miracle even for the talented and lucky.
I don’t think that’s the case. Most people don’t want to consume AI-generated content, especially books. Pretty sure there aren’t any really popular books that are AI-generated. Just some bottom-tier slop on sites like Amazon, made to fool people into believing they’re real books. If you’re competing with those, you wouldn’t have been successful anyway. Being a successful author has always been very hard and involves a lot of luck.
Well, how to say in the future no amount of effort will be enough. Only having a cult status and a niche will help, otherwise you will have to go to a regular job or even die of hunger if you have serious health problems.
The final stage of capitalism seems to scream: make as much money as possible at any cost, no matter who suffers in the process.
I’m pretty sure there’s a vast market for human made art and literature. Personally, I would never pay for AI generated slop.
Yeah, you’re gonna lose in some markets like advertising copy and ad artwork. But who cares?
Especially in literature, AI slop is really disliked and honestly it’s quite shit.
Are there gonna be AI slop books in Amazon bookstores? Yeah. Will some people buy it? Yeah, unfortunately, but it’s not gonna take over the market.
Just keep at your passions, yo. AI gen shit like that is largely a fad propped up by LLM companies saying their models can do everything when they’re really actually not very capable or interesting.
These AIs are more likely to simply steal human labor than create something of their own, although they are not people, so there is nothing surprising about it.
And I have another problem: my writing style is, so to speak, bloodthirsty, and the characters’ stories are cruel, I’m afraid that I will be constantly threatened with blocking if I publish this, but I don’t care, I will continue, I can’t not write.
But reality can be merciless, as if a flood had swamped an entire city along with its inhabitants, sparing neither children nor anyone else.
That’s why I’m afraid that capitalism can work miracles, even taking away people’s souls.
But thank you for your comforting answer.
It was actually the rise of spotify and enclosure of the music listening commons that killed my desire to record and produce music.
AI feels like the boring next step from the Spotify CEO saying musicians shouldn’t expect to be able to make a living making and recording music. It is all part of the same movement to train people to see creativity done by humans as inherently valueless and amateur so that profitable simulcrums of human creativity can take center stage that parasitically feed on unpaid artistic human labor. I don’t hate music streaming services, I hate the axiomatic assumption in my society that progress can only ever be a process of increasing austerity for artists in order to fund increasing profit for the ownership class that steals the labor of artists.
Art is a product of a corporation in the context of a market to be evaluated by how well it attracts attention, entirely human made art is just a silly thing you occasionally do on the side as a gesture to someone you know like a handwritten note that is novel and fun precisely because it is a vanishingly rare thing. This is the suffocating environment being forced on human artists.
Quboz is a great alternative, high def music large catalogue and they pay the artists at least 4 x the amount per stream.
Yes, until this alternative is sold to major players. Although I’m not exactly sure…
Yes, this is a real classic, I think the joke here is perfect: an influential nobleman takes away the last food from a poor peasant, only in our time with a smile and justification of progress.
You either give it away for free or nobody’s ever going to see your work. That’s the hard truth. You’re never going to make money with your stuff no matter how good you are.
OP, ignore this comment- it’s stupid
I have experience. You don’t.
Wrong
I worked in several art-related industries. You obviously didn’t. You don’t know anything.
It’s really fucking weird that you just keep assuming I have no relevant experience. Why do you do that?
This post is largely about writing; my book has been pre-ordered by several local bookstores.
Also, I made over $100 last year off my art without even trying- just doing it for fun
You mean per day, right? Please don’t tell me for an entire year. Because that would be worse than what I assumed. That’s nothing, that’s not even enough to pay a tax adviser. Sorry, but… are you still just a kid or teenager?
Like I said, I was just doing it for fun and happened to make some money along the way with literally no additional effort. Convenient that you ignored the more relevant part
Oh, it’s the harsh truth, there’s nothing to say about it. There used to be a tiny chance, on a miracle level, and now there’s not even that.
Either you work for free, like a [BAD WORD], or you’ll be thrown out in the trash like a mongrel.
