The most obvious parallel to me is YouTube. There are a ton of people ingesting books, then transforming that information into a roughly paraphrased video for people to watch for free (ish). That devalues the books they read and paraphrased, because other people don't need to read them.
Spark Notes devalue actual books in a way, because a lot of high schoolers read those instead of buying the actual book.
Search engines have also supplanted books in large part, because I don't need a whole book to answer a specific question. I don't know anyone that owns an encyclopedia anymore.
This is the next iteration of these processes. Non-novel information's market value has been degrading for decades now. A series of questions that would have cost thousands of dollars in books to answer in the 70's/80's is now free, with or without AI.
For that same exact reason, it’s totally reasonable they’re attracting unique amounts of negative attention too.
You can’t have it both ways: yes LLMs are going to change information retrieval the way nothing else has before, but no it’s actually just like all the other things in terms of their impact on incentive structures.
FWIW I don’t really know where I land on this issue. I just find it totally incoherent to believe in the bull case of “this will transform everything” while also portraying it all as par for the course when discussing potential negatives.
Just because Spark Notes didn’t obviously manage to kill valuable parts of our information ecosystem and economy does not mean that Spark Notes x 10,000,000 will not.