OK, so if a writer X has a blog to put up samples of their work to drive people to buy books and to get writing assignments and someone uses ChatGPT to write something in the style of X - this naively seems like a hit on that author's ability to sell their skills.

And I don't think it is fixable by making the AI act more like a search engine.

Basically AI is structured to make every result an answer onebox whereas in search this only happens sometimes.

If the AI is good, then the author's economic outlook is bad regardless of style.

Regardless of if the AI is or isn't good, then I can still see it being brand damaging, but my gut feeling (IANAL) is that this is more of a trademark issue than a copyright issue, as it's passing off as something it isn't.

It’s not clear to me that having their content “unindexed” is good for authors. It’s probably good and bad at the same time.