If someone told me they produced a 300-page novel by hand—I would be impressed.
If someone else told me they produced a 300-page novel with the aid of an LLM (that wrote the vast majority of the book) and the human merely organized the AI-generated content—I would consider the real author to be the LLM and the human would merely be an editor (or, at best, an artist creating a collage).
Imagine a photographer taking pictures with a fancy digital camera. Should we consider the camera as the real author and the person holding it as some clever impostor?
I’m not trolling. This was a serious question when photography was invented. For decades, art critics refused to consider photography as True Art. If we can plausibly claim that a professional photographer can sometimes be an Artist, I think that we also should accept that a novelist writing with AI assistance could be considered as such. Note that typing “write me a 300-page novel” into the prompt won’t get you good results, even with the most powerful models. The human has still to do heavy editing work… as long as not everyone can do that, the concept of “AI Artist” could be in some sense meaningful.
Suppose that “someone” is a woman. Would you stick to the same claim? Even my Dunbar-sized social circle includes people who consistently describe as “too muscular” women with any amount of visible muscle.