AI as Writing Assistant, Not Writer

AI fatigue is real , but it's here to stay—time to adapt.

AI is a tool. And like any tool, it can be used for good, or ill.

Writing is a massive undertaking, consisting of many parts (Research, Outline, Writing, Editing, etc...) and not everyone enjoys every part of the writing process. Setting the ethics of theft and apocalyptic outcomes aside for a moment, if you use it to reduce the parts of the process you personally don’t enjoy and, provided you have a direct hand in some major part of the process that guides the story, I don’t see a problem with the use of AI.

I have a fair bit of difficulty with OCD and ADHD. Staying focused and on task is hard for me... staying organized is hard. Before two years ago, the concept of sitting still long enough to write a book was impossible. In the last two years, I have written two novels both over 100,000 words, a 20k Novella, and am halfway through a 3rd book. Not because I am using AI to write. But because I am using it to reduce the parts I find tedious and frustrating.

I use AI for any part that I get stuck with... an outline giving me trouble. I plug it into the AI and have it spit out a bunch of ideas.... inevitably something in there will generate a spark that gets me thinking of a solution.

I will occasionally give the AI detailed information about a character and tell it: “In this scene, YOU ARE THIS CHARACTER. We are going to have a conversation and you will respond to me as that character.” This is great for getting a flow of dialog going back and forth, and seeing how this character might think, speak and react to situations.

Sometimes I use it to get past some scene I am stuck on... I know where I want the character to go, but can’t figure out how to get them there. I’ll have the AI brainstorm a few solutions. They are almost always terrible, but from reading through those ideas, it gets me thinking in a way I wasn’t looking at it before, and from that new way of thinking I come up with something that works.

Outlining large combat scenes is another great one. Again, it goes off in directions I would never use, but it helps get a large and complex process started, helping to get me over the hump of an insurmountable task.

Another thing I love is using AI to generate a narration of my book so I can listen to it... hearing it spoken out loud helps me find so many things I want to change. I don’t know about you, but I don’t have $20,000 just to have my book narrated for better editing.

Does this mean I stop using a real editor? No. However, now when I get my book in front of an editor, I am not dealing with nearly as many issues, and maybe I can eliminate some of the editing stages and fees. $2000 for a developmental edit, another $2-3000 for Copy and/or Line Editing, for a book that I might make a few hundred dollars a year? Again, I don’t have that kind of cash just lying around. When I am making Stephen King money, I have no problems paying for all these stages. Until then, I’m just scraping by.

Now, on to the “unethical” side of things. Do I think it sucks that these companies used people’s books to train their tool, making billions of dollars and not sharing the wealth? Yes. It sucks. Unfortunately, even if the laws were changed right now. It wouldn’t affect the millions of books already used. Those authors will NEVER be compensated for the theft retroactively. It would only affect future books.

In the end, and in reality, the only part that MOST people have a real problem with is the competition. Because, let’s face it, that’s the only part that really affects you personally. These jokers churning out dozens of books a year, flooding the market with soulless schlock, and making a living that way. It sucks, but I’m sorry to say… it’s going to happen, and it will keep happening. Unless we come up with a solution within our legal system to stop it, it will not change. There is too much money being made.

What you can do: Contact your congressman and political leaders. Write or call them, ask them to make a real change in how the government handles AI based products. Stand on a street corner with a sandwich board, scream at the top of your lungs, post on social media, rally an army of supporters to protest and boycott. Money talks and bullshit walks. Don’t buy it. (And if you are anti-AI then I suspect you are doing this already.) But as we can see by the massive profits these companies are making, you are in the minority.

Meanwhile, those who refuse to engage with AI tools out of moral outrage—while understandable—are doing themselves no favors. Burying your head in the sand won't make the technology disappear, and it certainly won't give you a competitive advantage in an evolving marketplace. The writers adapting and learning to use these tools thoughtfully will inevitably outpace those who refuse to acknowledge their existence. You don't have to love the technology or the way it was developed, but willfully ignoring it is a choice that will leave you behind.

People like to bash AI. Toss out statements like, “It just takes what it’s given, mashes it all up, and regurgitates it.” But what if I told you—that’s exactly what the human brain does? Without all of our previous experiences and our vast book collection, what would we be writing about? NOTHING. Ideas do not materialize from the aether. They are the seeds of everything we have experienced—every person we interacted with, every place we visited, all mashed together and reorganized into something new.

Something similar happened with photography in the 1990s when Photoshop came out. Photographers decried Photoshop as a crutch. That anyone using it isn’t a “REAL” photographer. There were shouts of, “Photography is DEAD.” And wouldn’t you know it... thirty some years later, people are still taking pictures, and using Photoshop, together, and separate. And AI will be the same. A sudden surge of hype and buzz. Attractors and detractors. And eventually it will fall into the background of our subconscious. A footnote in history of when some new technology upended the world.

Here is a quick recap of the tools that have upended the world of writing in recent history.

• 1440 - the first printing press.

• 1636 - Early versions of Fountain Pens (although there is evidence Leonardo da Vinci invented one.)

• 1870 - the commercially available typewriter.

• 1888 - First Patent for a Ball Point Pen

• 1966 - ELIZA early computing moving towards the eventual invention of LLMs

• 1968 - the electric typewriter.

• 1984 - the first low cost ink-jet printer.

• 1990 - the World Wide Web

• 1993 - notable public use of early LLMs (spell checker in MS Word)

• 1997 - Early stages of self publishing.

• 2002 - Cloud Computing

• 2004 - widespread use of e-readers with the Sony Librie

• 2007 - Amazon launches KDP

• 2018 - GPT v.1

• 2022 - ChatGPT v.1

There will always be major changes that shake up our perception of the world and challenge how we think things are, and how they should be. And as technology gets better, and more powerful, those changes will continue to arrive faster and faster. We must grow and accept that change happens. Because like it or not, change will happen with or without your permission or readiness.

In closing: AI is just a tool. I will use this tool in a way that makes my life better, and allows me to sleep at night. And I can only hope that more people use it for good than ill.

“Being a critic is easy. Criticism without a solution is merely an inflation of the critic’s ego.” ― Haemin Sunim (Quote paraphrased)