[dist-epoch]

> If effort wasn’t put into it, then the writing cannot be good

This is what people used to say about photography versus painting.

> pass it off as your own.

This is misleading/fraud and a separate subject than the quality of the writing.

[satisfice]

Well, with regard photography that is a lazy point. It is both true and not true, and also irrelevant. Artistic photography takes a lot of effort, training, and taste. But using an iPhone to take an arbitrary picture does not. I don’t value photography that takes no effort, just as you don’t. Ultimately, photography is recording data— light that traveled to the camera. AI writing is regurgitating someone else’s data.

When you use GenAI to produce work, it is to a significant extent not your own work. If you call it your own work then you are committing fraud to some degree. You are obscuring your own contribution. This is not separate from quality, since authorship is a fundamental aspect of quality.