But.

Passing off your AI output as "human written" should be punished somehow. As a fiction reader, I don't care what ChatGPT has to say, even if you think you prompted it into a publishable story. I want to read stories written by humans, and I want to reliably be able to tell which are and which aren't, so I don't spend half my attention while reading trying to work out if this is an AI or not.

I have no clue how to make that come true. Part of me is sitting here thinking "I'm glad I'm old enough that I can spend the rest of my life reading fiction written before about 2020 and never run out of genuinely great human written stories."

While watching it, I thought about AI generated content.

I have never personally met anyone who worked on any of the Toy Story movies. I know, from documentaries etc, who Brad Bird and John Lasseter are. I've also watched the video [0] about how Toy Story 2 almost got deleted (which I highly recommend if you are in storage, DevOps or SRE).

There are other movies like the Wild Robot that:

- had big emotional impact on me (b/c I'm a parent)

- are 100% animated

- I have zero idea who made them

I say all of this b/c at some point, most people don't care if the movie was hand painted cels, CGI done by humans or fully AI generated with human text prompting. If the feeling is strong, people will have a "bigger" reaction which in turn will make it more memorable. It's all basically on a spectrum of "humans using tools". They care about how the movie makes them feel. It started with humans spitting charcoal at a wall [1] and now it's linear algebra.

0 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8dhp_20j0Ys (Toy Story 2 almost lost)

1 - https://youtu.be/6tn3bMbm5uw (humans painting on walls0

I can't help but feel that what they're asking to be submitted is just another kind of slop. Unsurprising that they get ai submissions as a result

I'm not sure I see any inherent problem with publishing books written with the help of AI. As with software, I don't really care much how it's made, I care bout my experience with the finished product.

"Is it worth the $?" is ultimately the question that will be asked of anything one pays for, regardless of how exactly it was produced.