I get asked about this more than almost anything else lately, usually in one of two tones: either "isn't this going to put you out of a job," or "aren't you excited about how fast you could write now." The honest answer sits uncomfortably between both.
Here's what's real: the self-publishing shelves I sell alongside — Kindle Unlimited, Draft2Digital's wide network, Gumroad direct sales like the ones on this site — have been visibly flooded with AI-generated books over the past couple of years. Low-effort, high-volume, sometimes barely edited. That's genuinely bad for readers, who lose trust in the whole shelf, and bad for writers like me, who now compete for attention against a volume of content no human being could produce, because no human being did.
There's a separate, murkier issue underneath that: a great deal of the material these models were trained on was, by any reasonable reading, other people's copyrighted work, including working novelists', taken without consent or payment. I don't think that gets resolved by individual authors having opinions about it, but I don't think it's honest to talk about AI in publishing without naming it.
And yet — I'm not a Luddite about the technology itself. I use research tools built on similar underlying models constantly, the same way I'd use a search engine or a library. The distinction I try to hold onto, for myself and for The Bindery, is the difference between a tool that helps you organise, structure, and finish your own writing, and a tool that generates the writing for you. The Bindery is deliberately the first kind — a binder, a corkboard, character and world bibles, a timeline, nothing that writes a sentence on my behalf. That wasn't a marketing decision. It's just the only kind of tool I'd trust with my own books.
My guess, for what 29 years of watching institutions change slowly then suddenly has taught me about predicting anything: the market sorts this out the unglamorous way it sorts out most quality problems — slowly, imperfectly, and mostly through readers getting better at telling the difference. In the meantime, I'd rather spend my energy writing books I'd actually want to read than either panicking about the tide or riding it. That's not a neutral position. It's just the only one I can defend by the end of a working day.