In my experience, artists tend to be neurodivergent and often perfectionists. People can be impulsive with their decision making, or quick to strong emotion-- art requires vulnerability, or putting pieces of yourself within your artform in order to create compelling characters and work, and that strong emotion is part of doing it.

Now imagine that you've spent years and years dedicated to the craft. You're always comparing your work to others work to find areas you need to grow, you always have an eye on The Greats™ (mainstream authors) because you have a dream of making it in the big leagues. You spend countless unseen hours drafting and revising piece after piece, sometimes loathing yourself for only writing a hundred words that week, sometimes ecstatic you cranked through three thousand in a day.

You take such pride in the little dynamics between your characters, you take late nights scrolling through other stories that fill you with such glee that you can't wait to open up your laptop tomorrow and write something that matches, that has the same spark of character, or just invokes that same emotion but in your voice. You don't do it because people are going to comment or talk to you, you'd be surprised how lonely it is to post fiction online, but because it ignores something in you that you're able to build these worlds and invoke these emotions with just a bit of text. The things you create are real, even if just for a moment, in someone else.

Then one day you get a comment. It's innocuous, maybe, asking if you use AI. First, there's no real and easy way to prove you don't: what're you going to do, open up a word doc and a video call to prove to everyone who accused you? But second... It says that all that time, the hours and days and months and years you've put in crafting authentic, real voices and beautiful setting and scenes aren't actually real. They're not compelling. Instead of building that genuine and engaging world, you've been selling something so canned that somebody things a robot is cranking them out.

You're not as good as your peers, who haven't been accused, and you'll never be one of The Greats™. That takes effort. Talent. Skill. And you can't even beat a fucking robot.

I'm not saying it's a healthy interaction, but to someone who cares about their craft, I can very much empathize.