Difficulties with concentration, memory, language or simply getting thoughts into a coherent written form can make writing much harder than the actual thinking behind it.
That's alright with me. Just say, upfront, I couldn't express my thoughts. I wanted to say (whatever it was the person wanted to say), but I lack the skill. AI organized my ideas and polished them up for me. If the author does that, I don't have a problem. I won't consider the piece the creative work of a human, but I will think about the idea behind the work.
If AI has a hand in it, it's not original. When I write something...when I write this...I don't ask AI where the comma should go. I don't ask whether I should use this word or that. If I'm stuck on a word, I'll go to an old-fashioned Thesaurus and look for a word that expresses exactly the sense I'm going for.
AI may be able to polish thoughts, but simply by recasting these thoughts AI is taking away the character of the person.
If you ever read a Haiku, you will see how every syllable, every pause, means something. It means something because it expresses the character of the writer.
I use AI. I ask it questions sometimes about medical procedures. I ask questions about names that appear in history, if I want obscure information. AI is good at teasing through thousands of source pages and pulling out the exact fact I need. However, I never want AI to pretend it's me. I'm a purist in that regard.
I understand your purist position, and your Haiku example actually makes a lot of sense to me. If the choice of every word, syllable and pause is part of the creative work, then having AI recast the language inevitably changes something.
My own experience has nevertheless made me look at this from another angle. I have met people who, for very different reasons, had difficulties expressing their thoughts in writing. Some of them started using AI as a kind of bridge between what they were thinking and what they were able to put into words. In some cases, this even allowed them to participate in conversations and communities again in a way that had previously become difficult for them.
I wouldn't call the resulting text purely human creative work either. But I also wouldn't say that AI had taken their character away. In a strange way, it sometimes seemed to make that character visible again.
Perhaps there is a difference between AI replacing someone's expression and AI enabling someone to express themselves at all.
And that makes the question of character a little more complicated for me. If the thoughts, experiences, opinions, humour and decisions about what to say still come from the person, but AI helps them cross the gap between thought and language, where exactly does the person's character end and the tool begin?
I'm not sure there is a simple answer to that. But I think it's an important part of the AI discussion that is easy to overlook.
It is complicated. As our relationship with AI evolves, so will the rules about use and our understanding of its role in our lives.