This was true even in the 90s I’m sad to say. It’s one of the reason I didn’t pursue fiction writing as a career 30 years ago. I don’t think AI will replace any working authors because poorly written slop and computer generated text are both a lot older than today’s LLMs craze.

The field of authorship has been in a slow decline for a long, long time. It has a lot to do with the way the book Publishing industry was run in the middle and later half of the 20th century. We stopped valuing authority and authors and it became a less valuable occupation. This happened to teachers and a lot of other thought-based fields too.

The reality is that statistically you are more likely to win $1 million in the lottery than to become an author in the US who can live on their income from writing fiction. It does still happen but the people who’s work leads them to become full time authors are extraordinarily lucky, talented, hard working, AND again, lucky.

So you have to write for the joy of writing and expect to have a day job. And if that writing makes money, that’s great and you should keep doing as much of it as you can. But please accept that it’s not going to be your income driver for the foreseeable future.

True, but the second part was far more important. It’s not that they think they are right, it’s that they are CONVINCED that everyone else ALSO thinks they are right and are too scared to say so. So they are thrilled to force their racist beliefs on everyone because they are sure we are just victims of the “woke mind virus” or equivalent. They are sure they are saving us from ourselves and it makes them insufferable.

We didn’t do a good job in the aftermath of the Civil War cleaning up the people who caused the problem. We were too quick to pardon everyone and try to get back to normal.

That gave the losing side the idea that it was only a temporary setback everyone secretly thought they were right or else we would have been more angry with them and it’s been a huge fucking problem ever since.