What, I’ve wondered, is the role of the author, particularly the long-form author, in a world where an increasingly large percentage of writing is intermediated by large language models?
One framing I’ve heard somewhat frequently is the view that LLMs are first and foremost a great pillaging of authors’ work. It’s true. They are that. At some point there was a script to let you check which books had been loaded into Meta’s LLaMa, and every book I’d written at that point was included, none of them with my consent. However, I long ago made my peace with plagiarism online, and this strikes me as not particularly different, albeit conducted by larger players. The folks using this writing are going to keep using it beyond the constraints I’d prefer it to be used in, and I’m disinterested in investing my scarce mental energy chasing through digital or legal mazes.
Instead, I’ve been thinking about how this transition might go right for authors. My favorite idea that I’ve come up with is the idea of written content as “datapacks” for thinking. Buy someone’s book / “datapack”, then upload it into your LLM, and you can immediately operate almost as if you knew the book’s content.
I really like this framing of a datapack - something an author can create and package and optimize for a purpose and then sell. I like it especially because I can write and publish bits freely and then assemble that into a product - like writing online and publishing a zine for particular patrons.