Comment by vidarh

To some, the joy in writing is in producing a story. To others, it lies in crafting the words. If you want to "direct" a story, an LLM that could take your exposition of your plot and make it into something enjoyable to read could still let you enjoy the process. If what you care about is crafting the perfect sentence, an LLM that could assist with the plot could still let you enjoy the process. Maybe more, because not everyone enjoys every aspect of the process.

And even authors who enjoy both might hate the many subsequent steps to publishing a book, such as getting editorial feedback and doing rewrites that can sometimes feel like a gut-punch (I sat on my first editorial feedback for a month, agonising over what to accept and what to ignore, and it was anxiety-inducing and felt awful - since I don't expect to make much money from my novels, I decided to ignore a lot of it, even when I knew the editor was probably right from a mass-market appeal point of view, but it sure as hell was not an enjoyable part of the process).

And some people don't enjoy the actual writing at all, but enjoys coming up with high-level plots and seeing what pops out.

In other words: It's not all or nothing, and people enjoy wildly different things about the process.

Or to put it yet another way: Some people - even adults - enjoy paint by numbers too. Not everyone want to create - sometimes people just want to be adjacent to creation and discover things.