Stop comparing AI to the Internet this one isn't about distribution ------------ People keep comparing AI to other technological advances, but I realized something about it that I think most people aren’t seeing. This isn’t like the advent of the Internet, mobile phones, nor social media for one very important reason. Those advances opened new ways to distribute your ideas. AI has nothing to do with distribution and everything to do with creation. I’ve seen some developers post lately things like “yeah, I can create a ton more stuff quickly, but distribution is still the hard part.” The bottleneck wasn’t being able to make something quickly and see if people will buy it. There have been many ways to make a minimum version and test if it’s valuable to people. The bottleneck has been getting people to pay attention to your thing, getting eye balls on what you make. And convincing them they need it (or making it actually solve a problem that’s worth paying for). AI doesn’t change that. That’s still the bottleneck. So people shouting that you should get on the bandwagon and that this opens up a field of brand new opportunity for so many people are just dead wrong. It’s not a field of new opportunity. In this way, AI is more like the industrial revolution. It’s a means of creating faster and cheaper … or that’s how it’s being sold to us, but many companies are finding out that it’s not actually cheaper, and to make a quality product is not actually faster. So it’s more like a fake industrial revolution. And it came at a time when technology had already advanced enough that—with the right skills and effort—you could create just about anything you could dream of. Cheaply and quickly. There are huge exceptions to that. I’ll give you that. But people could write and distribute books, music, shows, wood working, crafts, clothes, hardware, even some types of movies. We could already create those things in your garage and start a business selling them. And it was at a pace that was humanly possible. Maybe not as fast as some people wanted to go, but it was a pace that required craft, taste, and skill. AI is trying to push people to go at a pace that is inhuman. Not just for the creators, but for the consumers. People can’t consume 10x more than they are today, and they aren’t making 10x more babies to keep up with the rate of stuff that tech bros want us to make. It’s just not possible. It’s just not human. This AI "industrial revolution" must be stopped.

🎧 On the ALLi #podcast: Howard Lovy speaks with Cameron Sutter, founder of @PlottrApp, about how visual planning tools can help authors organize ideas, structure their books, and move more confidently from concept to finished manuscript. Listen now: selfpublishingadvice.org/pod… #WritingCommunity