No, You Shouldn’t Use AI, Even on the Small Stuff

If you’ve followed me on social media for longer than a few days, you know I hate AI. I am morally opposed on every level to AI because it not only destroys the environment but is a tool of fascism. As much as I would like to word vomit about that, instead, I would like to speak about why writers shouldn’t use AI, even for seemingly minor details as so many AI-using authors claim to do.

Here’s the thing, there are no truly minor details or unimportant parts of a book as everything needs to further the characterization and mood of the story.

I can already feel some writers rolling their eyes at that. Feel free to do so at your own peril. Writers who are willing to hand over parts of their project to AI to “free up their time” to do other things should instead look at their relationship to hustle culture and why they have chosen quantity over quality. Hustle culture is rife in the writing world with many author groups pushing a churn and burn mentality where authors need to publish every 3 months or be lost to irrelevancy. If you go onto Amazon’s top 100 category boards for books on writing, you’ll find books about writing more or writing faster. While those can be useful, writing more isn’t the same as writing good or better books. The hustle side of the writing world stresses that readers don’t care about the books themselves. They’ll read anything as long as it checks off a few boxes for them, and that once you have hooked them, readers will come back every 90 days to choke down whatever book you throw at them.

I despise this mentality. For one, it is patronizing to readers. Readers won’t stick around if your book sucks or if the quality goes down over time. We’ve seen this with readers noticing an author with a massive backlist has turned to AI, and they abandon them when the writing becomes nonsensical or the quality change becomes noticeably bad. I don’t like when authors treat their readers like shit or take advantage of them by assuming they will always be there no matter how they treat them or how crappy their books are. If you’re a writer, I believe you should write for yourself first, but anything you sell to readers should be the best it could possibly be for them since they’re the ones supporting you monetarily.

What I hate even more about the hustle culture mentality is the way corporate speak has made its way into creative fields. Creativity can and should make you money. Artists should be paid fairly for their work and be able to make a stable living off of it. At the same time, I don’t think creativity should be treated like a business in the way that corporations expect exponential growth at all times. It is unsustainable. We cannot write more books every single year and increase our yearly word counts exponentially. It is impossible and will quickly lead to burn out and quality loss. In order to meet these unsustainable quotas, authors turn to AI because others have convinced them that if they outsource the tedious parts of writing to the machine, they will free up time to write more of the things they enjoy or just write faster. The problem is that those tedious parts aren’t useless; everything in your book should serve a purpose.

What many of these “write more in less time” gurus purposely ignore is writing as a craft. There is almost no discussion of how to make your writing better, only how to do it faster. If they did care about craft, none of them would be suggesting using AI. As someone who teaches young writers how to better their work, every piece of writing I have seen from AI is far worse and emptier than anything brand new writers in my classes have come up with. AI writing is confusing, devoid of charm or character, and just flat-out bad. 0/10 do not recommend using it because it will take way more time to edit than just writing something yourself. A study with people who code showed that while they thought they were taking less time using AI, they were actually taking longer because they had to review it, fix it, etc (source). This is on top of the environmental harm, the fact that it is a tool of fascism, and a plagiarism machine.

The thing that a lot of writers using AI for the “boring parts” don’t seem to understand is that the minor details are incredibly important to your story. One of my most hated posts online is the whole, “Only English teachers care that the drapes are blue. They’re just blue. The author just gave it a random color. It isn’t that deep.” Sure, that can be true occasionally, but 99% of your descriptions and details should be purposeful. When you are creating a world, even if a story takes place in the real world, you are building a microcosm specific to your characters and the story you are telling. Therefore, there is an added level of cohesion and purpose in those details that might not appear in our material reality. When you are setting the scene, you need to think about how you want the reader to feel while interacting with this part of the world, how the structure fits the function of this setting, and how the point of view character effects the way the world is interpreted or experienced. For example, a character with a phobia of dentists is going to view, experience, and describe a dental office differently than someone who doesn’t think getting their teeth cleaned is a traumatic experience. If you just let AI fill in the description of the dental office, you are losing that context. Even if the character isn’t scared of it, they will still notice details other characters won’t, and while you’re writing your story, that should be something you focus on.

The other place I’ve heard people using AI for “busy work” in books is dialogue. This really makes no sense to me because dialogue is one of the best ways to insert characterization, motivation, and movement into a story. Even if you feed a chat bot relevant information about your character, it isn’t going to understand the context of your work and anything about the character below a surface level. Any dialogue it spits out will be generic, boring, and probably ill-fitting for the moment. This is one of those situations where editing extensively will be necessary and will probably take longer than just writing it yourself.

But what if I’m stuck? Why can’t I just use AI to fill in the gap for me?

Because that’s cheating! It’s cheating yourself out of using your brain to puzzle out what should go next. It’s like saying, “I find this exercise hard, so I’m going to use a motor to move the dumbbell for me.” It isn’t going to help you, and at some point, your writing muscles are going to shrink and atrophy until you can’t write anything without constantly circling back to AI. Using AI long-term causes cognitive problems (source). If you continually use it to help write your books, you will become more dependent on it and eventually get worse at writing. The best way to combat this is to face the things that challenge you head-on. Why are you stuck on this dialogue? Why do you struggle with description? Do you not know when you need to add it, or do you simply need some resources to help you name things?

There are a ton of writing resources online made by authors for authors, many of which are free. Instead of using AI, slow down and invest time and effort into getting better at your craft. I know hustle culture says write more, write faster, publish quicker, but the best way to get ahead as a writer is to take time for yourself and do things to be a better writer. Sometimes, that looks like taking a break to read good books, watch shows that stoke that creative fire, do other crafts to refill your well. Other times, it’s dissecting how other authors write well and figuring out how to do that in your own way. Writing takes work, and work means effort on your part. Using AI to write the things that you struggle with or find boring means that you are cheating yourself out of the opportunity to learn, grow, and become a better writer. Before you run to ChatGPT for help when you get stuck, look up a resource on Google that can help you with this particular thing. If you are struggling, others have too, and there’s a 90% chance that someone has made something to help you figure it out on your own.