Will Larson’s idea about advantage of authors in the age of LLMs

Will has an interesting idea about how authors can still thrive in the age of LLMs.

Instead, I’ve been thinking about how this transition might go right for authors. My favorite idea that I’ve come up with is the idea of written content as “datapacks” for thinking. Buy someone’s book / “datapack”, then upload it into your LLM, and you can immediately operate almost as if you knew the book’s content.

This is a not necessarily a new idea. Kevin Rose has an article where he creates custom ChatGPTs based on specific books .

What’s interesting about Will’s idea, is the role of the author. Instead of having people upload your book to a chat bot (which most likely has already been illegally trained on), you provide a legal way of doing that.

What is our competitive advantage as authors in a future where people are not reading our work? Well, maybe they’re still buying our work in the form of datapacks and such, but it certainly seems likely that book sales, like blog traffic, will be impacted negatively.