I kinda figured this would happen when I saw what ChatGPT was doing, and here we are. Please remember that it is not actually as smart as it appears.

Basically, what it is doing is stringing words together which statistically often go together, and then stringing those sentences together because they often go together. It is basically Google search suggestions, on steroids. You'll notice that it starts to lose the thread of what it was supposed to be saying after a couple paragraphs, and just rambles in bizarre digressions after that. One poster here, as a joke, had it write a short novel inspired by the comedy series Black Books, and discovered that they had to work on it chapter by chapter, regenerating each one until they got one which made some sort of thematic sense rather than just being idle rambling -- this was actually a pretty useful experiment for showing the limitations of the tool. Arguably, that poster was still "the real author," or at least a very heavy-handed editor, and the chatbot was a tool.

No, AI is not going to be writing novels anytime soon, unless you are fine with novels which are just meandering, unedited thoughts off the top of The Internet's head. So far it is just generating low-quality, 3-paragraph filler content which people were not expected to read in the first place, like press releases and reddit posts. People whipping up books and loading them onto Amazon are just looking to make a quick buck selling cheap junk, like they already did in previous years by just copy-pasting someone else's fan fiction.

ETA: I searched high and low for that post because credit is due, and apparently it was removed. Whatever, I guess you'll have to take my word for it.