Should You Use AI to Help Write Your Book?

In Spring 2025, I received a request from a writer who said she had used AI to help write about 90 percent of her book. This would be the first of many requests I’ve received in the last year and a half from writers who used ChatGPT or another large language model (LLM) to help craft their manuscripts. Some used it only for researching or outlining purposes, while others used generative AI to do the actual writing.

 

AI-assisted or written content is so prevalent today that it doesn’t take me or any other editor much time to spot it. Even if a writer hasn’t disclosed use of AI when submitting a draft, I can tell within a paragraph or two if the writing was AI-generated. AI’s language and syntax hallmarks give it away immediately. Hallmarks like…

 

• The prevalent yet unnecessary use of em dashes for dramatic effect (e.g., “I briefly considered editing and scheduling the newsletter before my contractions got too intense—but decided the newsletter could wait.”[i])

 

• Short, one-sentence paragraphs

 

• Lists of three used within sentences

 

• Lots of bulleted lists and subtitles—an over-organization of the text, if you will

 

• Sentences that juxtapose several phrases or ideas (e.g., “You can’t have game without the pain; you can’t succeed without failure; you can’t grow without setbacks.”[ii])

 

• And many other quirks

 

These tendencies flag AI-generated content to the naked eye, but after reading many pages and paragraphs crafted by non-humans over the last year or so, I’ve begun to notice a more subtle cue that, as editor Katelyn Beaty describes, sets off my “AI spidey sense.” Often, something in the tone or feel of the writing just smells of mechanical production. Beaty quotes writer Jonathan Rowson who describes this as a feeling of “the text being uninhabited.”

 

That is exactly how I feel when I read AI-generated writing. It’s empty and hollow. It lacks human habitation. Which brings me to my greatest beef with AI. Aside from the copyright infringement issues and unethical practices (more on that below), its writing is generic and lacks heart. To be frank, its writing is bad. I don’t like it.

 

If I receive a manuscript that was largely written by an LLM, my primary edit to the author will be simply: rewrite this as yourself. I cannot edit a book that lacks any sort of unique voice or point of view. I am uninterested in AI’s version of your thoughts (and so are publishers). I want to know not only what you have to say but how you want to say it. That’s what makes your book unique. That’s what will make it stand out among other memoirs and works of nonfiction. The first step when editing an AI-assisted manuscript is removing the AI jargon, so the book can actually sound like…something, someone. Once that is done, then we can get editing.

 

Copyright and AI

 

I have strong personal feelings about using AI to write your book, but the law has something to say about this too. I suggest reading more on the Author’s Guild website, but basically, if your book includes AI-generated content, that content is not protected by your copyright. Because it isn’t human-written, it cannot be human-protected. For this reason, the Author’s Guild’s updated guidelines strongly encourage writers to disclose any AI-written text in their copyright application.

 

The Author’s Guild also points out that all LLMs were trained on pirated copies of books without the authors’ permission. I’m currently a class member in the massive lawsuit brought against Anthropic, which used about 500,000 different titles to train its model, including English Lessons and a few books I co-wrote. Using an LLM to generate content means you’re potentially stealing content from writers and creators who did not agree to have their work used to train robots.

So, Should You Use AI to Write Your Book?

 

So far, you probably think my answer is simply no, you should not use AI when writing your book. But you would be wrong. Although I am a bit of a curmudgeon when it comes to technological advancements (I was suspicious of DVDs when they started to replace VHS tapes), I know better than to dismiss AI altogether, especially in a profession where it is becoming more pervasive by the day.

 

I know—because many other writers and editors I follow have told me so—that the quickest way out of a job these days is to remain ignorant regarding AI and that I must learn to use it. And so I am. While I still have much to learn and more experimenting to do, I am appreciating its use in the following areas:

 

• Refining titles and subtitles

 

• Cleaning up and tightening drafts of back cover copy or book synopses

 

• Initial proofreading

 

• Incorporating SEO best practices (I used Gemini to help me do this with this article.)

