I'm not sure if you're actually disagreeing with me.
My point is once some future neural network starts to grasp continuity and context (something GPT-2 does not do) I think writing won't be safe from AI.
I couldn't speculate when that would be, but I've seen some unpublished efforts that make me think it's sooner than many people might think.
But between here and there will be the opportunity for AI-assistive writing that could facilitate what my developmental editors and beta-readers do.
Agreed that AI-assistive writing is pretty close to the point where it can save you the hassle of thinking up interesting ways of describing minor characters and locations, but of course when it reaches that level there are massive areas of content creation for AI companies which are more lucrative than novel writing and don't require further technological advances...
I think AI content creation will affect everything. Publishing will only be tiny part of that...but a significant part if that’s your industry.
If this is so, writers will more likely become editors. In the same way, visuals artists might become curators.
As an optimist, I am still pondering how this could be a good thing.
GPT-2 is good at generating coherent original sentences based on a given corpus, but they don't really mean anything, which rapidly becomes clearer with each extra sentence. Ask it for an essay and you get a string of sentences with zero underlying point. The distance from here to writing original novels is very, very far. (Experimental poets, however, might need to worry!)