That's the philosophical argument. In practice, though, the effect of large unreviewed AI commits on the project and its users is likely to be the same regardless of whether those commits were prompted by a core developer or an outside contributor.

I don't buy that at all. A core developer producing a thousand line commit that they'll be responsible for over the remaining lifetime of the project is entirely different from a fire-and-forget PR from an outside contributor.

My own experience is far from this. Steering the AI, early and while developing a change, matters sigificantly.

Therefore a maintainer is more likely to steer the AI in a direction that is aligned with the codebase.