At this point in time, it's extremely easy for me to see if a story I'm reading has AI influence/is written by AI. It's the little things in the text, the way characters react, move, speak.
This right here. I came across a story a few days ago that has a few decent first chapters, and halfway through chapter 4 or 5, I can immediately tell that they gave up writing and just copied and pasted whatever ChatGPT vomited out. Immediately kill my mood for the better half of an hour after that.
AI is a really cool technology, but I don't believe it belonged to the creative field, where most of the joy is in the creation process, where you decide to share and express yourself through a chosen medium. To use AI, in my opinion, is to show your lack of respect for your reader and yourself.
You are insulting your reader, who chose to read a story produced by an author with a different life experience, a different world view, whose mind operated differently. An author's story is a glimpse into their own soul, their own worldview, their own idea, their innerself that they decided to share with you, the reader. By involving AI, it removes so much of the 'soul' of a story, and to me, it wasn't worth it anymore. I would rather read something unpolished, a little raw, but full of creativity and struggle of someone else who is trying to grow, not by using a shortcut, but by their own effort.
And I say this as someone who developed their own machine learning neural network (it is really cool and nifty, and fun) for other applications.