It's an interesting possibility, but the other side of this coin is that it would change the rest of the field too, not just your own work. Instead of competing with a few hundred graphic novels that managed to reach the finish line, you'd be competing with hundreds of thousands. Sure, most would be much lower quality, but that means you've swapped one major problem for another.
We can see a bit of this in games, where improved tools have meant vast expansion in the number of titles released. Similarly with the impact of digital distribution on music.
So no, in the future everyone won't be famous for 15 minutes. Instead, production of works will become increasingly easy and visibility (what used to be called "marketing" when it involved actual skills) will be everything.
Tbh I think Mirabilis was never destined to be a big success. Too British, too old-fashioned, too much my own tastes rather than those of the market. Perhaps if I'd made it more cyberpunk... but in that case it would have been less personal and I wouldn't be regretting its demise a decade on. AI art would have allowed me to finish it, which is what mattered most. In the future, I wonder if we'll even need the old "broadcast model" of fiction -- as in one book or comic selling in the same form to thousands of readers. Maybe instead stories will self-assemble for each reader, the author's role being to create the characters, setting and scenarios and then leave the AI on your phone to spin the story from that.
AI is a very long way off from that, I think. Or at least, from doing it passably well.
I think you underestimate Mirabilis a bit here. It was timed too late for cyberpunk, but with its emphasis on folklore over high fantasy I think it's perfect for the early C21st speculative fiction market. Episodic fiction is always a tricky business, but if the completed story magically appeared I think visibility is all it would need to be successful.
It's certainly true that AI art has become less stylish and "creative" over the last year or so, while becoming much better at representing the things it's seen in photographs in photographic detail. And thank you for the kind words about Mirabilis -- unfortunately I, like AI, have over-trained on other things since and could no longer capture the magic. It's unfortunate that our publisher at the time effectively buried the project, but that's a story almost every author is painfully familiar with!
It's an interesting possibility, but the other side of this coin is that it would change the rest of the field too, not just your own work. Instead of competing with a few hundred graphic novels that managed to reach the finish line, you'd be competing with hundreds of thousands. Sure, most would be much lower quality, but that means you've swapped one major problem for another.
We can see a bit of this in games, where improved tools have meant vast expansion in the number of titles released. Similarly with the impact of digital distribution on music.
So no, in the future everyone won't be famous for 15 minutes. Instead, production of works will become increasingly easy and visibility (what used to be called "marketing" when it involved actual skills) will be everything.
Tbh I think Mirabilis was never destined to be a big success. Too British, too old-fashioned, too much my own tastes rather than those of the market. Perhaps if I'd made it more cyberpunk... but in that case it would have been less personal and I wouldn't be regretting its demise a decade on. AI art would have allowed me to finish it, which is what mattered most. In the future, I wonder if we'll even need the old "broadcast model" of fiction -- as in one book or comic selling in the same form to thousands of readers. Maybe instead stories will self-assemble for each reader, the author's role being to create the characters, setting and scenarios and then leave the AI on your phone to spin the story from that.
AI is a very long way off from that, I think. Or at least, from doing it passably well.
I think you underestimate Mirabilis a bit here. It was timed too late for cyberpunk, but with its emphasis on folklore over high fantasy I think it's perfect for the early C21st speculative fiction market. Episodic fiction is always a tricky business, but if the completed story magically appeared I think visibility is all it would need to be successful.
It's certainly true that AI art has become less stylish and "creative" over the last year or so, while becoming much better at representing the things it's seen in photographs in photographic detail. And thank you for the kind words about Mirabilis -- unfortunately I, like AI, have over-trained on other things since and could no longer capture the magic. It's unfortunate that our publisher at the time effectively buried the project, but that's a story almost every author is painfully familiar with!