There is still a chance but it’s so tiny that you better leave it out of the equation. Almost nobody makes it to the top, with the top beginning at “I can focus purely on writing my books and don’t have to do side jobs like lecturing, writing bogus articles for tabloids, teaching writing at evening school, making covers and frying burgers anymore”, but you’re still sitting in a tiny broken apartment and eat cheap ramen, you’re still forced to shit out 300-page-books every 1-2 months for some niche genre and you’re still working at least 80 hours per week and you’re still only self-publishing using Amazon’s print-on-demand service and you still have to crawl all kinds of social media groups and forums to advertise your books and to remind your audience that you’re still alive. This is how it was before the AI boom. How many decades can you go like that, hoping to reach the point where you get an actual contract with a publishing house? Twenty? Thirty? And even then you’re still far from that point when there’s a demand to translate your books into another language (which would be the point where you can actually rent a small house and earn enough money to feed a pet like a cat or dog too). Do not fall for the apex fallacy. This is hard work. Ask yourself how much shit you can eat and if shit cakes are your favorite thing in the world. Because this would be your life then. Most authors give up because they want to live at some point.
So ask yourself: How much are you willing to sacrifice? If the answer is “Everything!” without any doubt or hesitation, then you might get somewhere in a few decades. If you’re talented enough, insane enough and very lucky. And if the AI bubble bursts too of course. This is the hard truth.
Well, there’s nothing particularly surprising about that, I’ve already learned the hard way what a hell it is, if anything, I write light novels because I’ve received information that regular books or just novels are a very bad idea and few people can make money from them, and with light novels the chances are higher, but they’re still shitty, and because of AI people have become suspicious now, so you have to be damn unique and talented to get noticed by even a few people.
In short, it looks like I’ll have to find my niche instead of chasing money and popularity.
I used to make a living with helping artists stepping up to a higher level. I’ve seen a lot fail but a few succeeding.
Don’t look for your niche, create it. Write something that is too unique to be replicated easily - not by humans, not by AI. This applies to both content and style. It’s also important to be present as an author so (possible) fans can get in touch with you (“The artist next door”). Try to get a foot into other fields as well. How about writing stories and scripts for video games for example? This also helps with networking and slapping your name onto all kinds of products.
Another tip: Attend business classes. Learn how economy works. You would be surprised how many successful artists did that silently. This alone gives you a huge advantage over most artists who don’t know anything about starting (and keeping) a business (Heck, they don’t even know anything about taxes). Turn yourself into your own company. With this mindset you will work more efficient and effective. It’s no fun but it’s very helpful in the long run if you want to make a living with art some day.
Yes, I think everyone who wants to do art in our time simply has to know how business works, otherwise, alas, most likely nothing will come of it.
And you are also right about creating a niche, I forgot that proverb, if you want to shine among the bright stars, to be noticed, you will have to at least change your color to a unique.
And let’s give a bonus excerpt: an experienced mercenary was walking through an overgrown forest, he had not been able to find an exit to any path for several days, although he was warned not to go deep into the forest on Monday, but he didn’t care because he heard that the same dryad milker had finally woken up and he, as a brave warrior, could not miss such a rare opportunity…
Can you imagine yourself doing all kinds of “bubble work”? The writing of your books, lecturing the books of others, cover design, maybe teaching writing to a small class, enabling you to stay inside the writing bubble? Then you have a better chance. This is similar to how other artists make a living. As a painter you’ll do all kinds of image-related work like logo design, gretting cards, prints for cloths and so on. As a musician you make loops people listen to while on hold, sound effects for all kinds of media, sample libraries for other musicians (basically virtual instruments), some audio engineering for small gigs and so on. Those are the people who can actually make a living with no or rare occasions of having to work a normal job. You still need to have a frugal lifestyle but it helps to not get lost in the usual grind. Lots of small jobs which aren’t paid that great, but ideally it adds up and you can your bills. This is something I would recommend as well. You’ll learn many things which will be helpful later on.
