Your Writing Is Enough

What authors tell me when I've called them out for using AI in their writing—and why to resist the temptation to let it write for you

We live in a weird world. Five years ago, if you’d asked the average person working on a book project if they liked the idea of a robot generating their stories or their personal narratives for them, I think you’d have been met with bug eyes. It wasn’t even a thing—and what would be the point, right?

Anyone who’s graduated from college, never mind high school, knows that passing someone else’s work off as your own has a name, and it results in a failing grade to boot. But now, all of a sudden, we have collective or selective amnesia on this notion of passing off others’ work as our own. Even if there were a policy in publishing, I fear it wouldn’t matter one lick—because the desire not to use AI to write for us has to come from within. I was distressed by a Times article out this week, “I Got AI Slopped,” which featured Bill Johns, who’s published 445 titles on Amazon and who responded to the question of whether he even reads “his own” books: “That’s a funny question. I certainly read them as they’re being written.” But if Amazon won’t police AI slop, and they wont’t, this is the new dystopia we live in.

I’ve been struggling deeply with AI for the past two years. It’s infiltrated my world in ways I couldn’t and wouldn’t have imagined. It never occurred to me how many people who want to write, whether they struggle to call themselves writers or not, would turn to AI to write their words for them. Now that we’re here, I understand the temptation. I talk to writers who use it, who pass it off as their own, and I see how AI preys on insecurities and appeals to people’s laziest tendencies.

I’ve had to call out writers fairly often these past couple years, and the range of responses I get is a window into the human psyche. Here are the buckets the responses fall into:

It wasn’t me!

Some people have met the assertion that AI was used in their writing by simply deferring the blame. One writer told me that her son had edited her work and had probably inserted AI without her knowing. She told me she’d have to talk to him about it, and I never heard back. This line of defense—someone else used AI on my manuscript without telling me—was what we heard from Mia Ballard after Hachette canceled her book earlier this year, claiming that her editor must have introduced AI into her writing. Hm.

I thought it would make me sound better.

These people are generally contrite, and tell me that they had a crisis of confidence with their writing. They distrust themselves. They don’t think their writing is particularly good. The problem with using AI to make your writing better is that you lose your voice in the process. I’d rather read rough authentic student writing than plastic AI writing any day. AI writing has a particular veneer, cadence, and rhythm that people who work with words can easily spot. There are tells. It matters because it’s not self-expression if AI does it for you. AI is a filter, and it sacrifices authentic voice in favor of something far more generic. Most important, AI doesn’t teach writers to be better writers because it abets in eroding discernment.

I ran out of time.

This one is a challenge because meeting deadlines is important, but so is carving out time in your schedule to do your writing. Imagine if I showed up to a 10K race without having trained because I’d run out of time. I’d surely choke, or injure myself—a powerful disincentive. We have to make time for the things we say we want to do, and writing is hard work. It’s the wrestling through it that makes the writing better. It’s reaching for better ways to articulate what you want to say that makes your words more resonant. Always give your writing the time it deserves.

I was working through something traumatic.

This is the excuse I have the most compassion for because I work with so many memoirists who are writing through trauma. Opening up traumatic experiences on the page is to reexperience the trauma, and if AI puts some distance between you and that event, I can see how tempting that would be. However, the choice to write memoir is the choice to bring yourself directly back into contact with what happened, and memoir is healing for exactly that reason. It asks us to go in deep, to remember, and to find our “now” words to reclaim the story and to take back our power. When you ask AI to write for you, you give over your power and you abdicate the gift that personal narrative offers—which is the connection that flows from brain to heart to hand.

I’m out and proud.

These are the authors who embrace AI as ghostwriter, and who make the case that there’s no difference between paying a ghostwriter and using AI. (I disagree, but that will be a post for another time.) I got a pitch recently from someone who wanted to be a guest on my podcast. He’d used AI in every aspect of the process, from writing to editing to pitching to publicity. His pitch to me was also clearly written by AI. It had that breathy, exuberant cadence I’ve come to loathe. He’s dyslexic, so for him AI was a tool that allowed him to do something he couldn’t previously do. I am not unsympathetic to this argument, and I’d rather have a conversation with someone who’s out and proud about their AI use than with someone who’s using it extensively and trying to pass off the work as their own. That said, I did not invited him to be on my podcast because I’m personally incapable of evangelizing for AI.

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I’m in conversation on a regular basis with the editors I work for, many of whom are outraged, despondent, or deflated over the prevalence of AI in writers’ work. What happens is they’re reading along in a manuscript and all of a sudden they get to a place in the writing that’s recognizably AI. A little alarm goes off. This sounds like AI. I’m no longer reading the work of this author. Was I ever reading their work? Now I’m editing a machine. I don’t want to be editing a machine. What am I doing?

My own experience when I’ve come across AI-generated writing in my students’ work in my memoir class is similar. I don’t want to edit it. It feels nearly pointless. Luckily, this hasn’t been too prevalent, but when I do see it, my response has been simply to highlight whole passages, say why I think it’s AI-generated, and suggest that I’ll edit it after the writer has gone in and reworked the passage in their own words. This has been effective.

We’re in a strange and difficult place right now in the writing, editing, publishing profession, and this extends to schools because I’ve talked with distraught teachers who, like us, can’t stem the tide of AI.

If I could snap my fingers and make a single rule around AI it would be that writers (and students) are simply not allowed to cut and paste anything from AI into their own emails, word documents, assignments, manuscripts, etc. Forcing yourself to write your own words (even if you are using AI as a tool, or a prompt, or a fact-checker) creates that flow of energy I mentioned earlier—from head to heart to hands. When you cut and paste, you bypass the heart part altogether, and it’s my opinion that the resonant part of any writing stems from the heart.

Meanwhile, writers, I hope everyone and anyone who’s using AI on a regular basis continues to wrestle with the implications. Andrea Bartz wrote a great Substack in April called “Why I’m against the use of generative AI altogether” that I recommend reading. Andrea was one of the three plaintiffs in Bartz v. Anthropic, the lawsuit against Anthropic that resulted in countless authors hopefully someday receiving a $3000 payout for the illegal use of their books to train AI. Andrea makes the case in her piece that AI is bad for our heads and our hearts, but also that we’re enriching bad actors (AI companies), and losing control of AI products. Her piece should scare us, but we are short-sighted creatures who tend to shut off our brains at the thought of anything too epic or monumentally terrible. We are wired, after all, for small stories.

So, my small story lane is where I try to make small impacts. I can’t fathom the end of civilization or death to the human race, nor can I survive day-to-day in that level of fear or catastrophizing. But I can tell writers this: your writing is enough without the support of AI. You don’t need it, and it doesn’t make you a better writer. We need all the heart connection we can get, and we don’t do that via machine. We do it human-to-human, as we were designed to connect.