Why do it at all if I won't do better than the AI?

The worst risk with AI is not that it replaces working artists, but that it dulls human creativity by killing the urge to start.

I am not sure who said it first, but every photographer has ten thousand bad photos in them and it's easier if they take them at the beginning. For photographers, the "bad" is not the technical inadequacy of those photos; you can get past that in the first one hundred. The "bad" is the generic, uninteresting, uninspiring, underexplored, duplicative nature of them. But you have to work through that to understand what "good" is. You can't easily skip these ten thousand photos, even if your analysis and critique skills are strong.

There's a lot to be lost if people either don't even start or get discouraged.

But for writing, most of the early stuff is going to read much like this sort of blog post (simply because most bloggers are stuck in the blogging equivalent of the ten thousand photos; the most popular bloggers are not those elevating writing).

"But it looks like AI" is the worst, most reflexive thing about this, because it always will, since AI is constantly stealing new things. You cannot get ahead of the tireless thief.

The damage generative AI will do to our humanity has only just started. People who carry on building these tools knowing what they are doing to our culture are beneath our contempt. Rampantly overcompensated, though, so they'll be fine.