I've been reading the Whiskey Tango Foxtrot series, which is kind of military fiction mixed with the zombie apocalypse. I'm just on book 8 of 9 and have enjoyed them so far. Not fantastic writing, but fun reads.
I was about to put book 9 in my Kindle queue when I saw an inordinate amount of one star reviews compared to the other eight books. As I read them, people were complaining about ridiculously repetitive language, non-sequiturs, and stuff like whole paragraphs on the color of the paint on something. All agreed it was a completely different writing style from the previous eight books. Many posts were accusing the author of using AI.
The AI use is alleged, and I haven't read the ninth book (and am not sure I will, given the reviews). But it did get me to thinking how easy it would be for an author, especially of these long series of "pulp fiction", where they pump out a book or two a year, to just tell an AI to write the book. It would seem that currently (again, assuming the accusations are true), either AI is still not capable of copying an author's style, or it didn't go through enough iterations to get close.
It does seem like it would be easy for AI to write a half-assed $1.99 Kindle book that there are a million of on Amazon. A year's worth of writing done in minutes. An "author" in it for just the money, could scam the system and produce and self-publish a couple hundred books in a couple of days, put them on Amazon for $1.99, and just take in whatever profit from a few sales here and there. As AI improves, it will be an interesting conundrum for the publishing industry.
On the tangent, I asked Bard to write some scifi short stories for me. Done in seconds, but they were pretty crappy. I was biased knowing that a machine had done them, so I'm not sure if I could accurately gauge if they were "machine crappy" or "crappy crappy", being written by a human with zero imagination.
These are the one star reviews on the above book:
https://www.amazon.com/product-reviews/B0CKWD9TDR/ref=cm_cr_unknown?ie=UTF8&filterByStar=one_star&reviewerType=all_reviews&pageNumber=1#reviews-filter-bar