Not compensating people for their work is pretty harsh.

Not compensating people for their work and using their work to help create additional works for financial gain is even harsher.

Not compensating people for their work and using their work to help create additional works for financial gain and that compete with and reduce the market value of their work is really harsh.

If using someone's labor without their permission and without compensating them for their work is not a form of slavery, then can it be described as theft?

In my opinion, if the "AI" was trained using works by authors who did not give permission for their works to do so and were not in any way compensated for the use of those works, and you are okay with that and use content generated by an "AI" trained in such a manner, you are basically supporting slavery.

You are saying that you are okay with the work of others being owned by someone who did not compensate the persons who did the work.

If you say you have to manipulate what the "AI" generates to make it usable and you should thus own the work because of that, you are saying you are okay with a slave owner owning the slave's output because the slave owner wielded the whip that helped assure the slave's compliance.

Or maybe utilizing slave labor is a-okay so long as you don't have to look into the eyes of the people whose labors you have been complicit in the theft of just so you can get a few books out the door faster to fatten your bank account.

(2) Copyright laws (e.g. in the US) change so that AI-generated works can be copyrighted.

There are people on Quora who simply refuse to believe that Bot stuff has no copyright outside the UK.

The last one who told me that demanded I link to a source for me claiming it, and then told me without one, it was just my opinion.

Those are the people flooding KDP with drek.

Writeway, I'm not selling particularly well, but I've never blamed AI for that. Nor have I ever actually heard anyone do so.

My concern with AI is the ethical bankruptcy of its training methods and the potential to put people (in general) out of work.

I agree with you wholeheartedly that AI can't write whole books effectively. That hasn't prevented people from doing exactly that. The books are usually dumpster fires, and Amazon takes them down quickly. That may be what gives some people the impression that Amazon cares about AI. It does care about AI when it produces a horrendous mess that gets sold as a book through KDP.

I don't really have a problem with assistive AI. I don't condemn people who use it or want to ruin their careers. But I resist using it for text at the moment because of the way it was trained. Building what will be a multi-trillion-dollar industry using a training process that relies on other people's intellectual property and calling it "fair use" just doesn't sit right with me. Also, text generated by AI can sometimes replicate copyrighted content. The risk is slim that it would do that enough to create a problem, but hypothetically, it could inject enough material with enough resemblance to something else to be a problem, especially if I hadn't read the original source and therefore couldn't identify it. If those traces were good, didn't get rewritten, and ended up in the finished product, I could be accused of plagiarism and copyright infringement (for which "AI did it," doesn't sound like a legally valid excuse).

I don't know that AI will ever be able to generate literary masterpieces on its own, but I'd certainly be in favor of legal safeguards to prevent that. I don't see a problem with using it as a tool so long as the author makes the material his or her own. Since we both agree AI can't produce books on its own, no doubt, the authors you cite are doing that.

As I've mentioned in other threads, I have experimented with Shutterstock AI images, mostly because Shutterstock compensates artists whose work was used in its training process. Even so, I don't use AI images for covers because I don't want to take work away from my cover designer. Nor do I use them in cases where a good, entirely human stock image is available. Unfortunately, businesses may not use the same restraint. That's a long-term concern that needs to be addressed.

Ai will undoubtedly play a role in our future. We just need to be sure that, going forward, it doesn't trample intellectual property rights and put huge numbers of people out of work in the process.

And I wish that AI-haters would stop spreading that lie that Chat or any other AI can generate an entire book on its own. Not a readable one! Yeah, it can generate crap but it still takes input and work for the writer to make the work shine and into something good. So this "people are just spitting out whole books with AI" is BS. And those who are doing are not clogging up the store because those books aren't selling. The genuine authors who use AI use it as a TOOL not a replacement for writing the book. They still put just as much effort into writing as always. But no, no genuine author is just prompting Chat or any other AI to do whole books for them without intervention because the books would be crap and the real authors using AI are writing great books with it, where you can't tell. The only way you'd know is if the author told you themselves.

This is a big misconception that all AI looks so obviously like crap. Nope. I bet many of the AI-haters reader AI books every day and don't know it because the books don't look like what they "think" AI would look like. And they probably love these books and give them 5 stars while going on rants about AI. You gotta love it.

And let's not get started on these AI checkers because none of them are accurate.

And uh, big publishers are using AI too now. Yep.