This is a little like saying no one will ever paint anymore because cameras exist.
It might be harder to make a living off art now (which...debatable), but at no point, ever, was it easy.
-- Yogi Berra
Writing is hard now, not because AI exists, but because there are so many writers out there and everyone's competing for attention, not just with other writers, nor with books from the past, but with all forms of media. Loads of people today, who might otherwise be reading novels for entertainment, are too busy scrolling their phones or watching TikToks or playing video games.
We don't have another Terry Pratchett because all the would-be Terry Pratchetts are toiling in obscurity, and possibly giving up on writing as a result.
These writing jobs in print media have mostly disappeared in the UK. It's certainly harder to make a living as a writer today than it was in the 70's and 80's.
The Clovenhoof Series by Heide Goody and Iain Grant gets to Good Omens.
You could totally argue that if people can't tell the difference, it's irrational for them to care which one they get, and I don't totally disagree with that either, but it's not like personal tastes have ever really been a rational thing either. Our ability to enjoy something is the result of a bunch of signals in our brains, and it's not that crazy that adding another signal (or removing one) can change that result in a way that makes it more or less desirable to seek out. Some people might literally like a piece of writing more if they have reason to believe it's from a human than they would if they read the same exact thing but had reason to believe it's from an AI, and while I would find a study showing that as fascinating, I wouldn't see that as an argument that people like the wrong things, because "right" or "wrong" don't really seem like they apply to that sort of thing. If someone told me that knowing there's a human on the other end and that having some sort of indirect, one-way emotional connection to them is an important part of what makes them enjoy it, who am I to tell them that's wrong?
AI is never going to stop people from creating new things. Will it make it harder or different to make a living? Sure, but ai isn't the first thing to do that, nor will it be the last.
But making a living off of your art is incredibly, incredibly difficult, and always has been. If AI doubled, or halved, your chances of winning the lottery, it still wouldn't really change your odds of winning.
I concede that I don't have data to base this on but there's plenty of anecdata. AI companies brazenly steal artists' work and reproduce it, and automate its production, without those artists' permission. How is this going to make things not worse for artists? I think you're saying it doesn't matter because it's a drop in the ocean. Well, how did we get to the ocean? How did artists' work get devalued? Maybe it's all the technological advances that everyone brings up in those conversations, to justify the use of yet another one to do the work that until recently only human artists could do: photography, typography, CAD, computer graphics etc etc. Maybe the more we automate the more we take away from the value of artists' work, and that's why we're where we are now, where if you're an artist, you better find a day job?
I used to write a lot as a teenager. Hours and hours spent writing and overwriting, and correcting, and re-writing, drafts upon drafts. In Greek, mind, because that's my native language. I once passed some drafts to a big-name literary critic who was controversial for having said once that Kazantzakis had no talent; and he told me "write! Because you have talent!". He told me I got talent and he called Kazantzakis talent-less. What.
But of course I didn't become a professional writer. I didn't even try. I mean I kind of almost half-tried but it was obvious I could never write what I wanted (sci-fi and horror mainly with a smattering of fantasy) and still make a living. Not least because it was all written in Greek and those genres don't have a huge following in Greece. Or didn't back when I was a teenager, it's probably a bit better now. But still not enough to make a living out of. I could tell. Bad idea. Find a day job.
And then I got a job ...writing. Code. Ahem.
But I mean I'm bitching about the fact that we keep making all this new tech and none of it seems to make the life of artists any easier, and why not? Don't we all want to enjoy good art? Who's going to make it? Even if we replace human artists now, who's going to train the AI of the future to make new art, once the recombinations of the art they're already trained on stops being interesting? We enjoy novelty, right?