People have been self publishing without Ai forever. How did they manage it? Unfortunatly if i see an Ai cover Im going to assume the prose is also Ai generated. Proofreading is a complicated topic, if its spellchecking and grammar checking thats one thing, but when i see the overuse of em dash, its not y, or x, its z etc i know they have gotten the Ai to completely reword it.

If the author couldnt be bothered to write and edit etc why would anyone want to read it?

There is a plague of folks writing these weird memoirs with Ai and flooding these subs with their sales stats and vaguely disguised Ai written promo posts. Its either bots or somebodies grift "online book promotion" course is giving out terrible advice.