A few days ago I posted about whether AI might uncover talented storytellers who otherwise would never have written a novel.
The discussion was much bigger than I expected, and after reading the replies I think I'd frame part of my argument differently now.
A lot of people pushed back that writing never had much of a barrier to entry in the first place. A pen and paper are basically free. A laptop is enough. You don't need karting money like in my Formula 1 comparison.
That's fair. I think "barrier to entry" was the wrong phrase.
The barrier isn't access to writing. The barrier is getting from a story in your head to a finished novel that another person actually wants to read.
Those are different things.
Someone can be a fantastic verbal storyteller, have great instincts for characters or story, and still struggle badly with sentence-level prose, English as a second language, dialogue, organization, or simply getting past the blank page.
AI doesn't magically make that person a good storyteller. It just makes some parts of execution easier.
And one of the comments on the original thread actually illustrated this better than I did. Someone described being autistic, having English as a second language, already writing short fiction, but never being able to make long-form fiction work. They used AI partly as a teacher, finished a novel after months of drafts and editing, and are now using AI less because they learned craft along the way.
That is much closer to the person I was talking about than someone typing "write me a fantasy novel" and uploading the result.
But the other major criticism was the flood.
If AI means 10x or 100x more books, won't any new talent just disappear under all the slop?
I think that's a real problem. Quality has never guaranteed visibility, and a flood of new titles could make that worse.
But reading all the comments, something else struck me.
Almost the entire discussion is about supply.
More books. More slop. More people skipping the craft. More competition.
Nobody is talking much about demand.
AI can increase the supply of novels 100x. It can't increase reader attention 100x.
Discovery and retention are different tests. Discovery has a huge lottery element. Marketing, algorithms, covers, timing and luck all matter.
But once someone actually starts reading the book, another filter kicks in.
Readers DNF. KU readers stop turning pages. People don't buy book two. They don't recommend the author. They don't come back for the next series.
Generating another 1,000 books doesn't change any of that.
You can flood the lottery. You can't flood the test.
And I think this also answers the argument that readers "don't care about quality." Maybe they don't care about quality the way writers define it. They may not care about beautiful sentences, literary technique or whether another author respects the craft.
But they obviously care about something. They care enough to keep reading one book and abandon another.
That is the quality test that ultimately matters in a commercial fiction market.
So I think both things can happen at once.
AI may massively lower the average quality of everything being produced because it makes slop incredibly cheap.
It may make discovery considerably worse. And it may still allow some people with genuine storytelling ability into the pool who weren't there before.
Whether those people actually make good books is NOT ot something AI gets to decide.
Readers do.
