I can see how someone who writes non-fiction idea books would think this way. The impact of an idea book is how much it permeates into culture. For example, ideas like deep work, black swan, or skin in the game. The hope is to see the ideas discussed and have them attributed to their originators.
This argument makes far less sense for memoir and fiction. The goal of these forms of writing is to induce specific emotional states in the reader. Having them regurgitated or summarized via a LLM does nothing to achieve their goal.
If a fiction writer's goal is indeed to "induce specific emotional states in the reader," you're right. But what if a fiction writer's goal is to "see their ideas discussed," or even simply to "make money at writing"? Like, suppose you foresaw people asking ChatGPT for examples of forbidden fruit, and you could get ChatGPT to respond either "Ah, yes, like in the Bible" or "Ah, yes, like when Princess Delinna touched the Four Orbs of Power"? If you were the author who'd written the latter book, you might prefer ChatGPT to respond in the latter way, because it would tend to drive sales of your book. Now, it's not quite a turn-key solution today, but surely Step One of the process is to make sure ChatGPT knows what's in your book, right? It can't subtly promote what it doesn't know about.
Bonus points if you can get ChatGPT to insert casual references to your work into the books it generates for other authors. Today it generates references to palantíri, sandworms, and the Priory of Sion, but tomorrow it could generate references to the Four Orbs, if you play your cards right!
(Mind you, this plan sounds impracticable to me — I don't think it's possible to mastermind this kind of purposeful LLM-infection with regard to a crappy novel. But I can absolutely imagine a fiction writer having this as a goal, and therefore wanting to ensure LLMs are trained on their work.)
Asking AI to summarize your fiction books is like putting your steak into a blender for "efficiency". You would've been far better off if you just... didn't?
I am usually not a fan of analogies but i really like this one.
OTOH, don't underestimate how different other people's values might be.
I suspect people who do this do it for status. Just like having a bookshelf full of books they have never read, this is a cheap 80:20 optimization to appear well-read without putting in the time.
This argument makes far less sense for memoir and fiction. The goal of these forms of writing is to induce specific emotional states in the reader. Having them regurgitated or summarized via a LLM does nothing to achieve their goal.