I keep hearing, often from new writers or aspiring writers, that it’s pointless to write, you’ll never make a career of it today because AI is coming and spamming Amazon with rip-offs, knock-offs, or plain crap. AI will kill writing! AI will kill publishing! The Great Wave of Spam is coming!

Nope.

It’s already here, and it’s been here for a long, long time.

Spam publications and scammers have been a thing at least since 2011 electronically, and practice has existed lot further back in time than that.

In print, it goes back to at least the 1800’s, way before copyright and the Berne convention, when scamy publishers would steal the works of others and flood the market with the same book, but made by them. That’s not really a business model today. It hasn’t been a business model since the 1890’s.

Things change, but scams and get-rich-quick-schemes will always be there.

So don’t worry too much about this.

If you want to write, write. If you want to publish, publish. If you are persistent, if you keep learning business and improving your craft, you will eventually get good enough to earn money from it.

As for AI, it’s good at certain things, like creating mixtures of to disparate genres, but it’s horrible at others, like creating a coherent story or interesting characters. What it comes down to with LLMs, is that they’re averaging engines. Even if you give them a million-token context window like Gemini 1.5 is going to have, they aren’t capable of creating anything but average, since they’re taking an enormous input, and averaging it out into output.

On one hand, it means that if your work is substandard, AI will beat you.

On the other, if your work is just average, or a tiny bit above, you’re beating the AI. Yes, it might take some time, but eventually, the cream floats to the top and the trash sinks to the bottom.

So don’t worry. Don’t give up. Keep finding ways to make the process of writing fun, and keep writing.

That is, and has always been, the way to a writing career. And all those people who think that they can make a fortune by writing the Next Big Thing, would be better served buying a lottery ticket. The chances of success are the same, and writing requires a lot more effort.