I am very similar. I am a software engineer, trying to make the transition to full time writer. A year ago, I "finished" a first draft of my novel and I used AI to write some of the prose so I could get to that completed draft.

Now I've finished the third draft, and I think I've finally eradicated all of that slop from the text. It was terrible writing. Prose is my strength, it's what I was best at, why would I pass that off to a clanker, when it's the thing I was born to do in this world?

There are lots of other ways AI is helping me write, though:

- Hard Sci-fi - it creates simulations of various spacecraft configurations and allows to me see how it would play out. - Research - Consistency Checking - Simulated Reviews from different perspectives. Not as good as human reviewers, but still very useful. - Notes organizations - Speculation tracking and canon differentiateion

I will never use AI to write prose again. Even if it got really good, the point isn't the prose. The point is that I have something to say, and I'm going to use my own words to say it. If an LLM wrote this prose, even if it was at the level of winning a major literary prize, it still wouldn't be the words I would write, and it isn't satisfying.