when writing was first invented, it seems the most important things were written down. perhaps to the sumerians, keeping track of sheep, bales of wheat and jugs of beer was the most important thing. point is, it was a time consuming and resource intensive endeavor. they didn’t waste it if they could avoid it.
over time, more scribes with nothing better to do trained up. so they wrote more. they filled some of their excess time with doodles and the occasional epic poem, perhaps as practice. care was still taken.
the greeks and romans had so much written down, they had great libraries all over the empires. but still, only certain copies of certain works were made, and only certain valuable works were retained. academies were invented to both teach morally and authoritatively, but also to ensure the writers were at least using their talents to write down knowledge and philosophy instead of drivel. but don’t forget the sophists, peddling magic and snake oil in paper form!
fast forward to the printing press. oh wow! books galore. and a pile of garbage seventeen miles high. now everyone was writing down their putrid and insipid thoughts. and so many bibles. so. so. so many.
leap forward to the end of the age of enlightenment, and entire systems of institutions had been invented help to sift through the trash. universities, libraries, publishers, editors, professors, experts, science. still, the market for trash survived.
and here we are, piddling around with 500 monkeys banging away on 500 typewriters for 500 years. artificial intelligence, or generative large language models. now, not only can idiotic humans write massive amounts of drivel, but machines can take the writing of drivel to exponentially dizzying digital solar mass levels. they will eventually create the works of shakespeare! yes! in fact, an exact copy, just by rearranging the letters and words and chapters! and in the meantime, 500 trillion copies, each with edits to the original, ranging from a single word change to entire motifs being mashed up with dostoyevsky, pokémon or your grandmother’s shopping list. yay! billions upon billions of mangled works of trash to sift through to find microscopic nuggets of gold! thanks for undoing all knowledge, awareness, meaning, structure, ethics, intelligence, creativity! it’s been really fucking helpful! now we can all be dopamine producing machines while the world crumbles into another dark age!