 

• Copyediting queries (Though so far in my experience with ChatGPT, its authority on The Chicago Manual of Style is inconsistent at best.)

 

I do not use AI for…

 

• Developmental editing (This would require uploading a client’s entire manuscript to an LLM. Even though most commercial LLMs offer an option to opt out of your material being used to train its model, I don’t feel comfortable doing this, and the Author’s Guild cautions against it.)

 

• Rewriting large portions of text

 

• Drafting my editorial letters

 

I’m still considering additional uses for AI in my work. As I said, I can be slow to adapt, so I am looking to other editors and writers I respect for ideas. I really appreciate the way organizations like Dragonfly Editorial are thinking through ethical uses of AI and posting transparent AI policies on their websites. I’ve drafted my own AI policy, which you can read here: My Editorial AI Policy.

 

Ethical Ways to Use AI When Writing Your Book

 

If you’re embarking on a writing journey, here are some ways I’d recommend using AI that will help you work more efficiently without encroaching on plagiarism, endangering your copyright, or sucking the life and creativity out of your writing voice:

 

• Thought organization

 

• Initial proofreading (Always follow this up with a professional, human proofread.)

 

• Idea refinement for when you’re going on rabbit trails

 

• Research (Ask AI to cite its sources.)

 

• Interview transcription

 

• Creating a writing schedule and plan to help keep you on track and hit your deadline

 

I do not recommend using AI for the following uses:

 

• Doing the actual writing (uninhabited words!)

 

• Generating main ideas (This will get you into plagiarism territory. Data generated by AI comes from somewhere and someone. If you do use ideas generated by an LLM, you need to attribute those ideas appropriately.)

 

• Rewriting large chunks of text

 

My AI Manifesto

 

AI is ever-evolving. As are my thoughts and feelings about it. For now, consider this my working AI manifesto:

 

AI is not a replacement for human writing or editing and is best used as a tool to improve efficiency in the writing and editing process without compromising the writer’s voice, impeding original thought and creativity, or losing the human element that makes writing writing.

A Final Thought

 

I recently read Kazuo Ishiguro’s Klara and the Sun. Klara is a robot known as an “artificial friend,” or “AF.” Her role, so she thinks, is to keep the company of a young teenage girl named Josie, who is terminally ill. As the story unfolds, it becomes clear Klara’s role is much more than that. [Spoilers ahead.]

 

At the insistence of an acquaintance and AF enthusiast, Mr. Capaldi, Josie’s mother purchased Klara to train the AF to replace Josie after she dies. Of course, the mother is very conflicted about this and unsure the “continuation” of Josie will work. Will she love the AF version of Josie in the same way? Is there something essential about Josie that will always be lost once she is gone? Mr. Capaldi insists there is not. She will be able to live with and love the Klara version of Josie just as much.

 

Josie survives and Klara is not used as her continuation, but at the end of the book Klara makes an astute observation: “Mr. Capaldi believed there was nothing special inside Josie that couldn’t be continued. He told the Mother he’d searched and searched and found nothing like that. But I believe now he was searching in the wrong place. There was something very special, but it wasn’t inside Josie. It was inside those who loved her. That’s why I think Mr. Capaldi was wrong and I wouldn’t have succeeded.”[iii]

 

Maybe AI can write clearly and efficiently, maybe it can present an argument or tell a story well, but I believe we as human readers will always be able to detect what was produced by an LLM and what was produced from a place only we can access: the human experience and the heart.[iv]

 

 

 

 

 

 

[i] This example is from my own newsletter, which I input into ChatGPT, asking it to clean up the HTML formatting so I could more easily copy-and-paste it into Mailchimp. It failed to successfully do that, but it did—without my asking—clean up all paragraphs and sentences to sound more AI. Don’t worry, I reprimanded it.

[ii] I wrote this example. Not AI.

[iii] Kazuo Ishiguro, Klara and the Sun (New York: Knopf, 2021), 302.

[iv] I had an alternative ending for this article. I asked Gemini which ending was strongest, and it liked this one.