Economists debate whether AI slop will Gresham's-law human literature out of existence
paulnovosad · x · 2026-10-12
Economists alexolegimas and paulnovosad debate AI's impact on fiction. Olegimas argues literature is ripe for disruption, with human-authored work effectively ending at 2024. Novosad invokes Gresham's law: rising AI slop rewards AI writers and accelerates declining readership. He predicts a new equilibrium where fiction contains an unknown share of AI content, with only a few authors paying costly signals to prove they didn't use it — and the equilibrium likely trends toward the corner solution, dampening his own interest in reading.
Related event: Economist Paul Novosad Argues Human Literary Fiction Ends With the AI Era(11 posts)→
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