Should You Use AI to Write Your Book?

Let’s address the elephant in the room: AI is a hot topic. Authors are rightfully wary and downright opposed to it, especially when it comes to how it affects their livelihoods, their readers, and their craft. With apps and platforms with generative AI now more accessible than ever, the question isn’t just can you use AI to help you write your book, it’s should you?

The short answer is no.

The long answer isn’t black and white. AI has its place if you want to utilize it (not rely on it), but only if you know where to draw the line. Breaking down the pros and cons of using AI in your writing process, and why your book should ultimately remain yours, will help you better navigate this resource and whether or not you choose to use it.

What Are the Benefits of Using AI?

Writing anything, especially something long-form, is HARD. It should be. AI can present itself as a tempting shortcut, whether you’re looking to finish up a deadline on your second cup of stale coffee. But before you type up that prompt, consider this. AI isn’t your ghostwriter, or rather, it shouldn’t be. It’s your assistant. If used wisely, it can elevate your process without taking over completely.

Here’s how:

Researching

Generative AI can spit out surface-level overviews and lists faster than you can scroll Google. It’s a super convenient time-saver.

Thinking of writing an Eastern European thriller? You can create a list of languages and locations there at a moment's notice. You might type in, for example: “What are the average train travel times between Prague and Budapest?” Rather than digging through multiple websites and sources, you can have the answers to your world and character-building questions 

That said, AI is not a fact-checker. It’s a pattern-recognition model. Even when connected online, it can be confidently wrong.

Brainstorming

If you’re stuck on a name for your next haunted village or ghoulish companion, AI can help spark your imagination. If a language learning model can handle creating paragraphs of content, it can certainly help you get out of a creative rut, giving you fresh ideas to entertain or use.

You could ask, “Give me 15 eerie-sounding names for a creature for a horror story set in Appalachia”. Doubling it with the research element of AI that is connected online, it could pull up some sources related to myths and folklore in the region as well as some names to sort through and make your own.

Even if you don’t use everything it gives, it’s a jumpstart into making something better.

Editing

Unsure of where to put that comma? Is it ‘I’ before ‘E’, except after ‘C’? Running into run-on sentences that never stop? AI can help clean things up so that you don’t have to go crazy correcting yourself as you write down your spurts of inspiration.

Get creative, or ask for a bit of brutal honesty (being sure to put ‘be brutally honest’) and use the prompt, “Does this dialogue sound natural?” or even, “Rewrite this sentence to sound more active”.

Editing tools like Grammarly now incorporate AI-driven suggestions for tone, clarity, and intent, but it helps to see a comparison or to go into more detail about how to improve your work in order for it to reflect your style.

Outlining

If you're the kind of person who has a hundred tabs open on your browser and in your brain, AI can help gather all of those trains of thought and cache. Plot threads, character arcs, and timelines don’t have to be all over the place, use this tool to make it into something manageable.

Don’t use it to write the story for you. Use it to format your chaos into an outline you can personalize and refine. For example, “Help me organize the following chapters of my romantic thriller…” and be as easy as clicking and sending it into completion.

Of course, you should be giving it the content and context it needs, but it gives you a glimpse of how it could and should be ordered before going back and forth. It frees up your time to write.

Where AI Falls Short

Before you start calling your AI your ghostwriter, it’s not. It’s not your co-author either. While it can support the process, it also comes with real limitations that writers should be aware of and wary of. AI is fast, convenient, and can be impressive. However, at the end of the day, it’s not infallible.

Knowledge is power, so BEFORE you apply your new beneficial know-how from the points above, consider the areas where it tends to fumble. Understanding its weak spots will help you avoid common mistakes and will keep your work yours.

Language

Yes. AI can write. But can it write like you? Not exactly. AI-generated text often lacks voice, nuance, and emotional texture. It might sound okay, but just being okay won’t resonate with your readers. Readers who are getting better at spotting em dashes and phrasing that is repeated in language learning models. 

For instance, you want AI to rewrite a paragraph to be more ‘exciting’. It might swap in some more action-related adjectives or clip a descriptive sentence or two, but it won’t be able to instinctively understand why or how a line falls flat. How to punch it up in a way that is true to the scene and to your style. 

The paragraph you just read? Let’s go ahead and use it as an example.

That doesn’t even remotely sound like what was written before. The tone is completely different. While it provided some more insight in its own way, it added what it thought was best to fit the prompt. It was catered to the task, not the writing.

Misinformation

Even when AI spits out a perfectly formatted answer that seems ready to go, it could still be factually wrong. If you’re researching niche topics, historical timelines, cultural traditions, and scientific data, it can be misleading.

At worst, to be user-centric, the AI will rarely admit when it’s wrong or doesn’t know. It presents guesses with confidence, making it dangerously convincing to the user. For example, say you’re writing a mystery novel set in the early 1800s. If asked ‘what kind of revolvers were used in 1825’, you could be given a list of revolvers that weren’t invented until a decade later. Opps.

Always cross-check the facts, especially when details matter.

Progress

Setting aside the convenience of prompt writing and editing, there’s something sacred about the mess of writing. Dealing with the detours, the rewrites, and adding in new ideas mid-sentence is part of the process, or rather, the progress. 

AI, being as effective as it is, rushes past all of that. It’s optimized for finishing, not crafting. When you prioritize speed over progress, the writing suffers. The writer stops progressing as well.

It’s tempting to use AI to fill in scenes or stitch dialogue together in the guise of productivity. But the drafting process is where your story finds shape. Don’t let a quick draft rob you of being a better writer.

Over-Reliance

Critical thinking is a skill that’s slowly being diminished over time with the rise of newer and more convenient technology at our fingertips. The more you use AI to answer or solve your problems, creatively or practically speaking, the harder it becomes not to leverage it. It’s like writing with a guide you never needed in the first place.

Having it do all of the heavy lifting in your work completely takes away the human element needed for your writing to feel authentic, because at that point, it’s not. Over time, your confidence in your own words and pacing will erode, replaced by a well-read algorithm instead of a person who should have challenging perspectives.

What Counts as AI Usage?

Not all AI tools function the same way, or raise the same ethical concerns. Some assist your writing quietly in the background, while others can generate entire paragraphs with a single prompt. 

Knowing the difference between generative AI and AI-enhanced editing assistants is imperative in determining your needs and your boundaries.

AI-Enhanced Editing Assistants

Think: Grammarly, ProWritingAid, Microsoft Editor, etc.

These tools use AI to analyze grammar, clarity, and tone. Their primary function is to clean up what you’ve already written. They don’t create content for you. They refine it.

These tools are trained to act like a copyeditor and are specifically coded to do so.

Generative AI Platforms

Think: ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Sudowrite, Jasper, etc.

Generative AI tools are fundamentally different. These platforms are trained on massive datasets, including books, articles, web content, and more, often scraped from the internet without clear permission from creators. 

Their goal? To learn how language works, so they can produce new content based on prompts you give them.

Assistance vs Authorship

With great power comes… murkier boundaries.

Use AI tools if you want. But use them intentionally, transparently, and with full awareness of what you’re trading for convenience.

AI can be invaluable to your process as a writer if it’s used as a tool, not a crutch. Let it support your process, help you generate ideas, and organize your work.

But your novel? Your memoir? Your short stories? They should come from you; you owe it to yourself and your readers. Your lived experiences, your voice, and your imagination cannot be replicated by a line of code meant to help us, not replace us. Ultimately, it’s your story that deserves to be shared, not a machine’s version of it.

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