In fairness, we haven't heard in these economists' own words what their position is and it's possible that it's more nuanced than the author gives them credit for. (There's the quote about Fifty Shades but that's making a more defensible point and doesn't get into the "customer satisfaction" thing.)

Don't be. They are maximizing economy, at the cost of everything else. If anything, they are _perfect_ economists.

Economics has long recognized the distinction between GDP and value creation, but not everyone in a field is going to produce the best work.

Intangibles and unpaid work get ignored not because they cannot be included but because doing so is harder.

I think they’re saying if AI text is causing people to buy (and presumably read) more, that’s a good thing.

As in, if these marginal readers actually prefer AI texts, what does that say about human writing?

It tells you that human attention can be gamed.

Sure, and I feel something for the authors who are in it to write a high-quality novel.

For the authors who are in it for the game, writing bottom of the barrel airport checkout line garbage, they were already trying to game people’s attention and they lost to a robot.

The existence of someone buying AI slop and being okay with it isn't the same as losing to a robot. Unless you mean losing that specific sale, but they're not outselling human authors yet, and it's not clear they will until their quality improves immensely.

I do mean losing that specific sale. I’m also referring to the economists who saw an increase in sales.

This means there are marginal readers who previously didn’t buy any book but now buy AI slop books, or buy slop books in addition to human ones.

> I do mean losing that specific sale. I’m also referring to the economists who saw an increase in sales.

The sales of most of the books talked about in the article are minuscule, and the best selling one sucked so bad Amazon pulled it.

> This means there are marginal readers who previously didn’t buy any book but now buy AI slop books, or buy slop books in addition to human ones.

I don't think that's happening. It's tricking customers in to buying books no fully-informed person would buy. That amounts to either redirecting sales away from better quality books, or having people waste their money on something doesn't really exist, only "technically" exists (a slop book even the author didn't read is only technically a book, but not really a book).

> This means there are marginal readers who previously didn’t buy any book but now buy AI slop books, or buy slop books in addition to human ones.

The former would be interesting, but seems unlikely. The later seems much more likely, since they’re already in the habit of buying books.