Amazon books are now heavily infected with AI slop, I've yet to read a book which is detectably AI generated which is not garbage. When that stops being the case, perhaps people will stop objecting to it.

This isn't about suffering vs not, it's about quality vs garbage. If the judges truly couldn't tell though and actually read the book properly, I'd say it's fine to use AI in that sense as the author clearly heavily supervised it or just used it for inspiration and they produced something the judges valued.

Part of the problem with other use-cases is that we have up to now assumed that writing a book took significant effort and therefore do not have controls in place for quality. If it doesn't take significant effort to generate something plausible, all the rules have to change to take that into account.