In Epic Forgetting, Rob Horning skillfully (!) takes apart the idea that generative AI is democratizing art, writing about data totalitarianism quoting Kant that aesthetic ideas "arouse more thought than can be expressed in a concept determined by words", which means that the meaning of art can't be prompted with words: "there is often an assumption that AI is edging toward being alive because of its apparent language competency. Or that it its somehow participating in the zeitgeist because it has absorbed so much human expression. But the essential point here is that geist is precisely what escapes datafication. Generative models can only ever simulate it; they can only ever substitute something fixed and reified for it. Rather than bring ideas to life, generative models kill them dead."

Thus, it is no wonder that this happens: AI data training companies like Scale AI are hiring poets to improve datasets on creative writing, so models can churn out text that closely resembles literary art: "The companies say contractors will write short stories on a given topic to feed them into AI models. They will also use these workers to provide feedback on the literary quality of their current AI-generated text." I'm sure that ghostwritten shortstories about topics chosen not by a soul, but a corporate function will hugely improve the creative potential of AI.