I don’t necessarily see this as an obstacle. If you gave 80% there copy to any decent developmental editor and line editor, you could probably get to the level of any bulk genre novel on the shelves at B&N within 6 months. The content of most novels is derivative even when written by human authors and professionally edited and published. Theres very little art in those novels, as most of them tend to follow formulae for creating characters and plots and settings that are common enough to have worksheets being used in production. To be blunt, AI is going to absolutely decimate the writing industry because most of the published works are derivative and formulaic — and that’s exactly what AI is good at.

Just to give an example, this (https://savethecat.com/beat-sheets) is the Save the Cat beat sheet page. Save the cat is a plot structure used by Hollywood rather extensively and is fairly common in novels. It’s also fairly specific in how a plot should be structured— down to the page number in the case of movie scripts (https://savethecat.com/beat-mapper). This isn’t people learning from experience, this is basically an algorithm for telling a story. And this is what is expected in the industry. I’m sure the there are niches in high literary fiction that are less derivative and more artistic, but this is only a very small part of the book industry, and furthermore it’s not easy to do well.

One huge thing that AI detractors don’t like to admit is that AI doesn’t have to be perfect to be adopted for a purpose, it just has to create content that’s worth editing in this case. This is a pretty low threshold because of the economics— the AI is owned by the publisher and other than the software license, it’s FREE. And if the AI can produce 5000 novels that can be edited for publication, why bother with humans? If all that novels do is follow formulae then there’s no point to the human.