If I may be a centrist about this.

OP is being silly wanting a year-cutoff. Geeenerally people who are whole-hog on AI are very proud of that and will yell about it to the four winds. And even if they didn't, reputation is a real thing one can rely on for knowing who are the goodies and the baddies. (.... though if they do feel that's the only way... 2023. That's the date. November 2023 is when ChatGPT became something the public could use, and the floodgates opened for businesspeople wanting to replace all artists with robots. Before that, Generative AI was used mostly either by scientists for research into AI itself... Or by internet dorks like me for shitposting. It wasn't good enough for anything else either way.)

With that said, y'all are being unreasonable to them too: Literature is art, and when it comes to art, "I don't like the way it feels" is more than enough reason to not want to engage with something. If OP says "I don't want to touch anything AI related, I don't care if it is quote-unquote good" then that should be a complete sentence, and require no belaboured justification whatsoever.