OK, given that this was posted by an academic philosopher, it’s reasonably taken as provocative vagueness, so I’ll bite.

Ofc no one would be surprised to hear that my take is totally that it depends.

What kind of writing, and what was its purpose?

I suppose it’s possible to be enthralled by a furniture-assembly manual or a knitting pattern — especially the latter, like, “whoa, that is some cool-ass shit and I wanna make it”, but correctness is the point, and not the human mind presumably behind it, no?

Similarly for technical or bureaucratic documentation for stuff — it can be written excellently, with a borderline-enjoyable clarity, but the point isn’t that a human wrote it rather than that it is wonderfully functional, no?

If those seem like contrived expansions in scope of the question, consider that a lot of fiction can also be primarily instrumental. Romantasy is basically porn in text form, w/fantasy elements being a vehicle for bare-bones plot and palatability.

Even swashbuckling adventure novels are mostly meant to be inhaled. I loved Jules Verne when I was young, but it probably wouldn’t be a tragedy if a modern-day author who wrote Temu versions of his stuff turned out to be AI.

OTOH, I’m just some anon on the internet w/vanishingly few readers, but would any of them read sentences like

Every last comma here is hand-placed. Why would I have it any other way?

from my latest felicemish.substack.com… and not feel profoundly violated (not just in terms of the 20 minutes they spent reading but in the very trust they had vested in me) if it turned out that I, who write about writing as meaning-making as AI encroaches upon the meaning-making I most value, turn out to…have used AI?

How does writing purport to identify the writer? It feels like a violation of an implicit contract w/the reader if the premise of the work is about X written by Y who would have a unique or otherwise privileged understanding of X, and it turned out to have been written by Z who was just LARPing as Y. I don’t think Z needs to be human in this context; and sometimes the only reason Y is privileged to say anything about X is the supposed certificate of humanness.