I'll concede I don't know much, but hey I am technically a thrice-published article writer, so I'm not entirely unfamiliar.

The execution IS the writing. The taking of the idea and turning it into entertainment IS the craft.

That's not entirely the argument I'm trying to disprove. Maybe I should have defined what "it" in "it could work" is better. An attempt to break "it" down in its consituent parts:

1) It is possible as an individual to write 5,000 words of mediocrity not just with your own elbow grease but now with "Siri, write me a story" as well.

2) It is possible to improve written stories in a way you want as often as you want. "Siri, take that writing advice I heard Brandon Sanderson talk about and apply it to this paragraph." Aka the aforementioned vibewriting.

3) With LLM memory becoming larger and larger it is becoming increasingly more viable to manage consistency across larger pieces of text. "Siri, foreshadow this event in the previous 200 pages in 5 different places."

4) By chopping up tasks to multiple layers of agents, it is becoming increasingly more viable to cover all bases of writing by delegating tasks to specific agentic tools, from the abstract ("Siri, to what degree does this text convey this idea I have?") to the specific ("Siri, go through every sentence of the entire manuscript and ensure apostrophes are set correctly.")

5) The above can lead to a text which is good enough that it can be hard to distinguish by readers as being AI written. Hell, it could even be enjoyable to read!

Now - is that art? Is the next Star Trek in there? Not without serious human intervention, I'd say. Is it an offense to the art of writing that should abhor most if not every writer? For suure. Does that mean it's incapable of producing fiction that people will want to read/buy it? I'd wager no. But it depends on the process.

I mean, we've talked before about how LLMs are a specific tool which in the hands of creatives will lead to new and better art, even if using said tools feels heinous at first. Why would that be different for fiction writing? No, I don't think the monkeys will produce a good book. But I do think that you can create 80% of the scaffolding of a book in an afternoon and work from there. I believe you can forego writing groups and sharpen your thinking by loading 40 of the best books on writing into 40 LLM agents and have them have a go at your manuscript. I'm noticing that the barrier for myself to write longer form has been significantly lowered, because I know I can use these tools to create a version of my writing that is much better than I'd be able to pull on my own. Hell, I am cautiously optimistic that there will be writers who find new uses for these tools that enhance their writing in ways that we've yet to discover.

You're not wrong to hold to the idea that an LLM by design, by definition churns out something which regresses to the mean. But I do think it matters a great deal what we compare that mean to, I do think it matters in whose hands the tool is whether what it churns out ends up, in the final product, as anything good. We can now make the sausage diffently, at a higher abstraction level, and that has upsides and clear downsides. But it's hard to argue against LLMs being able to produce writing that is useful to some people under some circumstances, no? StackOverflow is dead because why would anyone bother with that when LLMs can produce what I am looking for. AO3 is not dead...yet, but I am not sure it will thrive in the next decade.